- Michael Farmer argues modern programmatic and social advertising often fail to drive real business growth
- Brand growth has sharply declined in the digital era
- Only 36% of programmatic spend reaches consumers, with the rest lost to adtech fees, intermediaries, and low-quality or fraudulent inventory.
- Direct programmatic DOOH offers transparency and efficiency
- Marketing Mix Modelling shows much programmatic impact is overstated, while DOOH consistently demonstrates stronger contribution to brand growth and effectiveness
A piece landed in my feed recently that stopped me mid-scroll.
Michael Farmer, a veteran advertising strategist, published a devastating analysis dubbed Madison Avenue Media Madness, of what digital advertising has actually done to the world’s biggest brands over the past fifteen years. (Read it – it’s a great piece!)
His conclusion is uncomfortable reading for anyone who has spent the last decade confidently shifting budget toward programmatic and social. Farmer asks the question almost nobody in those rooms asks – and one we see play out consistently in campaign performance conversations with clients: is it actually working?
Not “is it generating impressions?” or “is the CTR up?”, but the only real question that should matter to a business: are you growing?
The data, when you look at it honestly, is devastating. And across our own local outdoor landscape, we often see a similar pattern – strong reported performance metrics on paper, but far weaker correlation to real-world outcomes like store visits, footfall or sustained sales uplift.
The growth that disappeared
In the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the world’s great FMCG brands – P&G, Unilever, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive – grew at roughly 8% compounded annually. P&G alone went from $1 billion to $79 billion in revenue. This was the era of mass media. Television. Radio. Outdoor. Advertising that was felt, not tracked.
Since 2010, as digital and social came to dominate the media mix, those same companies have grown collectively at under 1% per year – a slowdown driven by multiple factors, but one that raises serious questions about whether modern media investment is delivering the growth it promised. Less than half the rate of the US economy.
Read that again.
The biggest advertising spenders in the world – the companies with the best agencies, the most sophisticated data stacks, the largest martech investments – have essentially stopped growing their brands. And yet the spend kept flowing.
Where did the money actually go?
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), just 36 cents of every programmatic dollar reaches an actual consumer, a finding that aligns with what many South African advertisers are now uncovering when they interrogate their own supply chains more closely.
The rest disappears into a cascade of intermediary fees, verification costs, and what the industry politely calls “made-for-advertising sites” – domains that exist purely to harvest ad budgets with no human ever meaningfully engaging with the content.
Twenty-nine percent gone to adtech transaction costs. Thirty-five percent to unmeasurable or fraudulent environments.
The platforms got rich.
The intermediaries got rich.
The consultants promising to navigate the complexity got rich.
The brands? They got older.
The cruel irony is that programmatic advertising was supposed to be the great efficiency play. Buy the right audience, at the right moment, for the right price – automatically. In theory, brilliant. In practice, the system has been gamed so thoroughly by so many layers of infrastructure that the advertiser is almost always the last person in the room.
Programmatic done properly
The core promise of programmatic – smart, data-driven, automated buying – is genuinely valuable. The problem was never the idea. The problem is the ecosystem it spawned: a Byzantine chain of intermediaries, each taking a cut, collectively consuming the majority of the budget before a single impression is served to a real person in a real environment.
What if you could keep the intelligence and eliminate the waste? That’s the argument for programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) media and specifically, for buying it directly from the media owner.
This isn’t an argument against agencies or programmatic infrastructure; both play a critical role in planning and scale. The issue is unnecessary complexity in 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 – dayparting, audience triggers, contextual relevance, real-time campaign management – without the adtech waterfall bleeding your budget dry.
No DSP margin. No SSP margin. No MFA inventory. No fraud. Every rand goes toward a real screen, in a real location, seen by a real person who chose to be there. In practice, this means campaigns where delivery, placement and environment are fully known, and where performance can be tied back to measurable movement patterns, footfall shifts or store-level impact.
The environment matters enormously. A premium DOOH network isn’t a pop-up ad chasing someone across the internet. It’s a brand showing up in the spaces where consumers live their lives – commuting, shopping, socialising, travelling.
The attention is ambient but genuine. The brand safety is absolute. And the context is one that consumers associate with quality, not intrusion.
Direct pDOOH also gives media owners and advertisers a cleaner, more honest data relationship. You know exactly what you’re buying. You know exactly where it ran.
And increasingly, with footfall measurement, mobile device matching, and sales uplift studies, you can know exactly what it delivered, without trusting a third party whose business model depends on the numbers looking good.
The reckoning is here
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) is having a serious renaissance, and the findings are challenging the orthodoxy. When CMOs ask hard questions – “what would happen to our business if we cut all programmatic display spend?” – the answers are often startling.
Much of what programmatic ‘delivers’ was going to happen anyway. It’s correlation dressed up as causation, and it’s cost the industry billions.
DOOH, by contrast, consistently outperforms its budget allocation in MMM studies, something we’re seeing echoed more frequently as brands revisit channel effectiveness with a more critical lens.
It builds brand equity in ways that performance channels cannot replicate, and with the direct programmatic model now mature enough to offer genuine flexibility and scale, the efficiency argument – once digital advertising’s trump card – now belongs to a different medium entirely.
What I’d say to every CMO reading this
The companies that win the next decade of brand-building will be brave enough to ask not “how do we optimise our digital spend?” but “are we spending in the right places at all?”
The answer to that question increasingly points toward pDOOH, bought directly and transparently from owners who have skin in the game and screens worth showing up on.
The most expensive lie in marketing isn’t that digital doesn’t work. It’s that programmatic has to mean wasteful.
It doesn’t. But you have to know where to buy it.
Dustin Martin is head of programmatic at Tractor Outdoor.
