DSPs have spent years competing on premium inventory access, measurement capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated optimization tools. But as those capabilities become more widely available—and AI reshapes how campaigns are planned, targeted, and optimized—the definition of a differentiated buying platform is changing.
The next competitive advantage may not be how much a DSP can access or how efficiently it can execute. It may be how much intelligence it can bring to every decision, and how effectively it can turn a growing universe of signals into something advertisers can actually activate on.
As that shift takes shape, there are a few questions the industry should ask about what will truly differentiate the next generation of buying platforms.
DSPs have spent years competing on scale, access, and efficiency. What changes as AI becomes a bigger part of media buying?
Those things aren’t going away, but they’re becoming the cost of entry. Most major buying platforms can give advertisers access to a significant inventory footprint, sophisticated audience capabilities, automated bidding, and increasingly advanced optimization. The question is: What happens when those capabilities start to look relatively similar across platforms?
Increasingly, differentiation will move upstream, from how effectively a platform can execute a decision to how intelligently it can help make that decision. Advertisers don’t just need to know whether an impression is available or whether it meets a campaign’s basic parameters—they want to understand the quality of that opportunity.
In connected TV, richer contextual intelligence can help a buyer understand what’s actually happening on screen around an ad break, while attention, brand suitability, and other signals can add another layer of understanding about the value of that impression. The DSP that can interpret more of those signals and turn them into better decisions becomes much more valuable.
There’s a lot of discussion about AI-powered and eventually agentic media buying. Doesn’t AI itself provide that intelligence?
AI can dramatically improve how quickly and efficiently decisions are made. But there’s an important distinction between automation and intelligence.
An AI system can make millions of decisions very quickly, but it can only make those decisions based on the information that is made available to it. Regardless of how sophisticated the model is, the results are only as rich and informed as the information that it’s fed. If it only has access to limited inputs, the quality of the output will be limited as well.
So, as AI takes on a larger role in buying, the quality and breadth of the intelligence available to those systems becomes increasingly more important.
Does that mean DSPs need to build more technology themselves?
No—differentiation doesn’t have to mean building everything yourself.
There’s been a tendency in adtech to equate differentiation with ownership: if a capability matters, build it. But specialized companies across the ecosystem are already building sophisticated products and solutions around identity, context, attention, brand suitability, and other areas. Rebuilding all that intelligence inside every platform isn’t the best use of resources, nor does it necessarily help to simplify buyer workflow. Interoperability is where the real value is.
The opportunity is where DSPs can make that intelligence work together. That means interoperability becomes more than a technical consideration—it becomes a competitive advantage. A platform that can seamlessly support various “plug-ins” from across the ecosystem is what drives value and creates differentiation.
What does the winning DSP look like in that environment?
The smartest platforms will be the ones that aggregate all this intelligence and make it feel the least complicated. Buyers want solutions built on simplicity. The value comes from taking the complexity that exists behind the scenes and translating it into simple, yet prescriptive, planning and execution tools with accessible measurement and reporting.
The pieces are largely here. The next battleground for DSPs is connectivity: making them all work together seamlessly for ease of execution.
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Ria Madrid is VP, global advertising at Wurl, a leader in the streaming TV industry. In her role, Madrid is responsible for company strategy and growth across Wurl’s ad revenue business, overseeing business development, client success, and programmatic activation across both publisher and strategic advertiser partnerships.