TL;DR
Programmatic advertising has entered a decisive phase in 2025. Cookies may still linger, but they no longer define strategy.
The real levers are in-housing and hybrid operating models, the surge of big-screen media like CTV and digital out-of-home, the dominance of retail media, and the shift toward first-party data collaboration through clean rooms and alternative IDs.
At the same time, supply-path optimization, AI tools, brand safety, sustainability metrics, and attention-based measurement are becoming non-negotiable.
Key trends to watch in 2025:
- Hybrid in-housing models
- Connected TV and DOOH growth
- Retail networks expansion
- 1P data + clean rooms
- Alternative IDs & curated audiences
- Artificial intelligence campaign optimization
- Attention metrics and predictive analytics
- Supply-path optimization (SPO)
- Dynamic creative optimization
- Brand safety & fraud prevention
Think of cities a decade ago: cars running on gas, paper maps in glove compartments, billboards fixed in place. Now, electric vehicles update themselves overnight, GPS routes shift in real time, and digital screens change ads depending on who’s nearby. Programmatic advertising is going through the same kind of upgrade.
In current programmatic advertising trends, it’s all about powering campaigns with first-party data, steering with AI, and expanding onto the biggest screens in the house and on the street. CTV, DOOH, retail media, and hybrid in-housing models are the electric engines of today’s ad economy, reshaping how budgets flow and how audiences are reached.
In this article, we’ll catch a glimpse of the future. We’ll explore top programmatic advertising trends, discuss how to adapt our marketing strategies for 2025 and approaches that will help you reach consumers with consistent messaging. Let's fire it up!
The Big Screens Wave: Connected TV & Digital Out of Home Growth
"CTV is becoming a more immersive and transactional environment. Advertisers must shift away from treating CTV as traditional TV and unlock its real potential."
A decade ago, connected TV (CTV) was considered a gamble. Today, it’s one of the fastest-growing pillars of digital advertising.
According to IAB, this year U.S. digital video ad spend surged 18% YoY to $64B, with another 14% jump projected in 2025, reaching $72B. This is 2–3× faster growth than overall programmatic ad spend.
Adoption rates are also rising: 56% of global marketers are increasing CTV and OTT advertising spend in 2025, up from 53% in 2024, especially when it comes to automotive, travel, pharma and finance verticals, says Nielsen report.
CTV’s appeal lies in precision. Household-level targeting, integration with available data, and the ability to run sequential messaging across mobile, desktop, and TV screens make it indispensable.
The same shift is happening outdoors: static billboards are being replaced by dynamic digital out-of-home (DOOH) screens that trade impressions in real time.
In the U.S., DOOH now represents 34% of total OOH spend, hitting a record $1.98B in Q1 2025 with 9% YoY growth, according to OAAA data.
The advantage is context. Ads on digital screens can adapt by utilizing real-time data, catching travelers at airport baggage claim or shoppers entering a mall. With programmatic buying and measurement becoming standard in the advertising industry, DOOH is now the most-sought performance channel.
Strategic DOOH and CTV Tips for 2025
Both CTV and DOOH demand integration into the broader programmatic stack:
- Expand reach: Use CTV to cover households at scale and DOOH to catch people on the move.
- Boost engagement: Retarget viewers across devices and update DOOH ads based on time or place.
- Track results: Measure CTV impact on sales and link DOOH to foot traffic and attention.
Hybrid In-Housing Models: Control, Transparency, and Data Ownership
"When brands own their data and contracts, and agencies bring in scale and expertise, both sides stop competing and start accelerating. Our role at Epom is to make sure the tech is neutral ground — a platform where transparency and flexibility come standard, so partnerships can thrive."
In 2025, most companies choose hybrid setups over fully managed services or going completely independent. Large brands and ad agencies keep control of data, contracts, and reporting, while programmatic platform providers stay in the game as strategic partners.
Why Hybrid Works for Digital Advertising in 2025
Transparency pressures
ANA and ISBA reports forced advertisers to demand more visibility. Hybrid setups give agencies a way to stay relevant running ad campaigns inside advertiser-owned DSP accounts instead of being gatekeepers. By adapting, agencies strengthen trust and secure longer-term contracts.
Data as an asset
Brands now insist on owning 1P data strategies. Agencies that respect this shift can position themselves as enablers, helping clients implement clean rooms, alternative identifiers, and privacy-friendly targeting, rather than competing for control.
Operational flexibility
Hybrid models mean advertisers pull sensitive functions (like target audience segmentation or reporting) in-house, but agencies step up where bandwidth and expertise are critical: retail, creative automation, or scaling campaigns across multiple platforms.
How Hybrid In-Housing Looks Like in Practice
DSP seat ownership
Instead of agencies holding the keys, clients get direct access to their DSP accounts. Agencies, meanwhile, run campaigns, optimize, and advise.
Full-funnel integration
Agencies design cross-channel playbooks, while in-house teams ensure these marketing strategies connect back to their brand's messages.
