StackAdapt's 2027 Programmatic Advertising Report Finds Top Performers Are Twice as Likely to Expand Their Channel Mix

Leading marketers are taking on more channels, data, and measurement while reducing fragmentation, with connected customer data emerging as a key performance driver.

TORONTO, October 19, 2026--StackAdapt (www.stackadapt.com), the leading AI advertising and orchestration platform, today released its annual State of Programmatic Advertising 2027 report. The research finds that top-performing marketers are taking on more complexity than their peers and managing it more effectively. They are expanding across channels, data, measurement and AI while keeping those capabilities working together.

Based on a global survey of 885 senior marketing and advertising professionals in addition to anonymized StackAdapt platform data, the report defines top performers as marketers reporting significantly stronger year-over-year performance. Compared with other respondents, top performers are:

• More than twice as likely to have expanded their channel mix to three or more channels (45% vs. 21%)

• More likely to use connected customer data (58% vs. 44%)

• More likely to report greater measurement confidence (69% vs. 52%)

• Less likely to report fragmentation-related budget waste (31% vs. 43%)

"More channels, better customer data, and AI are expanding what marketers can do, but they're also making marketing more complex," said Ryan Nelsen, CMO of StackAdapt. "Our research shows that the strongest performers are making those moving parts work together more effectively."

Measurement is one area where that coordination pays off. Only 7% of marketers say they have a fully unified measurement strategy, and most are using several methodologies at once. Marketers using cross-channel attribution report stronger year-over-year performance than non-users (75% vs. 60%) and greater confidence connecting ad investment to results (66% vs. 47%).

The research also shows that marketers are investing in reach. Eighty-three percent have added channels to their marketing mix over the past two to three years. The opportunity now is coordination: 10% say they almost always run truly omnichannel campaigns, and 42% estimate that more than 20% of their programmatic budget is wasted because of siloed or fragmented channel execution, rather than the channels themselves.

At larger budgets, the challenge shifts from access to alignment. According to StackAdapt platform data, advertisers spending more than $10 million annually are more likely to use measurement capabilities (69% vs. 56%) and adopt a broader set of platform features. In the survey, high-spend marketers cite organizational silos (28% vs. 16%) and technology limitations (23% vs. 17%) as barriers to omnichannel strategy more often than mid-spend marketers. That points to operating models, rather than investment levels, as the next lever for performance at scale.