Why greed, not technology, blocks programmatic advertising reform

Two advertising technology veterans debated the future of automated ad buying on LinkedIn during December 2025, exposing why protocols designed to fix programmatic advertising frequently fail before achieving adoption. Pavel Medvedev, who builds programmatic in-housing solutions, and industry observers including Christopher F. and Dr. Augustine Fou revealed fundamental obstacles facing the Ad Context Protocol launched on October 15, 2025.

According to Medvedev's LinkedIn post, the advertising technology ecosystem already possesses everything needed to improve transparency and reduce fraud. "Adtech doesn't need another protocol, framework, or acronym to fix itself," Medvedev wrote on December 2025. "It already has everything it needs. The reason the ecosystem hasn't truly improved over the years isn't technical. It's human. It's greed."

The post generated 48 reactions and six substantive comments from industry figures, crystallizing tensions that determine whether advertising automation succeeds or perpetuates existing dysfunction. Companies spent approximately $700 billion globally on programmatic advertising in 2024, yet persistent problems with transparency, fraud, and intermediary fees suggest technical solutions alone cannot overcome misaligned business incentives.

Hidden margins drive resistance

Medvedev identified specific behaviors that protocols cannot eliminate through technical specifications. High platform margins hide behind complexity. Fees remain unexplainable across the supply chain. Arbitrage masquerades as optimization. Inventory gets resold to the same sellers who originally created it.

Fraud persists despite industry claims of aggressive prevention efforts. Malware-infected creatives receive cleaning without attribution to their sources. These problems exist because opacity generates profits for intermediaries positioned between advertisers and publishers.

"That's why I keep coming back to in-housing," Medvedev stated. "When brands and publishers own their stack, greed has nowhere to hide. You can't quietly skim margins when the buyer controls the pipes." The argument positions technology ownership as the structural solution that protocol standardization cannot provide.

Christopher F., Director of Product Development at Attention Arc, expanded on business obstacles facing protocol adoption in comments on LinkedIn during December 2025. Platform adoption requires convincing chief technology officers rather than chief marketing officers, he noted. Marketing executives might favor unified protocols that simplify workflows, but technology leaders evaluate engineering costs and business risks differently.

"Does anyone genuinely believe Google will adopt a protocol that makes it easier for dependent trading desks and customers to move spend to a competitor?" Christopher F. asked. His analysis identified three major advertising platforms dominating the United States open web market. These companies possess minimal incentive to support protocols that reduce switching costs, require new technology investments, and introduce risks where few currently exist.

According to Christopher F.'s assessment, vendor lock-in frustrates customers seeking platform changes but remains undeniably beneficial for business operations. The harder switching becomes, the less likely customers migrate to alternatives. Protocol adoption costs money, particularly for platforms processing millions of transactions per second. Companies only make such investments when they clearly solve problems or demonstrate revenue growth potential.

Fraud exploits self-declaration

Dr. Augustine Fou, who investigates advertising fraud through FouAnalytics, raised concerns about security vulnerabilities in his December 2025 LinkedIn response. "The protocol itself contains merit in theory, similar to many standards that preceded it," Dr. Fou wrote. "But what it doesn't take into account, like many standards before it, are attack scenarios where fraudsters exploit it to commit MORE fraud."

He cited ads.txt as an instructive example of how self-declaration systems fail against determined adversaries. The IAB Tech Lab created ads.txt in May 2017 to combat unauthorized inventory sales. Publishers place text files on their websites listing companies authorized to sell their advertising space. Advertisers check these files to verify legitimate sellers.

"The standard represented sound thinking in theory, but from its first day of release, fraudsters used it to commit more fraud and provide better cover for their operations," Dr. Fou stated. Criminals created fake publisher websites with ads.txt files declaring fraudulent sellers as authorized. They also compromised legitimate publisher websites to add unauthorized sellers to existing ads.txt files.

DoubleVerify identified more than 100 cases of ads.txt manipulation since the standard launched, highlighting escalating threats to digital advertising integrity. The company documented a significant increase in such schemes during recent years as criminals adapted to exploit industry safeguards.

The problem stems from how ads.txt operates. The system relies on publishers declaring accurate information without providing independent verification that declarations are truthful. Fraudsters exploited this trust assumption systematically.

A February 2024 Pixalate report found that 25% of programmatic traffic with SupplyChain Object data failed validation checks. Traffic that failed these validation checks had 64% higher invalid traffic rates compared to traffic that passed validation, according to research examining Q4 2023 data.

