The Future of Programmatic 2024: Five Key Trends to Watch

From declining addressability to growing concerns over brand safety and ad fraud, WARC’s latest Future of Programmatic report highlights five major trends set to define programmatic advertising over the coming 12 months.

The findings of this research are based on an exclusive survey of 100 programmatic experts, conducted in partnership with B2B market research company, NewtonX.

 

Key themes

Brand safety tops list of programmatic concerns: Recent reports have shown advertisers are spending millions of dollars on low-quality ad placements that violate brand safety standards.

More than half (60%) of the advertisers and agencies we surveyed highlighted this issue as one of their biggest causes for concern, with 56% selecting improved ad verification capabilities as a top priority.

 

Advertisers are underprepared for a cookie-diminished world: Third-party cookies will no longer be removed from the advertising ecosystem, but will nonetheless play a diminished role in the future.

Many advertisers are still struggling to adapt to this new world. Despite concerns about the impact of signal loss on various areas including targeting, data access, audience segmentation and measurement.

 

The industry is failing to take action on transparency: Many thought the ANA’s damning report on the open web programmatic supply chain would inspire the industry to cut waste and improve transparency.

But a year on from the ANA’s ‘first look’ report, we find a significant portion of agencies and advertisers are yet to implement any recommended actions from the study.

 

Emissions reduction is not a priority at most companies: Programmatic advertising is notoriously energy intensive because of the complexity of its supply chain. Emissions related to inefficiencies around ad selection are of particular concern.

Less than a third (31%) of agencies and advertisers we surveyed said they had adopted a framework or set of methodologies to measure the carbon emissions from their digital advertising. Another third (34%) have taken no action at all to reduce the carbon impact of their programmatic advertising campaigns.

Open web investment decreases as walled garden spend grows: Despite evidence suggesting that the open web remains the arena in which audiences spend most of their time, investment in walled gardens appears to be growing

Three-quarters of respondents (76%) say they are spending 40% or less of their budgets on open web advertising. These figures are lower than those presented in research by The Trade Desk and LiveRamp.

Go deeper

Explore these trends and more in WARC’s latest Future of Programmatic report.

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