Programmatic advertising continues to command the lion’s share of digital budgets, but entering 2026, the forces shaping it point to a more disciplined phase of growth. Rising scrutiny around media quality, shifting consumer discovery patterns, and the deepening role of AI are pushing advertising leaders to rethink how programmatic delivers true value—not just scale.
Key Takeaways:
These trends underscore a broader shift in programmatic advertising, and success in 2026 will depend less on maximizing volume and more on managing complexity with intention, structure, and accountability.
As global ad spending is set to surpass $1 trillion for the first time, programmatic advertising continues to play a central role.
In 2025, programmatic digital display ad spending in the US grew 13.6%, surpassing $180.4 billion and accounting for nearly 92% of all digital display ad spend. That momentum shows no signs of slowing. In 2026, US programmatic display spending is expected to exceed $203 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 12.5%. Globally, programmatic is projected to account for roughly 90% of display ad budgets and nearly all incremental growth in display for the foreseeable future. With major events like the Winter Olympics, FIFA World Cup, and key midterm elections set to fuel the media landscape in 2026, the scale and stakes of advertisers’ programmatic investments will be especially high.
This growth is occurring against a backdrop of both challenge and opportunity. Privacy expectations continue to rise, data signals remain inconsistent, and long-standing assumptions about addressability and measurement are being tested.
While Google reversed its plans to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, the decision did little to resolve the broader challenges associated with signal loss. For many advertisers, declining data quality and shrinking addressable audiences remain daily realities, regardless of browser policy changes. Yet these same pressures are driving innovation in inventory curation, first-party data strategies, and privacy-conscious targeting approaches that promise more effective, sustainable advertising.
Artificial intelligence is further reshaping the programmatic ecosystem. AI is now embedded across the advertising workflow—from campaign planning and optimization to creative development and analytics—but its most alarming impact may be the flood of AI-generated content entering the programmatic supply chain. The rapid proliferation of generative AI is raising the stakes for brand safety and media quality, as low-quality synthetic content becomes harder to distinguish from legitimate inventory. While AI is also powering many of the tools to combat these challenges, the race between synthetic content creation and detection will be a defining feature of programmatic quality in 2026.
Meanwhile, consumer attention continues to splinter across channels and formats. Retail media networks are expanding quickly, short-form video is commanding a growing share of budgets, and ad-supported streaming is evolving with new formats and placements. At the same time, discovery itself is changing, as zero-click search experiences and AI-generated summaries reduce traditional paths to traffic and engagement (not to mention attribution).
Taken together, these forces have made programmatic advertising all the more powerful…and all the more demanding. The year ahead will test how well advertisers can manage AI-driven risks and opportunities, consolidate data foundations, adapt to new discovery patterns, and execute across evolving video and commerce environments.
Simply put, AI is reshaping the programmatic landscape.
While the technology has improved efficiency, the rapid spread of AI-generated content has increased the volume of low-quality inventory that can slip into campaigns, making it harder to separate genuine human interest from surface-level impressions.
AI-generated sites and content farms can deliver high impression counts and engagement signals that look legitimate in reporting but don’t translate to brand recall or purchase intent. This dynamic has elevated brand safety from a reputational concern to a performance issue. With 54% of advertisers believing generative AI has contributed to a decline in overall media quality, teams must rethink how they evaluate inventory and interpret campaign results to ensure optimization is grounded in authentic engagement.
Advertising leaders are responding by layering smarter controls into their buying strategies. Pre-bid protections, contextual intelligence, curated supply, and ongoing delivery analysis can help advertisers identify patterns associated with low-value or synthetic content before spend accumulates. These approaches reduce waste and ensure optimization decisions are based on reliable signals rather than volume that masks low-quality environments.
In 2026, advertisers must find ways to reliably and consistently apply these guardrails systemically across their programmatic strategies, leveraging AI for routine monitoring while reserving human expertise for strategic oversight and decision-making.
As consumer concerns around data privacy remain high and signal loss continues to reshape addressability, first-party data has become central to programmatic strategy.
In 2025, 40% of US marketers relied on first-party data as their primary privacy-centric targeting approach. Meanwhile, the usefulness of third-party cookies has continued to decline, this despite Google’s U-turn on deprecation in Chrome. As audiences move fluidly across platforms and formats, the signals cookies provide are increasingly partial, limiting their effectiveness as a foundation for long-term planning.
