• According to research conducted by a professor at MIT programmatic ad buys may not just be unproductive, it may be counterproductive.
• 3rd party data may be useless at the most elementary of targeting tasks.
• Using data acquired from 3rd party brokers improved targeting performance by 184%,but creates extra costs of about 238% on average in comparison to random placements.
• Adobe inspected traffic across thousands of its client sites and found that 28% of the traffic showed “non-human signals” indicating that it was fraudulent.

KEY TAKEAWAY: The online ad industry is in deep trouble.  Marketers are questioning online ad effectiveness and consumers are sick and tired of viewing irrelevant ads when they are paying through the nose for broadband access.  Pharma should not abandon online ads, but rather invest more time and effort to ensure they provide an adequate ROI.