2024 was the year of bright-eyed pitches, speculative innovation, and narratives about industry transformation. 2025 filtered the excitement through budget expectations and regulatory inquiry. At the outset of 2026, the mission statement for performance marketers seems to be benchmarking the performance of everything that has made it through the filter and fully integrating it into the wider adtech ecosystem.

Adtech giants commit to AI

The clearest indication of AI-led transformation of adtech, even to the uninitiated, is leading social and commerce platforms taking risks with the technology. Meta’s initiative to use data from AI chatbot interactions for tuning ad and content personalization across Facebook and Instagram shows the extent of AI’s current influence on media systems.

How committed is Meta to making AI part of its ad platforms’ infrastructure?  The decision to apply this update broadly across the platforms’ user bases with limited opt-out mechanisms should be an obvious sign.

Amazon keeps investing in AI-driven media buying inside its DSP, rolling out tools like Performance+ and Brand+ that leverage machine learning to automate audience selection, bidding, and optimization across the company’s inventory. These features lift operational load from media buyers and help campaigns optimize toward specific performance goals, combining Amazon’s first-party data with real-time behavioral patterns to predict conversion likelihood and adjust delivery accordingly.

Rolling out and incentivizing advertisers to use AI tools will likely remain the game plan for major advertising platforms in 2026. The good news is that the features will likely remain optional, and marketers’ job will remain the same: identifying which ones actually drive value and taking manual control where needed. The challenge is to split-test new capabilities in pace with this year’s tightly packed release schedule.

Programmatic still not automatic

Programmatic advertising enters 2026 mostly intact, but clearly more streamlined. Many advertisers have cut intermediaries out of their supply paths in 2025, valuing cost transparency and lead accountability above immediate volume.

Major platforms keep moving further into automation. For example, Google expanded its AI-driven bidding and keyword recommendations across search in 2025, while TikTok released predictive optimisation tools that reduce manual campaign management. Advertisers who have tested it report that results still depend heavily on data quality and campaign strategy.

What became clear in 2025 and stays pertinent in 2026 is that automation likely won’t ever eliminate the need for judgment. Machine-learning optimisation tools have streamlined execution since before the generative AI boom, but performance still depends on the marketer’s ability to interpret opportunities and act on them. The tools’ capabilities are still far from removing the responsibility for decision-making.

CTV gains more ground

Connected TV crossed a signpost threshold last year: it’s no longer perceived mainly as an experimental extension of linear TV. Lower-funnel use cases have become much more practical with improved household-level targeting, better attribution modeling, and tighter programmatic integrations.

At the same time, some of the format’s unresolved issues still carry over into 2026. Measurement is still fragmented, frequency management across publishers is inconsistent, and inventory quality varies widely. These shouldn’t be perceived as a barrier to investing, as major progress in these areas is bound to happen in 2026.

Cookies with context

Google’s impending third-party cookie ban finally stopped impending in April last year, to the collective sigh of relief from the performance marketing industry. However, “indefinitely postponed” doesn’t inspire complete confidence in the stability of the status quo, especially in the face of unremitting pressure from regulatory bodies and the average internet user’s ever-increasing privacy expectations.

The search for alternative tracking and attribution methods that started when the sky was falling continues as it stalls uncomfortably close to the ground.

Contextual and content-based methods are gaining traction, if not to replace cookie-based attribution, then to supplement it by giving marketers a clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t on the supply path. Emerging tools like Classify use generative AI to analyze and classify page content instead of logging device IDs and locations.

Optimising based on content and engagement instead of user identity is a potential way to avoid privacy challenges entirely. It also makes sense as a natural evolution of keyword-based models, leveraging one of the strongest points of the modern generative AI models: language processing.

Wrapping up the wrap-up

2026 offers more stable footholds for marketers than the previous few years. There are fewer hypotheticals to navigate and more defined options to test. While the field still carries more risk than it did before 2022, the shape of a new framework is becoming visible.

There is room both to help develop it further and to find a place within its existing sections. That constraint, paradoxical as it may be, creates more opportunity than the endless possibilities of the past few years.

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