👋 Hello media misfits!
While everyone else was busy mourning the death of the cookie (again), WARC was out here writing programmatic’s comeback story.
Their latest report, Future of Programmatic 2025 (it’s pay-walled btw), reads like a redemption arc for a channel that’s been blamed for everything from wasted spend to world hunger.
Let’s dig into the tea.
🧠 The Future is Curated (and CTV is Hungry)
Remember when programmatic was a Wild West of remnant inventory, brand risk roulette, and baffling CPMs? Yeah, not cute. But now? We're witnessing a surprisingly grown-up transformation.
Three big trends emerged:
Sell-side curation is the new media cocktail of choice – Forget chucking money at the open exchange and hoping for the best. Agencies are now sipping bespoke deals with trusted SSPs, minus the fraud hangover.
AI brand safety is actually doing something – Turns out, letting machines decide where your ads go is smarter than Brenda from compliance playing whack-a-mole with keyword lists.
prDOOH is having a main character moment – Half of all digital out-of-home is now programmatic. That’s not a niche; that’s a hostile takeover. Especially when you can serve raincoat ads only when it rains. Who knew weather could be a trigger for sales and emotional breakdowns?
📉 RIP Open Internet (Kind Of)
Here’s the kicker: open internet programmatic spend? Stagnant. Meanwhile, walled gardens are growing faster than a media intern’s ego after their first Cannes trip. Brands are leaning hard into cookie-free alternatives—first-party data and contextual like it’s 2006 (but with smarter pixels and fewer pop-ups).
📈 Efficiency Up. Excuses Down.
WARC reports a 14-percent boost in spend efficiency since 2023. Why? Because quality and transparency aren’t just buzzwords—they’re finally being enforced. This isn’t about more impressions. It’s about fewer “why did we spend twenty-grand on that?” Slack messages.
🔮 The Crystal Ball Says: Accountability, AI, and Actually Collaborating
The future of programmatic won’t be built on CPM races or shady arbitrage. It’ll be shaped by:
Real partnerships between buy and sell side
AI-enhanced tools that actually respect privacy
Creative that adapts faster than a brand manager in a crisis
The open web can still win—if we stop treating it like the bargain bin of media plans.
💡 The Takeaway
To stay relevant, agencies need to clean house:
✔ Ditch junk inventory
✔ Embrace AI-powered brand safety
✔ Go cookie-free with contextual and first-party firepower
✔ Ride the CTV, retail media, and DOOH wave like it’s your Q4 bonus on the line
The open exchange didn’t die. It just got curated.
Now stop blaming programmatic.
The problem wasn’t the pipes… it was what you were shoving through them.
Coming soon: AI weather-triggered adtech articles. Because if it works for raincoats, it’ll work for sarcasm too.
Until next time,
David