Top AdTech Trends That Shaped Digital Advertising in 2026

AdTech sits at the intersection of media, data, and advanced technology, with rapid innovation reshaping how digital advertising is planned, bought, and measured.Identity-powered marketing of an unprecedented scale; real-time multi-channel convergence; AI-powered transformation – these are only a couple of the next-gen AdTech trends that are becoming the new normal. With the pace of change being so fast, every digital advertiser must keep pace with what’s coming to keep the quality bar high and receive solid output from advertising activities.

In this article, we take a closer look at the following AdTech industry trends expected to shape the industry landscape in 2026:

• AI and machine learning.
• Privacy-first advertising.
• Retail media networks.
• Connected TV and streaming.
• Walled gardens vs. open web.
• Emerging ad formats.

Read on to see how they affect digital advertising tools and methods to supercharge your business practices with their help.

AI and Machine Learning

What once appeared experimental is now foundational to modern AdTech architecture. Artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved from isolated optimization use cases into a core operational layer powering campaign execution, measurement, and governance at scale. Leading platforms, such as Amazon, illustrate this shift through AI-driven video generation and real-time localization capabilities that enable advertisers to scale creative output across markets with unprecedented speed and precision.

Amazon Ads AI-powered Video Generator

https://advertising.amazon.com/library/news/video-generator

Importantly, AI adoption in AdTech is not entirely new. Machine learning has long underpinned bidding logic, forecasting models, and audience targeting. What has changed is the sophistication of these systems and the level of trust advertisers now place in automated decision-making. Today, AI operates as a full-stack campaign engine rather than a standalone tool, influencing nearly every stage of the advertising lifecycle.

In practice, AI-driven AdTech systems enable:

• End-to-end campaign orchestration, from setup and traffic allocation to omnichannel optimization.
• High-velocity experimentation, with teams testing hundreds of creative and targeting variations daily.
• Continuous performance improvement through automation paired with controlled experimentation.
• Built-in governance, including brand-safety enforcement, version control, and disclosure for AI-generated content.

By enhancing analytical accuracy and automating execution across the advertising pipeline, AI enables advertisers to operate at a scale that manual workflows cannot support. However, human oversight remains essential. Transparency, explainability, and ethical governance determine whether AI-driven advertising delivers sustainable performance or introduces operational and reputational risk. In 2026, competitive advantage belongs to AdTech brands that treat AI as a governed system, not an autonomous black box.

Privacy-First Advertising

The era of reliance on cookies is gone, and AdTech businesses have to navigate a new advertising environment with integrated privacy settings. The new epoch is governed by first-party data use, making sense of contextual signals, consented IDs, and modeled attribution. Things change fast in AdTech regulation, with new laws and platform policy changes reshaping advertising practices on the go.

This landscape dictates new rules for AdTech business resilience, which may be built on:

• Owning customer relationships.
• Conducting privacy-safe measurements.
• Avoiding third-party tracking.
• Using multiple platforms’ roadmaps as privacy and compliance guidelines.

Identity hygiene and consent represent the new backbone of ethical, compliant advertising. Brands that activate first-party audiences and provide privacy-safe onboarding channels win in the new, privacy-focused market. On the practical level, the implementation of privacy-first advertising works as follows:

• Upper funnel scaling for consenting customers in walled gardens.
• Contextual and attention-based ad space buying for incremental increases in outreach.
• Closed-loop customer data measurement in retail media or specialized commerce environments.

Retail Media Networks

The present of the AdTech industry is quite monopolistic, with Amazon controlling a dominant share of retail media ad revenue and traffic. However, retail media networks (RMNs) are rising in outreach and creating healthy competition for well-established advertising giants. Some examples of industry-wide significance include:

• Carrefour Links is currently positioned as a cross-asset retail media platform with a full transaction measurement feature suite.
• Tesco and dunnhumby in the UK provide full-funnel tools for customer outreach planning, targeting, and campaign evaluation.

Tesco Media and Insight Platform
powered by dunnhumby

https://www.dunnhumby.com/tesco-media-insight-platform/

This fundamental change thrives on first-party shopper data, which gives ad buyers and sellers a safe environment for mutually beneficial transactions. They possess the much-needed closed-loop accountability that enables informed investment in ad impressions that really work. In other words, retail media gives tangible insights into ads that translate into sales, thus informing high-ROI ad activities.

Retail media businesses operate through many advertising channels spanning on-site placement, CTV, video, and audio ads, thus giving ad buyers unique opportunities to affect consumer decisions at early stages of marketing funnels and achieve high advertising impacts. Thus, businesses that wish to take advantage of the RMN rise can follow the best industry practices as follows:

• Develop RMN advertising plans around a nuanced understanding of the buyer’s journey.
• Develop consistent measurement KPIs for RMN advertising, making performance comparable and informative.
• Design product offerings in a retail-ready, creative format, thus removing shoppers’ friction and delivering a consistent experience from advertising to sales.
• Focus on data analytics and reporting across the RMN’s advertising pipeline to assess performance and plan the budget.

