Our goal as marketers is and should always be to do a better job with delivering our messages to the right person at the right time. This means not to serve ads to people who already bought the product we are offering, not to serve someone the same ad on every Hulu commercial break, and not to serve irrelevant ads, like an ad for monthly parking to someone who doesn’t have a car.

In an age where programmatic marketing has taken more and more of digital ad dollars, we need to be cognizant of the people we are delivering ads to and also the frequency of showing them our ads. However, the way programmatic is currently officiated is through last-touch attribution. This encourages every media buyer to do “whatever it takes” in order to serve the very last impressions before someone converts. This is how strategies like cookie bombing were formed – serving as many impressions as possible to probable converters. However, practices like this are bad for every party involved, from the media buyers and advertisers themselves all the way down to the consumer.

Media traders can help control this by closely monitoring and changing their ad frequencies. Media traders have a wealth of information on when the frequency is best, and where the performance drops off and becomes wasteful – potentially causing poor brand image. It is up to them to speak out on what they are finding, even if that means extending flight dates to meet full budget delivery. The other issue we need to monitor is to take frequency not only of our programmatic campaigns, but also of all the partners on a media plan, to make sure we minimize wasted ad dollars and give consumers the respect they deserve by not flooding them constantly with ads. We need to ensure we are seeing where the overlap is with each partner and keeping an eye out to minimize the amount of this overlap.

The challenge is creating the right environment to align both the end advertiser and the media buyers’ incentives, removing the game of last touch and creating a mutual and respectful relationship between the advertiser and its customers. Once we remove or find a better way to place attribution across all partners, we can take away the game of last-touch attribution and move more toward respect for the consumer.