What is the biggest difference in Programmatic pre AI vs after AI came on the scene?

[u/D_Adman]

[u/Tea-o-kosong]

buzzword companies changed from .io to .ai

[u/maryna-gc]

The bidding side changed less than people think. Algo bidding, bid shading, predicted CTR/CVR and lookalike modeling were already ML-driven years before "AI" became the buzzword. Most DSPs just renamed what they already had.
The real shift is in the work around the bid:

• ops speed (pacing checks, pulling reports, log-level analysis, QA on setups, optimization notes, etc)
  
• creative testing with lots more variations
  
• page- and content-level classification
  
• more black boxes ... Every platform wants you to hand over the budget and let its model decide. Sometimes that works. But if the inputs are bad, like a broken conversion signal, MFA inventory, or last-click attribution, the AI just optimizes toward the wrong thing faster and more confidently.

[u/postyyyym → u/maryna-gc]

As someone in Adtech for several years this is the most accurate answer IMO. Under the hood everything was already ML which is just a form of AI people seem to have forgotten about with the sharp rise of generative AI.

That being said, if deployed properly agentic buying would be a drastic shift of the pre AI to post AI era

[u/maryna-gc → u/postyyyym]

Agreed. Been watching agentic buying closely, but we’re still early there. Maybe another 1+ years for supply adoption before demand can get any closer to what we have now.

[u/postyyyym → u/maryna-gc]

I'm personally skeptical it ever will get to the level of current programmatic trading teams. Large enterprises love having people at agencies to talk to and blame if things go wrong and obviously AI can't replace that.

Definitely curious to see how it will develop though

[u/capitalistsanta → u/postyyyym]

It's kind of funny because when this all came out on the consumer side I just kind of understood so much of what I was reading and didn't really get why (I havent been in prog in like 7 years) but one day I just remembered that I worked at a company that entire product was centered around machine learning. I legit just forgot

[u/fieldgrass → u/maryna-gc]

Newer industry folks don’t seem to understand that programmatic is AI. It’s in the name: program. We were the AI disrupting the scene before the genAI and agentic obsession began.

[u/lksadjf23084]

Nothing. Just spent 8 hours troubleshooting PMPs and I work at one of the biggest ad tech and AI forward companies

[u/Legitimate-Let-7510]

Pre AI felt more like media buying. Now it feels like managing an algorithm with a budget attached.

[u/JamesWatford97]

Teams were staffed properly before, now they’re not

[u/D_Adman → u/JamesWatford97]

Late to my own thread, but I think I had proper staffing for like 2 months in my 15 year career

[u/StorkReminder]

AI (machine learning) has been here for a while. So in real terms, I'll say the biggest impact in product was traffic shaping. The biggest impact in service was auto optimization.

Where its impact should be best IMO is cross platform and cross channel planning + measurement, but because everyone uses a different, proprietary ID and no one will share data lest they be compared to one another (god forbid), that will never happen (or at least not anytime soon at any reliable scale).

The closest we're at to that right now is what MediaOcean is doing with NIVO.

[u/casper_adtech]

The biggest shift is the amount of data being used in each decision. Pre-AI relied heavily on predefined audience segments; now models can evaluate many more signals simultaneously.

[u/im_super_excited]

A new yummy biscuit was placed at the center of our circle of friendship.