Is this the year programmatic gets simpler?

Opinion

Deep AI integration and the coming together of buy-side and sell-side will cure many advertiser and publisher headaches without sacrificing sophistication, says PubMatic’s chief revenue officer.

How did something that was supposed to make media trading simple become so complicated? It’s the question everyone who works in programmatic has likely asked themselves. The promised benefits of automation and real-time bidding in enabling efficient transactions can often be forgotten as systems have grown to accommodate huge volumes of data and ever-increasing technology stacks. 

In 2026, however, programmatic advertising will finally deliver on its promise of simplicity. Deep AI integration and the coming together of buy-side and sell-side will cure many advertiser and publisher headaches without sacrificing sophistication and fuel the expansion of programmatic into high-value, big-screen inventory.

Agentic AI makes trading as simple as speaking

AI (or, more specifically, machine learning) has always been a core component of programmatic, optimising bids and predicting performance in real time behind the scenes. But its next phase goes far beyond the backend by autonomously representing the needs of buyers and sellers through agents.

Buyers can give their AI agents a list of instructions, from what audiences they want to reach and in what formats to pricing and campaign KPIs, and their agentic counterparts on the supply side can surface the inventory most likely to achieve their campaign goals. 

Adding to the simplicity is that the interface for agentic trading is the most universal and accessible of all: natural language.

For buyers, this soothes the friction that has crept into increasingly cumbersome programmatic workflows. Instead of juggling activation across fragmented channels, they can define their intended outcomes in a simple prompt, then allow agents (and the predictive models that form their intelligence) to orchestrate the ideal supply paths to achieve them.

Open standards will make this possible at scale. AdCP (the Ad Context Protocol) gives AI agents a common language for exchanging information across digital media.

Objectives, audiences, context, and available supply can be communicated directly between buyers and sellers, without either side having to jump between interfaces or stitch together datasets. Decisioning thus naturally migrates closer to the supply side, where the contextual and behavioural signals needed for agents to gauge value are strongest.

For anyone who fears AI agents will introduce more systems with obscured inner workings into an already notoriously opaque supply chain, AdCP has been designed as an open book, not a black box. Every interaction between agents is logged, creating a clear audit trail and providing data for troubleshooting and model fine-tuning over time.

The rise of end-to-end is a win-win

Complementary to the integration of agentic AI (and quite necessary for it to be effective) is a foundational restructuring of the programmatic supply chain itself.

Years of ballooning complexity and fragmentation are reversing in the face of consolidation, strategic partnerships, and a focus on end-to-end efficiency.

Programmatic intermediaries are building the market that the market demands: budget-squeezed advertisers are streamlining their tech stacks, while publishers are reassessing their partners to retain or regain control over monetisation.

This is most evident in the rise of unified platforms that span both SSP and DSP functionality.

PubMatic for Buyers has opened up our supply to the buy-side, and many of our counterparts on the DSP side have also rolled out direct publisher integrations. The end-to-end evolution opens a new frontier of competition and innovation, with all parties keeping their sails set to the North Star goal of simplicity.

Buyers and sellers are the real winners here. Closer proximity between buyers and supply-side signals reduces unnecessary hops, minimising data loss and providing greater visibility into which factors move the needle on outcomes.

For publishers, a simplified supply chain offers a way to protect marketplace autonomy without sacrificing programmatic demand. Having all distribution and pricing levers within a unified infrastructure enables direct, open marketplace campaigns to coexist without stepping on each other’s toes.

CTV needs programmatic to scale with simplicity

The simplification of programmatic has come just in time for CTV, where publishers have been naturally cautious about opening their high-value, premium inventory up to a trading infrastructure that didn’t have the best reputation for protecting publisher margins.

Concerns about inventory and audience commodification are understandable, particularly now that prestige TV shares a screen with user-generated video.

However, commodification is not caused by automation but by the loss of control, which modern programmatic platforms have thoroughly addressed.

Programmatic trading today supports direct and curated deals, product-specific pricing floors, and the ability to ringfence the cream-of-the-crop inventory for upfronts.

It also brings capabilities that simply cannot scale through manual processes, from cross-device targeting and deduplication to dynamic creative optimisation, as well as incremental demand that traditional broadcast and streaming sales teams haven’t previously been able to access.

Tentpole live events such as the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which offer rare mass cultural moments in today’s atomised media ecosystem, will be a proving ground for programmatic CTV.

The FIFA World Cup is set to be the largest streamed event in history, and each game will be bookended by a wealth of associated content across all channels.

Programmatic technology is ideally suited for reaching audiences at such scale while measuring campaign performance and outcomes uplift in real time. 

Building programmatic into CTV allows publishers to unify trading models and meet buyers, particularly those with a digital heritage, where they already operate.

For advertisers, it delivers the best of both worlds, combining TV’s high attention and emotional impact with digital’s ease and accountability.

Whether it’s CTV or the open web, apps or commerce, programmatic technology enables advertising markets to function across today’s dizzyingly complex, connected digital media ecosystem.

But for too long, the industry has been painting over its cracks rather than rebuilding its foundations. In 2026, AI and consolidation will deliver the bottom-up change both ends of the supply chain have demanded, and return to programmatic’s raison d’être: automation in service of simplicity.

Emma Newman is chief revenue officer, EMEA, at PubMatic