It’s a tradition as revered as turkey on Thanksgiving and baseball in the summer: ad agencies dumping budget at the end of each quarter so they won’t lose it at the beginning of the next. “There’s an artificial market dynamic that resets every month in programmatic where at the end of every quarter, we see a ton of demand and a ton of budget being dumped,” said Andrew Casale, VP of strategy at supply-side ad tech provider Casale Media. He noticed this trend again when he put out the company’s Q1 2014 report on the state of programmatic in the United States (download it here). Additionally, a report from ad tech company Turn also noted spending spikes in March across telecom, travel and financial services verticals. While quarterly budget offloading is not a new practice, nor is it one relegated to the ad industry, Casale is irritated that this antiquated tradition continues to infect the automated ad buying space.