If you're trading XYZ company stock, you don't get "good" or "bad" shares, they're all the same (unless they are clearly marked as different e.g. preferred versus ordinary shares, etc). We know from the viewability discussions alone, that this is far from the case in media. There are many, many formats, every page is different, every ad unit behaves differently.
This is not new news, of course, but many in the industry seem to be finally waking up to the hard truth that data-driven media buying, as we know it today, is severely under threat and has to change. Cookies power everything we do, from humble frequency capping through to complex multi-touch attribution models, ad personalisation and audience segmentation. They underpin most of the gains we've made in performance advertising, as well as brand advertising, over the past decade.
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).
BSkyB is investing 40 per cent of its £15 million yearly display budget on real-time bidding (RTB), a figure which could be further driven higher by the growth of Facebook's Exchange.
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.
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.
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?
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:
