The Endless Chase: Why Brands Keep Falling Into the Programmatic Brand Safety Trap
As brands trudge through yet another round of brand safety concerns in programmatic advertising, it’s time to face a hard truth: these issues are not new, nor are they accidental. They are a symptom of a broader industry trend, one where the constant search for cheaper reach has led to a race to the bottom.
How we got here
For decades, media has been measured on reach and frequency. The arrival of programmatic in the early 2000s promised to deliver on these same metrics but in a more cost-effective way, unlocking the rise of performance marketing. Yes, direct response has been around for years prior but at its core, programmatic offered efficiency, precision, and automation. But as the industry scaled, agencies and tech vendors saw an opportunity, not just to meet advertisers’ goals, but to maximise margins - arguably undisclosed margins to boot.
This is where the shift began. Agencies and ad tech platforms encouraged brands to move away from direct response metrics like clicks and conversions, claiming they were easily gamed as the rise of made for advertising (MFA) websites proliferated with click-bait headlines driving up investment across the long tail of domains. Instead, advertisers were steered toward programmatic branding solutions built around new “quality” indicators like viewability and attention metrics, conveniently vague measures that justified ongoing investment in programmatic while enabling agencies to profit both from their centralised media commitments with top-tier publishers and the markup on long-tail inventory. The challenge that followed was that as ad spend increasingly shifted to Google and Meta, where agencies can't secure the same profit margins, they face growing pressure to push long-tail media in order to demonstrate the value of programmatic supply paths.
The Illusion of Control
With each new iteration of media measurement, the same problems resurface. Viewability metrics? Easy to manipulate. Attention tracking? A new vanity metric that doesn’t necessarily translate to real business outcomes. And now, as third-party cookies crumble, advertisers find themselves once again at the mercy of another opaque system; Retail Media Networks (RMNs).
Retail Media Networks are hailed as the next big thing, offering access to high-intent shoppers and closed-loop measurement. Yet, they introduce the same issues of transparency and control that brands have fought against in programmatic. These walled gardens hold first-party shopper data hostage, forcing brands to spend more while receiving limited insights on what truly drives performance.
The Rise of Digital Performance Advertising
Over the past two decades, digital performance advertising has been built around post-click and post-view conversion tracking. These attribution models use lookback windows, often 1 to 30 days for post-click and up to 90 days for post-view (depending on the brand category and product purchase in question) to determine whether a media exposure led to a sale. However, post-view conversions, in particular, have become a battleground for debate, as they often favor last-touch attribution and fail to account for organic conversions. The death of third-party cookies only exacerbates these issues, making it harder to track the consumer journey with confidence.
Time to Break the Cycle
Let’s end this cycle of misdirection and start focusing on measurable, actionable outcomes. Too often, clicks are dismissed as a valid metric simply because they don’t drive scale or immediate revenue. I’m a huge advocate for programmatic advertising, and truly believe it’s ability to provide precision audience targeting, but lets stop pretending that our current measurement solution infallible. Mixed media modelling has it’s place, but for retail brands looking to execute a cross-retailer promotional plan, digital couponing offers a far more effective measurement solution. By using trackable incentives tied to actual purchase behaviour, brands can directly link media spend to in-store and online conversions—without relying on obscure, easily manipulated metrics.
The obsession with reach at the lowest possible cost is what led brands into this mess. It's time to change course. If we truly care about performance, then let's prioritise outcomes that matter—sales, redemptions, and real consumer engagement—not just another set of numbers designed to keep ad dollars flowing through murky programmatic pipes.
