Australia's digital advertising market had its second consecutive year of double-digit growth in 2025 — and programmatic is right at the centre of it. The IAB Australia Internet Advertising Revenue Report, released in March 2026, confirmed that the market reached $18.4 billion for the full calendar year, growing 11.5% year-on-year. But the headline number only tells part of the story. Underneath it, the channels gaining share and the way media is being bought are shifting faster than at any point in the past decade.
For practitioners on the buy side, this is both exciting and demanding. The automation that once made programmatic feel like a shortcut now requires more deliberate thinking — about inventory quality, data strategy, measurement, and channel mix — than ever before.
Video is the Growth Engine — and Programmatic is Driving It
The standout number from the 2025 IARR is video. Total video advertising in Australia grew nearly 20% year-on-year to reach $5.4 billion. That's not incremental growth; it's a structural shift in where brand budgets are going. Within that, Connected TV continued its longer-term trajectory — CTV's share of content publishers' video inventory reached 57% for the calendar year, up from 51% in 2024.
Social video had an even bigger year, its share of total video spend climbing four percentage points compared to 2024. That gain has come at some cost to broadcaster environments. BVOD — 7Plus, 9Now, and 10Play — grew 7.1% to $500 million, the slowest segment within video despite the format's premium positioning.
"Programmatic remains dominant in video. The shift isn't whether to use it — it's how to use it better."
The good news for programmatic buyers: agency insertion-order buying is reclaiming share from direct buying across the board, and programmatic remains the dominant transaction method for video. The implication is that if you're not thinking carefully about your CTV and video programmatic strategy, you're buying yesterday's media market.
CTV: From Emerging Channel to Strategic Pillar
A few years ago, CTV sat in the "test and learn" bucket. In 2026, that's no longer an honest framing. CTV is now a central pillar of programmatic planning — and the challenge has shifted from simply gaining access to inventory, to managing format standardisation, supply-path quality, and measurement consistency across a fragmented ecosystem.
The IAB Tech Lab finalised its CTV Ad Portfolio in late 2025, establishing standardised definitions for six core CTV ad formats: pause ads, menu ads, screensaver ads, in-scene ads, squeezeback ads, and overlays. For buyers, this matters because it makes cross-publisher planning operationally easier. When every seller defines a "pause ad" differently, frequency capping, measurement, and creative briefing all suffer. Standardised formats reduce friction across the supply chain.
Supply-path optimisation (SPO) is increasingly important in CTV. With fragmented inventory across broadcasters, global streamers, and FAST channels, the number of intermediaries between a DSP bid and an actual impression can be significant. Scrutinising your supply paths — and prioritising direct deals or curated PMPs for premium CTV environments — is worth the effort in 2026.
Measurement remains the sector's biggest unsolved problem. Cross-screen currency fragmentation, clean room adoption gaps, and inconsistent access to signals in server-side ad insertion environments are live issues for every media buyer working in CTV right now. The IAB Tech Lab's OM SDK device attestation feature — released in late 2025 — is a step toward more reliable, fraud-resistant measurement, but progress is gradual.
The First-Party Data Imperative
Third-party cookies are effectively a historical footnote. The more interesting challenge in 2026 is what comes next — and in Australia, the conversation is maturing from "we need a cookie alternative" to actual first-party data infrastructure.
The programmatic market that's emerging rewards advertisers who have invested in CRM data, data clean rooms, and contextual targeting capabilities. Publishers with strong direct audience relationships are commanding stronger yields. DSPs are competing on the quality of their identity graphs and their ability to match and activate first-party signals across environments.
For most Australian brands, the foundational work is getting customer data into a usable, addressable state — hashed emails, loyalty IDs, CRM segments — and establishing clean room relationships with key publishers and platforms. This isn't a 2027 problem. The advertisers who sorted this early are already transacting with a meaningful reach advantage.
Australia's data skills shortage remains a genuine constraint here. The market has the appetite for data-driven programmatic — but finding people who can activate it end-to-end is hard. This is driving agency consolidation around teams that genuinely combine media buying expertise with data engineering capability.
Audio: Steady Growth, Underutilised
Audio advertising in Australia grew 8.2% in 2025 to reach $339 million, with podcast growth outpacing streaming. That's a modest number relative to video, but audio programmatic is arguably the most underbought format in the market relative to audience time spent. Australians are consuming podcasts in particular at a pace that ad spend hasn't caught up with.
Programmatic audio buying has matured significantly. Dynamic creative insertion, contextual targeting by episode category, and frequency management across streaming and podcast environments are all available at scale. For brand campaigns that need broad reach across a high-attention environment, audio deserves a larger allocation than most media plans currently give it.
Retail Media: The New Programmatic Frontier
Australian retail media networks are growing rapidly. Woolworths' Cartology, Coles 360, and Chemist Warehouse's emerging network are all expanding their programmatic capabilities — both on-site and in offsite/DSP-connected formats. The proposition is straightforward: first-party shopper data, closed-loop attribution, and access to high-intent audiences at the point of purchase.
The buy-side challenge is standardisation. Each retail media network has different data taxonomies, creative specs, reporting methodologies, and access mechanisms. Managing retail media alongside traditional programmatic requires either dedicated tooling or a specialist partner who can translate across networks without eroding campaign efficiency.
The Australian programmatic advertising market is projected to grow from $441 million in 2024 to nearly $3 billion by 2033, representing a compound annual growth rate of over 23%. The channels driving that growth — CTV, social video, retail media, and audio — are all primarily transacted programmatically.
What's Actually Hard Right Now
The programmatic landscape in 2026 is more sophisticated than it's ever been — and that sophistication creates its own problems. Rising CPMs in premium environments are being offset by fill rate challenges and invalid traffic concerns in lower-quality supply. Fraud in CTV, where device spoofing and server-side measurement gaps create blind spots, remains a live risk that buyers underestimate.
The practical response isn't paranoia — it's discipline. Supply-path optimisation, independent ad verification, deal ID buying for premium inventory, and regular log-level analysis of impression-level data are the operational habits that separate efficient programmatic buying from expensive noise generation.
AI-powered bidding and optimisation tools have become table stakes at DSP level. The question for practitioners isn't whether to use them, but how to configure them intelligently — setting appropriate conversion windows, using the right goal types, feeding clean first-party signals as inputs, and not letting automation optimise toward metrics that don't reflect real business outcomes.
The Bottom Line
Australian programmatic advertising in 2026 is in a more mature, more complex, and — for the practitioners who have kept pace — more capable place than at any point before. The $18.4 billion market isn't growing uniformly: video and CTV are pulling ahead; display ex-video is barely moving; audio is growing steadily but undersold; and retail media is the format to watch.
The practitioners who will perform best in this environment are those who combine channel breadth with genuine depth — who understand how to transact across DSPs, activate first-party data, manage supply-path quality, and interpret measurement in an increasingly complex cross-screen world. The automation handles the execution. The thinking still has to be human.