As the digital advertising industry continues to shift towards a cookieless future, industry leaders are focusing on trends expected to shape programmatic advertising by 2025. Executives from prominent AdTech firms Opti Digital, PubMatic, and Brainly shared their insights on emerging addressability solutions, ad latency issues, and the role of AI in bid optimisation, all of which are set to reshape the sector.
Addressability Solutions
With over half of third-party cookies already phased out and Google’s upcoming July 2024 changes that give users control over cookie settings, finding effective alternatives has become critical. Langdon Miller, Director of Programmatic at Brainly, sees the integration of probabilistic and deterministic IDs, combined with first-party data, contextual segmentation, and bid decoration, as the new norm. These strategies have helped maintain performance and increase yield for publishers. “We’ve seen the buy side embrace first-party data and contextual targeting more than ever before,” Miller stated.
Quality, he added, is becoming a priority for publishers who want to enhance advertiser value through selective inventory management. With platforms like Opti Digital, publishers can curate and filter ad inventory based on specific performance metrics, reflecting a rising trend of sell-side curation to boost ad impact.
Ad Latency & Web Performance
A recent study by Opti Digital highlighted ad latency concerns, showing that average ad scripts on publisher websites can weigh up to 1.6 MB, which affects both load times and ad performance. “A heavier ad stack significantly reduces revenue by slowing ad delivery, decreasing viewability and click-through rates, driving users away, and ultimately harming both audience and monetisation,” said Magali Quentel-Reme, CEO of Opti Digital. Her company has developed a lighter ad stack that has shown improved results, reportedly five times less weighty than average alternatives.
In a move to protect their Core Web Vitals, publishers are increasingly reducing their reliance on client-side header bidding, choosing instead server-side auctions to expedite loading times and reduce the weight of creative assets. While server-side auctions are growing in popularity, a hybrid approach that combines both client and server-side models may prove most effective. This approach considers the fact that some supply-side platforms (SSPs) are not compatible with server-to-server auctions, ensuring that publishers can maintain both speed and compatibility.
AI & Bid Optimisation
Looking towards 2025, the importance of efficient bid optimisation cannot be overstated. With programmatic advertising increasingly reliant on machine learning, effective traffic shaping is key to optimising infrastructure use and minimising costs for both publishers and advertisers. Mohsin Pervez, Senior Director of Platform Solutions and Operations, EMEA at PubMatic, explains, “If an SSP sends bid requests to multiple demand-side platforms (DSPs) without strategic traffic shaping, infrastructure use skyrockets without necessarily increasing auction wins.”
By analysing historical bid data, traffic shaping algorithms can minimise infrastructure load, sending fewer, more targeted bid requests to DSPs. According to Pervez, this streamlines the auction process and significantly reduces “waste,” benefiting the entire supply chain and ensuring advertisers achieve a more efficient path to their target audiences.
As the AdTech industry looks to the future, the leaders from Opti Digital, PubMatic, and Brainly agree that addressing the challenges of a cookieless environment, improving ad latency and UX, and deploying smarter bidding solutions will be essential for maximising both publisher revenue and advertiser impact.
