#programmatic-advertising

#programmatic-advertising

Blasto, a global programmatic advertising ecosystem, has reported its 2025 operational results, outlining platform developments across demand-side tooling, verification infrastructure, and service innovations, as well as the launch of a new DSP offering designed for small and mid-sized agencies. According to the company, 2025 marked a deliberate shift from surface-area expansion to workflow clarity, controllability, and measurable supply quality, reflecting buyer demand for tighter SPO outcomes, reduced auction noise, and consistent policy enforcement across mobile app and CTV environments.

"We're an American heritage brand," noted Stephanie Sandkvist, head of retail media and Amazon at Groupe SEB, All-Clad's parent company. As such, the chance to run ads in front of audiences cheering on Team U.S.A. during ice hockey or ski jump events without having to invest in a sponsorship or expensive linear package was a "no brainer," she said. It's a milestone event for the business.

"Our vision is to build a powerful technological and media-driven arm to break out of Overwolf Ads' closed ecosystem, expand its reach, and create unrivalled value in the gaming ad tech space," said Eyal Betzalel, COO of Overwolf Ads. "Overwolf has extraordinary assets in gaming. The opportunity now is to connect those assets to the broader programmatic ecosystem in a way that preserves quality, brand safety,

Programmatic has become almost synonymous with opacity. Each platform has its own rules for running ad auctions, which means advertisers and publishers often don't know what's happening behind the scenes. To shine a light into those black boxes, the Media Rating Council (MRC) released new standards last week for digital ad auction transparency alongside a new voluntary certification for platforms that adhere to them.

Intent IQ, a privacy-first identity resolution company, today (3rd February, 2026) announced a partnership with Raptive to deploy Intent IQ's Bid Enhancement offering across Raptive's publisher network. Through the partnership, Raptive will integrate Intent IQ's Bid Enhancement to improve bid performance and monetisation across both environments where traditional identifiers are present-such as cookie-based browsers like Chrome-and environments where identifiers are limited or unavailable, including iOS and other ID-less inventory.

Today's programmatic landscape has fractured into a maze of silos, proprietary ecosystems and walled gardens, each one extracting value, controlling access and making it harder for marketers to see where their dollars actually go. Meanwhile, open internet programmatic, once the promised land of clarity and control, has been reduced to a fraction of the overall media mix. This wasn't inevitable. It was engineered.

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.

Programmatic media buying is expected to account for the majority of growth in the CTV market in 2026. This year alone, over 90% of CTV ad dollars were transacted through programmatic pipes. That data isn't surprising. Programmatic has solved a real problem by helping brands reach TV viewers with targeted precision at much lower costs. But precision isn't the same as presence.

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?

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.