Programmatic advertising’s endless cycle of reinvention and rot

Brian O’Kelley has made a career out of rewiring the ad tech machine. The AppNexus co-founder has spent much of the past two decades deep in the weeds of programmatic advertising — an industry that, for all its ubiquity, remains an opaque, arbitrage-fueled mess. Now, he’s back with a new mission: tear down its inefficiencies and rebuild something cleaner, leaner and, ideally, more honest.

How? By using AI to rebuild ad tech from the ground up, Scope3’s agentic advertising platform optimizes media buying for efficiency, sustainability and brand safety.

If there were ever a moment for such a reckoning, this is it: marketers, long resigned to the system’’s flaws, are losing patience. Real-time bidding, the lifeblood of programmatic, is running low on both trust and liquidity. And then there’s the latest scandal, which landed like a bomb in the middle of an already shaky industry: revelations that major brands’ ads had appeared alongside child sexual abuse content. The fallout was swift. 

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