What AI is about to expose about programmatic advertising

Sponsored by Blockboard • June 18, 2026 •

Matt Wasserlauf, CEO, Blockboard

For years, the advertising industry had a convenient villain: fraud. It was real, it was measurable and it gave everyone something to blame when performance fell short of expectations. Brands hired verification vendors, agencies added line items to media plans and the industry collectively agreed that the problem was bots, not the system.

Fraud is still real. But as AI-driven automation removes layer after layer of manual execution from media buying, a different problem is coming into focus. Something harder to name, harder to fix and, for a lot of people in the supply chain, much more uncomfortable to talk about: structural waste.

The question isn’t whether the system is inefficient; it’s whether the industry is ready to see exactly how inefficient it is.