Yet as powerful a tool as first-party can be, data alone is not enough. Without strong organization and consolidation, even high-quality data struggles to deliver impact, particularly as AI becomes more deeply embedded in planning, activation, and optimization.
Fragmented data remains a major barrier for marketers: Fewer than one in five industry professionals say their first-party data is extensive and well-structured, while 34% describe it as limited or disconnected. Much of this stems from tech stack sprawl, with more than half of agency professionals reported to use eight or more tools to manage campaigns and 40% juggling 10 or more. These gaps make it harder to respect consumer choice, apply consistent governance, and generate reliable insights, while simultaneously undermining AI performance by limiting data-powered optimizations and increasing the likelihood of flawed recommendations driven by incomplete or inconsistent inputs.
Without data consolidation, these challenges compound. Unifying data across systems enables privacy-conscious targeting, clearer measurement, and more responsible use of AI—allowing advertisers to do more with less signal while maintaining trust and performance.
With the emergence of zero-click search environments, advertisers must also adapt to how consumers discover and evaluate brands.
As AI-generated summaries, AI Overviews, and AI agents increasingly resolve queries directly within a search or chatbot interface, fewer users are clicking through to websites. Recent research shows that only about 8% of users click links from Google’s AI summaries, signaling a meaningful shift in how discovery happens. More broadly, a growing share of searches conclude within the results pages themselves, with many users finding the information they need without clicking through to another destination.
This evolution challenges long-standing assumptions about search performance and attribution. When answers are delivered without a click, traditional KPIs like CTR and last-touch conversions become less reliable indicators of impact.
In this new context, brand exposure, contextual relevance, and repeated presence across channels increasingly shape consideration throughout the customer journey, with audiences visiting websites later and later in the process…if they visit at all. In parallel, brands must also account for how they appear within AI-driven search results and large language model (LLM) outputs, where summaries, recommendations, and cited sources can shape perception without any direct interaction. Visibility now extends beyond links and placements to include how—and whether—a brand is represented in these emerging information environments.
For programmatic advertisers, this shift elevates the role of display, video, and contextual placements in the awareness and consideration process. These channels help establish familiarity and preference in moments when consumers are forming opinions, even if they never leave the search or AI interface. Measurement frameworks and media strategies must evolve to reflect a world where visibility still drives value—just not always traffic—and where influence is distributed across a broader, more decentralized ecosystem.
As measurement and attribution models evolve to account for zero-click influence, programmatic budgets continue flowing toward environments that connect media to transaction data.
Commerce media has been one of the fastest-growing areas within programmatic advertising, reshaping how brands connect media exposure to purchase behavior. In 2025, retail media programmatic display spending grew more than twice as fast as total programmatic display, reflecting advertisers’ appetite for environments tied closely to transaction data and retail signals. WPP’s end-of-year forecast highlighted just how quickly the category has scaled, projecting that commerce media would surpass television in total spend by the end of 2025.
As the category matures, however, the focus is shifting from rapid expansion to execution and integration. Growth may not continue at the same pace, and leaders are increasingly grappling with inconsistency across retail media networks, misaligned measurement frameworks, and rising operational demands. At the same time, early signs of agent-driven commerce are beginning to influence how value is created within these environments. Industry forecasts suggest that by 2028, a meaningful share of digital storefront interactions could be handled by automated “machine customers.” As these systems play a larger role in product discovery, comparison, and purchase decisions, the quality and consistency of product data, pricing signals, and promotions are becoming just as important as media placement itself.
Today, commerce media demands integration, not just investment. Advertisers that treat commerce media as a core component of their programmatic strategies—supported by disciplined measurement, strong data foundations, and intelligent automation—will be better positioned as retail media evolves from a breakout growth channel into a more machine-mediated, long-term pillar of the media mix.
Programmatic video is increasingly concentrating around short-form, mobile-first formats. As audiences turn to quick, scroll-based video for entertainment, inspiration, and product research, ad budgets are following in kind.
In 2025, social video accounted for 53.7% of programmatic video ad spending, reflecting how budgets have followed audience behavior. Engagement patterns reinforce this shift, with a majority of consumers interacting with short-form video multiple times per day and using it as a source for product discovery and recommendations.
