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Ad Tech Briefing: CES marks the opening of digital advertising’s (likely) year of consolidation
Keep up to date with Digiday’s annual coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. More from the series →
Historically, the Consumer Electronics Show was the January kick-off event where media buyers could eye the hardware onto which they could festoon their clients’ wares. Manufacturers of household goods took center stage.
However, now the lines of the traditional business calendar have blurred, making it difficult to delineate between industry verticals. Sources characterized CES, which officially kicks off today (Jan. 6), as the precursor to the mid-year upfront discussions, to AdExchanger.
Such assertions bring Amazon front of mind, with the retailer/streaming service/ad tech vendor using the Las Vegas, Nevada event as a feedback tour where it can subsequently set out its stall for its 2026 planning.
Of course, this builds upon the intense lobbying Amazon undertook last year, when the platform provider sold scale, and leaned heavily on its Authenticated Graph and its demand-side platform — just look at the deal it cut with Netflix and Sirius in September — to promise full-funnel reach across the open internet using verified signals.
A more recent deal it inked with Samsung Ads, which combines the consumer electronics provider’s ACR data with insights from Amazon Publisher Cloud to improve ad targeting, further demonstrated the appetite for deals with historic foes in the name of market share.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a 2020s trade show without the term “AI-powered…” adorning the sales deck of every other pitch deck, with Amazon Ads vp, Kelly MacLean, telling Digiday that its agentic platform can help ease the fragmented landscape of the open internet. “We have a massive opportunity to completely simplify how customers are thinking, how they measure results, and how they launch campaigns,” she told Digiday ahead of the event.
Meanwhile, Reddit is using the week-long conference to make good on earlier tests with the formal unveiling of its AI-powered campaign tool. The goal is to provide buyers with an end-to-end automated campaign tool for performance advertisers. The product, dubbed Max Campaign, consolidates existing capabilities — such as automated bidding, targeting, and campaign setup — into a single workflow aimed primarily at simplifying activation for smaller advertisers.
Not to be outdone, the industry’s traditional holding companies, including the newly-merged Omnicom and InterPublic Group, will be on hand to pitch their wares, with WPP unveiling its Agent Hub on January 5 as its flagship offering, marking the first full calendar year of CEO Cindy Rose.
Meanwhile, bankers and corporate development executives at traditional ad tech companies are also likely to be on the sidelines — as CES veterans will know, the bars of the Cosmopolitan Hotel are a favored congregating point for such executives — debating deals among the tens of thousands of delegates.
All of this comes as the current AI hype cycle is reshaping the types of mergers and acquisition deals in ad tech, with consolidation likely the order of the day. Sources tell Digiday that buyers’ focus is shifting from expansive “growth-at-all-costs” deals to smaller, defensibility-driven transactions where proprietary data and integration with AI workflows matter more than pure AI pitch narratives.
As investors demand clear margins and durable economics, deal volume has cooled, and structures have become more surgical, with AI now a baseline requirement rather than a premium valuation driver. Such trends are expected to continue further into 2026.
What we’ve heard
“I think we’re likely to see The Trade Desk go back into the market this year.”
– An M&A source tells Digiday, the industry’s largest DSP is likely to repeat its 2025 Sincera purchase, as it faces stiff competition from household names, such as Amazon.
What we’ve covered
The definitive Digiday guide to what’s in and out for advertising in 2026
Programmatic agency execs speak out on CTV transparency
What we’re reading
The top 10 trends in advertising in 2026
W Media Research’s Karsten Weide forecasts that 2026 will be a pivotal year in advertising, with change accelerating into a “dramatic step-change” largely driven by artificial intelligence and reshaping how the industry buys, measures and engages audiences. It outlines emerging shifts such as the rise of AI-led automation and agentic systems, new identity and measurement paradigms beyond cookies, and structural inflection points for digital ad formats and platforms.
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Ad tech’s year of reinvention: These are the storylines that will shape the industry in 2026
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