Partnership mindset
Agencies adapt to new rules: clear fee models and full transparency. Meaning, it's time to be positioned as partners rather than vendors.
Hybrid Ad Stack Importance for In-Housing
Hybrid models only succeed when both sides work on shared ground. That means the tech stack has to serve transparency for brands and flexibility for agencies at the same time.
This is where white-label DSPs come in. Instead of the old model where agencies controlled the buying platform, a white-label setup allows advertisers to hold data access, while agencies still operate the system under their own brand.
A platform like Epom White-Label DSP makes this balance practical: advertisers gain log-level data and direct agreements, while agencies can manage multiple clients, tailor workflows, and expand services without being tied to a walled garden.
The result: advertisers have highly desired transparency, agencies retain strategic relevance, and the tech itself becomes the bridge rather than the battleground.
Artificial Intelligence in Programmatic Campaign Optimization
"Much of our on‑stack media spend is now touched by AI. AI‑powered creative testing has the potential to reduce timelines from weeks to days. It’s also overwhelmingly accurate when it comes to predicting whether creative will drive brand lift"
Artificial intelligence is no longer an accessory in programmatic advertising, it is the engine. In 2025, AI technology and machine learning touch every stage of the workflow, from media buying to measurement. The days when AI was simply optimizing bids are gone; today it powers ad creatives, ad copy, and campaign performance at scale.
Smarter Media Buying
AI technology now handles the complexity of real-time auctions with precision. Bid shading, pacing, and channel allocation are automated, ensuring budgets flow to the most effective impressions.
For agencies and advertisers alike, this means ad campaigns that adjust continuously to market conditions instead of relying on manual oversight.
Ad Creative Intelligence
AI trends in programmatic advertising extend into ad creatives. Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and generative AI produce and test variations of formats, visuals, and copy in real time.
AI iterates dozens of creative options against audience signals to uncover what resonates best. The result is personalization at a depth that human teams cannot match.
Data Quality as the Foundation
AI performance is only as strong as the data it ingests. Advertisers and agencies put greater focus on audience data, verified through clean rooms and curated identity frameworks. Feeding AI engines with high-quality inputs directly translates into sharper targeting and more reliable performance lift.
Campaign Performance at Scale
With AI in control, the campaign cycle compresses: setup, testing, optimization, and scaling now move faster. Predictive modeling identifies which impressions are most likely to convert, while real-time measurement ensures campaigns course-correct before wasted spend accumulates.
The outcome: programmatic campaigns that are not just automated but continuously learning. Agencies gain leverage with smarter AI tools, advertisers secure higher campaign performance, and the boundary between ad creatives and media buying fades into one fluid, AI-driven system.
Privacy and Brand Safety: The New Baseline for Programmatic
If 2025 has one universal rule, it’s this: no privacy, no safety, no deal. Advertisers have learned the hard way that scale without control leads to wasted budgets, reputational risk, and legal exposure.
Privacy Moves to the Forefront
User privacy continues to tighten across ecosystems. Apple’s ATT framework and privacy rules in Apple TV and mobile gaming environments limit identifiers, forcing advertisers to lean on contextual targeting and clean-room collaborations.
Google’s shifting timeline on cookies only underlines the uncertainty. Rather than waiting for the next announcement, smart advertisers treat privacy-first design as permanent, structuring programmatic advertising strategies around durable IDs, consented data, and secure integrations.
Nowadays Safety Challenges
The rise of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, CTV fraud, and bot-driven impressions has reignited scrutiny of supply chains. Advertisers no longer define success purely by impressions, they demand verified ad placements and human attention.
Agencies respond with curated marketplaces, stricter verification layers, and white-labeling their DSP platforms to guarantee brand-safe environments.
In short, brand safety matters so much in 2025 because:
- Consumers expect ads to respect privacy while still being relevant.
- Regulators expect compliance.
- Brands expect their campaigns to appear only in safe contexts.
In this environment, privacy and brand safety define the playing field. Programmatic growth in 2025 depends on proving that data use is ethical, that ad placements are trustworthy, and that campaigns deliver outcomes without crossing red lines.
Beyond Cookies: Data, IDs, and Contextual Targeting in 2025
The era of third-party cookies is effectively over, even if the technical shutdown keeps shifting. Advertisers and agencies stopped waiting.
In 2025, programmatic advertising trends in targeting rely on three pillars: first-party data, alternative IDs, and contextual intelligence.
First-Party Data and Clean Rooms
“Clean rooms became an enabler to collaborate as a brand with partners like publishers, to figure out audience overlap, build new segments, and activate them.”
Brands no longer view 1st-party data as a side asset. Retailers, publishers, and advertisers are building clean rooms to securely match consented data and map the customer journey across touchpoints. Instead of chasing individual users, marketers analyze patterns in user behavior while staying compliant.
This makes ad spend more efficient: only audiences with verified consent and clear attribution paths receive investment, raising confidence in where every dollar goes.
