Welcome to Programmatic I/O!

The open web is being reinvented in real time, and there has never been a more important moment to be in this room.

AI is intercepting discovery before the click happens. Commerce signals are finally delivering the closed-loop measurement the open web never had. And the programmatic infrastructure that powered digital advertising for two decades is being pushed into an era it was never designed for.

This year's theme — Unleashing Growth Across the Open Web — is a directive. The brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms that harness AI, commerce data, and smarter signal infrastructure will define the next era of programmatic. Over the next two days, the practitioners doing that work are here to share what they know.

Welcome to Programmatic I/O 2026, powered by Google.
 

The programmatic landscape is constantly evolving, and yesterday’s playbooks simply can’t keep pace. Stay ahead of the curve, and join us to see Google Marketing Platform’s newest product innovations and AI integrations—giving marketers the tools they need to unlock new possibilities, drive growth and measurable results today, tomorrow, and beyond. Discover the Gemini advantage in Google Marketing Platform: our best AI for your best ROI.

We built the most sophisticated advertising machine in history.

It knows who you are. Where you’ve been. What you’ve searched. What you might buy. It can find you anywhere, on any screen, in milliseconds.

And after all that innovation, we optimized the delivery and neglected the reason anyone should pay attention..

Programmatic perfected the science of reaching people while creativity became an afterthought. We celebrate impressions nobody remembers, optimize engagement nobody wants and call something “relevant” simply because an algorithm found the right person.

Meanwhile, AI, wearables, agents and new interfaces are about to completely rewrite how people interact with technology.

So why are we still serving advertising built for yesterday?

Walter Geer challenges the industry to stop asking how we can reach more people and start asking a far more important question:

Why should anyone care that we reached them at all?

The next revolution in programmatic won’t be another targeting breakthrough.

It will be reinventing the ad itself.

Walter Geer challenges the programmatic status quo. Drawing from groundbreaking campaigns that broke through the noise to connect deeply with specific communities, he will reveal how bridging the gap between data precision and cultural authenticity is the only way to reclaim consumer attention.

Key Takeaways:

• A reframe of programmatic's core failure: not the targeting, the creative neglect that followed it
• A clear-eyed read on why AI and new interfaces make that failure more expensive, not less
• The provocation that will define the conference: the next breakthrough isn't reaching more people — it's giving them a reason to care
• A mandate to stop optimizing delivery and start reinventing the ad itself

For years, programmatic innovation centered on making the auction faster, smarter and more efficient. The next wave may happen before an impression ever reaches one. As AI, curation, audience intelligence and automated decisioning become embedded throughout the transaction, Magnite’s SVP, Revenue, SpringServe, Ryan Kenney considers how the mechanics of digital advertising are being rewritten, whether familiar labels like DSP and SSP still describe where value is created, and what the next generation of programmatic infrastructure will need to do that today’s stack does not.

Colleen Coulter, OpenAI Ads Solutions leader, will walk through how the company is delivering a strong user experience alongside high-intent ad solutions to redefine the relationship between brands, publishers, and consumers. Coulter will dive into how the team is building native advertising inside ChatGPT—where consumers are increasingly discovering brands and making purchase decisions—and share what a premium user experience looks like when the primary ad interface is a conversation.

AI is no longer just generating ad copy or static assets; it is orchestrating entire enterprise workflows, managing data, and shaping programmatic distribution. But as adoption accelerates, critical questions around IP rights, data privacy, brand safety, and operational liability remain unanswered. When an automated workflow misfires or an AI model ingests sensitive data, who is held accountable?

Closing the AI accountability gap isn't just a technical challenge—it is an enterprise governance necessity. In this session, legal, innovation, and brand leaders come together to establish actionable guardrails for the modern marketing stack.

The supply side once asked, “How do we best represent supply?” Increasingly, it asks, “How much of the demand stack can we absorb?” The result: publishers risk being cut adrift, without a clear advocate in the programmatic marketplace. TripleLift Chief Product and Technology Officer Timothy Jasionowski argues that innovation isn’t the problem—ambiguous allegiance is—and challenges the supply side to remember who it represents when buyer convenience and publisher interests diverge.

With zero-click looming, is the era of publishers and advertisers prioritizing pageviews officially over? And what are the implications for digital advertisers? The Guardian, Future PLC, and Sundial Media aren't waiting around for an answer. They're already rebuilding around trust, first-party data products and commerce instead of raw traffic. This panel digs into what's replacing the pageview as the metric that actually matters.

Agentic AI is everywhere in ad tech. But automating decisions isn’t the same as making intelligent ones. As AI agents become easier to build, the real competitive advantage is what powers them: proprietary data, purpose-built models, and the ability to learn from real outcomes. Tatari’s Senior Director of Programmatic, Tom Discepola, cuts through the agentic AI hype to explore what separates automation from true intelligence, and what it takes to build AI that actually makes media buying smarter.

The open web is being repriced in real time. Wolfe Research's Shweta Khajuria will break down the market's current read on ad tech and unpack the forces driving our sector's next phase of growth.

Step into the trivia arena for a fast-paced challenge where ad tech history, acronyms, and oddball company names collide. Only the sharpest minds walk away with bragging rights.

AI can help teams produce creative at a volume they couldn't reach before. Too often that comes at the expense of quality. What marketers actually want is creative that hits everyday performance needs and strengthens the brand at the same time.

Hightouch's Liz O'Neal and HelloFresh's Conor Feeney explore what building quality AI creative looks like in practice, from everyday performance ads to big brand moments. They'll cover how the HelloFresh team went from brief to a Times Square ad in four weeks using Hightouch Ad Studio, and how marketers hold speed, volume, and creative quality at once.

Big swings don't have to sit apart from everyday marketing. When the workflow is grounded in brand context and guided by your creative team, the same system that gets you through a weekly creative refresh is what takes you to the world's biggest advertising stage.

Zoom may have achieved rare verb status as a pandemic utility, but scaling sustained growth required evolving into a fully formed, AI-powered work platform. Pivoting a ubiquitous global brand proposition isn't just a messaging challenge. It requires completely re-engineering how media and marketing budgets work together. To drive this transformation, Zoom broke down traditional silos in favor of a holistic "brand to demand" strategy that bridges top-of-funnel brand equity directly with performance-driven demand generation.

In this fireside chat, Josh Reed, Brand Strategy Lead at Zoom, unpacks how the company leverages the full toolkit of B2B and consumer marketing channels to build affinity, maximize media efficiency, and fuel sustainable growth across the open web.

The agency model is under pressure from every direction — AI, consolidation, shifting client expectations, and platforms that keep rewriting the rules. What does it actually take to lead through this moment? In a closing fireside conversation, top agency CEOs share how they're making hard bets on technology, talent, and the kind of work only humans can do.
 
 
 
 

Tickets to the AdExchanger Awards Ceremony are available for purchase (a separate ticket is required to attend). Ticket includes dinner, open bar, and a guaranteed good time!

Note: Admission not included with conference registration pass. Requires a separate ticket. 

The digital marketing industry’s biggest night! Join us as we crown this year’s AdExchanger Awards winners live on stage. See who takes home the gold, toast the industry, and be inspired. Ticket includes three course, sit-down dinner, open bar, and a guaranteed good time!

Note: Admission not included with conference registration pass, however bundles are available to combine a Programmatic I/O ticket with your AdExchanger Awards ticket at a reduced rate. See options and purchase tickets here.