IAB Europe this week held its Virtual Programmatic Day 2026, a hybrid event co-hosted at Google's London offices with hundreds of participants joining in person and a significantly larger audience streaming online. The event, published on YouTube on April 30, 2026, brought together practitioners from agencies, broadcasters, technology platforms, and SSPs across two main panel discussions: one dedicated to connected television and a second examining what organisers called the growth algorithm of programmatic advertising.

Wayne Tassie, group director of the Netherlands at DoubleVerify and chair of IAB Europe's Advertising and Media Committee, opened proceedings. Michael Todd, global director of industry relations at Google, welcomed attendees from the stage. According to Todd, the industry relations function at Google was established approximately 14 to 15 years ago, and its mandate is to engage with trade bodies, standards organisations, and regulators. "Our goal is to partner with you all to try and solve those big challenges," Todd said, pointing to supply chain transparency and measurement protocols as ongoing concerns.

Connected television: ownership, data, and new formats

The first panel, moderated by Paul Gubbins - CTV lead for exchange platforms in EMEA at Google Ad Manager - examined the current state of connected television buying across European agencies. The panelists were Chris Brennan, head of PMX Lift at Publicis Media; Lisa Kalyuzhny, VP of sales for EMEA at Nexxen; Mara Negri, SVP of global media agencies at MFE Advertising, the holding company of the Mediaset group; and Nikunj Sureka, senior director of product at Verve.

The absence of a clear ownership structure for CTV budgets inside agency holding companies was the first topic raised. According to Kalyuzhny, the buyer journey typically moves from programmatic teams to audiovisual specialists to client teams, and sometimes directly to brands, with no single team holding consistent authority. "It ranges across the board," she said. "Now, even the brands are getting involved." Negri agreed, adding that the KPIs change depending on which team a seller is addressing. Legacy broadcast teams measure using reach, frequency, and gross rating points, while programmatic teams focus on CPMs and digital metrics. A third group - performance teams - is now entering CTV, attracted by the possibility of measuring outcomes such as uplift in sales and web visits.

Nexxen's ACR data capabilities, discussed by Kalyuzhny, were a recurring technical reference point during the session. Automatic content recognition - ACR - is technology embedded in smart TVs that identifies what content is being watched without user input. Kalyuzhny described it as "the Shazam of your TV," enabling buyers to understand viewing exposure even in environments without advertising, such as BBC. The technology is central to frequency management and incremental reach analysis across linear and streaming inventory. PPC Land has previously covered Nexxen's exclusive ACR data partnership with VIDAA, a five-year deal covering global rights through 2029, as well as Nexxen's ACR data integration with The Trade Desk across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Despite the industry discussion around ACR, Kalyuzhny acknowledged that activation has not yet reached its full potential. "I think very much as an industry, we talk about it a lot," she said, "but I don't think the activation has really hit its stride."

OpenRTB 2.6 and pod-level buying

Gubbins referenced the introduction of OpenRTB 2.6 as a structural turning point for CTV trading. The protocol, developed by the IAB Tech Lab, allows SSPs and DSPs to communicate pod-level requests, enabling buying platforms to understand the full structure of an ad break - including its duration, the number of available slots, and competitive separation constraints - before placing a bid. Before this standard, programmatic systems were effectively applying mobile and desktop logic to television inventory, which created frequency and quality problems.

Sureka, from Verve, confirmed that the programmatic ecosystem has become substantially more efficient over the last three to four years as a direct result of these protocol improvements. "Delivering an ad experience of a one-minute break or a three-minute break is much easier, much more seamless as to how it was three years ago," he said. SSPs and DSPs have moved from single-opportunity auctions to multi-opportunity auctions with awareness of duration and creative quality. PPC Land has tracked the adoption of OpenRTB 2.6 across European markets in detail, including Alliance Digitale's March 2026 guide to CTV technical standards for the French market and IAB Spain's January 2026 harmonization guide establishing recommended bid request parameters. On frequency management specifically, Brennan said Publicis has made a significant investment in ID technology through Perpil and believes it now has a market-leading solution for understanding individuals and households across the ecosystem. Kalyuzhny offered a counterpoint worth noting: "You're so bombarded with a product, but then you remember it," suggesting that the relationship between frequency and brand recall is not straightforward.

