Agentic AI infrastructure dominates advertising week

The week of January 5-10, 2026 marked an inflection point for advertising infrastructure as platforms moved beyond testing to deploy agentic AI systems capable of autonomous campaign execution. While CES attendees navigated Las Vegas exhibition halls, a parallel transformation unfolded across programmatic advertising—one where IAB Tech Lab's comprehensive agentic roadmap attempted to prevent ecosystem fragmentation before competing protocols could splinter the industry.

Yahoo DSP's January 6 announcement demonstrated the shift from theory to practice. The platform integrated agentic AI directly into its demand-side infrastructure, creating a system where artificial intelligence agents continuously monitor campaigns, diagnose performance issues, and execute corrective actions autonomously. Adam Roodman, general manager at Yahoo DSP, framed the capability as fundamental workflow transformation rather than incremental optimization.

The implementation reflects decisions about security, governance, and control at enterprise scale. Yahoo DSP maintains transparency requirements allowing advertisers to audit agent actions, understand decision logic, and override automated changes when business requirements demand human judgment. The system operates with approval gates for campaign modifications—agents identify opportunities and recommend changes, but advertisers maintain final authority over execution.

This architectural approach contrasts with fully autonomous systems that execute decisions without human oversight. The distinction matters because advertisers managing million-dollar campaigns require accountability mechanisms and the ability to intervene when automated systems deviate from strategic objectives or respond inappropriately to market conditions.

The timing aligned with IAB Tech Lab's January 6 roadmap announcement, which extended established industry standards including OpenRTB, AdCOM, and VAST with modern execution protocols. Anthony Katsur, chief executive officer at IAB Tech Lab, stated the organization will make substantial engineering investment focused solely on artificial intelligence development, including dedicated resources to expedite roadmap delivery.

The roadmap positioned IAB Tech Lab as coordinator rather than competitor in the agentic landscape, extending rather than replacing existing platform capabilities. This approach contrasts with proprietary protocol initiatives that position particular vendors as gatekeepers to agentic functionality. However, adoption requires participation from platforms that process the majority of programmatic advertising budgets.

Live event streaming presents particularly challenging scenarios. IAB Tech Lab acknowledged specific challenges in delivering advertisements during live streamed events in its roadmap, leading to development of new OpenRTB signaling protocols and implementation guidance for programmatic advertising in environments where forecasting, concurrent streams management, and real-time optimization occur simultaneously.

The organization scheduled a public webinar for January 28, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time titled "Reviewing the Agentic AI Standards Roadmap," providing technical overview of the standards being extended and how agentic execution will be applied across different advertising contexts. Beginning February 12, 2026, IAB Tech Lab will launch monthly in-person Agentic AI Boot Camps and workshops at the IAB Ad Lab.

Analysis published July 21, 2025 by Ari Paparo, founder and chief executive officer of Marketecture Media, argued that autonomous AI systems could automate campaign setup, targeting, and optimization functions currently handled by demand-side platforms, potentially eliminating the centralized role traditionally occupied by those platforms. The statements reflect recognition that agentic capabilities pose existential questions for traditional programmatic platform business models.

AdExchanger announced January 6 the launch of Programmatic AI, a new spring industry event debuting May 18-20, 2026 in Las Vegas. The conference, anchored by the theme "Mastering the Shift to Intelligent Media," focuses on how intelligence, automation, and advanced data systems are reshaping media planning, buying, optimization, and measurement.

The event complements AdExchanger's flagship fall conference, Programmatic I/O New York, September 28-29, 2026, creating a year-round roadmap for understanding both AI-led transformation and broader forces shaping the programmatic landscape. Registration opened with Early Bird pricing in effect through February 13.

Measurement infrastructure converges television and digital

Comscore's January 6 release of program-level measurement capabilities addressed fragmentation that historically separated audience intelligence across platforms. The enhancement, powered by Amazon Bedrock agentic AI technology, provides normalized, deduplicated reach data tracking individual shows and episodes across streaming and linear television with daily reporting frequency.

The system processes millions of tokens daily, bringing together viewing metadata from multiple systems and platforms to create unified reporting. Steve Bagdasarian, Comscore's Chief Commercial Officer, stated the expansion unlocks better planning, smarter selling, and greater confidence in a converged world where content is the new currency.

