Source: Search Engine Journal
The article traces a direct lineage between programmatic advertising's unfulfilled efficiency promises and current AI marketing pitches. Both systems externalize massive costs in human oversight, error correction, and platform maintenance while vendors highlight only the automated savings. Marketing teams adopting AI without auditing total cost of ownership are replicating the programmatic playbook: initial ROI looks compelling until you factor in the constant firefighting required to keep systems from producing waste at scale. Vendor incentives remain misaligned with buyer outcomes. "Efficiency" is theater until someone measures what actually gets done versus what gets redone.