"AdCP relies on parties to declare things correctly and honestly," Dr. Fou stated. "As we know from the last 15 yrs, that's not going to happen." The Ad Context Protocol faces identical trust problems that enabled ads.txt exploitation.

Supply-side platforms filter threats

Supply-side platforms evolved beyond simple inventory connections to provide verification services protecting the advertising ecosystem. These functions become more critical as fraudsters develop sophisticated attack methods.

Industry anti-fraud efforts saved advertisers $10.8 billion in 2023 according to research from the Trustworthy Accountability Group, 4A's, Association of National Advertisers, and Interactive Advertising Bureau. The study found that without anti-fraud programs, invalid traffic would have cost the United States advertising industry $11.78 billion based on a 9.96% invalid traffic rate.

TAG's Certified Against Fraud program maintains invalid traffic rates below 1% across certified channels globally. This represents a 92% reduction compared to what losses would be without these protection systems.

Supply-side platforms participate in this fraud prevention ecosystem through multiple mechanisms. They implement pre-bid filtration that blocks fraudulent traffic before auctions occur. They maintain post-serve verification that identifies fraud after ads deliver. They participate in threat intelligence sharing that helps the industry respond to emerging attack patterns.

European anti-fraud programmes prevented €3.45 billion in losses during 2023, representing 69% reduction in fraud-related costs, according to a June 2025 TAG study. The research examined European video and display advertising channels worth €48.3 billion.

Channels where companies achieved TAG certification accounted for 76% of this spending, experiencing fraud losses of just €115 million at a 0.3% invalid traffic rate. The remaining 24% of spending flowed through uncertified channels that sustained €1.19 billion in fraud losses, more than ten times the relative level compared to protected channels.

Ad Context Protocol contains security considerations including authorization verification and fraud prevention mechanisms, according to technical documentation. However, these rely primarily on participants declaring information accurately, similar to the trust model that fraudsters exploited with ads.txt.

Transaction verification mechanics

Real-time bidding auctions occur within approximately 100 milliseconds as web pages load. Multiple advertisers submit bids simultaneously based on available audience and contextual information. The highest bidder wins the right to display their advertisement.

Supply-side platforms connect publishers to these auctions, providing tools for inventory management, yield optimization, and revenue reporting across digital properties. They aggregate inventory from multiple publishers, enabling advertisers to access diverse ad placements through unified platforms.

The platforms also prevent request duplication, where the same advertising opportunity appears multiple times through different supply paths. Transaction identifiers enable demand-side platforms to recognize when different bid requests represent the same ad space, preventing advertisers from bidding against themselves.

Prebid.org removed this cross-exchange tracking capability on August 27, 2025, following publisher demands for supply path control. The change eliminated transparency tools that helped advertisers detect duplicate bids. The IAB Technology Laboratory declared the implementation violated OpenRTB specifications.

This incident demonstrates ongoing tensions between publisher yield optimization and advertiser transparency. Publishers want to maximize revenue by selling the same inventory through multiple channels. Advertisers want to avoid paying multiple times for the same ad space.

Supply-side platforms navigate these tensions through supply path optimization strategies. Advertisers evaluate platforms, ad exchanges, and publisher connections to eliminate unnecessary technology fees and latency. Match rate losses between platforms typically range from 40% to 70%, making direct supply path connections valuable for maintaining data fidelity.

Platform resistance patterns

Six companies launched Ad Context Protocol on October 15, 2025: Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic, Swivel, Triton Digital, and Optable. These organizations represent various segments of advertising technology including supply-side platforms, carbon emissions measurement, media properties, targeting capabilities, audio advertising, and data collaboration.

Notably absent from this list: Google, Amazon, The Trade Desk, and Microsoft. These companies operate the dominant demand-side platforms that process the majority of programmatic advertising budgets.

Lindsay Rowntree, COO at ExchangeWire, noted during a podcast discussion that major platforms including Google, The Trade Desk, and Amazon DSP have not signed up for recent agentic protocols. This potentially creates more fragmentation through new walled gardens rather than solving existing coordination problems.

Google operates the largest advertising platform globally, processing billions of transactions daily. The company has minimal business incentive to support protocols that make customer migration easier. Its advertising technology stack integrates tightly across Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Google Ad Manager, and YouTube.

