AdTech's Transparency, Turbulence and Tech Upgrades

Programmatic tempers are high as DSPs, SSPs, and platforms clash over data access, supply paths, and shifting competitive lines. The Trade Desk’s Kokai rollout and its push toward OpenPath triggered noticeable drops in spend for Magnite, PubMatic, and Nexxen, all of which were forced to explain weaker-than-expected Q3 results. Seasonal growth that usually arrives in October didn’t show up, signaling broader softness across programmatic demand. At the same time, vendors are using earnings calls to redraw categories, question rivals’ independence, and defend themselves against reseller concerns.

And yet, none of this drama is entirely new. For as long as anyone can remember, people in ad tech have complained, even during boom times. Now they’re doing it while revenues tighten.

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The IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic RTB Framework is a new standard designed to make real-time bidding faster and more efficient by running every part of the auction inside a shared, containerized environment. Instead of sending bid requests across multiple vendors and cloud systems, all participants operate locally, using containers that hold bidding models, fraud checks, and data logic.

This structure cuts latency from hundreds of milliseconds to a fraction of that, creating room for real-time data enrichment, identity scoring, and fraud analysis before an impression is won. Advertisers gain direct control by placing their own bidding logic inside containers that run at the point of auction, while publishers can add more signals to each request without exposing sensitive data. The framework is in public comment and expected to move forward after industry review.

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Amazon’s DSP is gaining ground as a serious competitor to The Trade Desk, and new information suggests Omnicom might be redirecting a meaningful portion of its programmatic budget toward Amazon’s platform.

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Meta built a giant new AI model called GEM that acts like the central brain for all of its ad recommendations across Facebook and Instagram. Its job is pretty simple. It understands people better, understands ads better, and matches them more accurately. The goal is higher relevance for users and better ROI for advertisers. These types of technical write-ups get confusing fast, so I wanted to give you a clear snippet of what they’re actually building. If you want to read it in detail, you can.

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