Programmatic advertising promised something revolutionary: automation, efficiency, and instant access to massive scale. But in the race for reach, something shifted. Scale became the KPI. Cheap impressions became a proxy for performance. And somewhere in the background, the quality of the environments in which brands appear started to erode.
Today, advertisers can access millions of impressions in seconds. Yet a growing share of that inventory lives in environments no brand would intentionally choose: low-value content farms, MFA sites engineered to game auctions, and now an accelerating wave of “AI slop” content. The question now is whether that scale is working for - or against - your brand.
Read on to find out where programmatic scale goes wrong and how advertisers can regain control to protect and strengthen their brand.
Programmatic was built for remnants - and it still shows
Programmatic advertising began as a way to monetise unsold inventory. Over time, it evolved into the dominant infrastructure of digital advertising. But its structural DNA hasn’t changed entirely. The open exchange still rewards volume, auction dynamics, and CPM efficiency above all else.
Supply Path Optimisation (SPO) revealed that advertisers often don’t even see the most valuable inventory. Filters, traffic shaping, and complex auction mechanics mean buyers are frequently bidding on what remains rather than what performs best.
Meanwhile, low-quality supply thrives as AI has made it so easy to produce.
The rise of AI slop
The term “AI slop” refers to low-quality, mass-produced content generated primarily to attract traffic and monetise ads. It exists to capture impressions, and it’s growing rapidly.
Research highlighted that more than 20% of the videos shown to new YouTube users were low-quality, AI-generated content. On TikTok, tens of thousands of AI-generated videos (many not labelled as such) have gained billions of views, with many containing racist, anti-immigrant, or otherwise problematic material (Source). TikTok itself has acknowledged that over 1 billion videos on its platform are labelled as AI-generated in response to concerns about the volume and quality of AI content in its feeds (Source).
And this isn’t limited to video platforms. Studies showed that at least 10,000 new AI-slop websites were created every single month in 2025. When content production becomes infinitely scalable and nearly costless, volume explodes. But quality does not. And in programmatic advertising, where budgets follow available supply, this flood of AI slop increasingly shapes where campaign budgets land.
MFA sites: gaming KPIs, draining budgets
Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites are built to maximise ad revenue. They are structured to increase scroll depth, inflate engagement signals, and create layouts that encourage ad exposure. On paper, campaigns can look efficient. CPMs are low, and viewability is high. Click-through rates may even outperform expectations. But those metrics don’t always translate into meaningful brand impact. They reflect how well a page is engineered to surface ads, not how well they capture real attention or drive business outcomes.
Bad content is bad for your brand
Studies found that between 88% and 94% of consumers said they are annoyed when ads appear next to low-quality content. When an ad appears next to content that looks misleading, low-effort, or purely monetisation-driven, it can affect how it’s perceived - if it is even noticed in the first place. Even if performance dashboards show strong viewability, this doesn’t guarantee consumers paid actual attention to it. They simply might have scrolled by, overwhelmed by the flood of bad content.
The scale illusion
The open exchange offers unprecedented reach. Yet not all impressions are equal. When supply chains are opaque, and inventory is mixed with resellers, when AI-generated environments multiply by the thousands each month, and when auction mechanics prioritise extremely low prices over quality, scale becomes distorted.
The more content floods the ecosystem, the harder it becomes to separate valuable impressions from noise. In that environment, buying broadly is no longer a neutral strategy. It’s a gamble.
A shift toward intentionally curated supply
Advertisers are increasingly demanding greater transparency and control. They want to know where their budgets go, which environments they support, and whether their ads are driving real outcomes.
This shift has accelerated the rise of curated marketplaces. Curation is about intentionally packaging inventory so advertisers can activate scale without sacrificing quality. Instead of navigating countless fragmented deals or relying solely on broad open-market access, curated marketplaces aggregate trusted publishers and structured supply into a streamlined activation path.
Scale isn’t the enemy. Unfiltered scale is.
If supply expands faster than quality controls, advertisers face a simple choice: continue chasing reach wherever it appears, or refine how they access it.
Curation has emerged as the solution to programmatic’s scale trap. It sits between the open auction and direct publisher deals, combining the reach of programmatic with a more deliberate selection of environments. When done right, it simplifies activation, strengthens brand safety, and aligns optimisation with meaningful performance indicators such as attention.
If you want to understand how curated marketplaces work, how they differ from traditional buying paths, download our white paper, Curation: The Smarter Way to Scale in Programmatic Advertising. It offers advertisers deeper insight, moving beyond buzzwords and sharing how companies like SAS and WPP Media use Agentic Curation to optimise campaigns today.
