Ep 9: Programmatic Advertising Benchmarks: DSP Trends, CTV Growth, and What’s Changing in 2026

Kelly and Sean break down Guideline’s new quarterly programmatic benchmark report, explain how DSPs fit into the media buying ecosystem, and share the latest trends in programmatic, CTV, and streaming.

Programmatic advertising plays a growing role in digital media buying, but it is still one of the more misunderstood parts of the industry. In this episode, Kelly and Sean use Guideline’s newly announced quarterly programmatic benchmark report as a starting point for a practical discussion on what programmatic actually is, how DSPs work, and what the latest benchmark data suggests about the market.

They begin by defining programmatic at a high level: automated buying and selling of digital media, often built around audience targeting, pricing efficiency, and near real-time optimization. From there, Sean explains why this episode focuses specifically on DSPs, or demand-side platforms, which are the tools buyers use to purchase programmatic inventory.

The conversation then turns to the benchmark findings. Sean shares that programmatic saw very strong growth through 2024, though the pace slowed through 2025 as the market matured and economic pressure weighed on ad spend. They discuss how much of that activity is tied to streaming and connected TV, and why the growth pattern looks different now that most large streaming platforms already offer ad-supported products.

They also look at category-level movement, with telecom, insurance, and quick-service restaurants increasing programmatic spend, while categories such as alcohol, toys, and games have pulled back. Kelly and Sean then walk through the current split between programmatic and direct buying, why programmatic has remained near 30% of market activity, and why Sean expects that share to move higher in 2026.

The episode closes with a closer look at buying methods inside the programmatic ecosystem, including private marketplaces, programmatic guaranteed, and the open marketplace, along with a request for listener feedback on where the programmatic series should go next.

Key topics include:

• What programmatic advertising means in practice
• How DSPs function in digital media buying
• Why Guideline launched a quarterly programmatic benchmark report
• Growth trends in programmatic across 2024 and 2025
• The link between programmatic growth and streaming / CTV
• Which advertiser categories are increasing or reducing spend
• The current split between programmatic and direct buying
• Private marketplaces, programmatic guaranteed, and open marketplace buying

Chapters

00:00 Spotify reviews and why the episode topic matters
00:50 Guideline’s new programmatic benchmark report
02:22 What programmatic advertising means
03:48 DSPs and how programmatic buying works
06:01 Global programmatic growth trends
08:40 Categories gaining and losing spend
11:05 Programmatic vs direct buying share
12:28 Sean’s 2026 outlook
13:07 Private marketplaces, guaranteed deals, and open marketplace
16:13 Invitation for listener feedback on the series

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. John, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hi. How's it going?

SPEAKER_01 0:19

It's good. You know, I'm riding a little high because I checked our reviews on Spotify. I don't know if you've looked. But we've got 36 five-star reviews.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

People are talking. It was it was exciting. I mean, it was a pretty large jump in like a week. It seems like it's catching on.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yeah, I like it. That and we've got a lot of news from guideline over the last couple of weeks. And so what I was thinking we could do, considering we had a press release go out, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that last week, that a lot of folks have asked questions about. And so I thought it warranted us to chat a little bit about it. So what uh what did we announce, Sean?

SPEAKER_00 1:07

We are we announced that we have a programmatic benchmark report that we will be putting out quarterly. Uh we kind of prepared one for Q4 as like a test, see if the clients liked it. There was pretty warm reception, so we kind of put it out there, and it seemed like overall went well enough that we wanted to announce it that that's going to be an ongoing thing. And it seems like it sparked enough interest that I've I had people reach out and send me direct messages on LinkedIn, which is usually just like random spam kind of stuff. But in this particular case, was like, hey, I saw this, let's talk, which I thought was interesting. And then tied to the downloads, which is like a our own little unique thing, is we are now big enough of a podcast that we actually got reached out to to say we could be part of an affiliate selling network where we can be listed on programmatic exchanges. And I did some math on what our cut would be relative to where where we're at. I think, again, don't get too excited about this and don't try to like maybe figure out when's retirement coming. But over a three-month period, you and I, if we did this right, could split about a penny.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

