Ad Tech and CTV Experts Forecast 2026’s Biggest Trends

Published: January 6, 2026

The way people watch TV and the technology continues to change, even as the technology evolves that marketers rely upon to make their ad spend more efficient, better targeted and, in 2026, culturally relevant.

Connected TV viewing is a lynchpin in this transition, helping to give brands and agencies greater insight into the wants and needs of viewers. CTV-derived viewing data in turn enables artificial intelligence to assist advertisers with their campaigns.

Here, “TVTech” presents the predictions of ad tech and CTV luminaries about what 2026 has in store.

Digital Culture Group, Crystal Foote, Founder/Head of Partnerships

Diversity and cultural intelligence will become AI's strategic edge: In 2026, the most effective AI-driven campaigns will come not from those with the largest datasets, but from brands that embed cultural intelligence into the core of their tech infrastructure. AI is only as effective as its operator; without diverse talent guiding its development and deployment, campaigns risk automating bias instead of unlocking insight.
Authentic cultural resonance requires more than data: It demands teams with lived experience and cultural fluency. Agencies that eliminated DEI roles missed a critical opportunity to evolve those positions into AI and innovation leadership. The expertise required to detect and mitigate bias, understand nuance and build inclusive strategies already existed within those roles. To succeed in the next wave of AI, brands must reimagine their organizational structures—infusing diversity not as a layer of review, but as a strategic function at the foundation of how AI is built, trained and applied.
Voice will become the next frontier for contextual targeting: As consumers increasingly interact with technology through voice, advertising is poised to follow. Next year, voice-activated ad targeting will become a breakout channel, driven by a shift in behavior. People are speaking to their devices more than ever, replacing typed searches with spoken commands. This behavioral shift signals a major opportunity for brands to rethink how, where and when they show up in consumers' lives.
Asking Alexa for a recipe, queueing up a podcast on Google Home or checking the weather through Siri are no longer just utility moments; they’re emerging touchpoints for real-time, hyper-relevant advertising. If brands and platforms don’t yet have infrastructure in place to retarget based on voice commands, they’re behind. Voice offers the immediacy and intimacy of conversation, paired with the potential for contextual targeting that reflects a consumer’s exact need in that moment. In a world where convenience, relevance and personalization are paramount, voice isn’t just a media channel—it’s a strategic unlock.
Not every trend is yours to chase: Brands will re-evaluate when to join a cultural movement. Too often, brands jump into cultural conversations without understanding the audience they’re speaking to. The result? Cringeworthy content, outdated references and missed opportunities. The pressure to stay culturally relevant will push brands to chase emerging trends, especially those tied to Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
However, the smartest marketers will ask themselves: ‘Is this really our audience?’ It’s no longer about being ‘in culture’ for the sake of optics. It’s about being in alignment with the audience you’re trying to reach. Cultural cachet doesn’t guarantee purchase intent, resonance does.
In the year ahead, brands will need to pivot, reassessing whether their values, offerings and internal identity genuinely align with the generation they’re pursuing. When marketers treat culture as a static playbook or jump into conversations they don’t fully understand, the result is dissonance. Relevance in 2026 won’t be about looking youthful. It will be about using real-time audience signals, emotional context and resonance tools to ensure they’re not just speaking, but connecting.
M&A activity will be driven by cultural intelligence, not just data. Startups are outperforming legacy platforms due to their agility and cultural fluency. This shift will drive a new wave of M&A activity in 2026. Just as holding companies once acquired influencer agencies to buy credibility, they’ll now seek out AI startups that offer clarity—tools that decode what people feel before they act. The value won’t be in the data alone, but in the cultural intelligence behind it.
The smartest startups will seek collaboration not acquisition. In 2026, the most meaningful AI innovation in advertising won’t come from big tech. It will come from startups. Agile and unencumbered by red tape, these companies will lead by building culturally intelligent, partnership-driven solutions that reflect how people actually live and choose.
They’ll use AI not just to automate but to anticipate—decoding emotional, behavioral and cultural signals in real time. The smartest founders won’t wait for acquisition offers; they’ll build power through collaboration. By joining forces with other nimble innovators, they’ll form ecosystems of shared data, creativity and cultural fluency that big tech can’t replicate. Together, these partnerships will create value through clarity, resonance and measurable outcomes shaping the future of advertising on their own terms.