Emerging formats: pause ads, L-shapes, and home screen placements

Beyond the standard 30-second pre-roll, the panel discussed a growing catalogue of non-interruptive formats that streaming platforms are developing. Negri listed display formats, L-shapes, pause ads, and interactive intro ads as available options on broadcaster inventory. "Creativity - sky is the limit," she said, adding that viewers can click through from some formats to experience content within the TV ecosystem. Still, the 30-second spot remains dominant. Sureka confirmed that some formats are in experimental stages, with results still emerging, and that IAB is developing new standards to support them. The IAB Tech Lab published standardized guidelines for six CTV ad formats in December 2025 - covering pause ads, menu ads, squeezeback formats, overlay ads, in-scene insertions, and screensaver ads - following a collection of more than 100 real-world format submissions. Brennan argued that the formats most likely to scale are those that feel native to the television experience. "The ones that will win out, the ones that will scale will be the ones that feel native to that experience," he said. Home screen placements, which appear before a viewer chooses what to watch, were highlighted as a particularly strong candidate given the high attention levels during that 10 to 12 minute content discovery phase.

SMB advertisers entering television

A substantial portion of the first panel addressed the unlocking of small and medium-sized businesses as TV advertisers. Negri identified three historical barriers: the minimum audience size required for addressability, the high cost of entry in both media and creative terms, and the complexity of execution. CTV removes the first barrier by enabling geo-targeted campaigns at local scale. AI tools address the second by reducing creative production costs. Self-serve platforms - of which Negri said MFE Advertising launched its own ad manager in May 2024, now deployed in Spain with expansion into Germany anticipated - remove the third. "With a few clicks you can buy a campaign very simply and you can track your results on it," she said, describing an influx of net-new advertiser clients that would have been unreachable on traditional television. Brennan confirmed that digital-first brands, which previously relied on social channels rather than above-the-line TV, are now entering the medium. This dynamic aligns with broader industry data showing 45% of marketers increasing programmatic CTV budgets by reallocating from linear television, a figure from Proximic by Comscore's January 2026 State of Programmatic Report.

Retail media and connected television: drawing the line

The CTV panel closed with a discussion of retail media data applied to television advertising. Brennan raised a concern about expectations. Retail media has historically been bought on-site, with the assumption that an ad impression would directly drive a purchase. Applying that logic to television creates a risk of misreading the channel's actual value. "I think you're doing yourself a massive disservice as to the power of what you can actually glean from it," he said, specifically around QR codes as a primary measurement function. Roku's integration with Shopify - which allows purchases via the Roku remote - was cited as an example that, while technically innovative, may not fit living room habits. An in-room show of hands suggested roughly 10% of the audience had scanned a QR code in the past six months. Kalyuzhny reframed the issue as one of balance: "We are all consumers first and then work in adtech after." A useful data signal and an intrusive buying prompt are not the same thing, and the distinction matters for publishers protecting engagement. Negri pointed to contextual advertising as a more natural fit, where the content itself informs ad selection. "Now the capability to really read and scan your content and understand what scene you have in front of you and put a relevant ad because of the context" is available, she said, with particular relevance for sectors such as tourism, food, and jewellery.

The growth algorithm: programmatic's next 20 years

The second panel was moderated by Rebecca Ackers, VP commercial UK and EMEA DV Plus strategy at Magnite, who also sits on the IAB Europe board. Panelists were Alberto Ciot, sales director for EMEA at Quantcast; Emma Crawford-Prajapati, head of EU sales GTM at Amazon Ads; Liora Fox, business lead at Ogury; and Jacques Du Preez, head of programmatic at Starcom, part of Publicis Group.

Ackers opened by asking the audience when programmatic began. The response - "2008," "nine," "the mid-to-late noughties" - landed roughly on 20 years. Ciot noted that in programmatic's early days, campaigns ran across tens or at most a hundred websites, managed in spreadsheets. Today, some budgets activate across hundreds of thousands of domains and placements. DSPs were built to manage that complexity but introduced their own layer of human limitation. "We gave this some limitations, which are human limitations," Ciot said, adding that AI now presents an opportunity to "rebuild or reshape" programmatic's decision-making architecture.

Crawford-Prajapati described Amazon's approach to this transition as a two-mode system. Smart mode allows campaigns to operate in a fully agentic fashion, with reduced human input and more autonomous AI control. Expert mode preserves manual buying practices but augments them with AI-generated insights delivered at the moment of campaign setup, rather than requiring the user to seek them out. "I think this continuation of humans wanting to work how they also want to work will continue for a while," she said. Amazon also announced during the panel that it has a campaign optimization feature called Brand Plus, designed to bridge the gap between brand lift and conversion by identifying viewers with a higher propensity to convert within the next 90 days. On live sports, Crawford-Prajapati noted that Amazon DSP buyers could have purchased Champions League spots the previous night programmatically, with the ability to remarket those audiences into subsequent campaigns. Interactive video ads deployed on Thursday Night Football in the US delivered an 83% increase in purchase rate, she said, citing audience and creative integration as the driver.

