How Programmatic Advertising Impacts CX – And How to Improve It

Clara De Rosa, Head of Customer Success at Adform elaborates on how programmatic advertising impacts customer experience. She recommends strategies  to enhance personalisation, transparency, and relevance.

Programmatic advertising has transformed how brands engage with consumers, offering precision targeting and real-time optimisation. However, as automation scales, customer experience (CX) can suffer if campaigns feel intrusive, irrelevant, or misaligned with user intent.

“I see brands facing several key customer experience (CX) challenges when managing programmatic campaigns. These pain points often stem from complexity, lack of transparency, and performance optimisation,” says Clara De Rosa, Head of Customer Success at Adform. Privacy regulations further complicate CX, making first-party data and identity solutions essential for trust and relevance.

Clara develops customer success strategies that align with business goals, leveraging data-driven insights to optimise ad tech investments. She collaborates with product, sales, and support teams to refine the customer journey, influence product innovation, and foster long-term partnerships. Her focus is on driving retention, growth, and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Talking to CXM Today, she elaborates on how brands can overcome CX challenges in programmatic advertising with AI, transparency, and data-driven strategies.

Excerpts from the interview:

What are the biggest CX pain points brands face when managing programmatic campaigns, and how can they overcome them?

As the Head of Customer Success at Adform, I see brands facing several key customer experience (CX) challenges when managing programmatic campaigns. These pain points often stem from complexity, lack of transparency, and performance optimisation. However, with the right strategies and technology, they can be effectively addressed. Some pain points that often standout are:

• Complexity of the Ad Tech Ecosystem – campaign creation, inventory and partner selection, audience creation are just a few examples of the amount of decisions brands face when running campaigns programmatically. Adform simplifies this with a user-friendly end-to-end platform as well as help sections and support teams
• Transparency & Data Control – Many lack visibility into ad placements and budget allocation. Partnering with vendors that offer full transparency, like Adform, ensures better decision-making.
• Balancing Automation & Control – AI boosts efficiency, but brands should retain strategic flexibility to adjust campaigns.
• Identity & Privacy Challenges – Privacy regulations and cookie deprecation impact targeting. Using first-party data and future-proof identity solutions, such as Adform’s ID Fusion, helps maintain addressability whilst bringing peace of mind when it comes to compliance to local regulations.
• Measuring Performance & ROI – Proving ROI is increasingly difficult, especially across channels and in this fragmented ID landscape. Working with a partner that can provide log level data to feed into a client’s own attribution methodology will facilitate greater actionable insights.

By leveraging the right technology, transparency, and expertise, brands can enhance their programmatic strategies and create a seamless, high-performing customer experience.

How do you balance automation and personalisation when delivering support and insights to clients?

Balancing automation and personalisation is key to supporting our clients effectively and efficiently. The foundation to doing this successfully is understanding the client’s goals, operations, and communication styles. We work both with our proprietary tech and Customer Success tools such as Gainsight, which allows our teams across all levels of the business to obtain a 360 view of our customer base at the click of a button.

While automation handles routine tasks, true client success comes from a tailored approach. Our team works closely with clients to interpret data in the context of their specific goals, industry, and market conditions. We provide consultations, strategic business reviews, and customised recommendations to help them leverage our product effectively to reach their goals. We also ensure we survey our clients regularly via Customer Satisfaction Surveys to collect their sentiment towards our service, product and support. This is a good example where automation allows us to send surveys globally to all our clients, collect results in a timely manner – but then we add our personal touch reviewing feedback with our clients and adapting success plans with them based on this.

With the growing complexity in ad tech, how can platforms like Adform simplify the user experience for brands and agencies?

Adform simplifies the user experience with an integrated platform that breaks down silos in ad tech, allowing brands to activate, optimise and report on omnichannel campaigns via one single interface. As a tech partner, we take away the heavy lifting of dealing with billions of data points and hundreds of partners, this enables brands and agencies to focus upstream on strategy and results.

The key benefit to brands and agencies? Efficiency in an ever-evolving digitalised ecosystem with the transparency required to ensure that clients can make changes at any point (no black box approach). As new technologies emerge, Adform continuously evolves, helping simplify processes, reduce complexity, and tackle critical challenges, from privacy and regulation to campaign execution cross-channel.

What do you foresee will be the greatest challenges and opportunities with AI developments?

This will be an ever-evolving picture, but I am excited to see increased automation in data outputs, allowing us to service clients even more than we do today with relevant insights at a fraction of the time. I am also looking forward to clients being able to go fully into omnichannel buying at scale and leverage tools that have existed already for years, such as Dynamic Creative Optimisation, in digital to build better creative for their audiences at a fraction of cost and time.

On the flip side, I foresee challenges around how quickly we can as a business adjust our organisation to the adoption of AI—this means not only the uptake of tools but also thinking of the org charts and how these need to evolve and roles need to change. I believe this is both a challenge and an exciting opportunity for all of us! Thoughtfully navigating these challenges will help unlock AI’s full potential, ensuring improved customer experiences and long-term business growth.

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