These moves can turn an RMN partnership into a scalable growth lever, giving tangible benefits to businesses in 2026.

Connected TV and Streaming

Multi-platform viewing is the new normal, and brands need to factor this content consumption pattern into their advertising campaign designs. The Connected TV (CTV) format transforms even traditional TV-based buying models into digital formats, with frequency management and audience targeting coming to the fore. Some examples of creative solutions in CTV advertising are as follows:

• Amazon’s Prime Video limited ads feature, which expands ad inventory beyond traditional TV formats in multiple eligible countries.
• Amazon offers interactive video and pausable ads in European markets, where the viewers can learn more about the product, scan a QR code, and add products to a cart without leaving the stream.

Amazon Interactive & Shoppable Ads on Prime Video

Amazon Ads example of an interactive Prime Video ad with on‑screen product engagement options like “Add to cart” and interactive CTAs (as documented in Amazon’s ad specs).

https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/interactive-ads

CTV ad design for streaming platforms evolves with the market, posing new technical demands for marketers. For instance, the golden standard for 2026 includes:

1. Strong first 2 seconds
2. Clear audio branding
3. An engaging CTA, with a QR code, short URL, or voice/click instructions.

Notably, CTV ad revenue is concentrated among a small group of sellers, including Amazon, Disney, Google (YouTube), and Roku. These dynamics have unfavorable implications for other market players, shaping data access and pricing power across the industry.

Fragmented measurement standards across CTV platforms remain a key operational challenge, forcing advertisers to reconcile reach, frequency, and attribution across isolated ecosystems.

Walled Gardens vs. Open Web

Walled gardens, often powered by clean room environments, are closed advertising ecosystems controlled by a single platform. These environments centralize user data, inventory, buying tools, and measurement under one operator, enabling deterministic attribution and privacy-safe activation. However, this control comes at the cost of limited transparency, restricted interoperability, and reduced data portability.

In contrast, the open web consists of independent publishers, premium editorial inventory, and mobile applications operating across a decentralized ecosystem. It offers advertisers flexibility, partner diversity, and broad reach, allowing them to dynamically adjust supply paths based on performance. At the same time, responsibility for quality control, fraud prevention, and brand safety shifts entirely to the advertiser.

In 2026, successful advertisers rarely choose one environment over the other. Instead, they design hybrid media strategies based on each ecosystem’s strengths.

When walled gardens deliver the most value:

• Activating consented, first-party audiences at scale.
• Running upper-funnel and performance campaigns with closed-loop measurement.
• Operating within strict privacy and compliance frameworks.

Where the open web excels:

• Accessing premium editorial environments and regional inventory.
• Executing differentiated ad formats with greater creative control.
• Maintaining pricing leverage and reducing platform dependency.

To operate effectively on the open web, advertisers must invest in supply-path optimization (SPO), fraud detection, and brand-safety enforcement to ensure predictable performance and risk management.

The most resilient AdTech strategies balance both models. Walled gardens provide control and stability, while the open web delivers flexibility, transparency, and continuous optimization opportunities. When combined thoughtfully, these environments enable advertisers to scale reach, preserve governance, and avoid over-reliance on any single platform.

Emerging Ad Formats

Advertisers experiment with ad formats to bridge consumer attention and action. These efforts are tech-driven and contingent on trending content formats. In 2026, the AdTech community makes its chief stake on the following:

• Shoppable videos.
• Interactive CTV units (QR-driven CTAs, pause ads).
• Location-personalized ads and videos.
• In-game and esports ad integrations.
• Commerce-aware creative formats.

A key 2026 trend is location-based interactive video. Innovative technology enables brands to create one original ad, which gets localized in real time to reach out to consumers in multiple locations in a way that works the best for them.

Podcasts also remain popular and compete with video streams, showing that consumers are still attracted to an audio format of data consumption. Thus, marketers and AdTech industry players have to take this trend seriously; some of them stick to audio formats, while others develop new fusions of audio and video to capture new audiences. Some examples of action in this area include:

• Netflix’s growing collaboration with Spotify and iHeartMedia.
• SiriusXM’s video ads project on YouTube.

Each of these approaches offers distinct benefits, including new audience outreach, channel diversification, and sustainable growth in the conditions of transient AdTech trends. Omnichannel and omniformat advertising also gives AdTech brands greater flexibility, with continuous experimentation keeping them on top.

Conclusion

The AdTech industry trends discussed above show the direction and pace of the ad market we’re witnessing in 2026. Deeper integration of advanced technologies, comprehensive AI automation, robust identity management and ad quality controls, and ad format diversification – all these changes are sure to affect advertising routines on all levels. Brands embracing these trends and taking timely action are sure to thrive in the market, keeping their existing clientele and attracting new, tech-savvy consumers.