Amazon DSP expanded rapidly throughout 2024 and 2025, adding supply-side platform partnerships with Disney in June 2025, Spotify in October 2025, and Netflix in Q4 2025. Microsoft Monetize joined as a preferred partner in October 2025, creating new supply path connections before Microsoft Invest shutdown on February 28, 2026.

The Trade Desk launched OpenAds platform on October 2, 2025, after Prebid.org removed transaction identifier functionality. The platform aims to maintain transparency tools that advertisers lost through the Prebid changes. This demonstrates The Trade Desk's strategy of building proprietary solutions rather than adopting industry-wide protocols it does not control.

Industry criticism intensifies

Ari Paparo questioned Ad Context Protocol's viability on November 3, 2025, while expressing support for creative automation specifications. He raised concerns about whether AI agents can overcome fundamental business problems including pricing transparency resistance, scale economics, and data fragmentation that prevented programmatic direct success historically.

"So again, the use of agents ends up being more appropriate for reinforcing the role of intermediaries, rather than enabling a breakthrough to empower buyers and sellers," Paparo wrote in his analysis. Long-tail publishers lack technical sophistication and data scale necessary to differentiate themselves to advertisers without aggregation.

The protocol may still deliver value, but likely to different constituencies than intended. "It's just that the value will likely accrue to very large publishers and cross-publisher ad networks, in much the same way it has with programmatic more generally," Paparo stated.

David Kohl warned that Ad Context Protocol represents "the tail wagging the dog" in an October 15, 2025, LinkedIn post. He cautioned that rushing to build agentic advertising infrastructure without clear goals risks repeating mistakes that created today's dysfunctional programmatic supply chain.

Kohl argued that the programmatic supply chain evolved without foresight or a master plan, creating an ecosystem where intermediaries prioritized profits over advertiser and publisher needs. He called for shared goals, structured innovation approaches, and measurable success metrics before committing to specific technical implementations.

The criticism matters because transparency issues resulted in only 36% of post-transaction programmatic budgets reaching valid, viewable, measurable impressions according to 2023 research. The Association of National Advertisers conducted a similar investigation, examining metadata on 16.4 billion media impressions from seven major advertisers. The ANA found that on average, 42% of each programmatic dollar was spent on "nonworking media" meaning it went toward tech or agency fees.

Protocol proliferation problem

Multiple agentic AI protocols emerged during fall 2025. LiveRamp donated the Universal Context Protocol to IAB Tech Lab on November 3, 2025. IAB Tech Lab introduced its Agentic RTB Framework v1.0 for public comment on November 13, 2025.

Each new protocol generates industry discussion about whether advertising needs additional standards before addressing fundamental problems. The proliferation itself creates coordination challenges as companies evaluate which frameworks to support with limited engineering resources.

Microsoft announced on May 14, 2025, that it would discontinue Microsoft Invest effective February 28, 2026. The company cited incompatibility between traditional demand-side platform models and their vision for "conversational, personalized, and agentic" advertising futures, according to Microsoft Advertising Corporate Vice President Kya Sainsbury-Carter.

Amazon merged its DSP and Ads Console into unified Campaign Manager at the company's annual unBoxed conference on November 10, 2025. An agentic mode called Full-Funnel Campaigns sets up and adjusts multi-format campaigns across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display, and streaming television from a single prompt.

These developments suggest major platforms are building agentic capabilities within their own ecosystems rather than adopting cross-platform protocols. This approach maintains the vendor lock-in dynamics that Christopher F. identified as obstacles to Ad Context Protocol adoption.

In-housing as alternative

Medvedev's LinkedIn post positioned in-housing as the structural solution that protocol standardization cannot provide. "In-housing doesn't magically make everyone ethical, but it removes the incentives that reward bad behavior," he wrote.

When brands and publishers own their advertising technology stacks, opacity-driven profit extraction becomes more difficult. Transparent decision-making replaces obscured margins when the logic lives inside infrastructure that the owner actually understands.

"The future of adtech is buying media smarter with clear rules, accountable systems, and transparency that's built in, not promised in a slide deck," Medvedev stated. The industry will probably keep inventing new acronyms and protocols, he acknowledged. However, the fundamental shift already happens underneath: ownership over convenience, clarity over complexity, quality over volume.

Florian Schadauer, who focuses on making brand alignment drive growth for publishers, responded to Medvedev's post noting that the advertising industry sees significant Goodhart's Law in practice. As a highly metric-driven sector, it takes ethically behaving leaders to avoid exploiting skewed incentives across the value chain.

