Programmatic like many areas of digital marketing has been under pressure over the last couple of years.

It started with brand safety remember everyone being up in arms about what content their adverts were being shown next to. I was at Google at the time and had to deal with the fallout of ads on YouTube appearing ahead of extremist videos.

This largely thanks to the like of Proctor & Gamble opened up the eyes of marketeers around the world of where was their digital marketing budget going. They started to demand greater transparency in their campaigns. Where were their ads being shown and how much of their budget was going on ad tech. With some tech providers within programmatic taking 50% ad tech fees it was no wonder they were asking questions.

Despite all of these challenges programmatic continues to grow making up 80% of all the display ads you see online in some countries. What we have seen is a shift to some advertisers wanting greater control by bribing their programmatic in-house versus through agencies.

Then we entered 2018, a year filled with four letter that had companies panicking and marketeers running about like headless chickens, yes you’ve guessed it GDPR. Now despite the obvious issues within our industry I’m a big fan of this, from my clients perspective someone who is against ads, doesn’t want to engage with ads isn’t the type of person I want to show ads to.

As companies were getting prepared some of the big data companies started cleaning house one of the leading data providers had to delete 400 million…