Welcome to The MadTech Podcast special from ExchangeWire, a weekly deep dive into a pressing industry issue.

Hello and welcome to today's edition of The MadTech Podcast.

I am delighted to be joined by, well, I'm joined by both the founders of ExchangeWire.

This is a really rare occurrence.

I'm thrilled to have both Rachel Smith, CEO here.

Thank you.

I mean, you're right it's a rare occurrence that Ciaran and I are on the same podcast,

but it used to happen all the time in the early days and I'm not sure it always went very smoothly, so.

It's like ghostbusters, you know.

Don't cross the streams, otherwise you open up an extra dimensional rift in space and time.

So there you go.

You might be getting a new dimensional rift in space and time today.

Fantastic.

What else could we offer our wonderful listening audience?

Welcome, Ciaran.

Nice to you back.

Thank you for inviting me on this morning.

Always a pleasure.

Never a chore.

Inviting, cajoling, whichever way you want to put it.

Thank you very much for coming on today.

We're going to use the opportunity of having you both to discuss ATS London.

It took place last week.

It was a great success of an event.

We all had a great time.

But I'm going to use today to pick apart some of your top takeaways from the event.

But there was some news yesterday that broke.

The IAB and MediaSense have released their latest Digital Adspend UK report.

And the top line is that the digital ad market grew 13% year-on-year in H1 2026 up to 21.6 billion.

Comparing to six years ago, the digital ad spend totaled 16.5 billion for the full year.

So there's been a really rapid increase in digital ad investment since that, since 2020 basically.

Before we get into ATS, gonna get some top line thoughts from you, Rachel.

What does this say to you about the digital industry and about programmatic?

Yeah, I think it's super interesting, John.

Of course, at ATS London um this year I gave a bit of a I gave an opening presentation which I which I do uh pretty much or have done most years for a while now.

And as one of the things that I present uh to try to give everyone a bit of context for the discussions for the day

and share with them a kind a kind of outlook on the industry for the coming twelve months.

We I always dig into ad spend a little bit.

So uh, you know, the figures that I presented were were were were figures that actually had been revised during the year and they were reporting, you know, something close to

certainly a a global ad spend figure of about eleven percent year on year, and for the UK something like 8.5%.

So this is an uptick on that and it's obviously a more recent ad spend study and report.

So I'm not surprised to be honest with you, because as I said,

the ad spend sources that I was looking at in preparation for ATS London had already been revised up during the year.

So and I also dug into what was driving ad spend and also looking at where what that what that looks like regionally.

So I had a little bit of look in detail about w uh on on the figures of on the figures that were being presented within Europe.

So I'm not that surprised because the figures have been looking healthy throughout the year

and have been revised upward, both globally and also here in the UK and also across other European countries as well.

But it's the drivers that are really interesting.

So if we look at global ad spend, the drivers are coming from growth markets, which are not necessarily the more mature ad spend markets like the US, the UK,

other European markets, but really the strong almost double-digit growth figures.

that's propelling the global market are coming from the more developing and aggressively growing economies of APAC, uh LATAM and also still the Middle East.

But what we're starting to see is the growth figures in the more mature markets like the US and like the UK picking up speed compared with 2025 and also 2024.

So it doesn't surprise me to see a more updated report that's showing a very favorable ad spend figure.

But the growth isn't just coming from spend emerging into new channels as well – sorry, diversifying into other digital channels, not necessarily new channels,

it's also coming from an overall larger pool of digital advertising opportunities.

So

We've been seeing ad spend growing in channels like TV, video, out-of-home, retail media, and commerce media for the last couple of years.

And we're seeing really aggressive growth figures across each of those channels globally in 2026.

But the main reason for that is not repurposing spend from other channels.

So in the IAB and MediaSense report, it also touched on search marketing spend and search advertising spend, which is continuing to grow.

despite obviously the challenge that we're seeing in search from AI and also the challenges that we're seeing in the open web as opposed to the open internet.

