The digital ad business is broken, says former Forbes.com CEO

Essentially, Spanfeller said, the resulting digital ecosystem — with massive, real-time buying, selling, and deployment of ad space inventory and ads across a wide array of platforms — is too complex, with too little transparency into who’s buying what.

But it’s not only the complexity, the lack of transparency, the unknown places where ads reside. It’s also that the ad system is using massive amounts of third-party data to direct where ads will be placed.
And third-party data, Spanfeller said, “is fundamentally useless.”
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/08/the-digital-ad-business-is-broken-says-former-forbes-com-ceo/