Programmatic advertising was supposed to solve the problem of media efficiency. Buy the right audience, at the right moment, at the right price — automatically, at scale. The reality in 2026 is more complicated.
The walled garden concentration — Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok — has intensified to a point where the "open" programmatic ecosystem is structurally disadvantaged in terms of data quality, targeting precision, and measurement. Brands that built their media strategies around the open web are facing increasing pressure from signal loss, brand safety concerns, and declining reach quality.
But the alternative — fully walled garden dependency — creates different risks: concentration of spend in platforms with opaque auction dynamics, limited portability of audience data, and creative constraints that can compress campaign effectiveness over time.
What I think is actually happening, based on direct media planning experience:
**The ROI case for open web programmatic has weakened but not disappeared.** High-quality publisher environments with first-party data integrations — through deals, PMPs, and publisher-direct buys — still deliver meaningful results for brands that invest in the curation. The shift from undifferentiated programmatic buying to curated supply is real and necessary.
**Retail media is the most important structural shift in programmatic.** Amazon's advertising business, and increasingly the retail media networks of major retailers, are attracting spend that previously went to traditional display and social because of proximity to purchase intent. This is not a trend — it is a structural reallocation.
**Measurement is the unresolved problem.** Multi-touch attribution in a cookieless, walled-garden-fragmented world remains genuinely unsolved. Brands that have invested in media mix modeling as the primary measurement framework are navigating this better than those waiting for a cross-platform attribution solution that may never arrive in the form it once took.
Personal views. Not professional or investment advice.