But those so so it's not just about spend being repurposed from other channels because those those existing channels are still doing reasonably well.

It's about an overall larger pool of digital advertising opportunities.

And they are being more aggressively harnessed by advertisers in those channels that I just mentioned, TV and out-of-home, retail media and commerce media.

And the reason is because advertising opportunities in those channels are becoming more sophisticated.

So and this is the link that I drew in the opener at ATS London is if you look at the technology tools and solutions that are that that that that we've got available to power.

advertising in those channels and more importantly to measure effectiveness in those channels and to reach specific audiences and specific consumers,

they've become that much more sophisticated.

So two things are happening at the same time, which is consumer habits are diversifying and optimizing more towards those digital channels, plus advertising tools and advertising

technology is getting more sophisticated and more precise within those channels.

And that's creating a more effective advertising environment.

The other thing is if we look at something like out-of-home, we're seeing a growth in digital screens.

So digital out-of-home is becoming again more of a volume advertising opportunity than it was even twelve months ago.

And I think Ciaran, when we talk about this, often gives an example of self-driving cars.

Just imagine the screen advertising opportunities.

You know, there's already screen advertising opportunities in, you know,

cabs, whether they're black cabs in London or yellow taxis in New York, but just imagine the increase in advertising opportunities once we're all getting around in

self-driving vehicles that have got digital screens in them.

So yeah, I'm not surprised.

Most of this inventory as well is available programmatically too.

So obviously that's a big strong, that's a big growth story for programmatic as well.

And overall I think it points to the sort of argument that I was trying to I was trying to make at ATS London, which is the industry is healthy.

And it's not just that the industry is healthy, the technology side of the industry is actually driving ad spend growth, and it's also resulting in more technical innovation.

And that is opportunities available across the open internet.

It's not just about growth in social media platforms or existing dominant wall gardens.

There's plenty of new and fresh opportunities.

And I think these ad spend figures in this particular report underscores that.

Yeah, it's an impressive growth.

As you mentioned, search is still high, it grew 10% year-on-year.

It's still the largest digital advertising channel in the UK, but it's being caught by other mediums such as retail media, online video, out-of-home.

Ciaran, what do you feel about this report?

I think that Google still dominates.

I mean search is still doing 10% growth after all these years and the amount of money still growing in there is incredible.

I was noted that the programmatic accounted for like seventeen billion or 81% of spend which is really impressive.

And I sort of have a hot tip to Rachel round the

the out-of-home stuff.

Like I think digital out-of-home now represents about a billion, nearly a billion dollars or billion pounds in spend, which is about I think still 67% of out-of-home.

So it's got still room to grow.

So these are encouraging figures and I think there are like there are interesting sort of areas of growth.

The retail media stuff is huge.

I mean it's it's funny we talk about retail media we we just immediately jump to like

you know, Tesco's or Sainsbury's.

It's not just that anymore.

So you know, Maccy D's now is apparently an ad network.

If you've read the trades this week, they're they're starting up an ad network.

So not only can you get a you know, cheeseburger and chips, you can get a sort of retargeted ad for juice on your phone or a nice out-of-home

or digital out-of-home ad in a Maccy D's location somewhere around the world, wherever you might be.

So that's not just those, you know,

sort of huge grocery outlets.

There's loads of opportunity in retail.

And I think that's that's really a big growth area.

And I agree with Rachel about the underlying tech piece.

Like you know, like I the numbers here, I haven't seen the numbers around social.

I imagine social is growing 'cause of TikTok.

But ultimately there are opportunities within our industry.

And we talked about that extensively at ATS London.

You know, within the sort of like the doom loop, the doomers talking about the death of the open web, there are loads of opportunity around the space,

adjacent ad tech as I like to call it, you know, that that are not obvious.

I mean and we'll talk about ATS London panels in a minute, but

you know, out-of-home was a huge area of of interest for all of the investors because we all feel it's a kind of a almost like what display was before programmatic, like

there's lots of opportunity, it is a fragmented ecosystem, buyers and sellers, which is a good thing.

