By Becky Johnson, CEO, Workhorse Studio LLC
featured in Advertising Week
Programmatic has become more powerful, but also harder to manage. For many teams, the challenge isn’t access to tools. It’s understanding what’s working, where spend is going, and how to act on it quickly.
Barbara Burnett, Senior Director of Business Development at Orange 142, works with brands and 
independent agencies to turn performance goals into effective programmatic strategies. She also contributed to Orange 142’s recent rollout of Ignition+, an integrated approach designed to simplify buying paths and improve outcomes.
In this Q&A, Burnett shares what she’s seeing in the market, where complexity is getting in the way, and how teams are starting to rethink how they approach programmatic day to day.
If you sit with a mid-market team today, what are they frustrated by?
It’s the disconnect between effort and clarity. Teams are putting in the work, but not always getting a clean read on what’s driving results. They see pieces of performance, but not always how those pieces connect. In many cases, the challenge isn’t just performance. It’s understanding how the system is working in the first place. Many teams think they know where their dollars are going, until they take a closer look.
That leads to second-guessing. Not because they don’t have data, but because they don’t fully trust how it fits together. Teams often believe they have a full visibility into spend, but they’re only seeing part of the picture. When trust drops, everything slows down. Even strong performance gets questioned, if it can’t be clearly explained.
When that line isn’t clear, it also becomes harder to understand how much of the budget is going toward working media, how costs are structured, and what’s influencing outcomes.
Where does that break down the most in their day-to-day?
It shows up in how much effort it takes to get to a decision. Time goes into reconciling platforms, checking outputs, and making sure everything lines up before acting. Teams aren’t running campaigns. They’re spending a significant amount of time managing the process around them.
Many of these teams are managing enterprise-level complexity without enterprise-level resources. That’s where things start to drag. Not in capability, but in how long it takes to move from question to answer. In a fast-moving environment, that delay becomes a real cost. And right now, too many workflows create that hesitation.
When buyers say programmatic has gotten harder, what are they reacting to?
They’re reacting to how much coordination it takes to make it work. Each addition to the stack made sense on its own. Over time, the work has shifted from execution to coordination. Buyers are navigating a chain of intermediaries, where each step adds distance between spend and outcome.
At a certain point, that complexity stops adding value. In many cases, it starts working against performance rather than improving it. The model still works, but the experience of using it has become harder to manage at scale.
You’ve introduced Ignition+ into the market. What gap were you trying to close?
There are too many steps between seeing a problem and being able to do something about it. We kept hearing the same thing from teams managing larger, more complex programmatic investments. Too many steps between seeing something and being able to act on it. Too much time spent validating instead of moving.
It’s built for teams managing complex programmatic investments, where those extra steps have a real impact on outcomes. The goal is to create a direct path through the workflow, bringing buying, optimization, and measurement closer together instead of spreading them across disconnected systems. That means if a team has to check three places before they feel confident in a decision, that delay is a real cost.
At a certain point, teams want to feel like they’re buying media, not layers of cost around it. The goal isn’t to replace how teams work. It’s to support it in a way that feels connected and easier to manage. If a team can move from insight to decision without having to double-check across multiple systems, that’s a meaningful shift.
Where does Ignition+ show up in the day-to-day? What feels different?
It shows up in how quickly teams can move. Instead of bouncing between platforms to piece together what’s happening, they can stay closer to the workflow and make adjustments with confidence in real time.
It also changes how much effort goes into validating decisions. Less time verifying, more time acting. When those extra steps are removed, teams get time back and performance becomes easier to manage at pace.
It’s less about adding new capabilities and more about removing friction from the ones teams already rely on. A big part of that comes from how we’re approaching it. There’s a mix of buy-side and supply-side experience behind it, so the workflow reflects how both sides operate.
This is grounded in a performance mindset. It reflects how campaigns are managed and measured every day. It’s designed to work alongside existing teams, whether in-house or agency-led, with a hands-on approach to how teams navigate and act on what they’re seeing.
Everyone’s talking about AI right now. What’s proving useful?
Where it’s proving useful is in surfacing performance changes earlier, before they show up in standard reporting. When something changes in performance, teams want to catch it quickly and understand what’s behind it. That’s where AI can help, especially in flagging patterns that might not be obvious right away. Most marketers aren’t asking for more automation.
They’re asking for better visibility into what’s already happening. Where it falls short is when it skips over the “why.” If teams can’t explain what’s happening, it’s hard to act on it with confidence. Speed without clarity also doesn’t help. In some cases, it creates faster confusion.
What separates platforms that are working for teams right now from the ones that aren’t?
It comes down to how much they get in the way. The platforms that are working make it easier to understand what’s happening and act on it without a lot of back-and-forth. The ones that don’t perform well tend to require interpretation, cross-checking, and added time before teams can move.
The setups that tend to work best are the ones where performance, incentives, and outcomes are aligned. Teams aren’t asking for more features. They’re asking for fewer obstacles between them and the outcome.
What’s one thing you want teams to keep in mind as they think about where programmatic goes from here?
What I keep coming back to is how much effort it takes to move from insight to action. There’s a lot of capability in the market right now, but if it takes multiple steps to act on what you’re seeing or too much effort to feel confident in a decision, that becomes the issue. I hear that consistently in conversations.
So, for me, it comes back to making sure the setup supports how teams actually operate. Can they see where spend is going? Can they act on what they’re seeing without having to validate it across multiple places? That’s where the shift is happening. It’s less about adding layers, and more about making it easier to work with what’s already there and acting the fastest with confidence.
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