Comscore launched cross-platform content analysis tools for media companies on January 16, 2025, establishing the foundation for program-level tracking. The system integrates data from linear television, streaming services, personal computers, mobile devices, and social media platforms to analyze audience behavior across distribution channels.

Deduplicated measurement represents a fundamental challenge in cross-platform television advertising. When audiences watch content on multiple devices or platforms, traditional measurement approaches double-count viewers, inflating reach estimates and creating inefficient media allocation decisions. The program-level module addresses this through unified content identification that tracks specific shows and episodes regardless of where viewers watch them.

The capabilities extend beyond basic viewership metrics. Daily reporting powered by Amazon Bedrock AI technology enables 24-hour update cycles, providing granular data about consumer behavior that allows content owners to optimize distribution strategies and media placements.

Spotter's January 6 partnership with Comscore designated the measurement company as its official independent measurement partner for creator-led content. The collaboration addresses the absence of standardized, third-party measurement for creator content comparable to what exists for traditional television and streaming platforms.

Spotter will utilize Comscore's Cross-Platform Content Measurement, Video Metrix, and Media Metrix products to assess YouTube creator performance. The measurement approach mirrors methodologies traditionally reserved for broadcast, cable, and streaming television, enabling direct benchmarking between creator franchises and conventional programming.

Nic Paul, Spotter's President and Co-Founder, stated the partnership provides creators with television-caliber measurement that positions their content alongside premium programming rather than as supplemental digital inventory. The 71 percent connected television viewership within Spotter's creator portfolio—including franchises like Dude Perfect, Kinigra Deon, and Airrack—aligns with broader streaming consumption trends where viewers increasingly consume long-form content on television screens rather than mobile devices.

This shift positions creator content within living room entertainment rather than supplemental mobile viewing, justifying measurement standards comparable to streaming services competing for the same screen time. YouTube's advertising revenue growth of 13 percent year-over-year in Q2 2025 reflected strong performance, particularly in direct response formats.

Platform consolidation reshapes programmatic supply chains

The Trade Desk secured commitments January 6 from nine prominent publishers including AccuWeather, BuzzFeed, the Guardian, and Hearst for its OpenAds auction platform. The infrastructure provides what The Trade Desk characterizes as a direct, high-integrity alternative to existing programmatic auction environments where transparency concerns persisted throughout 2025.

Will Doherty, SVP of Inventory Development at The Trade Desk, stated OpenAds represents a major advance in how the industry thinks about a clean and transparent supply chain, starting with the auction. The platform uses forked Prebid codebase maintaining original transaction identifier functionality that allows buyers to detect duplicate impressions across multiple supply paths.

AccuWeather, The Arena Group, BuzzFeed, the Guardian, Hearst Magazines, Hearst TV, Newsweek, People Inc., and Ziff Davis constitute the first wave of publishers supporting OpenAds. The company initially announced OpenAds on October 2, 2025, made it available to OpenPath enterprise partners in October 2025, and plans continued development throughout 2026 including simplified implementations for smaller publishers.

The Trade Desk created OpenAds to address transparency concerns in programmatic advertising auctions where publishers and advertisers struggled to understand fee structures, detect duplicate impressions, and verify that highest bids win inventory. The platform operates within the global programmatic advertising ecosystem, affecting transactions between advertisers, publishers, demand-side platforms, and supply-side platforms across display, video, connected television, mobile, and audio advertising channels.

Jeff Green, The Trade Desk's CEO, stated during CES on January 8 that 2026 will mark the open internet's strongest year yet, arguing that advances in AI and long-awaited improvements in measurement will push more brands to shift their first ad dollars away from walled gardens and toward premium web inventory.

Green described 2025 as "one of the biggest game-changer years in the history of our space," citing the U.S. Department of Justice's monopoly ruling against Google alongside growing pressure on companies to demonstrate tangible returns from AI investments. The positioning frames 2026 as a turning point after several years of upheaval across the advertising industry.

