StackAdapt today published The State of Programmatic Advertising 2027, a 40-page report built on a survey of 885 senior marketers across 13 countries and a year of anonymized platform data. Its central finding is that marketers who report the strongest growth are not running fewer channels or tools than their peers. They are running more of them, and say they waste less money doing it.

In Short

StackAdapt, a company that sells software for buying ads automatically across many websites and screens, asked 885 marketers how their advertising was going and compared the answers. The marketers who said business was going best were the ones who had connected their customer data and measurement across channels, while most others said messy, disconnected setups were wasting a big slice of their budget. The survey suggests the problem for most advertisers is no longer finding new places to put ads, but getting the places they already use to work together.

What the report measured

The report, dated October 19, 2026, combines two sources that StackAdapt keeps separate throughout. The first is a survey fielded by research firm NewtonX between July 7 and July 31, 2026. Respondents ranged from manager level to the C-suite at brands and agencies with 100 or more employees, including mid-sized businesses with 100 to 999 staff and enterprises with 1,000 or more.

The geographic split is wider than in previous editions. According to the methodology section, the sample included 360 respondents in North America (240 in the United States, 70 in Canada and 50 in Mexico), 300 in EMEA (100 each in Germany and the United Kingdom, 50 each in France and Spain) and 225 in APAC (90 in Australia, 50 in Japan, 25 in Indonesia, 24 in Malaysia and 18 each in Singapore and Thailand). Some of those country cells are small. Eighteen respondents in Singapore cannot support country-level conclusions, and the report says as much: findings "should be interpreted as broad market indicators, not as a basis for claims about individual industries or verticals within a region."

The second source is anonymized StackAdapt platform data covering August 2025 through July 2026, which the company says examined how advertisers used channels, audiences, optimization and measurement in practice. The report does not say how many advertisers that data covers. It also uses different spend definitions for each source. In the survey, low-spend means annual paid advertising and media spend below $121,000, mid-spend means $121,000 to $10 million, and high-spend means more than $10 million. Platform data, according to a footnote, "uses lifetime spend tiers."

StackAdapt does not publish a margin of error, nor does it say how many respondents fall into the "top performer" group on which its headline comparisons rest. That group is defined as marketers "reporting significantly stronger year-over-year performance," which makes it a self-reported category rather than one tied to audited revenue or sales figures.

What separates top performers

According to StackAdapt, top performers differ from all other respondents on five measures:

  • 45% have expanded their channel mix to three or more channels, against 21% of others
  • 58% use connected customer data, against 44%
  • 69% report greater measurement confidence, against 52%
  • 31% report fragmentation-related budget waste, against 43%
  • 75% report benefits from AI in coordinating channels, against 66%

The first comparison produces the "twice as likely" claim in the company's release. On PPC Land's arithmetic, 45% against 21% is a ratio of about 2.1. The AI coordination comparison appears in the report but not in the release.

"More channels, better customer data, and AI are expanding what marketers can do, but they're also making marketing more complex," said Ryan Nelsen, chief marketing officer of StackAdapt. "Our research shows that the strongest performers are making those moving parts work together more effectively."

The direction of causation is not established. Marketers reporting strong growth may have the budget and headcount to add channels and data infrastructure, rather than adding those capabilities and then growing. StackAdapt acknowledges a version of this problem in its discussion of measurement, where it describes its findings on cross-channel attribution as "directional rather than causal."

The year-over-year benchmarks have cooled

The report compares several answers with its previous edition, The State of Programmatic Advertising 2026. That edition was released on January 7, 2026, and according to StackAdapt's announcement at the time it was based on 484 senior marketers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, alongside platform data from more than 6,000 advertisers. The 2027 edition therefore draws on a sample nearly twice as large, spread across ten more countries and published about nine months later in the calendar.

Those differences matter for the comparisons. Budget growth expectations fell from 75% of respondents expecting increases in 2026 to 63% expecting them in 2027. The share reporting stronger year-over-year performance dropped from 84% to 65%. Belief that balancing brand and performance drives long-term growth rose from 38% to 60%, but the share prioritizing performance over brand building moved the other way, from 75% to 79%. The share estimating that more than 30% of programmatic budget is wasted through fragmentation stayed at 11% in both years.

A footnote warns that "because the two studies differ in geography and respondent qualifications, year-over-year comparisons should be interpreted directionally rather than as changes within the same population." Data for the 2026 report was collected in 2025 and data for the 2027 report in 2026. A 19-point fall in reported performance could reflect a harder market, a different mix of countries, or both. The report does not separate those effects.

