Advertising technology (adtech) is overcomplicated. It started as a simple scaffolding for delivering and managing banner ads. Now, it’s a sprawling, tangled matrix of ad servers, ad exchanges, supply-side platforms, demand-side platforms, customer data platforms, data clean rooms, brand safety tools, mobile measurement partners, and more.
Advertisers are fed up with becoming system integrators, consumers are fed up with audience targeting’s status quo, ad platforms are illegally dominant, and some adtech is commodifying. Convergence, data deprecation, curation, and supply path optimization are adtech’s new currencies.
Going forward, adtech must right-size and (re-)focus on compelling customer experiences by enabling:
- Deeper customer understanding. Adtech is only as valuable as the actionability, structure, and strength of the data powering it. Without inferring intent and predicting performance, adtech becomes dumb pipes. Data deprecation diminishes adtech’s ability to glean insights from browsing and shopping signals but also incentivizes solutions to signal loss. Solutions demand identity resolution, the authenticated internet, and clearly measuring ads’ full-funnel impacts. Adtech enables all these elements that empower advertisers to have sequential, resonant dialogues with prospects.
- Advertising so relevant that it feels organic. Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page theorized that “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Now, Alphabet is the world’s biggest ad platform trying to reconcile consumers’ needs with those of advertisers, publishers, and regulators. To its credit, Google’s ad revenue grows more than twice as fast as Google.com’s traffic; the relevance of Google’s machine learning-powered ads enables Google to sell more ads without commensurately growing traffic. Others must follow suit by developing or renting robust machine learning to serve increasingly relevant advertising.
- A streamlined supply chain. The supply chain built for display ads is increasingly applied to advertising’s two fastest-growing channels — CTV and commerce media — to maximize yield and response rates. But that chain is convoluted by stakeholders robbing Peter to pay Paul, necessitating standards such as ads.txt and sellers.json. In that vein, initiatives like The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, Magnite’s ClearLine, and GroupM’s Premium Marketplace promise to maximize working media and minimize supply chain costs. With help from technology and service providers as well as standard-setting bodies, advertisers must get as close as possible to consumers by identifying and eliminating unnecessary hops in supply paths.
- Creative and media to be more than the sum of their parts. Deep customer understanding, excellent machine learning, and a streamlined supply chain are moot without compelling creative, which is the strongest determinant of media’s performance. For decades, creative was separate from media and fraught with arbitrary taste-making. Then, iOS 14 limited audience targeting, and creative automation gained currency. Now, creative advertising technologies are end to end, spanning creative production, testing, and optimization. Next, creative adtech must close the loop between creative intelligence and media planning to make creative the key factor in media decision-making.
Introducing The Forrester Tech Tide™: Advertising Technology, Q3 2025
The Forrester Tech Tide™: Advertising Technology, Q3 2025, forms and reflects adtech’s inflection point. It analyzes the maturity and business value of adtech categories that support modern advertising and provides example use cases and vendors.
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