There's no walled gardens to kind of like dominate in that space.

So from an ad tech perspective, it's very, very interesting.

And the growth shows that.

The growth in spend shows there that there is a ton of opportunity there.

Yeah, agreed.

It's positive figures and nice to see for the industry that the investment is up and very up actually quite high.

I'm gonna to move us on to ATS.

You both mentioned ATS London in there.

I'm going to move to an ATS section of the pod today.

Like I said, great event.

So good to see the industry faces there, people turning up, people having a great time.

We've had lots of lovely things said regarding the content that was put together.

But yeah, Rachel, what was your top takeaway for the event?

How did ATS London go for you?

Yeah, I mean I thought you know, I thought ATS London this year was great.

Maybe listeners will think I would say that,

but it's not just, I'm not just, you know, blowing our own trumpet here.

The team at ExchangeWire puts an enormous amount of work into pulling off this event every year.

And I think it really shows year on year things are sort of getting

you know, that bit sharper, that bit more sort of focused.

Anyone that's ever run an event or a conference of any kind will know that there's always something that can be improved on year on year.

And there's almost always some sort of little dramas in the background that require all hands on deck to sort out

whether it's, you know, in the days or moments before the event or whether it's actually on the day.

But I'd have to say that this year,

was one of the ATS Londons where there really was not really any drama immediately prior or on the day, background drama that you know attendees might not notice, which I

think is down to the team's preparation and planning.

So there's that element of it.

I just think it went so wonderfully smoothly for us and all of our sort of partners for the event that have fed back to us.

They had a fantastic experience both working with us in the lead up but also

on the day and really enjoyed enjoyed their stage opportunities and their networking opportunities.

So that to me is kind of one of the main points of ATS.

Like we try to bring to the industry some really solid, good quality content.

There will always be opinions, of course, that's what we want, and debates about, you know, whether people enjoyed the content or not, or what they thought was strong

content-wise and what they thought maybe wasn't as strong content-wise.

But you know, we're we're always open to to be hearing about

what people think, whether it's good or bad, you know, because the point of the event is to be reflecting to the industry, what the key uh sort of issues and challenges are of the

day, the trends of the industry where we think things are going or where we think there's opportunity, and, you know, what people feel that they can come together as

as a group of professionals to to to kind of troubleshoot and solve and change and influence for the industry from from tomorrow onwards.

The other thing I'd say about ATS London this year is I was just really impressed with the, you know, degree of maturity that I think is reflected across the industry now.

And that's if I think specifically about the ad tech side of the industry.

Of course, advertising and marketing has been alive and well for decades,

and digital advertising and marketing has also been alive and well for decades.

But I feel like the ad tech side of the industry is still pretty young.

And it's entering very much a maturation phase, which is why when we talk about things like ad spend and where the opportunity is, as Ciaran rightly points out, still a lot of

that, you know, goes towards the largest ad tech players in the ecosystem.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of opportunity outside that.

And I feel like we now have got an industry of professionals and really interesting businesses and companies that fully recognize that.

So ATS London is no longer a conversation about

geez, what do we do to deal with the dominance of a handful of big tech companies?

It's much more about, okay, what's happening in the industry at the moment, what's working well, what's a bit shit, what can we improve, how do we do that?

And I was just so impressed to see the caliber of not just the speakers on stage, but also the chats and discussions during networking and in the audience that

made me feel like this industry is thriving.

And I think, you know, if ever you are feeling a little bit glum and a little bit depressed by the direction of the industry, or perhaps you have been affected by,

you know, the inevitable changes in growth and maturation of the companies in the industry, which might mean redundancies,

it might mean lots of sort of pivoting and changing course and changing direction.

If you want to feel optimistic that there is actually a really sort of healthy, stable industry behind all of this

and that there are other opportunities out there within the industry,

just come to ATS because there's such an atmosphere and energy every year.

