Why Programmatic Failed to Capture Publisher Richness

Strap in. Anne Coghlan — co-founder of Scope3 and one of the few adults supervising the industry’s AI experimentation — joins The ADOTAT Show to explain why the ad-tech ecosystem is teetering on the edge of a long-overdue reckoning.

If you’ve ever tried to understand programmatic and ended up feeling like you were reading a ransom note assembled from mismatched acronyms, Anne is here to decode the mess. She walks through why AI agents shouldn’t be treated like futuristic prophets, but rather like “smart interns” who need guardrails, human supervision, and — most importantly — a protocol that prevents them from burning the house down.

We dive deep into the logic, engineering, governance, and sheer absurdity of a marketplace where one publisher can somehow have 24,000 resellers, entire layers profit from “data mud,” and MFA sites thrive by gaming the gaps that no one wants to talk about publicly.

Anne doesn’t do euphemisms.

She talks plainly about waste, fraud, obfuscation, sustainability, outcomes, and why the industry is held together by habit more than design. She explains how AdCP rewrites those rules, how agentic negotiation actually works, and why it’s time for the ecosystem to evolve on purpose — rather than stumbling forward on top of a decade’s worth of duct tape.

This episode is far more than another AI-ad-tech fireside chat. It’s a blueprint for the next era of digital marketing, created by someone who actually understands the pipes, the politics, and the incentives.

If you want to know where the ecosystem is heading — and who’s sweating behind the scenes — this is the episode you don’t skip.

💬 Deep-Dive Topics We Hit

(yes, we hit all of this)

• How AdCP actually functions (beyond slide-deck mythology)

• Why AI agents need guardrails, supervision, and human veto power

• Multi-hop supply chains & why 24,000 resellers is not a rounding error

• Ad fraud, MFA patterns, and the “crap and waste” Anne wants gone

• The carbon footprint of bad media and why sustainability correlates with outcomes

• What “agentic negotiation” looks like — and why it's nothing like RTB

• Creative + context reasoning: the missing puzzle piece

• Why publishers finally regain leverage in an agentic marketplace

• How brands shift from “spend allocation” to genuine outcome architecture

• The coming political battle: AdCP vs ARTF vs UCP vs “the old guard”

• Who gets left behind when transparency stops being optional

• Human-in-the-loop: what automation still absolutely cannot do

• What goes extinct, and what replaces the ad-tech fossils

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