Max Kalehoff, CEO at Adverteyes, provided the most comprehensive response. "The open web adtech community would do itself a favor by caring more about advertiser and consumer value, less the preservation and efficiency of workflow established 20 years ago, and which continues to cede relevance to walled gardens," Kalehoff wrote.

He suggested the answer exists in observing how younger generations interact with technology. They no longer type "www" to get answers or make purchases. The ecosystem established two decades ago increasingly fails to serve current user behavior patterns.

David Kohl identified two significant parts of the problem. Greedy humans represent one component. FOFO executives (fear of finding out) constitute the other. Too many people who spend money on programmatic advertising prefer not paying close attention to details, making exploitation easier.

Fraud detection expertise

Christopher F. brings direct experience with these challenges through his work building advertising platforms and fraud detection systems. As Director of Product Development at Attention Arc and Head of Media Product at Cheil Worldwide, he architected A+, described as an enterprise-grade agency trading platform.

The system uses Golang programming language running on Ubuntu Linux with dedicated microservices for data collection and anomaly detection. These components work together to identify fraudulent traffic patterns before they impact advertising campaigns.

Prior to his current role, Christopher F. founded Spartan Ad in April 2021, building an enterprise-level ad fraud prevention platform. The system also uses Golang with the Gin-Gonic framework, deployed on scalable Linux-based infrastructure.

His patent portfolio includes "Fraud Prevention in Programmatic Advertising," filed September 10, 2019, patent number 11,521,231. The patent describes machine learning-based systems and methods for preventing fraud in programmatic advertising environments.

Building these systems requires understanding how fraudsters attack programmatic infrastructure. Invalid traffic takes many forms, from simple bots that click on ads to sophisticated operations that spoof premium publisher inventory.

Dr. Augustine Fou has documented advertising fraud patterns since founding FouAnalytics, marketed as an alternative to mainstream analytics for verifying digital advertising campaigns. His background includes a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Materials Science and Engineering, completed at age 23.

He previously worked at McKinsey & Company before serving as Group Chief Digital Officer at Omnicom's Healthcare Consultancy Group, a $100 million organization with eight agencies serving pharmaceutical, medical device, and healthcare clients.

His fraud investigation work involves assisting government and regulatory bodies while helping commercial clients strengthen cybersecurity and mitigate threats. FouAnalytics operates as a free platform for small businesses to verify digital ad campaigns and clicks from various paid online sources.

Dr. Fou taught digital strategy and integrated marketing at Rutgers University and NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. His technical background informs his fraud analysis approach. He understands how complex systems work and how adversaries exploit weaknesses in their design assumptions.

Structural incentive misalignment

The LinkedIn discussion between industry practitioners crystallized tensions that will determine how advertising automation develops. Protocols need widespread adoption to function. Adoption requires convincing technology executives that business benefits justify engineering investment and risk.

Simultaneously, protocols must account for fraud exploitation scenarios. Systems relying on self-declaration without independent verification become targets for criminals. The balance between simplicity that enables adoption and complexity that enables verification remains unsolved.

Supply-side platforms occupy critical positions in this ecosystem. They verify transactions, filter fraud, optimize yield for publishers, and provide transparency tools for advertisers. Whether AI agents can replicate these functions without concentrated intermediaries remains uncertain.

Medvedev's closing argument emphasized structural solutions over technical ones. "If we want a cleaner ecosystem, the path is obvious. Control beats greed every time." The statement positions ownership and accountability as prerequisites for meaningful improvement.

The debate matters for marketing professionals allocating programmatic advertising budgets. Technology protocols cannot eliminate business incentives that reward opacity and intermediation. Platform consolidation continues as major players build proprietary agentic capabilities rather than adopting open standards.

Fraud continues evolving alongside detection capabilities. DoubleVerify reported on September 25, 2025, a substantial escalation in fraudulent mobile applications employing artificial intelligence technologies to perpetrate ad fraud. The security intelligence firm's analysis reveals how automated systems are being weaponized to compromise digital advertising integrity across mobile platforms.

What seems clear from the December 2025 debate: Ad Context Protocol faces significant obstacles from both business incentives and security requirements that its design does not adequately address. The future of programmatic advertising may depend less on technical standardization and more on fundamental restructuring of ownership and accountability throughout the supply chain.

