If you ask people working in programmatic what’s most broken, transparency still tops the list. In a recent poll of 185 industry professionals, 36 percent chose transparency as the weakest link, followed by measurement at 28 percent, supply path at 20 percent, and data quality at 17 percent.
None of these results are shocking, but the fact that transparency remains the biggest concern should raise a flag. The industry has been talking about it for over a decade. Yet advertisers are still unsure where their budgets actually go, how much working media they get, or who’s taking what cut in the process. Even with supply path optimization and direct-to-publisher initiatives, there’s still a sense that too much happens in the dark.
Measurement came in second, and that makes sense in 2025. Between ongoing cookie deprecation, mixed device graphs, and new privacy laws, cross-channel attribution is still unreliable. Clean room adoption is growing, but most marketers still struggle to understand performance across media owners. And while brand lift and incrementality tools help, they rarely scale across partners in a unified way.
The supply path itself is still messy. Even with fewer intermediaries, many buyers still work with multiple SSPs and rely on heuristics to decide who to trust. Sellers are also getting smarter about managing their paths, but even within one exchange, the logic behind bidstream duplication or floor pricing isn’t always clear.
Last on the list is data quality. While only 17 percent selected it as the most broken area, it’s likely because the other issues are more top-of-mind. But the reality is that poor or outdated data still drives many campaigns. With more restrictions around identity signals and device-level targeting, brands are relying on modeled or inferred data that often lacks accuracy. And even when first-party data is available, there’s still work to do in how it’s activated and measured across platforms.
The results from this poll reflect a broader truth: no single part of programmatic works in isolation. Lack of transparency makes it hard to fix measurement. Poor supply path clarity impacts data quality. And every one of these areas suffers when incentives between platforms and advertisers aren’t aligned.
Fixing programmatic doesn't mean overhauling one part. It means addressing the disconnect between what marketers expect and what the system is designed to deliver. Until that gap narrows, transparency will continue to lead these polls.
Sam Khoury
Founder, Cedar Consultants
Creative consulting solutions for Adtech