2026: The year of change? Or stuck in the same ol’ cycle.

Every year, adtech declares itself to be at a turning point.

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s just wishful thinking.

The industry never stands still; new formats, frameworks, and acronyms arrive at speed. But while PR releases on innovation sprint ahead, the foundations & functionality often lag behind. And when those foundations crack, the problems don’t stay hidden for long.

Over the past few years, these cracks widened. And in 2025, they finally spilled into the open.

What used to be whispered behind closed doors - or over warm rosé in Cannes - played out publicly. On stages. In threads. In articles. In increasingly candid conversations between industry leaders.

For a moment, professional politeness slipped. And adtech got a rare thing: a reality check.

The uncomfortable question is whether anything actually changed. Did the industry listen? Did it reflect? Or did it simply move on to the next distraction?

When the noise got louder than the progress

Questions that had lingered for years suddenly gained volume:

• What does transparency really mean?

• What qualifies as “clean supply”?

• Who defines sustainability — and who benefits when they do?

None of this was new. What was new was the openness.

In 2025, sustainability claims were publicly challenged. Vague net-zero pledges were called out. Supply-chain opacity was debated in full view of buyers, publishers and regulators alike. It was uncomfortable, sometimes messy, but necessary.

Because beneath all of it sat a deeper tension the industry has been circling for years:

when complexity concentrates power, trust erodes.

Which brings us neatly to ADCP.

ADCP, agentic advertising, and what it revealed

ADCP arrived as one of the more serious attempts to make agentic advertising real. In theory, it promised cleaner supply paths, fewer intermediaries and clearer rules between buyers and sellers.

In practice, it ran into the realities of the open web.

Latency matters. Scale matters. Real-time environments don’t forgive friction.

So far, ADCP has found its footing mainly in more controlled environments, like programmatic guaranteed. That’s not a failure. It’s a signal.

A signal that while the industry is excited about agents doing the heavy lifting, it’s still constrained by infrastructure built over decades. Some welcomed the structure. Others worried about power concentrating elsewhere.

All valid reactions. And all pointing to a bigger question: what sits above all of this?

Beyond agents talking to agents

Not dumbing things down. But stripping things back.

The next phase of adtech won’t be won by whoever controls the most pipes or shouts the loudest. It will be shaped by those who help the ecosystem navigate complexity without owning it.

That’s where we see the future taking shape: not in more layers, but in smarter discovery. And curation that surfaces value instead of hiding it.

2026 won’t be the year adtech reinvents itself overnight.

It will be a year of evolution:

• Transparency becomes a condition, not a value-add

• Publishers push for greater control over how their inventory is packaged and monetised

• DSPs and SSPs prove value through outcomes, not positioning

• Sustainability shifts from narrative to evidence: audited, measurable, verifiable

• Performance is judged on real business impact, not proxy metrics

• And curation continues its migration toward the sell side, where scale, control and fairness can actually coexist

Fancy a coffee?