This dynamic is especially pronounced among younger audiences: Gen Z—whose spending power is projected to reach $12 trillion by 2030—engages with short-form video at a higher frequency than older cohorts and relies on it as a primary source of entertainment, inspiration, and discovery. As a result, short-form video ads are influencing consideration earlier and compressing the path from exposure to action faster than traditional video formats.
In 2026, the challenge for advertisers will be less about whether to invest in short-form video and more about how deliberately they do so. Creative must be built for the format and paired with strong brand safety guardrails and deliberate KPIs that account for how quickly short-form video can drive movement from awareness to action. As short-form video continues to absorb both attention and budgets, advertisers that integrate it thoughtfully within broader omnichannel strategies will be better positioned to convert fleeting moments into durable impact.
Subscription fatigue is driving viewers toward ad-supported streaming—and turning CTV into a laboratory for format innovation. The experimentation is pushing CTV beyond standard pre-roll and mid-roll placements toward formats designed to complement the viewing experience rather than interrupt it. Pause ads, interactive units, content hubs, and contextual sponsorships are gaining traction as advertisers look for ways to capture attention without increasing ad load.
Audience behavior is reinforcing this shift, with viewers increasingly multitasking while streaming, thereby creating demand for formats that invite engagement rather than passive exposure. Interactive CTV ads are emerging as one response: More than 40% of US marketers already use interactive features across social and CTV, and over half expect interactive elements to account for at least a quarter of their ads. Early performance signals suggest these formats can deliver meaningful lift, including higher unaided recall and stronger brand affinity, when aligned with content and context.
As CTV inventory continues to fragment across platforms and environments, new formats have in turn created new operational challenges. The absence of universal CTV standards has created significant variability in how ads are served, measured, and experienced, increasing the need for structure and visibility as experimentation accelerates. Programmatic activation—supported by a unified, omnichannel platform—provides a framework for testing emerging formats with guardrails, allowing advertisers to compare performance, manage frequency, and maintain consistency across placements. In 2026, advertisers that pair creative experimentation with programmatic discipline will be better positioned as CTV shifts from a reach-first channel to a more interactive, performance-aware component of the media mix.
Across all these channels and formats, a common thread emerges: the need for greater control over where ads appear and how budgets are deployed.
Programmatic advertising has long been synonymous with scale. Yet as programmatic investment continues to climb, so does scrutiny around media quality and working spend. Leaders are increasingly expected to defend not just performance, but also the transparency and quality of the media supply chain. In 2025, inefficiencies and waste in programmatic spend were estimated to total about $26.8 billion globally, underscoring the gap between dollars invested and working media outcomes.
Curated inventory packages give advertisers more visibility into where ads appear and how supply paths function, helping reduce inefficiencies and improve confidence in campaign outcomes. Curation has gained traction as marketers seek stronger alignment between media quality and performance, with 41% citing curated deals as a path to higher ROI. DSPs and SSPs are responding by expanding tools that support flexible deal structures and clearer supply chain insight.
The open exchange remains an important source of reach, but in 2026, it is increasingly paired with curated strategies that bring added control. Together, they enable advertisers to pursue growth without compromising trust.
The trends shaping programmatic advertising in 2026 reflect a steady recalibration (rather than a dramatic reset). As budgets continue to grow and scrutiny intensifies, advertisers are moving away from volume-driven approaches and toward strategies that prioritize quality, accountability, and adaptability. The shift is visible across the programmatic ecosystem—from consolidated data foundations and stronger media quality guardrails to evolving commerce media, changing discovery and video environments, and curated supply paths.
What connects these shifts is the rising importance of integration. Disconnected channels, formats, and signals require systems and operating models that support consistent decision-making across planning, activation, and measurement. As automation becomes more embedded in programmatic workflows, human oversight will become less focused on manual execution and more centered on governance, interpretation, and long-term value creation.
In 2026, advertisers that pair thoughtful experimentation with clear guardrails, maintain transparency as strategies evolve, and combine automation with human expertise will be best positioned to evaluate performance, defend investment decisions, and sustain growth amidst ongoing change.
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Looking for more insights into the major innovations and opportunities to watch this year? Our 2026 Trends Report: Rewinding to Fast Forward provides real perspective on the key trends that are poised to shape the year ahead.