So we could split something that we're not even producing anything.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Not even producing. But if we did, you would get half of it.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Love it.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah. That's by the way, just partnership here. 50-50, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Hey, you know what? Last week I talked about 40 years of doing this. You gave me one. So if you're talking partnership, I'm in.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Yeah. And honestly, by 40 years, we should probably be up to, I don't know, like$3 with inflation by that point, just raking it in.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Well, so getting back to the the programmatic report.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

I figure, you know, especially because it's programmatic comes up on my client calls all the time. And it's a big part and a growing part of our industry. And so I figured we should talk about what is programmatic for those who aren't as close to it, and then spend some time talking about, you know, some high-level points from the report that you produced. So just before we go into it, programmatic advertising. What is that? So it's referring to automated buying and selling of digital media, which is enabling the advertisers to transact while applying data, targeting, and optimization in near real time. So it's a way to buy that when I always give examples at a high level. Um say you could buy direct on, say, Sports Illustrated, or you could say, I want to target audience male audiences between 18 and 34. I don't care where it runs, it doesn't have to be there. And you can buy programmatically to achieve that goal. Um that's kind of a high level of oversimplified way that I explain it to my grandmother. Um, you'll probably get more in-depth on it. But um the idea is that you know you're kind of focused more on an audience or a spend goal versus purchasing directly.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah, I think that's fair. And again, you know, uh this is probably the first of what you and I had talked about as almost a series on programmatic. Because I think today we'll focus really on just the DSPs, the demand side platforms, which kind of in your example is if like I want to go out and I want to target this particular cohort at this price point with this budget, you go to one of these platforms, and and folks may have heard of like DV3C Desk, right? Uh, where you, as the person buying the ads, goes there and tries to see what's available, like what you can buy. We'll cover it a whole other time, but even within our data, we can also see a little bit of the supply side platform, which is on the flip side for all of the people that have these ads, they don't work directly with you know the DSPs. They kind of send all of the ads they have to these big platforms, you know, SSPs, the supply side platforms. And then those two entities kind of talk to each other about like, I have this, I buy this. And so today we'll kind of just talk a little bit on your example of like if I want to go out and buy these things, what kind of revenue are we seeing in the market today from our data? Um, because I think there's also then like a million different stops along the way that like once you buy the ad to ultimately once somebody sees the ad, there's a billion, not a billion, but like in some ways it feels like a billion different ways that the dollars, the impressions get sliced, diced, dissected before ultimately it lands there. And so the programmatic marketplace for as simple as it sounds, of like I want ads, I could buy them through some sort of like web portal is so much more infinitely comp complicated. Like infinitely more complicated than your example of like direct, I want to buy Sports Illustrated, cool. We have five ads available. Cool, I'll buy three. Right. Like in some ways it is, it is like it's supposed to feel like it's it's simpler, but it's just so wildly complex. So I think for today, maybe we could kind of highlight in our report a little bit of the activity that we've seen around um, you know, the DSP side specifically, which I think is is probably a good place to start.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Yeah, gr and good call out as we were talking about this. We definitely see it as a multi-part series. And so we'll flag to folks who want to tune in when we're doing our part two. Um but without further ado, let's jump into it and talk high level, Sean, about the trends that you're seeing in programmatic, what's happening?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Yeah. So the the first thing I'll say is like going back over the last couple of years, um, we have the the ability to look at this globally. So that's kind of usually where we start because it's it's an interesting thing uh in terms of our global point of view. Uh for all of 2024, um, wild growth in this space, anywhere from like, you know, year over year, from 20 to like 50%. Um and so we saw this tremendous growth happening in programmatic. What's interesting is headed into 2025, we saw the same numbers being posted in Q1, but we've seen a pretty rapid slowdown in terms of trends going into the the back half of 2025. So those like monster numbers of like 43% in January, uh 23% in March start to slowly tick down. And you know, programmatic is now hovering, you know, uh at around like 3% in September, 11% in August. So we're we're starting to see this market slow a bit in terms of what we can see from a data perspective. So that was one thing that stood out to us of like, hey, this was a banana's growth year in 24, and we're starting to see it kind of stable, stabilize a bit going into 25. And so that was something that kind of stood out to us overall, which I think is probably two things, right? It's probably overall, we've seen kind of economic headwinds slow down ad spend. And it's also related to a lot of what we have visibility into in terms of what we can see programmatically. So the cool thing about our data is you can slice and dice it and look at it from ad type, you know, globally. Is it a display ad? Is it a video ad? And then you can kind of get a sense vaguely of like what we what internally we might call like placement type, but what most people would call like streaming. Is it OTT? Is it uh short form network, like a YouTube? You can see that across most uh all of our countries. In some of our entities, you could see super more granular than that, but high level, what we know is a lot of our programmatic data we have visibility into ultimately goes to some sort of streaming product or maybe a connected TV product. And that's actually an area where we've started to see some kind of maturation and slowdown as kind of there isn't this huge explosion this year of a brand new player coming in and announcing ads like they did with Amazon last year in terms of how Amazon scaled. You know, Netflix was a couple years before that. So that was helping fuel a lot of the growth. Now that kind of all the global players have some sort of ad-supported format, it's now about like that, you know, five, you know, more rhythmic growth, kind of maybe 10%. Um so that's a big part of why we're seeing essentially the slowdown in our data, economic headwinds and maturation of the market.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