There is a split by budget size. According to the survey, 70% of mid-spend marketers expect budgets to grow, compared with 58% of high-spend marketers. Agencies were the most likely group to endorse brand and performance balance, with 61% saying it will drive the greatest long-term growth, yet 83% said their clients have prioritized performance over brand.

"Taken together, the benchmarks show an industry whose thinking and capabilities are evolving faster than some of its behaviors," the report states.

Regional differences

APAC respondents were the most positive on every measure the report breaks out by region. Seventy-eight percent of APAC marketers reported stronger year-over-year performance, compared with 63% in North America and 59% in EMEA. Eighty percent of APAC respondents said AI had improved cross-channel coordination, against 66% in North America and 58% in EMEA.

EMEA was the outlier on complexity. Thirty-six percent of EMEA marketers said complexity has increased faster than performance, compared with 32% in APAC and 29% in North America. The report describes EMEA as "focused on making existing investment work harder amid economic pressures." It also says "over 90% of regional teams" in APAC "operate in fragmented data silos," a figure that does not appear in any chart and for which the report gives no underlying question.

Measurement: many methods, little unification

Measurement is the area where the survey finds the widest gap between practice and integration. Only 7% of marketers say they have a fully unified measurement strategy. Another 8% rely primarily on a single methodology, 42% use multiple methodologies independently, and 40% triangulate multiple approaches to inform decisions. The remaining 3% were unsure or said they have no formal measurement approach.

Respondents could select every method they use. Platform-reported attribution led at 57%, followed by marketing mix modeling at 54%, multi-touch attribution at 38%, cross-channel attribution at 36%, last-touch attribution at 34% and incrementality testing at 29%. That platform-reported attribution tops the list is notable. It is the method in which each ad platform grades its own results, and the one most likely to produce the conflicting numbers respondents complain about elsewhere in the survey.

Asked where measurement confidence breaks down, 48% cited data quality and attribution, 43% offline measurement, 41% incomplete customer journeys and 37% conflicting measurement systems. Thirty-one percent pointed to too many metrics or reporting sources, 26% to limited connection to business outcomes and another 26% to lack of executive alignment. Privacy and signal loss ranked last, at 15%.

StackAdapt calls that last result "one of the more surprising findings." Its interpretation is that marketers "have had years to adapt through first-party data strategies, modeled measurement, and other ways of filling gaps left by reduced tracking and identifiers," so the problem has shifted from collecting signals to reconciling them.

The platform data adds a spend dimension. Sixty-nine percent of advertisers spending more than $10 million annually used at least one measurement method on StackAdapt's platform, compared with 56% of those spending $10 million or less.

Cross-channel attribution users

The survey's sharpest measurement comparison is between users and non-users of cross-channel attribution. According to StackAdapt, 75% of users reported stronger year-over-year performance, against 60% of non-users. Sixty-six percent of users had high confidence connecting ad investment to results, against 47%. Sixty-five percent frequently or almost always run omnichannel campaigns, against 42%. And 36% of users estimate more than 20% fragmentation-related waste, against 45% of non-users.

StackAdapt says its platform data "shows a similar pattern," with cross-channel attribution users associated with lower aggregate cost per click and cost per acquisition than non-users. The report gives no figures for those cost differences. StackAdapt sells a cross-channel attribution product, so the finding favors a capability the company offers, which is a point worth weighing alongside the report's own caveat that users "may differ in scale, channel mix, and measurement maturity."

Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at EMARKETER whose commentary appears throughout the report, framed disagreement between methods as expected. "Attribution can guide daily optimization, incrementality testing can establish causality, and MMM can inform budget allocation. Because they answer different questions, disagreement is a feature, not a bug, of a strong measurement strategy," he wrote. "Privacy hasn't disappeared as a measurement constraint, but marketers have developed workarounds for signal loss."

A pharmaceutical case study in the report describes a brand that combined cross-channel attribution, brand lift data, engagement insights, Google Analytics and what StackAdapt calls "privacy-safe prescription data" across CTV, online video, display and native. According to the report, cost per new prescription fell 60% over the measurement period. The brand is unnamed, and the report does not state the period, the spend or the baseline.

Channels: expansion without coordination

Eighty-three percent of respondents have added channels to their marketing mix over the past two to three years. Only 10% say they almost always run truly omnichannel campaigns, which the report defines as "consistently planning, executing, and measuring those channels as one strategy." The gap between those figures is the report's second trend. Forty-one percent of all respondents, according to StackAdapt, have expanded their channel mix but still are not consistently coordinating campaigns across it.