Digiday's January 6 analysis characterized 2025 as the year Google quietly recalibrated—retreating from some of its longest-running bets while accelerating decisively in others. The most visible reversal came with the effective end of the Privacy Sandbox experiment and Google's decision to walk back plans to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome.

After years of insisting that Privacy Sandbox represented the future of web advertising, Google opted for optionality, underscoring what the analysis termed a long goodbye to a project that never won broad industry trust. For many ad tech companies, the shift confirmed that the economics of the open web proved harder to re-engineer than anticipated.

Amazon's momentum emerged as the counterpoint. Internally, the strategy was framed as doing more with less. Automation and AI became central to maintaining momentum with a leaner workforce, shaping how Amazon aims to do more with less across its ad business. The ambition was clear: turn a $17 billion quarterly ad haul into sustained DSP expansion, laying the groundwork for a much bigger push heading into 2026.

That momentum came at the expense of independent ad tech, with The Trade Desk emerging as the clearest counterpoint. Once positioned as the standard-bearer for open-internet buying, the company spent much of 2025 responding to buyer pressure on pricing and flexibility, culminating in a decision to loosen its grip on pricing. Leadership at The Trade Desk may view 2025 as a year defined less by category leadership than by defensive repositioning as Amazon redrew the competitive map.

Content monetization platforms expand creator infrastructure

Spotify announced January 7 reductions to Partner Program eligibility thresholds by 80 percent, lowering requirements to 1,000 engaged audience members, 2,000 hours consumed, and 3 published episodes. The changes arrive during the program's first anniversary, marking a period of infrastructure development and creator adoption across multiple markets including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Nordic countries.

The Partner Program launched January 2, 2025, introducing dual revenue streams that combine Premium subscriber video engagement payouts with advertising revenue from free users. Spotify distributed more than $100 million to podcast publishers globally in the first quarter of 2025. Payouts for creators enrolled in the program grew over 300 percent in January 2025 compared to the previous year.

The company stated that hundreds of podcast creators now earn more than $10,000 monthly through the program, with top earners surpassing six-figure annual incomes. Spotify introduced its Distribution API, enabling creators hosted on participating platforms—including Acast, Audioboom, Libsyn, Omny, and Podigee—to publish and monetize video content on Spotify without re-uploading files or changing workflows.

Creators can check eligibility by visiting the Monetize tab on Spotify for Creators. The platform processes applications based on the reduced thresholds, evaluating baseline requirements. Sponsorship management tools will roll out starting April 2026 across Spotify for Creators and Megaphone, including capabilities to remove, replace, and add host-read sponsorships in video episodes with scheduling functionality and performance tracking metrics.

The timing reflects broader industry movements toward creator monetization infrastructure. Audioboom, positioned as a competing platform, stakes its claim in video podcast distribution while Spotify expands accessibility to its Partner Program. The reduced barriers lower entry requirements for creators who previously fell short of original thresholds while maintaining quality standards through engagement and consumption metrics.

Agency consolidation accelerates operational integration

Omnicom unveiled January 8 the next generation of Omni, its central identity and analytics service. The upgrade stems from Omnicom's acquisition of Interpublic Group, which closed in November, making Omnicom the largest agency holding company by revenue.

The deal brought valuable assets into the fold, chief among them the Acxiom Real ID, an IPG-owned identity solution now integrated into Omni. Omnicom is leaning harder into Flywheel, acquired in 2024, to power Omni's shopper intelligence. The new Omni product comes with a new agentic AI framework addressing the broader industry trend toward consolidation.

The final pillar of the new and improved Omni is Interact, which was IPG's name for essentially the same centralized data and analytics service. The upgrade underscores how agency consolidation creates operational challenges and opportunities simultaneously—combining technology stacks, eliminating redundancies, and presenting unified offerings to clients while managing cultural integration and talent retention.

At ADWEEK House during CES, Florian Adamski, Omnicom Media's CEO, expressed confidence in the direction of the newly recalibrated organization and opined on the future of ads within AI interfaces like ChatGPT. The executive addressed questions about how the Omnicom-IPG merger positions the combined entity for 2026, emphasizing client fatigue driving what he characterized as a "renaissance moment" across media and creative.

