A piece landed in my feed recently that stopped me mid-scroll.
Michael Farmer, a veteran advertising strategist, recently published a devastating analysis called Madison Avenue Media Madness. It examines what digital advertising has actually done to the world’s biggest brands over the past 15 years. (Read it – it’s a great piece!)
His conclusion makes uncomfortable reading for anyone who has spent the last decade confidently shifting budgets toward programmatic and social. Farmer asks a question that almost nobody in those rooms asks. We also see this question arise consistently during campaign performance conversations with clients. Is it actually working? Not “is it generating impressions?” or “is the CTR up?” Instead, ask the only question that should matter to a business: Are you growing?
The data becomes devastating when you examine it honestly. Across our local outdoor landscape, we often see a similar pattern. Reported performance metrics look strong on paper. However, they show a much weaker correlation with real-world outcomes such as store visits, footfall or sustained sales uplift.
The growth that disappeared
In the 50 years from 1960 to 2010, the world’s great FMCG brands – P&G, Unilever, Nestlé and Colgate-Palmolive – grew at roughly 8% compounded annually. P&G alone increased its revenue from $1 billion to $79 billion. This was the era of mass media. Television. Radio. Outdoor. Advertising that people felt rather than tracked.
Since 2010, digital and social have come to dominate the media mix. During that period, those same companies have grown collectively by less than 1% per year. Multiple factors contributed to this slowdown. However, it raises serious questions about whether modern media investment delivers the growth it promised. That rate is less than half the growth rate of the US economy.
Read that again.
The world’s biggest advertising spenders have essentially stopped growing their brands. These companies have the best agencies, the most sophisticated data stacks and the largest martech investments. Yet the spending has continued to flow.
Where did the money actually go?
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), only 36 cents of every programmatic dollar reaches an actual consumer. This finding aligns with what many South African advertisers now uncover when they examine their own supply chains more closely.
The rest disappears into intermediary fees, verification costs and what the industry politely calls “made-for-advertising sites”. These domains exist purely to harvest advertising budgets. No human meaningfully engages with the content.
Twenty-nine percent disappears into adtech transaction costs. Thirty-five percent ends up in unmeasurable or fraudulent environments. The platforms got rich. The intermediaries got rich. The consultants who promised to navigate the complexity got rich.
The brands? They got older. The cruel irony is that programmatic advertising was supposed to deliver efficiency. Buy the right audience, at the right moment, for the right price – automatically. In theory, it sounded brilliant. In practice, countless infrastructure layers have gamed the system so thoroughly that advertisers almost always become the last people in the room.
Programmatic done properly
The core promise of programmatic – smart, data-driven, automated buying – remains genuinely valuable. The problem was never the idea. Instead, the ecosystem created a Byzantine chain of intermediaries. Each one takes a cut. Together, they consume most of the budget before serving a single impression to a real person in a real environment.
What if you could keep the intelligence and eliminate the waste? That is the argument for programmatic Digital-Out-Of-Home (pDOOH) media. Specifically, it supports buying directly from the media owner. It is also the foundation of programmatic without waste.
This is not an argument against agencies or programmatic infrastructure. Both play a critical role in planning and scale. Instead, the issue is unnecessary complexity within the supply chain, not the existence of partners themselves.
When you buy pDOOH through a direct owner relationship, you get the targeting sophistication that programmatic promises. This includes dayparting, audience triggers, contextual relevance and real-time campaign management. At the same time, you avoid the adtech waterfall that drains your budget. There is no DSP margin. There is no SSP margin. There is no MFA inventory. There is no fraud. Every rand goes toward a real screen in a real location.
A real person who chose to be there sees that screen. In practice, this creates campaigns where delivery, placement and environment remain fully transparent. It also allows performance to link directly to measurable movement patterns, footfall shifts or store-level impact. This is programmatic without waste in action.
Why brands are embracing programmatic without waste
The environment matters enormously. A premium DOOH network is not a pop-up advert chasing someone across the internet. Instead, it places a brand where consumers live their lives. They commute, shop, socialise and travel in these spaces.
The attention remains ambient but genuine. Brand safety is absolute. Moreover, consumers associate the context with quality rather than intrusion.
Direct pDOOH also gives media owners and advertisers a cleaner and more honest data relationship. You know exactly what you are buying. You know exactly where it ran. Increasingly, footfall measurement, mobile device matching and sales uplift studies also show exactly what it delivered.
You no longer need to rely on a third party whose business model depends on favourable numbers. This is another reason why brands are embracing programmatic without waste.
The reckoning is here
Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) is experiencing a serious renaissance. Its findings challenge long-held assumptions. When CMOs ask difficult questions such as, “What would happen to our business if we cut all programmatic display spend?” the answers often surprise them.
Much of what programmatic appears to deliver would have happened anyway. It is correlation dressed up as causation, and it has cost the industry billions. By contrast, DOOH consistently outperforms its budget allocation in MMM studies.
We are also seeing this pattern more frequently as brands reassess channel effectiveness with greater scrutiny. DOOH builds brand equity in ways that performance channels cannot replicate. Furthermore, the direct programmatic model has matured enough to provide genuine flexibility and scale. As a result, the efficiency argument, once digital advertising’s greatest advantage, now belongs to a different medium entirely.
What I’d say to every CMO reading this
The companies that will win the next decade of brand building will ask a different question. They will not ask, “How do we optimise our digital spend?” Instead, they will ask, “Are we spending in the right places at all?”
Increasingly, the answer points towards pDOOH. Buy it directly and transparently from media owners who have skin in the game and screens worth showing up on. The most expensive lie in marketing is not that digital does not work. It is that programmatic has to mean wasteful. It doesn’t. However, you have to know where to buy it.
Dustin Martin | Head | Programmatic | Tractor Outdoor | mail me |