That definition is narrower than the one used a year earlier. StackAdapt's January 2026 announcement said 75% of marketers claimed to run omnichannel campaigns. The two numbers measure different things and cannot be compared directly, but the change in framing shows how much the answer depends on how strictly the question is put.

Forty-two percent of marketers estimate that more than 20% of their programmatic budget is wasted or underperforming because of siloed or fragmented channel execution. The release attributes that waste to execution "rather than the channels themselves." Asked for reasons behind wasted or underperforming budget, 57% cited inconsistent measurement across channels, 47% an incomplete understanding of customer journeys, 43% uncoordinated audience strategy and 43% channel-by-channel budget optimization.

These are estimates from respondents, not measured waste. No respondent was asked to show how they calculated the share of budget lost, and the self-reported figure is likely to vary with how each organization defines underperformance.

According to the platform data, more advertisers are using five or more channels year over year, though the report does not publish the share. A second case study describes Urban Sports Club running digital out-of-home, native and display ads to reach businesses in Cologne, supported by account-based marketing, contextual targeting and retargeting. The campaign produced 9.83 million impressions, and website traffic and keyword searches both rose 50%, according to the report. No campaign dates or spend are given.

Bigger budgets, different barriers

The third trend concerns scale. StackAdapt's platform data shows high-spend advertisers using more platform features, more channels and more audience capabilities than mid-spend advertisers. Third-party audience adoption stood at 100% among high-spend advertisers on the platform, against 81% among mid-spend. In the survey, 72% of mid-spend marketers said AI had improved coordination, against 62% of high-spend, and 44% of high-spend marketers estimated 20% or more of budget lost to fragmentation, against 39% of mid-spend.

The barriers to a truly omnichannel strategy change with spend. Mid-spend marketers were more likely to cite data silos (41% against 32% for high-spend) and budget constraints (14% against 7%). High-spend marketers were more likely to cite organizational silos (28% against 16%) and technology limitations (23% against 17%). The release concludes that this "points to operating models, rather than investment levels, as the next lever for performance at scale."

"Mid-market organizations occupy a sweet spot," Bourne wrote. "They have enough resources and expertise to experiment with new capabilities without the organizational complexity that can slow larger companies. As organizations scale, more stakeholders, handoffs, and decision layers can turn greater resources into friction."

Connected customer data as the dividing line

The fourth trend is the one StackAdapt presents as most consequential. Only 45% of marketers say their first-party data on customers and prospects is mostly or fully connected across acquisition, conversion and retention. On PPC Land's arithmetic, that is roughly 400 of the 885 respondents.

Those marketers outscored the less connected group on every measure the report lists:

Measure Connected Less connected Gap
High measurement confidence 69% 41% +28 points
AI improved coordination 79% 58% +21 points
Frequently or almost always run omnichannel 61% 41% +20 points
Stronger year-over-year performance 74% 59% +15 points
Lower fragmentation-related budget waste 65% 52% +13 points
Expect budget growth 69% 59% +10 points
Triangulated or unified measurement 52% 43% +9 points

The report separates data activation from data connectivity. According to platform data, first-party data activation reached 56% among low-spend advertisers, 86% among mid-spend and 93% among high-spend. StackAdapt argues that activation, meaning putting the data to work in campaigns, is now common among larger advertisers, while connectivity across the lifecycle is not.

"Data connectivity is both a marker of marketing maturity and a contributor to better outcomes," Bourne wrote. "When customer data connects across the lifecycle, marketers can see how acquisition affects conversion and retention, and then feed those insights back into planning and activation."

A wording difference on AI

The release and the report differ slightly on one AI figure. The release says that among marketers with mostly or fully connected customer data, 79% say AI has improved cross-channel coordination, "and they agree that AI only delivers value when the underlying data and measurement are connected and trusted." The report states separately that "seventy-nine percent of marketers agree that AI only delivers value when the underlying data and measurement are connected and trusted," without restricting that figure to the connected group. The two 79% figures may describe different questions and different bases.

The report's AI section also shows coordination gains rising with foundations. Seventy-six percent of marketers with high confidence connecting ads to results said AI improved coordination, against 56% without. Among those with mature measurement, the split was 73% against 61%.

Brands and agencies

Brands and agencies report friction in different places. Forty-four percent of brands cite data and technology integration as a barrier, against 31% of agencies, and 32% cite operationalizing AI and automation, against 23%. Agencies are far more confident in measurement: 64% report high measurement confidence, against 43% of brands. Yet 83% of agencies say performance is prioritized over brand, compared with 75% of brands. Brands were slightly more likely to report stronger year-over-year performance, at 68% against 63%.

