How to own your programmatic strategy in 2026

From planning to activation to measurement, marketers are under pressure to make every decision count. In 2025, we focused on building partnerships and tools that remove friction and let you improve campaign performance across channels. This year, you can make the most of those innovations across five areas: 

• Audience strategy 

• Quality supply 

• Omnichannel reach 

• Data-driven buying 

• Measurement 

Each represents a tangible step toward helping you own your programmatic strategy in 2026. 

Elevating audience strategy

Last year, we focused on helping marketers activate audiences with more precision, more interoperability, and more paths to growth. 

Retail media partnerships, such as that with Instacart, give brands access to richer commerce insights and more flexible ways to reach high-intent shoppers. This integration makes it easier for advertisers to activate purchase-based signals mid-flight to help with: 

• Prospecting 

• Mid-funnel engagement 

• Sales-driven optimization 

The launch of the Connector app on Snowflake helps users activate their own UID2 and conversion data directly within the platform. Live, SKU-level retail insights feed real-time optimization, helping brands build a privacy-conscious foundation to reach the right customers across their campaigns. 

Together, these developments help make audience-first planning more actionable across the entire media journey. 

Building a stronger supply foundation

We also focused on continuing to strengthen our quality of supply. 

• Deal Desk reimagines how advertisers and publishers manage deals by introducing greater transparency, clearer accountability, and AI-powered insights into premium inventory planning. 

• Blue Lists builds on that foundation by giving buyers the ability to curate their own marketplaces, applying their preferences with confidence and ensuring brand safety and visibility. 

We also expanded the intelligence available across the open internet through a series of tools and integrations: 

• OpenSincera adds richer metadata and objective quality signals to help buyers make informed decisions and help publishers better communicate the value of their content. 

• OpenAds continues modernizing the programmatic auction with new features designed to create a more efficient and transparent path between buyers and sellers. 

• News Navigator surfaces high-quality journalism in partnership with Ad Fontes Media and Mobian to support responsible investment in premium news. 

• PubDesk equips publishers with insights to better evaluate inventory performance and understand how buyers view their inventory. 

Together, these solutions strengthen the overall supply environment, helping make it easier for advertisers to activate with confidence across the open internet and for publishers to sustainably grow monetization. 

Seamless omnichannel reach 

In 2025, our advertisers gained broader, more connected access across CTV, audio, display, and mobile. 

• Netflix: Our expanded partnership provides global reach and new measurement capabilities, like reach and frequency, helping brands better understand the value of their Netflix investment. 

• Live events & tentpole activations: With live events in Kokai, advertisers can automate pacing and budgets across sports seasons and major events, from the Olympics to the FIFA World Cup, capturing attention in real time. 

• Digital audio: Our expanded integration with Spotify and new creative capabilities via Bunny Studio enable richer formats and more engaging audio experiences. 

Together, these expansions help advertisers unify their messaging across channels and build experiences that reflect modern media consumption habits. 

Data-driven buying

Over the past year, we’ve reimagined the buying experience to be more powerful, intuitive, and efficient for advertisers. 

Through ongoing iterations and innovation, our platform is now simpler to navigate and faster to use. The Kokai platform experience’s AI features help turn complex data signals into actionable insights, automate routine tasks, and help buyers make more precise, data-driven decisions with less effort. 

To build upon that foundation, we further introduced a series of enhancements designed to help strengthen decisioning across the entire buying journey: 

• Audience addressability & identity: Our global identity graph now delivers enhanced coverage and improved accuracy, strengthening audience addressability and frequency management across markets.

• Vertical-specific capabilities: For health care and direct-to-consumer advertisers, we introduced new tools to support compliance, refine targeting, and measure impact more effectively across channels. 

• Planning & measurement upgrades: Enhanced reach and frequency (R/F) reporting gives advertisers clearer visibility into unique reach and overlap across channels like audio (now supported with iSpot), enabling smarter budget allocation and more precise optimization. 

• Budgeting & flexibility: Local budgets provide greater flexibility in multi-market campaign planning, allowing teams to distribute spend across regions while maintaining centralized oversight and control. 

• Platform workflow enhancements: The Kokai platform experience saw streamlined workflows, customizable views, and smarter on-platform insights. These enhancements aim to reduce friction and give traders greater control, faster activation, clearer visibility, and more optimization opportunities across every stage of their campaigns. 

Ultimately, these enhancements position advertisers to make more confident, data-driven decisions at every stage of the campaign and unlock more value from every impression. 

Performance you can measure

In 2025, we delivered stronger proof of performance by advancing measurement tools that link media investments more directly to business impact. 

Through our first-to-market partnership with EDO, advertisers can now connect CTV exposures to mid-funnel consumer actions like site visits, store traffic, and mobile engagement. 

Retail measurement integrations deepened as well. For example, by further integrating the commerce data platform Attain in our marketplace, we made it easier for advertisers to: 

• Tie programmatic activity directly to incremental commerce results 

• Provide valuable insights on consumer behavior and purchase intent 

• Help brands understand how campaign exposure translates to consumer action 

Across these partnerships and platform enhancements, the focus was simple: Help empower advertisers with the information they need to evaluate performance, refine strategies, and make more informed investment decisions. 

Opportunities for the year ahead

The progress made in 2025 reflects an industry moving toward more connected, accountable, and intelligent advertising on the open internet. This year, we remain focused on expanding premium partnerships, strengthening data-driven buying, and delivering tools that help marketers plan and measure campaigns with greater clarity. 

Contact us today to learn more about how these new capabilities and advancements can enhance your next campaign. 

This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.