By Brian Mitchell, Managing Partner & CEO.
Every year or so, someone declares that adtech is dead. A big platform changes its privacy rules, a holding company reshuffles, a few vendors get acquired or fold, and the obituaries start writing themselves.
Adtech isn’t dead. It’s doing what every serious industry does when it grows up: it’s evolving. The players change, the business models change, and the value moves around. But the need to connect brands with audiences at scale hasn’t gone anywhere.
We’ve seen this movie before
The telecom industry was once dominated by long-distance carriers. Calling across the country was a premium product with a premium price. Then wireless, VoIP, and bundled plans came along, and “long distance” stopped meaning anything. Telecom didn’t die. It evolved, and it’s bigger than ever.
Software used to come in a box. You drove to a store, bought a disc, and installed it. Today almost nobody buys software that way, yet the software industry is one of the largest on earth. The delivery model changed to the cloud. The demand didn’t.
And the internet itself has been rebuilt several times over. It went from dial-up portals and static web pages to search, then social, then mobile apps in every pocket, then streaming on every screen. Each shift reshuffled who held attention and who got paid for it, but the internet kept getting bigger.
Adtech is on the same path.
Adtech has already reinvented itself twice
In the early days, premium publishers commanded $50 CPMs and sold their inventory through their own in-house sales teams. Relationships were everything, and scarcity kept prices high.
Then ad networks arrived and disrupted everything. They aggregated inventory across thousands of sites, gave advertisers reach that no single publisher could offer, and pushed prices down in the process.
Then programmatic disrupted the ad networks. Real-time bidding, exchanges, DSPs, and SSPs automated what networks had done by hand, and data started driving decisions that used to be made over lunch.
Each wave was supposed to be the end of something. Each time, the industry came out bigger and more efficient.
The next wave is already here
Today the disruption is coming from an unexpected place: companies that were never in the ad business. Big retailers, hospitality brands and financial services firms are sitting on rich first-party data about what their customers buy, where they travel and how they spend. Now they’re turning that data into their own ad exchanges and media networks.
That’s a fundamental shift. The most valuable signal in advertising is no longer rented from a third party; it’s owned by the companies closest to the customer… Ever heard of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.?
Connected TV is the other big story. As viewers cut the cord and move to streaming, the biggest screen in the house has become addressable, measurable, and biddable. TV budgets that once moved through annual upfronts are shifting into programmatic pipes, and CTV has become one of the fastest-growing channels in all of advertising. The living room is now part of adtech.
Agencies still hold the “buy” keys. They still manage budgets and relationships for the world’s biggest advertisers. But they’re nowhere near as influential as they once were. Brands are bringing capabilities in-house, data owners are selling direct, and the old gatekeepers have to earn their seat at the table.
AI will rewrite the playbook again
If programmatic automated the buying, AI is about to automate nearly everything around it. Ad delivery is moving from rules and manual optimization to systems that plan, bid, build creative, and adjust in real time. Workflows that took a team of traders and analysts days will take minutes.
Measurement is changing too. With cookies fading and signals fragmenting across screens, AI-driven modeling is filling the gaps, connecting exposure to outcomes in ways last-touch attribution never could.
The biggest change may be on the consumer side. As people get answers from AI assistants instead of scrolling search results and feeds, the places ads appear, and what an ad even looks like, will change. Ads that are relevant, conversational, and genuinely useful will win. Interruptive ones will have a harder time than ever.
Maturing, not dying
Times have changed. The $50 CPM days aren’t coming back, and the companies that defined the last era may not define the next one. That’s not death. That’s maturity.
Adtech is growing up, consolidating around data and becoming part of how every large business makes money. And if telecom and software are any guide, we’re still in the early innings.
So the next time you see the headline “Adtech is dead,” read it for what it really means: the old way of doing adtech is fading. The industry itself is just getting started.