Programmatic advertising is broken. Here’s how can we fix it.

The knee-jerk response is to completely eliminate digital ads. That’s the approach that some projects are taking to solve privacy problems, inefficiency and intermediary payment issues within the ad industry.

We think this response is misguided. Digital advertising today is failing everyone — consumers, publishers and advertisers. However, eliminating ads completely is not in anyone’s best interest. It threatens a sustainable business model for publishers and advertisers, leads to lower quality content and still falls short of protecting user privacy.

A better alternative is to address the underlying problems within the ad tech system. That requires hard work. It’s certainly not as easy as the blunt approach of trying to block digital ads. But building an ad tech solution that removes unnecessary middlemen, protects consumer privacy and mitigates fraud is a much better solution to ad tech’s woes.