Getting With The Programmatic: How Advertisers And Marketers Are Finding Their Edge

As marketing and advertising budgets are expected to grow in 2026 — according, at least, to 75% of those surveyed recently by StackAdapt — those that are showing the biggest performance improvements are demonstrating “five clear behaviors,” according to The State of Programmatic Advertising 2026 report.

• “Unifying fragmented workflows” — 65% of top performers say data management “must be best-in-class,” as opposed to 49% of lower performers.
• Consolidating technology — Top performers are 4x more likely to modernize at least half of their tech stack by 2027, with 53% saying consolidated tools drive ROI.
• “Adopting AI where it drives immediate value” — 27% say they expect content production to be the stack most disrupted by AI.
• “Redefining performance through attention and creative quality”
• Investing in emerging channels

And it’s among emerging channels that programmatic direct mail’s value is revealed.

(Source: StackAdapt)

“Marketers with the strongest YoY performance gains are dramatically more likely than peers to invest in emerging formats like programmatic direct mail (40% vs. 28%), in-game advertising (33% vs. 17%), and DOOH (28% vs 19%), representing a +12 to +16 percentage point performance delta,” says the report, which suggests using AI-assisted production and creative templates to experiment faster across formats.

As EMARKETER’s Arielle Feger recently wrote, 2026 is the “beginning of the end for manual programmatic buying as genAI gives way to agentic AI.” The expectant changes included automated bidding now being the default, “targeting shifts from static to real-time,” and smarter measurement.