The consolidation comes as Digiday reported that Havas' Forward Media unit won most of LVMH's media business in Europe from Publicis, effective January 2026. Forward already handles media for the luxury brand holdco in Italy and Latin America. The shift demonstrates how major client movements continue reshaping agency relationships even as industry consolidation proceeds.

IPG's global CEO of UM, Andrea Suarez, reportedly left the holding company amid a restructure that will see most of the holding company's global CEOs be replaced by brand presidents. The changes reflect operational integration following the Omnicom acquisition, with leadership transitions creating uncertainty for staff while promising streamlined operations for clients.

Google policy modifications expand advertising inventory

Google announced December 19, 2025 that it will update its Pharmaceutical product policy for Authorized Buyers in January 2026. The change represents a departure from certification requirements that govern pharmaceutical advertising on Google Ads, creating distinct policy frameworks across Google's advertising platforms.

Authorized Buyers will gain the ability to promote prescription drugs and prescription drug services in specific locations without requiring Google certification. The policy modification affects Google's Authorized Buyers platform, which operates within the programmatic advertising infrastructure connecting demand-side platforms to publisher inventory.

In the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, creatives may use prescription drug terms for promotional purposes, including content promoting the branding, use, sale, and distribution of prescription drugs. This mirrors policy modifications Google implemented for Google Ads in October 2025. In other locations, creatives cannot use prescription drug terms for promotional purposes.

Non-promotional use of prescription drug terms remains permitted globally, including regulatory warnings, legal notices, public health and safety campaigns, and academic publications. This bifurcated approach creates operational complexity for buyers managing campaigns across multiple geographic markets.

The programmatic advertising ecosystem continues evolving through technical standardization efforts and privacy-oriented modifications. Google completed its transition to OpenRTB protocol on February 15, 2025, abandoning proprietary Authorized Buyers RTB protocol in favor of industry standards. This standardization facilitates interoperability across programmatic platforms while maintaining platform-specific policy requirements like the pharmaceutical advertising modifications.

Google Ads announced January 6 it will update advertising policies to allow ads for Prediction Markets starting January 21, 2026. The policy applies in the United States, but only for federally regulated entities. Prediction markets are online platforms where people trade contracts based on the outcome of future events, like elections or sports, with prices reflecting the market's collective forecast of probability for each outcome.

Advertisers must apply for certification through Google to run ads targeting the United States. Eligibility is limited to entities authorized by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as Designated Contract Market whose primary business must be the listing of Exchange-Listed Event Contracts, or those authorized as a Brokerage by the National Futures Association to offer third-party access to products listed by a DCM that meets specified criteria.

The policy creates new advertising inventory for platforms like Kalshi and PredictIt that operate federally regulated prediction markets. The timing coincides with increased mainstream attention to prediction markets following the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, where these platforms demonstrated pricing mechanisms that reflected electoral probabilities with notable accuracy.

Search ecosystem faces algorithm volatility and AI integration

Search Engine Roundtable's January 5 recap documented Google Search ranking volatility affecting multiple sites. Google Discover appears to show X posts too frequently according to searcher complaints. Google Knowledge panel has a bug where it is squishing images, which Google will fix soon. Google Search Console links report seems to be showing fewer links.

The January 2026 Google Webmaster Report emphasized that the Google December 2025 core update was the dominant story, running for 18 days and having a large impact on many sites. Search traffic to news publishers continues to dwindle, not just because of the core update. Numerous Googlers say SEO for AI is the same as SEO for traditional search.

Google also said Discover is minimally aligned to search rankings. Search Console had announcements including AI-powered configurator, social channels in the Insights report, and smoothed out reports. After a long delay in data, the performance report and the indexing report seemed to have caught up.

January 6 brought additional volatility with SEOs and site owners complaining about large drops in Google Search rankings. While the unconfirmed update does not feel as widespread as previous ones, documentation serves publishers impacted by changes. Things calmed down before December 29 and then became more volatile into the new year, with some volatility touching down around January 3 before intensifying January 6-7.

With ranking changes came complaints of drops in AdSense earnings, with chatter on Search Engine Roundtable and WebmasterWorld documenting the pattern. Site owners reported drops of 87 percent, 30 percent year-over-year for December and January, 62 percent from last year, and traffic down 90 percent from normal levels on specific days.

