Omnichannel Ad Platforms: The Future Beyond DSPs

The market for omnichannel demand-side platforms (DSPs) reached its limit. Pioneers like The Trade Desk and its erstwhile rivals, including the likes of Xandr, Turn, MediaMath, TubeMogul, and Rocket Fuel, grew by accelerating cross-channel media planning, buying, and optimization. Now, DSPs’ core capabilities are very mature and highly automatable. Vendors focused primarily on improving DSPs’ functionalities have limited pricing power and differentiation.

Market dynamics punctuate this inflection point. Microsoft shuttering its DSP, tepid growth among midsize DSPs, and the lack of unicorn startups in the DSP market signal its diminishment.

Advertisers Need Broader Ad Platforms

Advertisers require a roster of platforms to help them orchestrate paid media across channels, formats, and devices. But their requirements now transcend minimizing paid media’s time-to-value. They also need to deepen their moat of customer understanding, resolve various identities, rigorously test agentic AI, map and sequence ads across online and offline channels, develop more compelling creative, and clearly perceive paid media’s incrementality.

These demands exceed what DSPs alone were designed to deliver. Now, advertisers need omnichannel ad platforms (OAPs) that incorporate DSP functionalities as well as capabilities to help them effectively deal with paid media’s operational, analytical, and creative complexities.

OAPs have four main advantages:

They span closed and open ecosystems. Data deprecation continues dimming signals across the open web, privileging platforms with proprietary, full-funnel inventory. Strong intent signals gleaned from walled gardens’ authenticated audiences make walled gardens’ OAPs critical to advertisers’ media plans. But OAPs that own inventory are liable to bias decisioning towards their owned and operated properties. Advertisers should balance walled gardens’ signal strength with the relatively impartial decisioning delivered by OAPs free from first-party supply, necessitating multi-platform plans.
They converge media and creative. At best, OAPs are sources of truth that provide various personas a common vocabulary to explain ads’ performance and decide what to test next, minimizing arbitrary decision-making. OAPs can bridge gaps between media and creative subject matter experts so that media and messaging are mutually supportive. After all, creative quality is the strongest determinant of advertising’s performance. Vendors with robust native creative automation, testing, and intelligence capabilities are well-positioned to lead the OAP market as performance marketers become creative scientists.
They afford AI-integrated workflow and analytical efficiencies. OAPs mixing malleable agentic AI with effective predictive and generative AI have strategic advantages. Together, the three types of AI help advertisers accelerate media and creative decision-making, improve campaign health, and lift traders’ productivity as well as media’s performance. But faster advertising shouldn’t come at the expense of transparency and control, which induces advertisers to accumulate tech debt while trying to decipher black boxes. Leading OAPs empower advertisers to apprehend and harness AI to deliver increasingly relevant customer experiences.
They mature the fastest growing channels. Emerging and resurging channels like out-of-home, commerce media, audio advertising, and in-game advertising benefit from flowing through omnichannel ad platforms. OAPs help buyers and sellers of those media scale demand and make data-driven buying and optimization decisions. But it’s insufficient to port a programmatic infrastructure built for open web display to various other channels. Ad platforms must flex to fill new channels’ particular needs rather than forcing tomorrow’s media into yesterday’s paradigms.

Introducing The Forrester Wave™: Omnichannel Advertising Platforms, Q1 2026

Check out our first Wave on OAPs to compare the most significant vendors and select the right providers for your needs. Schedule a guidance session to learn more about the OAP market’s dynamics and notable vendors. Stay tuned for upcoming research on commerce media, a channel every OAP prioritizes.