#programmatic advertising

#programmatic advertising

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:

Amazon is following the same playbook Google and Meta have refined for years: automate more of the planning and buying that agencies once handled. But this isn't an overt bid to push them aside. It's to capture the long tail - the thousands of advertisers who were never going to hire a shop in the first place. That's the way Amazon ad execs are pitching a major overhaul to the way its ads business works this week: the DSP and Sponsored Ads console are being unified into a single Campaign Manager.

Rajeev Goel, PubMatic's CEO and co-founder, demurred like a champ. He dismissed the "reseller" label as "noise" and pointed to PubMatic's recent collaboration with The Trade Desk on an API that helps publishers and advertisers share deal metadata between platforms in real time. "PubMatic is a platform for direct inventory monetization - reselling is not our business," Goel said. "We are a direct connection to publishers ... and I think it's pretty clear we provide value in ways that DSPs do not."

When AI is a bubble, and talking about AI being a bubble is a bubble ... what do you do? Right, you start talking about AI agents. And AI... agentic... what does it matter? Once you put out a new message, you quickly find a small group of people most likely to respond. You harvest that group fast, performance drops, you change the message, find a new cohort, repeat.

The latest flashpoint bubbled to the surface this summer when Prebid issued a change that rendered TID non-unique across exchanges, effectively undermining its primary purpose of helping buyers detect duplicate bid requests. The change was initially rolled out with little public notice, but concerns about governance and influence in open-source standards were soon raised - it's fair to say that since the August update, there's been much (public) spirited debate on the matter.

Brands and media agencies rely on Google's Ad Exchange (AdX) unit to buy programmatic ads from a wide range of publishers. But they've never had much luck negotiating the rates on that ad inventory. Given AdX's dominant position in the marketplace, they might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Earlier this year, AdX execs opened a gap in that wall for the first time.

Many marketers are curious about omnichannel advertising, but often settle for multichannel, where multiple channels are activated but not orchestrated into a cohesive strategy. In reality, most campaigns are still a patchwork of siloed tactics, but in a fragmented media landscape, simply showing up across channels isn't enough. Access is no longer the challenge. Coordination is. As identity signals fade and consumer journeys become increasingly challenging to track, marketers must shift their approach.

With the protocols that AdCP has in mind, an advertiser might be able to begin an agentic campaign with the prompt like, "I want to find women who are interested in rock climbing in the UK," Coghlan told reporters. That request would go to publisher and platform agents (the agents of sales agents), which could respond with the types of inventory packages and audiences that fit the bill.

What we've learned about retail signals is that they tell us so much more about a consumer around their interests and their lifestyle than any other signal can," says Molly Ryan, agency partnership director, Kroger Precision Marketing. Retail data has become a key ingredient in building precise, performant audiences - but for many brands, the complexity of programmatic activation has been a barrier. KPM's new managed-service offering is designed to make programmatic channels like CTV and streaming audio more accessible, particularly for mid-tier advertisers.

The definition of TV has never been broader. From video on demand to subscription services to platforms like YouTube on connected TVs, audiences are watching more and in more places than ever - but with shifting viewership behaviors, achieving your brand's reach goals requires a new approach to planning and measuring media effectiveness. Instead of treating each streaming service as a silo, a unified CTV