At one company I worked for, we allocated impressions ahead of time

> each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value This is the argument that gets made, but very rarely is it true. From Neumann et al in 2019 [1] "When investigating gender (being male) and age (three different tiers: 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44 years) individually, we find that digital audiences for gender are on average less often correct than random guessing (accuracy of 42.3%)." If the accuracy of targeting is worse than random guessing on average then it's value is less $0.00. Advertisers would reach more of their target audience by simply buying more media instead of spending money on 'targeting' even after you discount wastage to $0.00 in 'value'. I agree with everything you're saying about programmatic *in theory*, but I would argue that in practice the whole system is just broken. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3203131

> * Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads) > * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them > * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted That's horrible ! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.

> Sure, you could just pay $5,000 a month to a website to show a banner ad directly, but a larger % of your money would be wasted How do you know that the waste is higher with the banner ad?