#programmatic-advertising

#programmatic-advertising

As AI becomes central to programmatic advertising and powers agents, targeting models, and decisioning, the need for quality media, trusted data, and secure, adaptable infrastructure has never been greater. OpenX is investing across product and strategy to build the intelligence required to simplify programmatic while delivering stronger performance. These leadership appointments reinforce the company's commitment to making media work better for those who run it and those who experience it.

Big TV networks and studios are finally shifting toward programmatic advertising - even for their linear TV spots. And this shift is attracting a new wave of advertisers and transforming what a typical TV ad break looks and feels like. For example, as reports, Comcast is starting to see net-new ad revenue growth from first-time TV advertisers. "The people coming in the door are small performance advertisers, but they've been doing social ads forever," says Travis Flood, Comcast Advertising's director of insights. "They don't have a TV ad."

Digiday attempted to gauge market engagement after the dust had settled, and backers have started to put in the hard yards. First, it's worth a recap of what exactly AdCP is - for some, it's an open-source bridge between today's programmatic infrastructure and the dawn of the agentic era - or, as Digiday's Tim Peterson phrased it, "openRTB for the agentic AI era" (see video below).

Many factors make the CTV home screen a powerful ad opportunity. In a recent study of senior ad buyers with a $1m-plus CTV spend, 70% said CTV data sparked effective ideas, and 84% linked creativity to business outcomes on one of advertising's most lucrative channels. This winning blend of science and art is most evident on the CTV home screen, 2026's hero spot - and a unique gateway that sparks action before a show has even started.

Today (15th January, 2026), VIOOH, the leading premium global digital out-of-home (DOOH) supply-side platform, announced a strategic partnership with Atmosphere TV, the world's largest streaming TV platform built for businesses, expanding access to premium place-based video inventory in the UK, North America, and Australia. The partnership delivers access to over 60,000 venues generating more than 1 billion monthly impressions across restaurants, bars, gyms, airports, hotels, and other high-traffic business locations.

EscalaX, a global programmatic advertising company, begins its third year with sustained market growth, an expanded product portfolio, and ongoing strategic alliances with partners such as Human, The Media Trust, and Pixalate. Over the past two years, the company has developed its own proprietary technology, launching a multichannel Ad Exchange and an SSP designed by publishers for publishers. This approach aims to adapt the value of supply to the programmatic environment while enabling optimal and transparent monetisation.

That cuts against the grain of ad tech, which has spent the better part of two decades engineering software to trap budgets, data and behavior inside proprietary dashboards. But Yahoo is making a different bet. Lower the friction to exit, and it also lowers the friction to enter. If that still sounds backwards, put it this way: Yahoo is recasting its DSP less as a place marketers go, and more as infrastructure their systems can plug into.

AgenticOS provides a system-level layer that allows agents to plan, transact, and optimise programmatic advertising with speed, consistency, and control. PubMatic is launching AgenticOS in close partnership with a group of forward-leaning advertisers, agencies, and publishers actively engaged in testing, shaping, and deploying agent-led workflows, providing real-world validation and innovation for the next phase of AI-native advertising. Advertising is compounding across new devices and formats, hundreds of thousands of new entrant advertisers, and billions of global users, placing increasing pressure on legacy programmatic systems.

As Carty expands across the programmatic marketplace, integrating GeoEdge's ad quality and malvertising protection technology ensures that all ads delivered through the platform remain safe, compliant, and free from malicious or deceptive creatives. The partnership secures shopper experiences across Carty's global footprint, supporting safe paths to purchase, smooth journeys, and increased trust that transforms shoppers into loyal customers.

And while some have been quick to declare the era of TV over, for the advertising industry this isn't the end of TV, rather an opportunity to bring together the benefits of TV and digital through programmatic technology. Programmatic gets a bad rep in the traditional TV stronghold of branding, but this is a chance to show programmatic can do more than just deliver performance metrics.

Has anyone seen any improvement in their CTV transparency in their buys at all, anywhere? Is it still just everyone's not getting any feedback of data, what episode you ran on [in] streaming, anything, no transparent pricing? Anyone found any solutions to address that other than yelling into the ether?

Adnami, a leader in attention-driven digital advertising, today (10th December, 2025) announced the launch of its Agentic Curation product to create custom publisher deals and optimise campaigns fast and at scale. After a year of success delivering curation services to global brands and agencies, Adnami now takes a big leap forward by adding an agentic layer to its programmatic activation and optimisation processes.

Butler/Till is moving past this approach by pushing curation upstream, deciding what inventory should even be allowed into the auction rather than relying on DSP-side filters to clean things up downstream. That shift runs through SWYM.AI 's SelfCurate platform, which gives the agency's traders direct, self-serve control over supply before it reaches the DSP. Instead of bundling fixed lists they can dynamically score, filter and assemble inventory from a defined set of SSPs as campaigns run - producing a smaller, more intentional bidstream not because DSPs are being asked to "do better" but because fewer, higher-quality impressions are permitted into the marketplace to begin with.

The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a "Listening Age," which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went rival, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes.

In a move that could clean up one of programmatic advertising's messier processes, IAB Tech Lab has released version 1.0 of its proposed Deals API for public comment. The new spec introduces a standardized way for supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to sync deal data-cutting down on the manual errors that often derail private marketplace (PMP) transactions. The public comment period runs through the end of January,

Direct-sold ads remain the top revenue source for publishers, with 95% saying in Q3 2025 that they get at least a very small portion of their revenue from direct-sold ads and 56% saying they get a large or very large portion of revenue from this source. These percentages have remained steady over the last few years, according to Digiday's survey data, and lend themselves to how much publishers say they'll focus on growing this part of their business in the next six months:

The data marketplaces powering programmatic advertising have exploded, with DSPs, SSPs and third-party platforms offering solutions for curating custom audiences. But, for marketers, combining data segments to reach their target audience can be a confusing and wasteful process. AudienceMix, a new curation startup, aims to make it more cost effective to mix and match different audience segments using only the data brands need to execute their campaigns. This helps mitigate wasteful overlaps between off-the-shelf audience segments.