Opinion

No one in programmatic advertising needs another reminder about fragmentation. This complexity stands in sharp contrast to the original promise of the open internet. Programmatic was supposed to give marketers the freedom to reach audiences anywhere online by combining data, automation and inventory from across the web.

It’s widely reported that anywhere from 20% to 30% of programmatic video spend is lost due to supply-side misrepresentation, invalid traffic and low-quality inventory. That’s billions in wasted ad spend – not to mention billions in ad revenue siphoned away from premium publishers – further eroding high-quality video inventory.

Retail media is booming.
Spend is climbing, new networks are launching and every platform seems to deliver strong returns. And yet many marketers are asking the same uncomfortable question: How do we know what’s actually driving growth?

In 2011, three media devices captured 87% of consumer attention. Today, that figure has dropped to 65%, according to McKinsey. The fragmentation isn’t slowing down; it’s accelerating. Streaming services, social media, podcasts and gaming now compete for eyeballs, making traditional media planning feel like navigating with an outdated map.

If you want to protect your margins, your data and your long-term strategy, here are five questions worth asking before you sign anything.

The play “Data” sparks conversations about AI, surveillance, data tracking and predictive modeling. The ad tech world should be paying attention.

As we head further into 2026, the biggest risk for marketing orgs isn’t choosing the wrong AI – it’s letting “AI perfectionism” delay decisions so long that no decision gets made at all.

Should businesses start advertising on AI media platforms? Yes. But it depends on how consumers in your category are already using AI and how quickly your organization can respond.

Customers don’t need perfection. But they do need to know that a brand will make it right when something goes wrong.

When Truthset revealed that IP-to-postal matches are accurate only 13% of the time, it exposed an uncomfortable truth about connected TV advertising: The industry has been optimizing for the wrong metric.

If you buy CTV advertising, you’ve likely encountered two approaches to securing premium inventory: programmatic guaranteed (PG) and buying direct, also referred to as direct IO (DIO).

Marketers are projected to have invested nearly $400 billion in US media in 2025, based on estimates from MAGNA and eMarketer. About half of that will go toward finding new customers. Yet, as marketing investment grows, clarity on what actually drives ROI and growth continues to shrink. The loss of third-party identifiers, rising privacy restrictions and closed ecosystems have made it harder to see what’s working.

If a buyer wants real control, “domain rationalization” alone will never be enough. Buyers need “bid rationalization,” shaping the supply at the bid-request level so they see fewer, better, more outcome-relevant opportunities.

Many organizations are encountering a paradox: Performance appears strong, while durable growth remains elusive. How should performance be evaluated when the strongest signals no longer align cleanly with growth?

Complexity hasn’t made the CTV supply chain difficult to trust. This is a transparency problem and, more specifically, an ads.txt problem.

The advertising industry is full of noise about AI making buy-side and sell-side processes more efficient. That framing is convenient, but it misses a broader point, writes Snowflake’s Dennis Buchheim.

When marketers get too fixated on measuring short-term performance, they miss opportunities to capitalize on TV’s strength as a brand-building channel.

Consumers today switch between screens and viewing interfaces to seamlessly view content. Now it’s time for advertisers to catch up to this convergence, so they can make ad experiences better – not worse, said Cadent CEO Doug Rozen.

Marketers who want to remain competitive need to reexamine the way they view, plan and measure performance across video and streaming platforms. If they’re still debating programmatic vs. direct or linear vs. streaming, then they’re missing out on the real meaning behind convergent TV, according to Mike Fogarty, head of client development, brand and agency […]

The US government wants to use digital ad infrastructure for the exact type of surveillance the industry’s critics have long warned about. We should have seen this coming.

The divergence between the DSPs reveals shifting buy-side priorities. Advertisers have grown wary of how The Trade Desk earns margin, where its algorithm steers inventory and how these strategies compete with buyer goals.

As the video landscape evolves, one thing is clear: CTV is no longer operating as a standalone line item. It is now a foundational component of fully converged, total video strategies. The implications are especially significant for regional and local advertisers.

Yes/no binary logic was the right tool for programmatic. But autonomous AI agents can evaluate 10 million impressions per second, combining data from hundreds of sources, and human-defined targeting logic can no longer keep pace.

The future of publishing won’t be defined by where content lives, but by how it’s created, licensed, distributed and valued, writes David Kohl.

Traffic didn’t drip. It dropped. In 2026, publishers are prioritizing stability over scale as AI, automation and curation reshape the sell side.

The future of retail media depends on a shift away from siloed in-store and online metrics to a full-funnel approach that reflects how customers actually shop.

ICE wants to know how ad tech and location data could aid investigations. The question is: Will ad tech finally draw a line – or cross one?

For most of the last decade, performance marketing was rewarded for momentum. Spend efficiently. Scale quickly. Optimize continuously. If the line went up and to the right, few questions followed. But that era is ending, because performance without accountability is no longer credible.

A 2004 statute prevents owning enough TV stations to reach 39% of households. But without the scale afforded to other digital content companies, local TV is at a competitive disadvantage.

AI in advertising has gone from a buzzword to a full disruptor in what feels like just a few months. If CES was any indication, there is no sign of this slowing down.