Google added a new button to the Google Ads Change history report January 4 that lets advertisers quickly jump to different campaigns and ad groups in the report. The feature should serve as a time saver for advertisers navigating campaign modifications and auditing historical changes across account structures.

Danny Sullivan told creators January 8 not to split content into bite-sized pieces for LLMs, saying optimization tactics won't survive ranking system improvements. The statement, made during the Search Off the Record podcast published January 8, emphasized that Google does not want publishers to fragment content for AI consumption. Sullivan even spoke to Google engineers about this directive.

The guidance reflects tensions between traditional SEO approaches focused on search engine optimization and emerging pressures to optimize for large language models and AI-powered search experiences. Publishers attempting to adapt content for both traditional search and AI retrieval face competing optimization frameworks that may require different content structures.

AI chatbot competition intensifies across platforms

Similarweb data shared January 5 documented year-over-year growth from January 2025 to January 2026 across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude as mobile app adoption surges past website visits. The AI chatbot landscape shifted dramatically from January 2025 to January 2026, transforming from what industry observers characterized as "one giant" into a genuine competitive race.

ChatGPT entered 2025 already operating at massive scale. While its growth spike appeared significant compared to standard websites, percentage-based growth calculations revealed smaller expansion rates than emerging challengers faced. Gemini achieved the largest year-over-year growth when comparing January 1, 2025 performance against January 1, 2026 metrics.

The question confronting industry analysts centers on sustainability. Gemini still faces ground to cover in app usage relative to competitors, but the momentum documented through Similarweb's measurements demonstrates undeniable traction. ChatGPT maintained commanding lead in U.S. AI chatbot traffic with 66 percent share according to November 2025 data, though Gemini demonstrated growth patterns that contrasted sharply with ChatGPT's decline during that measurement period.

For Perplexity, 2025 represented what observers termed "the year of the app." The platform started January 2025 with similar app usage and daily website visits. Twelve months later, the data showed a massive leap in app engagement, fundamentally altering the platform's user interaction patterns from web-based testing to daily mobile app habits.

The competitive dynamics matter for advertisers monitoring where audiences engage with AI-powered search and information retrieval. Platform consolidation around a single dominant player would create different strategic considerations than a fragmented landscape where multiple platforms maintain meaningful market share across different use cases and geographic regions.

Publisher monetization challenges intensify

AdExchanger's January 5 analysis by Scott Messer argued that 2026 will also bring a new era of pain when ads creep into LLMs and the enduring but stagnant web-display budgets leak into this nascent channel. As AI Overviews become Google's default search interface, the "organic result" will effectively vanish.

The piece introduces the concept of "Sponsored Citation," a model where being the "source" in an AI answer is an auction, not an accolade. Google will effectively charge publishers to be the footnote in their own stolen content. The question for 2026 isn't "How do I rank?" It's "Can I afford to bid on my own survival?"

The analysis frames 2026 as the year publishers finally remember how to walk without platforms. After years of building on rented land, publishers are done. The collective trauma of 2025 will harden into a strategy of ruthless independence. Publishers will continue to use social platforms, but with zero loyalty, designing every post or video solely to move users off that platform and into an owned experience—an email, an app, or a website worthy of loyalty.

The metric of success is no longer "viral reach" but "sovereign reach"—the audience publishers can contact without asking an algorithm for permission. Once publishers extract that audience, they must give them a reason to stay. The era of "managed decline" is over; the era of existential clarity has begun.

AdExchanger noted that publishers have been losing 20, 30, and in some cases even as much as 90 percent of their traffic and revenue over the past year due to the rise of zero-click AI search. The statistic appears repeatedly across AdExchanger coverage during the January 5-10 period, emphasizing the severity of traffic displacement affecting publisher business models.

Digiday's comprehensive guide to what's in and out for publishers in 2026 documented the shift from keyword rankings as visibility metric to citation tracking for AI answers. The guide emphasized that agentic-driven media trading replaces agents for campaign optimization, while enterprise LLM licensing revenue displaces ad-only dependence.