And I guess maybe also growth off of a bigger base from 2024 is harder to achieve, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

So um within programmatic, you've talked about ad types. Are there certain ad types that are pacing ahead of others or certain categories where things are pacing ahead that are worth calling out?

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Yeah. Yeah. I think I think there's some interesting uh kind of pieces globally that we're seeing is is number one, uh, from a category perspective, uh basically three and four of the categories we look at increased programmatic spend. So it is still growing, and it's it's also a place where there's overwhelming more growth than there is cuts. But categories like telco, so think of like uh like a uh T-Mobile globally, where I guess Deutsche Telekom globally, but T-Mobile in the US, insurance across kind of uh home, auto are all seeing pretty strong growth. And then also uh what what folks might call you know fast food, we would call quick service restaurants, the McDonald's, the Burger King of the world have all you know pretty significantly shifted dollars and I guess pounds in many cases into programmatic. But you know, uh telco is the high end, up 61%. Uh, and then on the low end of that spectrum is is QSR, quick serve restaurants, still up almost 20% year over year. So, like some pretty big swings there. On the flip side, though, it's not all growth. Uh, we are seeing some categories start to kind of pull back. Credit cards is down 15%, alcohol's down seven, um, you know, toys and games cut down pretty heavily, almost down 40%. And it's a mixed bag, right? Alcohol overall, we're just seeing less consumption. And so as a result, you know, uh less revenue going in. So budgets are getting cut, particularly around advertising. With toys and games, globally, a lot of that is just tied to tariffs and economic headwinds, that it was a lot harder to move that stuff globally, and so there was less people buying it. And so I think kind of a combination of both, again, economic headwinds and very specific category dynamics, there are a handful of categories that are not opting to move more into programmatic, which is again kind of a, you know, a bit of a unique tale here. The other thing I should should mention, which is also a lot of what's fueling programmatic, uh, that again, because we work with agencies, we get agency data, we don't necessarily have line of sight into this. But programmatic is very popular for like small brands who maybe don't have an agency but want to kind of book their own advertising, many times they will do that programmatically. So we don't necessarily see that, right? We're seeing the big brand spend, but that is a big part of why programmatic overall is is growing pretty healthfully.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Aaron Powell And in terms of you know the share of programmatic versus direct, how is that evolving and what did that look like in 2025? Um, and kind of where do we think see that going?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah. So it's it's kind of stuck in 2025, which I was I was genuinely a little surprised about. I would expect, given programmatics growth, direct's kind of tapering off, you'd expect kind of every month or every quarter it to kind of slowly climb up in terms of share. But essentially for all of 25, we've kind of seen it hold in at around that 30%. Again, maybe 1% up or 1% below below in a given month. But basically, for every$100 uh being spent in the market, 30 is being transacted through programmatically. And then 70 bucks is still going through your sports illustrated example where someone's going to the publisher and saying, I want to buy your ad. Publisher going, great, cool. Uh let's exchange some dollars. Um, so like interestingly, it is it is kind of stuck. Now, again, that's up from you know 27% a couple of years ago, but 27 to like 30 is really not that big of a jump relative to you know the growth that we saw of like 14, 18 percent um, you know, throughout kind of all of 24. Uh and again, maybe it's because 25 isn't growing as fast, but it is kind of just hovering in that kind of about a third is programmatic.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

