Half Of Advertisers Buying Programmatic Are Underperforming...

by Joe Mandese , May 29, 2026

Ever since 19th Century retail marketer John Wannamaker's "which half" quip, the ad industry has been transfixed by binary results, so it's not surprising that the just-released first quarter 2026 edition of the Association of National Advertisers' quarterly "Programmatic Transparency Benchmark" reports has divided programmatic advertising ROI into a tale of two performance cohorts: the "lower half" and the "upper half."

Specifically, the analysis finds the performance gap is spreading between the two.