Giovanni Gardelli, Head of Product at Yahoo DSP, identified critical trends from CES 2025 indicating seismic shifts in the competitive landscape of advertising technology platforms. He highlighted the convergence of measurement methodologies, which reconciles a 20-year gap between rapid but inaccurate attribution and slower yet reliable incrementality testing. Concurrently, the rise of agentic AI systems is rendering user interfaces less of a competitive advantage, compelling platforms to differentiate themselves through customer acquisition strategies and infrastructure capabilities instead of just workflow design.
These insights were shared in a LinkedIn post shortly after the January 2025 Consumer Electronics Show and come at a time when advertising platforms face increasing pressure to demonstrate authentic business impact rather than merely optimizing proxy metrics. Gardelli’s analysis underscores how enhanced Conversion API implementations and agentic automation will influence the investment strategies of these platforms and the criteria advertisers use to evaluate technology partners.
Digital advertising has been hampered by incompatible measurement systems since the early 2000s. While pixel-based last-touch attribution allowed for swift optimization, it fundamentally misrepresented campaign effectiveness. Conversely, marketing mix modeling and other incrementality testing methods provided accurate measurements but required extensive time to yield actionable insights. “For nearly two decades, measurement has lived in two separate worlds,” Gardelli stated. “On one side, fast, self-attributable last-touch attribution; on the other, slower but more accurate methods.” This disjunction has led advertisers to grapple with conflicting data when allocating budgets, resulting in frustration across marketing teams.
In November 2025, Google adjusted its incrementality testing thresholds to $5,000, democratizing access to causal measurement that had previously required substantial budgets. This shift reflects the industry’s growing acknowledgment that reliance on attribution-based optimization alone cannot substantiate genuine advertising effectiveness. To address this, measurement vendors are developing improved Conversion API implementations that facilitate richer attribution and incrementality signals between platforms, aiming to better align real-time optimization with measurable outcomes.
“We’re seeing real progress toward convergence,” Gardelli explained, noting that several measurement vendors are working on enhanced versions of Conversion APIs that improve the passing of incrementality signals. This technical advancement promises to reduce the longstanding disconnect between optimized metrics and actual business impact.
Despite these technological advancements, confidence in marketing measurement stagnated in 2025, with 54.1% of marketers reporting no year-over-year improvement in confidence levels. Research conducted by TransUnion and EMARKETER revealed that 67.4% of marketers identified proving incremental ROI as their most pressing challenge, underscoring the urgency to bridge the gap between attribution and incrementality methodologies. The technical architecture supporting this measurement convergence relies on enhancements across major platforms, including Google’s updates to Display & Video 360 and Meta’s trials with Google Analytics 4.
Investment priorities are shifting accordingly, with nearly half of marketers—46.9%—planning to increase their spending on marketing mix modeling over the coming year. Another 34.7% are focusing on multitouch attribution improvements. The combination of these approaches enables a more thorough performance assessment than either methodology can achieve independently.
On another front, the rise of agentic AI is reshaping competitive dynamics in the advertising technology sector. Historically, the quality of user interfaces has been a significant competitive advantage. Demand-side platforms, ad exchanges, and agencies have invested heavily in workflow design and dashboard functionality to simplify operations for advertisers. However, as AI systems develop the capacity to create functional, customizable interfaces at a reduced cost, traditional platforms may find their advantages eroded.
“It’s still early, but it’s increasingly clear that agentic is here to stay and will only grow in importance,” Gardelli remarked. This evolution suggests that UI and workflow will no longer provide a lasting competitive edge. As systems become simpler to customize through agentic AI, more companies will likely create tailored interfaces to meet their needs.
The acceleration of agentic systems and advertising infrastructure was markedly pronounced in November 2025. Amazon unified its DSP and sponsored ads console while releasing AI agents for campaign management. Simultaneously, Google made its Ads Advisor available to all English-language accounts. The IAB Tech Lab introduced an Agentic RTB Framework, setting standards for autonomous buying systems.
The competitive landscape is bifurcating: platforms must either excel in customer relationships and service quality or invest heavily in algorithmic capabilities and infrastructure performance. The previous emphasis on UI design begins to lose significance as agentic systems enable rapid interface development. This shift points to a future where competition will increasingly focus on either customer acquisition efficiency or technical infrastructure.
The implications of these dual trends create divergent strategic paths for advertising technology firms. Platforms must choose whether to prioritize customer service excellence or invest in superior algorithmic and data processing capabilities. The loss of strategic value in workflow design means that metrics like dashboard aesthetics will hold less relevance in the future.
As enhanced Conversion APIs enable more effective alignment with incrementality, the integration of richer data signals into bidding algorithms will require substantial engineering efforts, likely favoring larger platforms with the resources to invest accordingly. The evolving regulatory landscape, including GDPR and CCPA, further complicates measurement methodologies. The convergence of measurement approaches must navigate these privacy frameworks, which impose constraints on data collection and processing.
Overall, the observations shared at CES 2025 reveal critical inflection points within the advertising technology sector. While measurement convergence is underway, the process remains incomplete. As platforms adapt to the rise of agentic systems, the competitive landscape is set for fundamental transformation.
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