The framework reflects publisher adaptation strategies as zero-click search erodes traditional traffic sources. Bitterness over Google's AI monopoly replaces bitterness over Google's ad tech monopoly. Curation revenue spikes while curation hatred fades. Publishers buying traffic displaces publishers selling traffic as acquisition costs reshape audience development strategies.

CES themes reveal hardware and infrastructure priorities

ADWEEK's January 9 coverage of five things the ad industry can't stop talking about at CES 2026 highlighted conversations among ad industry leaders revolving around the infrastructural requirements for advancing agentic advertising, the enduring appeal of live sports, and agency consolidation.

The altogether resounding feeling of the event has been overarching uncertainty. Questions outnumber answers at a time when AI-based search has increasingly consumed the open web and decimated publishers' traffic and revenues, AI's role in creative production and media trading is evolving, and the industry confronts ambient geopolitical and macroeconomic concerns.

CES 2026 marked a turning point as artificial intelligence moved beyond chatbots and into physical products, with robots, vehicles, wearables, and immersive systems showcasing how AI is becoming real-world infrastructure. The shift from software to hardware implementations creates new advertising surfaces and data collection opportunities that platforms are beginning to explore.

AdExchanger highlighted consumer wearables primed to go off in 2026, especially accessories and rings. Smart watches remain the top wearables choice by far, with 163.5 million smart watches shipped in 2025 compared to 4.3 million smart rings. Smart glasses have taken a shine lately, largely thanks to Meta's Ray-Ban collaboration.

Rings are best poised for growth according to some observers. Their data collection potential is intimate, with high-end versions featuring delicate health-tracking capabilities and sub-$100 options that include built-in microphones for taking prompts and sending reminders. OpenAI's mysterious hardware product, ambitiously set for a 2026 release, will be built around enhanced audio capabilities.

Google acquired Fitbit years ago and has since integrated health-tracking and fitness data into the core Google identity graph. The wearables trend represents the "everything is an ad network" pattern where new advertising canvases and data sources continuously emerge, creating new inventory and targeting capabilities for advertisers.

Timeline

January 5, 2026

• Digiday publishes comprehensive guide to what's in and out for publishers in 2026
• Similarweb shares year-over-year AI chatbot growth data showing competitive race across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude
• Search Engine Roundtable documents Google Discover showing X posts frequently, Knowledge panel image squishing bug
• AdExchanger publishes analysis on media in 2026 transitioning from managed decline to ruthless independence
• Search Engine Roundtable posts January 2026 Google Webmaster Report covering December 2025 core update impacts

January 6, 2026

• IAB Tech Lab announces comprehensive agentic AI roadmap designed to scale AI agent deployment across digital advertising
• Yahoo DSP integrates agentic AI capabilities directly into demand-side platform for autonomous campaign operations
• Comscore releases program-level measurement capabilities tracking individual shows and episodes with daily reporting
• Spotter announces partnership with Comscore for TV-style measurement of YouTube creator content
• The Trade Desk announces first wave of OpenAds publishing partners including AccuWeather, BuzzFeed, Guardian, and Hearst
• AdExchanger launches Programmatic AI conference debuting May 18-20, 2026 in Las Vegas
• Digiday publishes Ad Tech Briefing analyzing how Big Tech won 2025 even when it lost
• Search Engine Roundtable reports Google Ads will permit ads for prediction markets starting January 21, 2026
• Search Engine Roundtable documents additional Google Search ranking volatility and AdSense earnings drops

January 7, 2026

• Spotify announces Partner Program eligibility reductions by 80% and Distribution API launch

January 8, 2026

• Omnicom unveils next generation of Omni identity and analytics service following IPG acquisition
• The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green speaks at CES declaring 2026 will be best year yet for open internet
• Danny Sullivan tells creators not to split content into bite-sized pieces for LLMs on Search Off the Record podcast

January 9, 2026

• ADWEEK publishes five things ad industry can't stop talking about at CES 2026
• AdExchanger highlights consumer wearables and smart rings primed for 2026 growth at CES
• Search Engine Roundtable posts weekly video recap covering Google volatility, personalized AI answers, Microsoft Copilot Checkout