By Ronan Murphy, UK Country Manager, Pubstack
On the face of it, programmatic advertising is one of digital marketing’s greatest success stories. Media buyers now have access to sophisticated tech tools to help them identify audiences, measure performance and optimise outcomes with a level of precision that previous generations of advertisers could only have dreamt of.
However, this progress has also come with a cost; most notably on the sell-side. While the buy side has become smarter, the sell side has become increasingly commoditised.
Publishers invest heavily in quality journalism, premium content, and engaging user experiences. Despite this, their inventory too often arrives in programmatic marketplaces stripped of the very context that makes it valuable. To buyer algorithms, a premium publisher can look remarkably similar to a click farm. Quality inventory remains, but the signals that define it have disappeared.
In 2026, the problem has become impossible to ignore.
Publishers under pressure
Publishers are grappling with multiple problems right now, including declining referral traffic, the rise of AI-generated summaries and increasingly opaque social algorithms. Meanwhile, the economics of the programmatic media market are moving in the wrong direction. In response to falling revenues, many publishers have increased the number of bid requests they send into the market.
The logic is that more opportunities should mean more revenue, but the opposite has happened. As bid requests swelled, DSPs and SSPs have been forced to throttle traffic simply to protect their infrastructure. More supply is being generated than buyers can realistically process, meaning valuable impressions are never even evaluated. Publishers respond by sending even more requests, creating a vicious cycle that drives down efficiency for everyone.
For too long, publishers have been passive participants in this ecosystem. They have created premium experiences but left the definition of value to intermediaries and buyer algorithms. In an era where every impression is judged in milliseconds, simply making inventory available is no longer enough.
The open web isn’t suffering because there’s too little inventory, but because there’s too little intelligence attached to that inventory. Publishers need to become active participants in how their inventory is understood.
Outcome-based buying
The advertising industry has already embraced the idea of outcome-based buying. Campaigns are increasingly planned around measurable objectives, whether that’s viewability, attention, brand lift or business outcomes. Yet on the sell-side, inventory is still often traded as though one impression is largely interchangeable with another, when this clearly isn’t the case.
Publishers hold rich deterministic signals that buyers simply don’t possess. They understand audience engagement, content quality, ad pressure, attention and countless other indicators that demonstrate the value of an impression before it reaches an auction. Those signals should no longer remain trapped inside publisher environments. Instead, they should be part of the transaction itself.
This move from ‘supply management’ to ‘supply intelligence’ represents the next evolution of programmatic advertising. Just as buyers have spent years building increasingly sophisticated decisioning systems, publishers now need their own intelligence layer that enables them to structure, enrich and package inventory around meaningful outcomes.
Rather than flooding exchanges with billions of undifferentiated bid requests, publishers should signal which impressions matter most, enabling buyers to make better, more efficient decisions. Publishers capture more of the value they’ve created, while advertisers gain access to higher-quality opportunities that align with their objectives.
Everyone’s a winner?
For years, tech innovation has been overwhelmingly weighted towards the buy side. While that may have made sense during programmatic’s formative years, today’s challenges are different. The industry needs better information flowing through the ecosystem.
Publishers have spent years building trusted brands, loyal audiences and valuable environments. Today, they also need tools to ensure that the value of their premium inventory survives the journey into programmatic marketplaces.
The rapid rise of AI tools has made the need for this shift more urgent than ever. As buying algorithms become increasingly autonomous, the quality of the signals feeding those systems becomes even more important. AI cannot recognise premium inventory unless publishers communicate why it is premium. The future of programmatic will be defined by who provides the richest intelligence.
