Most programmatic campaigns fail not because of poor targeting, but because buyers never verify who they are actually purchasing inventory from.
Eric Tilbury, Head of Programmatic & Solutions Engineering at Inuvo, says knowing exactly who you are buying from is the single skill that separates effective programmatic buyers from ineffective ones.
Tilbury recommends prioritizing authorized direct inventory, handpicking exchanges, and maintaining active blocklists to keep supply quality high and campaign performance on track.
Programmatic advertising works. The problem is that most teams are not set up to make it work. While sophisticated audience targeting and campaign optimization have become standard practice, the foundational step of knowing exactly who you're buying from is still widely skipped. When buyers activate campaigns without vetting their supply, they're not running programmatic poorly. They're not really running it at all.
Eric Tilbury, Head of Programmatic & Solutions Engineering at programmatic technology firm Inuvo, has spent years operating on the buy side with the kind of supply-level discipline that most teams skip entirely. Tilbury has been with Inuvo since 2017, where he oversees programmatic strategy across display, online video, and CTV. He believes the industry's credibility problem is largely self-inflicted.
"Programmatic can really work. You just have to know how to execute it correctly," says Tilbury, positioning poor programmatic performance not as a channel problem but as a process one. For most teams, the process breaks down before a single impression is ever served, skipping past supply vetting and going straight to campaign activation.
The issue runs deeper than a single misconfigured campaign. Most programmatic buyers never audit the supply they are activating against, treating inventory sourcing as a given rather than a variable. That misplaced focus means even sophisticated targeting strategies are being applied to a foundation that was never vetted, and the results reflect it.
The cost of lazy buying: When supply vetting gets skipped, the consequences compound quickly. Brands get poor results, lose confidence in their approach, and shift budget toward walled gardens, where the ceiling on performance is often lower than they expect. "When you start going down that path, you never really move the needle," says Tilbury.
The one question that matters: The dividing line between effective and ineffective programmatic buyers often comes down to a single question: Who are you buying from? Tilbury says most teams cannot answer it. "You could ask any team what exchanges they're buying from right now and they would have zero idea," he says. The buyers who can answer it, down to the exchange and publisher level, are the ones making programmatic work.
Pick your players: Tilbury recommends building a programmatic strategy in layers, starting with direct publisher relationships and private marketplace deals, then moving to open exchange activity that is carefully curated rather than broadly activated. For channels like display and online video, that means identifying which publishers offer signals unavailable elsewhere and structuring PMPs to access them. "You should be handpicking the exchanges that you buy from and making sure you can answer the questions: am I buying authorized direct, and what publishers am I buying from?"
The blocklist means business: Even after a buyer has vetted their supply and established trusted relationships, the work is not done. Tilbury actively monitors his inventory sources, watching for sellers who slip in unwanted placements after the fact. When it happens, the response is immediate. "I still watch where I'm buying, even though I know who I'm buying from, because they can still stuff unwanted inventory in. Once you're on my blocklist, you're done. You'll never come back."
The same discipline applies in Connected TV, where the supply chain carries even higher stakes. As CTV has grown into a premier advertising channel, it has also attracted more resellers and intermediaries, making the path between buyer and publisher harder to verify.
The reseller's ruse: In a crowded reseller market, inventory can be misrepresented at the bid request level, with placements labeled as CTV that have little connection to the premium channel buyers intend to reach. "A reseller could get a hold of a bid request, say anything they want, and claim it's CTV," says Tilbury. Working directly with known publishers keeps the inventory verifiable and the relationship transparent.
Gone to the dogs: The temptation to chase lower CPMs compounds the problem. In CTV, cost-cutting without supply vetting creates exposure to placements that fall well short of the premium experience the channel is built to deliver. "When you start going for those lower CPMs, you start delivering on very questionable content. You'll pay a dollar CPM for a CTV ad, but no one ever saw it."
The curated future: The industry's broader trajectory points toward a more structured version of programmatic buying. "I think real-time bidding will be heavily curated, which it should be. Curation and sell-side decisioning should be a big thing now, because it saves a lot of buyers from themselves."
Importantly, the argument here is not against resellers or the open exchange outright. The ecosystem has legitimate players and real value for buyers who know how to navigate it. Tilbury concludes, "The danger is in the blind spots. Buy authorized direct inventory. Publishers make more money, and you get better results when you do that. The problem comes when you're blindly buying from resellers and unauthorized impressions. That's where it starts to implode."