The company behind the numbers

The report is also a product document. It closes with a page on Ivy Studio, StackAdapt's AI advertising hub, and a final section stating that by bringing media activation, customer intelligence, cross-channel execution, measurement and AI together, "StackAdapt can help advertisers coordinate increasingly sophisticated strategies." The four "building blocks" the report recommends - connecting customer data across the lifecycle, coordinating omnichannel execution, reconciling measurement, and aligning teams and workflows - map closely onto capabilities the company sells as a demand-side platform.

That context does not make the survey findings wrong, but it shapes which comparisons appear. The report draws its sharpest contrasts around connected data, cross-channel attribution and AI coordination. It does not test, for instance, whether marketers using fewer channels with tighter control outperform those using many.

Why this matters for marketers

StackAdapt has spent 2026 positioning itself beyond a conventional programmatic buying platform. The company introduced Ivy Studio on July 28, a natural-language hub inside its platform that StackAdapt employees were using for more than 15,000 AI-assisted workflows a week. Two days later it launched an economic impact measurement tool built on Affinity Solutions card transaction data covering more than $4 trillion in spend. In May it became a technology partner in OpenAI's ChatGPT advertising pilot, and in late September its Innovation Forum featured OpenAI's head of ads.

The new report sits alongside StackAdapt's August study on AI decision-making, which found that only 6% of marketers almost always act on in-platform AI recommendations. That survey, also fielded by NewtonX, covered 500 professionals. Read together, the two reports describe an industry adding AI tools faster than it trusts or integrates them, a pattern the new report attributes largely to disconnected data.

The 7% figure for fully unified measurement fits a run of independent findings PPC Land has reported this year. Winterberry Group found that only 9% of US marketing executives said they could practice unified measurement extremely well, although that survey covered just 121 respondents. Incubeta research in May found that 70.4% of marketing leaders were confident in their budget deployment while 41.6% admitted part of their investment was not delivering full value. A year ago, TransUnion and EMARKETER reported that measurement confidence had stalled despite growth in available data, with 49.5% citing fragmented data as the main reason they questioned accuracy.

Different samples, sponsors and wording make these studies impossible to stack into a single trend line. What they share is a consistent finding that single-digit shares of marketers describe their measurement as unified, while far larger shares report waste they cannot fully account for. StackAdapt's survey adds a figure for that waste: 42% put it above a fifth of programmatic budget.

The cooled benchmarks may be the more immediate signal for budget holders. A fall from 75% to 63% in budget growth expectations, and from 84% to 65% in reported performance gains, would be significant if it held within a single population. StackAdapt's own footnotes say it does not. The 2027 sample is broader, adds markets such as France, Spain and Germany, where the report describes EMEA marketers working "amid economic pressures," and was collected at a different point in the year. Whether the softer numbers reflect market conditions or a methodology change is a question the next edition may answer, if the sample stays stable.

"Marketers are navigating a rapidly shifting media landscape defined by channel proliferation, greater access to data, and expanding AI capabilities," Bourne said in the release. "Yet the challenge has moved beyond gaining access to these resources to integrating them into strategies and systems that improve decision-making."

Timeline

Summary

Who: StackAdapt, a Toronto-based advertising platform, with survey fieldwork by NewtonX and commentary from EMARKETER analyst Jacob Bourne. StackAdapt CMO Ryan Nelsen is quoted in the release. The survey covered 885 senior marketing and advertising professionals at brands and agencies.

What: The State of Programmatic Advertising 2027, a 40-page report finding that only 7% of marketers have fully unified measurement, 10% almost always run truly omnichannel campaigns and 42% estimate more than 20% of programmatic budget is wasted through siloed execution. Self-identified top performers were more than twice as likely to run three or more channels (45% against 21%). Reported performance gains and budget expectations fell from the previous edition, though StackAdapt says the samples differ.

When: The report and release were published today, October 19, 2026. The survey ran from July 7 to July 31, 2026, and the platform data covers August 2025 to July 2026.

Where: Respondents came from 13 countries across North America (360), EMEA (300) and APAC (225). APAC reported the strongest performance and AI gains, and EMEA the highest share saying complexity has outpaced performance.

Why: The findings suggest the constraint on programmatic performance has moved from access to channels and data toward coordination across them, with connected customer data showing the largest gaps between groups. The comparisons are correlational and self-reported, and the report's recommendations align with products StackAdapt sells.