Advertising Week always generates an oversupply of predictions (often stated far more confidently than the evidence warrants). Most of them will be forgotten quickly.
Underneath the usual noise, three themes stood out to me because they mean something more durable: a structural change in how our industry will capture growth.
The industry still confuses observability with causality
Measurement tells you that an outcome happened. Attribution attempts to explain why it happened and how much credit each touchpoint deserves. Those are very different jobs.
Too much of the industry still treats what is easiest to observe as if it were the same thing as what caused the result. A click is observable. So is a conversion path. That doesn’t make either a complete explanation of incrementality.
This is how last-click distorts budget allocation. It rewards demand capture while under-crediting demand creation. It overvalues the channels closest to the transaction and undervalues the channels that shaped the decision earlier.
Consumer behavior has already moved past the neat, linear models many marketers still use to evaluate performance. Discovery, consideration, and action are increasingly compressed into the same window of time, often across channels.
The marketers who gain an advantage in the near future are the ones who get serious about causality. That means incrementality testing, lift analyses, and a greater willingness to challenge reporting that looks clean but explains nothing.
Consolidation is coming
Every maturing market follows this script.
In the late 1800s, as railroads proliferated, between 1,000 and 2,000 operating rail companies emerged. Through successive waves of mergers, dozens of major carriers condensed into a handful of giants. After the Ma Bell breakup in the 1980s, over 3,000 telecom companies sprouted in the 1990s—only to consolidate into today's mega-survivors. Even in CPG, Pepsi acquiring Poppi represents the same playbook: scale absorbing genuine differentiation.
The same dynamic is playing out—and will accelerate—in adtech. Our industry has spent years producing more platforms and intermediaries than the market can indefinitely sustain. How many actually possess a differentiated value proposition that matters?
The drivers of this consolidation mirror those of previous eras: scale and efficiency. But what sets advertising apart is the imperative shift toward real outcomes. Companies owning unique, outcome-driving technology will hold a defensible position. Major media companies must increasingly cater to performance advertisers, who drive the revenue engine today—as clearly demonstrated by the dominant revenue and market caps of search and social platforms serving over 9 million performance oriented advertisers.
Net net: To survive and thrive in the coming era of adtech consolidation, you must deliver scale, provide efficiency, or uniquely power performance for advertisers.
Agentic AI needs to be accountable to revenue
I’ve lost count of how many times I have heard, “We have an agent for that.”
Some of it is real progress, and some is just rebranded workflow automation. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with automation. The question is what the system is actually optimizing for. Because workflow automation is not the same thing as growth.
The standard for agentic advertising should be much higher. Does it identify customers you would not otherwise have acquired? Does it allocate spend more intelligently over time? Or put plainly, does the system improve business outcomes?
The systems that will matter most are the ones that can answer yes to those questions and genuinely connect signals, execution, optimization, and measurement tightly enough to improve business results over time.
This is important because there isn’t a universal AI brain for advertising. Different products have different margins, purchase cycles, customer behaviors, and growth constraints. A system that works for a mobile app won’t necessarily work for a retailer without adapting to the economics of that business.
The common thread
These may sound like three separate observations, but they’re really one. As advertising becomes more accountable to outcomes, the industry is being forced to separate proxies from proof.
Measurement is being tested against causality. Platforms are being tested against outcomes. AI is being tested against financial impact. That’s a healthy correction.
Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech—cutting through the noise to focus on what really drives outcomes. Subscribe here.