Ampersand, Justin Rosen, SVP, Data and Insights

2026 will be the year data dominates TV advertising. As marketers become more comfortable with AI and machine learning in their daily workflows, 2026 will be the year the focus shifts from the tools themselves to the quality of the data powering them. Audiences, outcomes and especially device graphs and ID linkages will determine who can execute precise, measurable campaigns across CTV, streaming and linear TV.
Ecosystem players with large, scaled first-party data will hold a decisive advantage, whether acting as marketers or as enablers, controlling insights that drive targeting, measurement and optimization. In a world where AI tools can be leveraged by anyone, retaining exclusive access to high-quality first-party data will be more than a competitive edge. It will be essential to winning in a landscape where precision and transparency across screens define success.
Vertical video becomes the open web’s new front door, and its next premium channel. By 2026, vertical video won’t just enhance publisher experiences. It will define them.
As short-form becomes the dominant language of the internet and 90% of consumers say they’re open to vertical video on publisher sites, publishers will rebuild homepages and article templates around immersive, swipe-first video streams rather than static layouts.
This evolution will fundamentally change how users enter and navigate the open web, with vertical clips acting as a dynamic ‘front door’ that funnels audiences into news, evergreen content and commerce experiences.
At the same time, the rise of AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes will push advertisers toward brand-safe vertical environments controlled by trusted publishers, elevating vertical video from a format to a standalone premium channel. Expect chief marketing officers (CMOs) to carve out dedicated budgets for this inventory as attention and engagement –not just views— become the core KPIs for digital storytelling. The result: the open web finally competes with walled gardens on the same creative canvas, but with one crucial advantage—credibility.

Media.net, Karan Dalal, COO

Sell-side decisioning becomes the new battleground for performance: The next leap in programmatic efficiency won’t come from curated packages, it will come from smarter sell-side decisioning. Supply-side platforms (SSPs) are evolving from simple access points into real-time decision engines that determine which impressions to surface, which demand paths to prioritize and which low-quality supply to filter out before the auction even begins.
This shift creates a cleaner, higher-signal supply layer by default, giving buyers performance gains without the manual work of curation. As identity erodes, decisioning becomes a new form of addressability, powered by context, intent and quality scoring rather than user IDs. The platforms that pull ahead will be the ones that make the most intelligent choices upstream, long before a bid is ever placed.
Transparency transitions from a ‘check-the-box’ expectation to a measurable advantage. Programmatic transparency has long been treated as hygiene, but in 2026 it becomes a competitive moat. As marketers gain clearer visibility into how impressions are sourced, scored and priced, transparency will directly correlate with lower media waste and higher ROI.
Buyers will increasingly abandon ambiguous supply paths in favor of partners who can show, not tell: no MFA sites, no hidden fees, no black-box optimization. The rise of AI only heightens this demand; marketers will insist on explainable automation that surfaces why certain impressions won and how decisions were made. This dynamic creates a two-tiered market. Systems built on radical clarity rise, while opaque platforms lose relevance in budget cycles driven by accountability. In the coming year, transparency evolves from a compliance requirement into a performance driver.

Direct Digital Holdings, Calvin Scharffs, VP, Marketing & Maria Vilchez Lowrey, Chief Growth Officer

Calvin: The open web is facing real existential pressure. AI is absorbing consumer traffic, and more ad spend continues to migrate into walled gardens like CTV and commerce media. To retain advertiser interest, the open web must make buying easier through AI-driven tools and improve accessibility for smaller and mid-market advertisers.

Maria: The ad market has been tough because the macroeconomic environment remains unpredictable. Next year may surprise on overall spend, but that spend will likely consolidate around social, CTV and search—where performance is clearest.

Yahoo DSP, Joshua John, Head of Strategy

AI becomes the primary gatekeeper of discovery. Seventy-five percent of executives say OS-level AI assistants will increasingly determine which shows and services are surfaced on TV home screens, shifting power away from individual apps.
AI reshapes what gets watched, not what gets written. Nearly half say AI’s biggest near-term creative impact will be in automated trailer creation, artwork testing and content packaging. Respondents see AI enabling faster, scalable creation of thumbnails, cuts and promotional assets tailored to different audiences at a speed impossible with manual workflows.
Sports remains the biggest CTV battleground. A total of 47.4% say bundling will define sports strategy, but 34.5% still expect fragmentation to worsen first.
FAST has matured into a core revenue model. Nearly 60% view FAST as a sustainable, premium, ad-supported business in its own right, marking its evolution from ‘free funnel’ to a strategic pillar.
Gaming remains complementary, not core for now. Nearly 73% say streaming-to-gaming convergence will remain niche in 2026 with growth focused on casual, low-friction experiences that enhance viewing rather than replace it.
Younger audiences see TikTok and YouTube as their primary TV. Nearly half say viewing behavior has permanently shifted, forcing traditional streamers to rethink discovery, formats and cultural relevance; 38.3% say streamers must adopt creator-driven models to compete with YouTube.

