• by Ray Schultz , January 31, 2024

Programmatic ad spending is just now starting what should be a very good year — relatively speaking. 

Of all ad dollars, over $157.35 billion will go to programmatic, according to Programmatic Ad Spending Forecast H1 2024, a study by Insider Intelligence/eMarketer, presented by LiveRamp. That reflects a 15.9% growth rate and is 91.3% of all ad spending. 

The year 2025 will be even better, with programmatic spending expected to total $178.25. 

In contrast, nonprogrammatic will grow at only a third of that rate in 2024 at 5.3%.

However, cookie depreciation has hit ad spending — programmatic advertisers have been “refocusing strategies around first-party data and investing more heavily in closed and private ecosystems,” the study says. “This will leave the open exchange with less than 10% market share by the end of 2024. 

Open exchange ad spending represented 74.5% of the programmatic display market when eMarketer began tracking it in 2013.

Since then, advertisers have “invested more heavily in private marketplaces and closed ecosystems like social media platforms and retail media networks (RMNs), which fall under programmatic direct.

The study continues, “As signal loss reaches a fever pitch with cookie deprecation, ad buyers and sellers are harnessing their own consumer data for programmatic activation across transaction methods. Six in 10 buyers reported they’d be focusing somewhat or significantly more on ad placements with publishers with first-party data in 2024, per November 2023 survey data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)." 

CTV ad spending is expected to be $1 billion less than the sum originally predicted. 

"Advertisers are still increasing spend, just not as quickly as expected thanks to issues with measurement, frequency capping, and ad fraud," the study says.