Alternative IDs and Curated Audiences
With cookies gone, alternative IDs (like UID2, RampID, Lotame Panorama ID) create persistent links across video ads, display, and mobile environments. Publishers are packaging curated audiences, groups defined by shared behaviors or contexts, that preserve scale without invasive tracking.
Lotame’s Panorama ID is particularly notable because it is a global, people-based identifier designed for the open web. It aggregates deterministic, probabilistic, and contextual signals to extend reach beyond walled gardens, while remaining privacy-compliant. For advertisers, this means broader addressability; for publishers, it unlocks ad revenue by making more of their ad space targetable.
Contextual Targeting Reborn
The rise of video-driven ecosystems has turned contextual targeting into a high-value tool again. Campaigns align with video content categories, sentiment, and placement quality. The result: ads fit seamlessly into environments where viewers are already engaged.
Retail Media Expansion: 1P Data Becomes the Ad Network
“The opportunity for a brand to influence a consumer closer to the point of purchase via a retail site is super exciting. If you combine that with the richness of purchase data and the ability to directly attribute ROI, it’s incredibly attractive for brands... It’s a golden age for retail.”
In 2025, Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are expanding faster than almost any other digital channel in the programmatic advertising space, driven by their unique control of first-party purchase data. Here is why retailers matter in the near future:
- Scale of spend: Global retail digital ad spend is projected to surpass $130B in 2025, growing at double-digit rates year over year.
- Closed-loop attribution: Unlike many other channels, RMNs show a clear line between ad exposure and purchase behavior, making them highly attractive to performance-driven brands.
- Privacy alignment: With cookies gone, retailer 1P data (loyalty cards, e-commerce transactions, in-store receipts) offers a compliant way to target audiences.
Retail isn’t just about search boxes on e-commerce sites anymore. Ads now extend across onsite placements, offsite web and app inventory, CTV, audio ads, and even in-store digital screens. That means retail networks are competing head-to-head with DSPs as a popular alternative.
How Epom DSP Matches Programmatic Advertising Trends
Programmatic advertising trends in 2025 are shaped by hybrid in-housing, the rise of big screens like CTV and DOOH, privacy-first identity, and the demand for safety, automation, and transparent measurement.
Epom white-label DSP is already built around these requirements, allowing advertisers to get the best of each trend for affordable cost.
Here’s how Epom aligns with the key trends:
- Hybrid in-housing: White-label DSP ensures platform and data ownership, so agencies could manage campaigns under their own brand.
- Big screens (CTV & DOOH): Native support for CTV and over the top ads alongside display and formats on mobile devices.
- Privacy-first identity and audience segments: Lotame DMP and their Panorama ID integration delivers cookieless reach and cross-device targeting.
- Brand safety: Pixalate filtering blocks invalid traffic and enhances viewability.
- AI & automation: Smart pacing, bidding rules, and bid shading improve performance continuously.
- Measurement & transparency: Real-time analytics with 30+ metrics with a focus on video stats.
- Traffic centralization: Epom Traffic Hub aggregates 80+ SSPs into one branded seat.
Programmatic Advertising Trends FAQ
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How do advertisers measure ROI in CTV and DOOH campaigns?
CTV ROI is tracked through attribution models that link household-level ad exposures to web visits, app installs, or even connected purchases. DOOH ROI often relies on foot-traffic attribution and attention metrics like dwell time. Increasingly, both channels are tied to incrementality testing and cross-device retargeting, proving their impact on the customer journey.
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Are white-label DSPs only for agencies, or can brands use them too?
Not just for agencies. Agencies white-label DSPs to manage multiple clients under one platform and keep margins transparent. Brands use them to own contracts, data, and reporting directly without rebuilding tech in-house. A white-label DSP is therefore allowing users to stay independent of walled gardens while customizing workflows to their needs.
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How does programmatic advertising impact sustainability goals?
Programmatic campaigns now factor in carbon cost per impression. Advertisers use supply-path optimization to cut redundant hops, lowering both wasted spend and energy use. Some DSPs and verification partners also report on green metrics (e.g. CO₂ footprint of an impression). Sustainability in programmatic is also about efficiency: fewer wasteful auctions mean cleaner supply and higher ROI.
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What’s the entry barrier for small advertisers in programmatic?
Much lower than it used to be. Many DSPs now offer self-serve onboarding, credit-card billing, and low or no campaign minimums. White-label platforms (like Epom) let smaller brands or agencies run professional-grade campaigns. The barrier today isn’t budget, it’s knowledge—understanding how to deal with precise targeting, predictive analytics, and real-time optimization effectively.
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How are video ads evolving on streaming platforms in 2025?
Streaming services are shifting from simple pre-rolls to shoppable and dynamic ad creatives. CTV and OTT environments now support formats like pause ads, QR code overlays, and sequential storytelling. Measurement has matured too: advertisers can link ad exposures on services like Hulu, Netflix, or Apple TV+ directly to site visits or app installs. For brands, this means video ads on streaming platforms are now full-funnel tools with measurable outcomes.
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