Looper Insights, Lucas Bertrand, CEO

In 2026, the real breakthrough won’t come from yet another shiny targeting feature. It will come from fixing the stubborn, unsexy problems that still keep billions of TV dollars stuck on the sidelines.
Today’s CTV pipes are clogged with genre mislabeling, inconsistent metadata, opaque supply chains and brand-suitability blind spots: issues that no amount of AI hype can mask. The platforms that apply next-generation contextual intelligence to clean up these basics will unlock the real step-change: making CTV buying as transparent, predictable and high-performing as digital promised a decade ago.

Nexxen, Oscar Rondon, VP, Data and Measurement Solutions, Eric Solomon, SVP Product-Data, Ally Appelbaum, VP, Global CTV Partnerships & Irina Katsnelson, SVP of Enterprise Sales

Oscar:

Audience portability finally becomes real. The next frontier in automation is audience portability. Marketers want to define an audience once and activate it everywhere, without having to rebuild it across different partners or channels. 2026 will be the year we start seeing that vision realized across both TV and digital, creating a true bridge between planning, activation and measurement.
Attention becomes the new performance metric. The industry is moving beyond clicks and impressions. Attention measured through time-in-view, creative resonance and contextual alignment is becoming the new performance signal. This is the first step towards real outcome-based models where success will be determined by the consumer’s response, not the platform’s metric.
Smarter TV signals unlock true incremental reach. The next big efficiency boost will come from better TV viewing signals. As high quality, privacy safe smart TV data becomes more available, advertisers can cut waste and find audiences that legacy datasets might have missed. The goal is true incremental reach, not redundant exposures.

Eric:

CTV investment accelerates as measurement and AI evolve. CTV remains a true lean-back, highly engaged environment, but it’s under-monetized relative to time spent. In 2026, that gap in spend will likely narrow as outcome measurement improves and AI reduces production costs, expanding access to this high-quality inventory.
Planning and buying converge as walled gardens tighten control. As AI platforms and walled gardens take more control over audience discovery, buying efficiently across the open web will become more challenging. More ad spend will flow to platforms that connect TV and digital planning in one place with clear reporting on business outcomes rather than just reach. The focus will shift toward real-time learning, using live campaign data to adjust performance faster.

Ally:

Premium CTV gets redefined amid supply abundance. The CTV market is experiencing a supply surplus, creating a need to rethink what qualifies as ‘premium.’ As advertisers crowd around a few household-name apps, valuable audiences across FAST and mid-tier platforms are being overlooked. In 2026, education around quality and engagement, not price point or paywall, will reshape how premium is defined.
New CTV formats scale through programmatic efficiency. Innovative ad formats like pause ads and native placements on OEM platforms are gaining traction, but standardization remains fragmented. The next phase of growth will rely on bridging creative innovation with programmatic efficiency, ensuring these experiences scale beyond direct deals into automated, measurable environments.

Irina:

Automation becomes the industry’s operating system. The macro trends shaping 2026 –specialization, consolidation, workflow simplification and autonomous advertising– aren’t abstract ideas, they’re the realities guiding how advertisers plan and buy today. We’re seeing the industry shift from experimentation to execution where efficiency and intelligence are the real differentiators. And the companies that embrace this reality, adopting automation and streamlining how they operate across the ecosystem, will be the ones who win.

AdOmni, Jonathan Gudai, CEO

The rise of the creator-powered billboard. For the past decade, creators have been trapped in a 5-inch screen. Digital-out-of-home (DOOH) is their breakout stage. It transforms content into a real-world statement—a way to say, ‘This matters beyond the algorithm.’ Whether it’s a tour, a product drop or a fan milestone, showing up on a screen in Times Square or a college campus signals that what they’re building has cultural weight.
Instant creative iteration. Content may still be king, but context is queen—and in DOOH, she rules with precision. The same ad can speak differently on a rainy Monday than it does on a sunny Saturday. This isn’t just clever creative, it’s strategic adaptation. When ads adjust to real-world signals like weather or time of day, they stop interrupting and start resonating.
AI media planning becomes mainstream. For decades, sophisticated media planning was the domain of the few, meaning large brands with big budgets and specialist teams. AI has leveled that playing field. Today, a small brand can describe its campaign goals in plain language and receive a multi-screen, data-informed media plan in seconds. The shift from exclusivity to accessibility is the real breakthrough.
By the end of 2026, at least a quarter of DOOH and video campaigns globally will be AI-planned with humans setting the vision and AI doing the heavy lifting. AI’s greatest impact won’t be job replacement but idea acceleration.
The return of local. When the screen on the street becomes the polling station. The most effective political campaigns know that persuasion is local, and in 2026, so is advertising. DOOH has become the modern-day field organizer, reaching people where they live, commute and vote.
Smart campaigns aren’t just buying citywide impressions; they’re targeting the exact bus stop a swing voter uses on their way to work with messages tailored to the time of day and local context. Brands are starting to adopt this mindset, realizing that mass reach doesn’t mean much without relevance. Whether you're running for office or launching a product, the winning strategy is the same: act block by block.
DOOH becomes the interface for the AI agent economy. As AI agents begin to guide more of our decisions, DOOH will become their real-world interface—the place where algorithms meet emotion. These agents will filter, recommend and prioritize, but the final decision still belongs to the human. That’s the magic of DOOH. It’s the moment where a person reconnects with a choice. Advertisers who design for both the algorithmic layer and the emotional moment on the street will win in the AI-powered economy.