We also offer, you know, together with our event partners, we offer really good opportunities for people who are job seeking to access the event without having to dip

into their pockets.

So, you know, don't ever hesitate.

Just, you know, just get involved because it always l leaves you feeling full of energy because you've got sort of 800 professionals in the industry coming together on one day.

to have good quality, serious conversations about, you know, about where everything's going.

And then the final thing I'd say is I loved all the chat.

I loved that AI is no longer talked about as what are we going to do about AI.

It's just an accepted part of everything we do in the industry because isn't that what our lives are like?

And that's a massive change from 12 months ago.

And I think that's worth recognizing.

And then the second thing is I always really enjoy the bit where we get to talk about

what tech innovation is coming down the line.

And, you know, containerization, modular, modular ad tech solutions, composable architecture is something we started talking about at ATS London last year.

And this year it was it was discussed widely across almost every single panel when we got to talking about technical execution.

And I just think that's brilliant.

I think we're in the we're in the throes of a period of innovation in ad tech.

The next phase and the next period of innovation and probably

the most interesting phase of technical innovation since, I don't know, header bidding.

So it's exciting times.

Yeah, agreed.

Ciaran, how did you feel about ATS this year?

Yeah, I'm with Rachel on on this.

Is that like the the objective of this show is to kind of you know demonstrate what's going on in the space.

Like, you know, you we we you could easily sit and have multiple panels about how Google have, you know, won won the race and all the rest of it.

They won the race many, many, many, many years ago

and they're still part of the ecosystem.

But like our job with ATS is to kind of like talk about innovation and opportunities within the space.

And I think we did that in spades.

Like if you think about where the industry is at right now, and you think about even from an M&A perspective, like where the hot areas are.

Like we covered a lot of that via the ATS content and the MadTech Money sort of stream we had as well.

And you know, you can't compare

this to last year or the year before because it's the rate of knots

Well because the industry yeah, the industry has changed so much and that's the whole point of it, right?

Yeah.

It's not a sort of static conference that does the same thing every year.

No.

The point is it's an industry led event, conference, conversation.

So it changes massively every year.

And you know what, Ciaran, sorry to interrupt, but I just say this.

It's not about winning the race anymore.

It's about diversifying and

supporting and sustaining a thriving industry.

So it's not about it's no longer about you know, the degree to which Google has become a hugely successful tech platform.

It's about what everybody else is doing.

And that's really important.

Great.

You know, like I did the two big conversations at the top of the day with Rajeev and Andrew Casale.

And they were very, very interesting from different perspectives.

Both are sell side platforms, both have you know an interesting view of the world.

Like Rajeev went deep into how agentic advertising is is progressing and developing and it was quite

quite instructive actually about what's going on and how it might pan out.

And I think a lot of what he said is starting to come to come to the fore in this in the stuff we're hearing from from our own partners

and from people who are involved in content on ExchangeWire.

Andrew said it basically went deep on containerization and the idea of

you know, working as a collective among to compete with walled gardens or for budget, which I find very interesting.

So that you know, you there's a lot of innovation going on in the side.

So I enjoyed both those conversations.

And obviously I was holed up in the the MadTech Money room for most of the afternoon.

So I did miss quite a few of the streams.

But from a MadTech Money perspective, I think we reflect the industry as a, you know the industry as a whole and from a money perspective,

and we get a sense of where the money is going and to be honest, a lot of the things that we talked about on the main stage and the side stages of ATS were

reflected in MadTech Money and where money, where capital has been allocated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I and I love being able to bring those two things together, right?

The you know, where's the money where's the money flowing and what's actually happening happening on the ground within ad tech companies and also across the industry from the buy

from the buy sell side to the sell side.

Yeah, you were locked away with the gilet eyes in the MadTech Money corner.

The ad tech gilet guys.

I don't think anyone was wearing gilets.

Like the quarter zip jumper, pretend VC jumper was on show for sure.

I mean well look think about some of the patterns.