What is your prediction for 2026? Do you think it's gonna continue hovering or do you see any shifts happening?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Yeah. So it's interesting, right? On the CTV space, essentially, if you stripped out programmatic globally, CTV would be more or less down. And within that subset, really streaming. So uh kind of taking aside the YouTubes of the world for a second. Basically, all of the growth in streaming in our data came from programmatic in 25. Um so I would expect actually programmatic then to kind of start to claw up this year, given so much of that growth on streaming is coming from the programmatic space. If you told me by the end of 26 it was like 33%, 34%, I would believe you. If you told me it stayed at 30, I would actually be pretty surprised.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

Okay, so you're anticipating a change. Now, I want to get a little more granular here, and this is where we may need to define some things. But like you mentioned at the top of the call, there's lots of um permutations of how you can buy. And and within buying, there's um there's a few different um kind of like tactics you can take. You can buy in what's called an open open marketplace, you can buy in programmatic guaranteed, um, and private marketplaces, there's a bunch of different ways that you can buy. I'd love to hear a little bit about what that looks like if we kind of go a level down. What are the trends?

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah, so kind of two things to call out there is is one, we do want to say that whereas the rest of the stuff we talked about was really a global trend, this in-depth look around kind of the the deal type of like how it's flowing through programmatic is really something we only offer in the US today in terms of the really kind of granular kind of cuts of the data. Uh so from a kind of uh how we're we're looking at it, there's something called like a PMP, which is like a private marketplace. That's uh a publisher is gonna take their inventory, they're gonna put it to the side, and they're going to invite brands or agencies in and say, only you who we invite in can bid on this programmatically, but bid on it. So it's kind of this reserved inventory. It's often done for maybe like higher value events, maybe it's kind of like uh unique titles to that platform, um, an exclusive. So that is like roughly, let's call it about 30% of what we can see in terms of our inventory for 25. There's also a programmatic kind of guarantee where um it's not necessarily in a kind of programmatic marketplace, but if you buy a certain amount of uh ads from us, we'll guarantee a certain price, we'll guarantee a certain volume, right? There's all sorts of guarantees, but it's kind of this give-get exchange in terms of what we can see. And that kind of is around, let's call it a little less than 17, about 16%. Um overwhelmingly, what we can see in our data is a lot of the stuff we see from an open marketplace is is that's where a lot of it's transacted, so about half of what we can see. An open market is anybody can buy and sell in these spaces. It's often bundled, so it doesn't necessarily go to one network. It's often what might be called like remnant inventory, things kind of left over after the better, you know, kind of stuff gets sold. Um, and then in those cases, you're really just saying, like, I need to reach these people. I want the lowest possible CPM. Here's my budget. Go out and find them whenever we can kind of get there. And that's where we see a lot of the movement. But it's something that we're also exploring and opening up in other countries, but for right now it's just it's just available in the US.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Gotcha. So private marketplaces, members only, programmatic guarantee. You kind of like signed a lease and reserve some space, and then open marketplaces Craigslist for lack of a better term.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Yeah. Or yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Um, okay. Well, I think let's pause here because that was a lot already. And I think a lot of numbers. A lot of numbers, a lot of industry buzzwords. So one of the things I wanted to do was invite folks to reach out to us and see where we should go next with our programmatic coverage because there's a lot of angles we can take. So please give us a shout. Our contact is in our various channels. But you know, we're looking for feedback. We want to hear what you want to hear, and we'll bring it to you on our next installment of our programmatic series.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Yeah. And as a plug too, I would also be curious of like keep going on the global individual countries. Very kind of curious to hear more there as well. So uh very much open to the feedback, as Kelly said.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

So all right, Sean. As always, a wealth of knowledge, and thank you for your time today.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

It's been real. I'll see you in a week.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

All right, bye.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Bye. That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.