I guess electric bill isn't a good example, but I can think of lots of other situations where you might reimburse someone else for a product or service that spends on programatic advertising: flights, hotels, concerts, and obviously, all sorts of food and beverages.

That being said, personally, I'm bearish on programatic advertising.

> I guess my point is what adtech firm is going to be interested in a person who pays for electricity? Everyone does that. I pay for water too, but that's not going to help anyone sell me stuff.

If your electricity bill is big, they could bucket you into a group that's potentially interested in "energy efficient appliances."

On the other hand if you're paying your bills with Venmo you're not in the demographic that buys appliances... If this is actually a valuable thing the winner is Visa/Mastercard, not Venmo. Venmo thinks you had a slice of pizza at some point because of an emoji, but Visa knows what pizza slice you had, when you ate it, how many other people went there that day, etc etc.