We had, you know, Josh Wepman who is like you know, he does huge ad tech M&A deals in New York, has been a friend of the show, a friend of ATS and MadTech Money

for a long time.

He gave a very, very, very good presentation top of the day and had a sit down with him about

the state of sort of ad tech public companies and private companies and how, you know, public valuations are seeping into private companies.

So we got sort of like a proper helicopter view of the state of things and that was really good.

And I think like I think my favorite panel of the day was probably the the founder panel with Remí from Scibids and Kristina, formerly of Eyeota.

And very, very interesting sort of like trajectories to outcomes there.

And it was interesting to listen to Kristina 'cause like obviously it's very rare that you have a female CEO of an ad tech company have a multi hundred,

you know, hundred million pound dollar plus exit.

But actually the banker that did the deal was a female as well, which was interesting.

So there was a kind of a you know, interesting sort of insight in how that all worked and you know that the actually both founders, both Remí and

Kristina give a great sort of like you know picture of how they started and how they got to an outcome and the journey they went on.

So that was very, very interesting.

And then we you know we had a bunch of our very deep in the weeds panels, we had one with Index and some of the FPC GPs talking about you know where the

innovation is in the space and why, you know, why the likes of Index invested in FPC.

It was quite interesting actually their their perspective, but actually their progressive view on the on the space

and helping to kind of like invest in the future of the business. So that was good.

I really enjoyed all that.

But I did miss a lot of the streams, which I'm annoyed about.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I feel like you had a bit of FOMO actually, Ciaran, as a result of that.

You missed great stuff going on in the Churchill room, the Burton room.

Rachel, as you mentioned at the top of the show, you gave the opening presentation and from your other panels, what were your favourite takeaways?

What were your favourite things?

Yeah, I mean, um, there were so many, 'cause I feel like I spent like you, John and Lindsay, many hours on stage that day and moderated a good few panels.

But I think one of the standouts for me was the retail media discussion I moderated in the late afternoon.

Actually, the point of the discussion was to really unpick exactly what Ciaran mentioned earlier on, which is

retail media is no longer actually just about retailers and their potential retail media network opportunities or, you know, consumer brands and how they make use of

retail media networks to you know to sort of sell their products.

Actually, there's much more of a commerce media angle to it.

It's much wider than retail media, the you know, aggressive growth figures that we're seeing.

Any business that's very data heavy can play really well in a commerce media environment supported by retail media networks.

And they are not necessarily just the big owned and operated networks from large retailers.

So we talked in a bit more detail about how that's unfolding, particularly across Europe.

Had some great panelists in that discussion as well.

And the one really interesting thing was that we had The Telegraph joining that discussion

to talk about as a publisher that has got a lot of very high quality first party data and intent,

how they can be using that in a commerce media, making it available in a commerce media or retail media network environment to

enable buyers and brands to really reach very targeted consumers.

And I found that fascinating, right?

Because it blends into the trends that we talked about towards the back end of last year,

that in a world where we're not necessarily discovering content and products in a traditional search way, we're

all using AI search, for example, and perhaps we're also relying more on trusted and known news brands and content, you know, sites or apps, and we're really sort of leaning

into our commerce habits.

How do you discover new products and how do you and and how to how to, you know, publishers and media owners um pick up new subscribers?

And in that environment, brands and retailers need to think of themselves more as publishers and need to think about the content opportunities that they can make available

to potential customers to get them interested in their products.

And publishers and media owners need to think of themselves more as brands and what they could be doing to attract

more subscribers, but also to be protecting their trusted brands.

And one of those things is making the most of their first party data where they've got a subscriber business and a subscriber model or even just a content wall instead of a

paywall, any kind of login that enables them to collect that valuable first party data.

And I thought that was a really good practical example of how publishers are making use of it.

And it is a retail media or commerce media opportunity,

both for other networks and potentially even for The Telegraph to build out their own.

So that was super interesting.