Timeline

• May 2017: IAB Tech Lab created ads.txt to combat unauthorized inventory sales
• September 10, 2019: Christopher F. filed patent for fraud prevention in programmatic advertising
• April 2021: Christopher F. founded Spartan Ad, enterprise-level ad fraud prevention platform
• Q4 2023: 25% of programmatic traffic with SupplyChain Object failed validation checks, with 64% higher invalid traffic rates
• 2023: Industry anti-fraud efforts saved advertisers $10.8 billion through 92% reduction in invalid traffic losses
• 2023: European anti-fraud programmes prevented €3.45 billion in losses, representing 69% reduction in fraud costs
• February 24, 2024: Pixalate published report on programmatic traffic validation failures
• May 14, 2025: Microsoft announced discontinuation of Microsoft Invest effective February 28, 2026
• May 29, 2025: DoubleVerify identified over 100 cases of ads.txt manipulation since 2017
• August 27, 2025: Prebid.org removed cross-exchange transaction identifier functionality
• September 25, 2025: DoubleVerify disclosed findings on substantial escalation in fraudulent mobile applications
• October 2, 2025: The Trade Desk launched OpenAds platform to maintain transparency after transaction identifier changes
• October 15, 2025: Six companies launched Ad Context Protocol for advertising automation
• October 15, 2025: David Kohl posted LinkedIn criticism warning AdCP is "the tail wagging the dog"
• November 3, 2025: LiveRamp donated Universal Context Protocol to IAB Tech Lab
• November 3, 2025: Ari Paparo published analysis questioning AdCP media buying protocol viability
• November 10, 2025: Amazon merged DSP and Ads Console into unified Campaign Manager with AI agents
• November 13, 2025: IAB Tech Lab introduced Agentic RTB Framework v1.0 for public comment
• December 2025: Pavel Medvedev, Christopher F., and Dr. Augustine Fou debated AdCP viability on LinkedIn

Summary

Who: Pavel Medvedev, who builds programmatic in-housing solutions, Christopher F., Director of Product Development at Attention Arc, and Dr. Augustine Fou, advertising fraud investigator with FouAnalytics, debated advertising technology protocols on LinkedIn. Six companies launched AdCP: Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic, Swivel, Triton Digital, and Optable. Industry experts including Ari Paparo and David Kohl also criticized the protocol.

What: The debate centered on whether the Ad Context Protocol can improve programmatic advertising when fundamental problems stem from business incentives rather than technical limitations. Medvedev argued that greed, not technology gaps, prevents ecosystem improvement. High platform margins hide behind complexity. Fees remain unexplainable. Arbitrage masquerades as optimization. Fraud persists despite prevention claims. Christopher F. explained that major platforms lack business incentive to adopt protocols that reduce vendor lock-in. Dr. Fou warned that AdCP relies on self-declaration that fraudsters will exploit, similar to how ads.txt was subverted from its first day.

When: The LinkedIn discussion occurred in December 2025, following AdCP's October 15, 2025, launch. The debate emerged as multiple agentic AI protocols launched during fall 2025, including Universal Context Protocol on November 3 and Agentic RTB Framework on November 13. Microsoft plans to shut down Microsoft Invest on February 28, 2026, citing incompatibility with agentic advertising visions.

Where: The discussion occurred on LinkedIn but addressed the global programmatic advertising ecosystem worth approximately $700 billion in 2024. Supply-side platforms process billions of transactions daily across display, video, mobile, and connected television environments. The debate affects advertisers, publishers, and technology platforms operating across the open web market.

Why: The debate matters because it reveals fundamental obstacles facing advertising automation. AdCP proponents claim protocols reduce custom development costs and vendor lock-in. Critics argue dominant platforms benefit from customer switching costs and will resist adoption. Meanwhile, fraud prevention systems maintained by supply-side platforms saved advertisers $10.8 billion in 2023 through invalid traffic filtration. Protocols relying on self-declaration without verification create new fraud attack vectors, as demonstrated by ads.txt exploitation. Only 36% of programmatic budgets reach valid, viewable, measurable impressions according to 2023 research. The Association of National Advertisers found that 42% of each programmatic dollar goes to tech or agency fees rather than media. Structural incentive misalignment means technical solutions alone cannot eliminate opacity-driven profit extraction. In-housing represents an alternative approach where brands and publishers own their technology stacks, removing incentives that reward bad behavior through transparent decision-making and accountable systems.