Persona intelligence, fragmentation, and what AI is actually replacing

Fox, from Ogury, described the direction of her company's data strategy as a shift toward what she called persona intelligence - building aggregated audience models from large-scale datasets based on behaviours, motivations, and intent, rather than chasing individual identifiers. "Those personas are much more durable," she said. "They work across channel and they are much more resilient in a privacy-first world." PPC Land has covered Ogury's February 2026 extension of this approach to connected television, where the same persona framework is now deployable across mobile, desktop, and CTV within a single campaign.

Fragmentation was the word the second panel returned to most frequently. Audience strategies are not consistent across channels. Measurement frameworks differ between platforms. Campaign execution often diverges from planning intent. "Advertisers are really beginning to question whether their budgets are reaching the right audience or just being optimized towards those short-term metrics," Fox said. The practical consequence is a trust gap between what programmatic promises and what it demonstrably delivers.

Du Preez, from Starcom, raised the Model Context Protocol as an area of active internal focus. His team is working to understand how MCP can be used not just to serve brand data into large language models, but to influence custom algorithms and reshape how audiences are defined and activated. The agentic advertising management protocols published by IAB Europe were referenced as a framework his team is monitoring closely - covering how publishers monetise, how interoperability should be structured, and how data flows through buying systems. PPC Land has covered IAB Europe's related work, including IAB Europe's March 2026 explainer on agentic ad infrastructure, which broke down the structural components of agentic advertising from single-LLM agents to full multi-agent ecosystems. Separately, Ciot announced that Quantcast would release the open beta of a new product on May 5, 2026, described as a single-budget, single-outcome interface where the company's AI determines allocation across inventory. He also noted Quantcast's investment in reducing the environmental footprint of its AI computing infrastructure, moving processing to cloud environments through AWS rather than dedicated data centres.

Responsible investment and the open exchange

An audience question near the end of the second panel asked directly about the long-term role of the open exchange, historically the backbone of publisher monetisation. Fox offered an honest assessment: many brands buying on the open exchange are acquiring inventory she considers low quality, and a more effective route exists through curated audiences. "You get what you pay for," she said. Du Preez acknowledged the tension but positioned the programmatic team - by virtue of experience filtering open exchange supply - as well-placed to navigate the coming complexity. Crawford-Prajapati argued that DSPs carry a specific responsibility not to reduce transparency in the name of automation. "Programmatic doesn't equal reduction in transparency," she said. Choices around measurement methodology, targeting logic, supplier selection, and reporting must remain visible and selectable by the buyer. A second audience question raised the topic of guard rails for agentic operations - specifically, which party in the supply chain bears responsibility when an autonomous agent makes a decision. Ciot, speaking from an IAB perspective, argued that the standards-writing process gives the industry more leverage than it typically recognises, and that writing universal agentic guard rails early is a priority rather than an afterthought.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The discussion at this event reflects several simultaneous pressures that PPC Land has been tracking closely. IAB Europe published its most detailed programmatic CTV guide in April 2026, documenting 18 CTV-validated consent management platforms, 466 TCF-registered vendors supporting CTV environments, and sharp SVOD growth of more than 200% in Europe during 2024. CTV's share of total media budgets reached 26% in 2026, up three percentage points year-over-year, according to data cited across multiple industry reports. More than half of marketers expect over 60% of their CTV buys to occur programmatically during the year. At the same time, 70% of advertisers in IAB Europe's January 2026 survey reported frustration with performance measurement - a tension the Virtual Programmatic Day panels addressed repeatedly. The event's two-panel structure mapped almost exactly onto that tension: one panel examined why CTV is hard to buy and measure, and the other examined what the industry's underlying growth infrastructure needs to become. The answers - more consistent identity frameworks, probabilistic measurement that earns advertiser trust, AI that reduces operational overhead rather than just adding another interface, and standards that anticipate agentic pipelines before they are already live - were largely agreed upon. The gap between consensus and implementation is where the actual work lies.

Timeline

Summary

Who: IAB Europe, hosting its Virtual Programmatic Day 2026 at Google's London offices, with panelists from DoubleVerify, Google, Publicis Media, Nexxen, MFE Advertising, Verve, Magnite, Quantcast, Amazon Ads, Ogury, and Starcom.

What: A hybrid industry event featuring two panel discussions - one on connected television covering measurement, ACR data, OpenRTB 2.6, emerging formats, SMB entry, and retail media - and one on programmatic growth covering AI buying modes, persona intelligence, agentic protocols, live sports programmatic, and the future of the open exchange.

When: April 30, 2026, broadcast live from Google's London offices with on-demand recording published the same day.

Where: Google's London offices, with hundreds of in-person attendees and a larger online audience streaming internationally.

Why: The event addressed a set of persistent structural tensions in European programmatic advertising - measurement fragmentation in CTV, unclear ownership of streaming budgets inside agencies, the transition from human-operated to AI-assisted or fully agentic buying, and the need for guard rails around autonomous advertising systems before they are deployed at scale.

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