Yeah, that's definitely been one of the hot topics I think across the industry in this past year is that diversification, brands becoming publishers, publishers becoming brands

and that whole kind of, yeah, that direction that we've moved in.

It was, yeah, I mean, there was so much interesting stuff we can't, couldn't possibly cover it all in one podcast, but do keep your eyes on exchangewire.com because we are

publishing video footage as we speak of insights from across the day.

So yeah, just keep checking it back and you'll see what actually went down and do come along next year.

No, I just gonna say that's a really good shout out to catch as well, Ciaran's openers with Andrew Casale and Rajeev Goel

because these guys are the CEOs of some of the original ad tech infrastructure companies and it's just really interesting to hear their perspective on where they think

their businesses are going and where they think the industry's going.

It's one of the things we really try to do at ATS is get some of the get some of the OGs along to reconnect with the industry and the audience.

Yeah, I mean, they were both well worth the watch those sessions.

They were fascinating.

It was great to be in the crowd watching, know, Ciaran's unique interview style.

You bring the best out of the guests, I think.

And they were great conversations.

I still can't believe you managed to mention Pornhub on stage.

What happens if a rogue agent decides a Pornhub or a porn in itself is actually a better performance media outlet?

Like I mean, if you you want independent agents, you know they might be decide that that is the case.

It was a point well made, Ciaran.

And then you went on to extrapolate and talk about the potential of AI bots, buying agents going on ski trips and getting pissed with one another at the bar.

Yeah, like if you think about it, like trading deals could be done by bots and they go on like, you know, virtual stuff.

Yeah, they're down at the virtual rocca.

I mean that was the whole point of the MaiTai app that the comedy app sort of AI that I built and got absolutely got many many many many messages supporting all

Two VCs from Silicon Valley offered me a terms.

That's how insane all this AI nonsense is.

Like I mean, don't get me wrong, underlying tech is great, but it's how we use it.

I think that was one of the other panels I missed.

So I think you know, I think we're gonna just start get growing up around some of this stuff, cost and utility and and the privacy sort of aspect as well, which

I heard what's good on and when it's online I'll watch it.

You know, that's what I'll be doing.

One night.

Yeah.

One evening on my own.

If I ever get one

John, I just wanted to add two more things.

Number one, I was a bit disappointed that Hugh Grant didn't turn up to the afterparty this year.

But then it turns out it was on his birthday

because of course we had it on a different week last year.

So that's why.

I'm sure he had it in his diary and he was expecting it, but unfortunately it didn't coincide with his birthday.

The second thing I just wanted to say too is that

I love connecting with people I haven't seen for ages at ATS.

And there were a few old faces that I hadn't seen for a long time.

It was great to see them back again.

Arthur used to work for IPONWEB doing his own thing over in Cyprus.

Damian Scragg, is it,

Ciaran, haven't seen him for years.

It was really nice to see him.

And then the and then the point I'm making here is it's also really great to learn about people that are coming to ATS for the first time.

And I met two

really great young people who are in their first ad tech jobs, who came to ATS for the first time.

Elizabeth Peters, who works for Kaizen, and Joy, who works for Magnite.

The three of us bumped into each other in the loose at the end of the day and they were getting ready to go over to the networking party.

And we had a great chat and they told me how much they enjoyed it and how critical it was to them.

It it's basically part of their

you know, getting to grips with uh how they should be doing their jobs.

And it gets brought up allegedly when you start working with a lot of these companies that one of the first things you should do is try and get yourself a ticket to ATS.

So yeah, shout out to Elizabeth and Joy.

Welcome to the industry and one of many ATSs, I hope.

Excellent.

Yeah, it is all about the people.

So yeah, well, now wrapping up the podcast, Rachel, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Ciaran, thanks for joining us.

You are always very welcome to be on the podcast.

I will cajole you again in the coming weeks.

Thank you very much.

Right.

Thank you all for listening and we'll normal service will be resumed next week.

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to this MadTech Podcast special.

We'll be back to discuss another hot industry topic soon.