What Advertising Week Europe 2026 Told Us About the Future of Programmatic

Advertising Week Europe 2026 made one thing clear. Programmatic isn't broken, it's being rebuilt. Structural inefficiency. The democratisation of access. A growing conviction that the open internet is ready to compete again.

Here is why it matters for gaming advertising.

The old model is running out of road

Andrew Casale, founder of Index Exchange, made the case. Programmatic was a workaround. When real-time bidding launched in the late 2000s, the model required sending bid requests to as many platforms as possible, hoping one would find value. It worked. The market grew to tens of billions of dollars. But it created enormous inefficiency, quietly eroding what publishers earned and advertisers got for their money.

Index Exchange now handles 700 billion advertising bids a day. A year ago it was 400 billion. At that volume, running the old model is no longer viable. 

The future starts at the impression

The shift Casale described: decide whether an ad is worth buying before bid requests are sent. Instead of a platform making that call after the fact, it now happens at the source. What took 150 milliseconds 15 years ago now takes five to ten, and that speed makes leaner, smarter buying possible without a platform sitting in the middle.

The result: less waste, lower costs, and more revenue reaching media companies. Casale’s analogy: programmatic should work more like Visa. A fast, invisible transaction layer. Not a bloated stack taking a cut at every step.

TV advertising is being democratised

Channel 4's Alexandra Wright made the same argument for TV. Two things have always kept smaller advertisers off broadcast: the upfront cost and the need for a proper ad creative.

Channel 4 is dismantling both. Non-guaranteed programmatic deals remove the upfront budget commitment. A partnership with AI company Streamer turns an advertiser's existing website into the foundations of a TV ad, putting broadcast within reach of businesses that have never run one.

Wright was candid about what still needs work. Measurement. Project Lantern, a cross-broadcaster initiative, will track TV ad exposure against real online outcomes, finally proving what broadcast actually does beyond the last click.

Both sessions pointed the same direction. Leaner infrastructure. Lower barriers. Proven outcomes.

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Why this matters for gaming

Gaming captures only 5% of media budgets despite being one of the fastest-growing attention environments in media. That gap exists because gaming has been too fragmented, too hard to buy, and too difficult to measure.

The shifts AWE described address all three. As the decision moves closer to the impression, programmatic infrastructure gets leaner, and AI-driven optimisation reaches the open internet, gaming inventory becomes simpler to plan, buy, and prove.

iion’s Guaranteed Outcomes model is built on this premise. Brands don’t pay for impressions that don’t deliver. Our Attention Advantage research, across 9 million gaming ad impressions in partnership with IAB Australia, backs it up. Our CTV gaming partnerships with Play.Works and TCL are live across 15+ countries. The infrastructure AWE was pointing toward already exists in gaming.

The future starts at the impression. For gaming, that future is already here.

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