Swivel, Frans Vermeulen, President

Agent-to-Agent Trading Becomes Real. In 2026, we will start to see media buying diversify beyond programmatic and direct sold paths. Buyer and seller agents begin handling full workflows from interpreting intent to generating executable logic. Instead of just automating what exists today, these agents open the door to new types of deals, new product formats that don’t fit into legacy pipes, and scale that humans simply cannot match. Once these agents start talking to each other across systems, interoperability turns from a buzzword into the way work actually gets done.
Ad ops move from doing to directing. Ad ops teams today are executing manually and across a lot of disconnected tools. In 2026, ad ops teams can finally focus on strategy–if they can delegate execution to machines. Operators define the rules, the constraints and the goals. Agents take those inputs and execute across platforms continuously. With agentic orchestration, specially trained agents parse operator intent and act on it. Automation handles the repetitive work so teams can focus on strategy–launching new experiments, adapting in real time and unlocking ideas that would have been deprioritized in a manual world.
The gateway to automation. Across the ecosystem, teams are leaning into automation first where the work is repetitive, high-volume and can operate within human-defined guardrails. These are the clearest places for agentic systems to replicate existing behaviors, executing tasks the way a trained operator would. Once that reliability is established, organizations begin to scale automation across more workflows, expanding coverage and accelerating execution. As trust builds, teams grow more comfortable delegating critical and time-intensive tasks, freeing up operators to focus on higher-order decisions that drive margin and revenue.
2026 is the year of agentic trust building led by CTV. This is the year when people finally start giving agents real work rather than just testing them on the side. Trust grows as agents handle low-risk, repetitive tasks reliably while humans stay in the loop on critical decisions. CTV moves first and shows the rest of the market that agentic selling is ready for real scale and real revenue impact.

GWI, Misha Williams, COO

Generic AI will collapse under its own weight. In 2026, the threat to marketing won’t be AI hallucination—it’ll be AI homogeneity. As more brands rely on the same public models, strategies will start to blur. What once felt like an edge will become indistinguishable. The real differentiator? Specificity. Brands embedding real-time, psychographic data into their AI tools won’t just move fast, They’ll move meaningfully. In a world of sameness, relevance becomes the moat.
The consumer intent funnel will finally fracture. In 2026, marketers will stop pretending consumers buy in neat, rational paths. Real decisions are emotional, erratic and culturally shaped. AI can now detect contradictions, so the smartest teams will stop smoothing over gaps between intent and action and start designing for them. The future belongs to those who market to tension not just conversion.
Social media will be recast as a passive superchannel. In 2026, social won’t be dead, it’ll be dominant. Passive discovery has replaced active searching. Gen Z and Gen Alpha aren’t logging off. They’re scrolling in silence. Social media now commands more attention than TV, streaming or radio. For marketers, the job isn’t to disrupt the feed. It’s to become the feed.
The 2026 World Cup will redefine what a ‘fan’ means. In 2026, fandom will go far beyond the pitch. Gamers, content scrollers and cultural spectators are reshaping what it means to be a ‘fan.’ These audiences aren’t watching—they’re playing, remixing and sharing. Brands that cling to TV-centric targeting will miss the real opportunity: finding fans in the feeds, not the stands.
Gen Alpha will demand to be treated like stakeholders, not segments. In 2026, Gen Alpha hits 16—and hits reset on generational marketing. This isn’t Gen Z 2.0. They’re collaborative, creative and co-purchasing. They want empowerment, not pandering. Brands that treat them like passive consumers will lose. The ones that include them in creation will win. They don’t just consume culture, they code it.
Human data will be the next great AI differentiator. In 2026, the smartest AI won’t be the biggest—it’ll be the most human. Most tools today are trained on scraped, outdated or synthetic data. The result? Insight that feels off, or worse, biased. Winning brands will pair AI with real, structured, psychographic data, turning automation into cultural relevance. Truth, not scale, will be the new benchmark.