WARC’s The Future of Programmatic 2025 is a meticulously composed document. The charts are polished. The language is neutral. The predictions are framed as progress.

But read it closely and a deeper truth emerges:
It’s not a report. It’s an autopsy.
What’s dying is unpredictability. Creativity. Humanity.
And we’re all expected to applaud as the corpse is carried off, sanitized and smiling.

We Are Optimizing Ourselves Into Irrelevance

Every year, programmatic becomes more “efficient.” More “targeted.” More “brand safe.”
And with each incremental improvement, something irreplaceable is lost.

We’ve mistaken precision for persuasion.
We’ve traded emotional impact for mechanical relevance.
We’ve built a system that serves the spreadsheet, not the soul.

74% of European impressions now come through curated deals.
Which sounds like order. Until you realize it means the wildness is gone.
No chaos. No accidents. No friction. No magic.

We didn’t refine advertising. We tamed it. And in doing so, we made it forgettable.

Curation Is Not a Strategy. It’s a Symptom.

Let’s stop pretending curation is innovation. It’s not.
It’s fear management. It’s an escape hatch from a system that got too messy.
We created an open marketplace—then panicked when it did what open things do: surprise us.

So we closed it.

We built private marketplaces, multi-publisher deals, curated “quality” impressions.
And we congratulated ourselves for regaining control.
But in truth, we just shrank the canvas. The reach is cleaner, sure. But the resonance is gone.

Personalization Has Become a Prison

We’re shown what the machine thinks we want—again and again—until novelty disappears.
We call it relevance, but what it really is… is confinement.
When every ad is customized to our past behavior, we stop growing. We stop discovering.
We become static reflections of data points.

We aren’t advertising to humans anymore. We’re advertising to ghosts of their former selves.

AI Isn’t Making Ads Safer. It’s Making Them Invisible.

The report praises AI for enhancing brand safety.
But here’s the problem no one wants to name: AI doesn’t understand context.
It understands keywords, sentiment scores, and statistical tone.
So entire stories, entire voices, entire truths are algorithmically scrubbed out—because the machine can’t read between the lines.

It’s not safety. It’s sanitization.
It’s censorship with a dashboard.

We’re not avoiding risk. We’re avoiding reality.

Out-of-Home Might Be Our Last Chance

Digital out-of-home is the only space left that still feels human.
It’s dynamic, unpredictable, environmental. It responds to mood, weather, location.
It doesn’t follow you. It meets you.

It’s flawed. It’s physical. It’s not entirely measurable.
And because of that—it still has soul.

It reminds us that real advertising doesn’t beg for clicks.
It stops you mid-step.
It lingers in your head hours later, uninvited.

The Real Threat Isn’t Bad Ads. It’s Forgettable Ones.

We keep polishing the system, but forget why the system existed in the first place.
Advertising isn’t a math problem.
It’s a cultural force. A punchline. A provocation. A seduction. A story.
And we’ve allowed it to become… efficient.

That should terrify us.

Because efficient ads don’t change minds.
Efficient ads don’t start movements.
Efficient ads don’t get remembered.

Only real ones do.
Messy. Emotional. Imperfect.
Human.

In Case You Skimmed, Read This:

• Curation isn’t strategy. It’s shrinkage.
• AI brand safety is quiet censorship.
• Personalization killed surprise.
• The future of programmatic isn’t what’s next—it’s what’s left.

We didn’t lose the plot. We wrote it out of the story. Stay Curious