🔥 The AdTech Extinction Watchlist: NINE companies that may not make it to 2026

When “strategic realignment” really means “we’re laying people off before the Q3 call.”

Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
June 10, 2025

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🚀 AdTech’s Quiet Killers: 10 Companies Crushing It Through 2026

The rest of adtech? Flailing. Posturing. Sending “we're not dead yet” signals while quietly updating LinkedIn profiles to include words like “Fractional” and “Advisory.”

But these ten companies? They’re writing the next chapter—on performance, innovation, and actually building tech that works. No vaporware. No “powered by GPT” stickers slapped on 2015 dashboards. Just raw, strategic execution.

So here it is: the 10 companies who are not just alive—they’re out for blood. And they’ve got the receipts.

1. 🚀 AppLovin – The Apex Predator in a Cookie-less Jungle

While most of the industry is stress-eating over the third-party cookie apocalypse, AppLovin has been doing deadlifts with it. Their AXON deep learning engine isn’t just smart—it’s clairvoyant. It doesn’t “optimize impressions”—it basically writes your next screen tap before your brain does.

In 2024, they dumped their own gaming studios like excess baggage on a hot air balloon and tripled down on adtech. And while the industry blinked, they threw in a wild TikTok acquisition bid—not because they had to, but because they could. That’s apex energy.

They’ve become the Vegas odds-maker of the attention economy: bold bets, precision tech, and all-in on AI while the rest are still rebooting their dashboards.

💡 Bottom line: AppLovin isn’t part of adtech’s next wave—they are the wave. Everyone else is just trying not to drown in it.

2. 🤖 Meta – The Autopilot That’s Driving You to ROI

Meta is doing what Meta does best: breaking the system and rebuilding it from the bones up—with machine learning, superclusters, and a casual $70 billion spend on AI infrastructure.

While lesser platforms debate which signal to prioritize, Meta’s building a system where all you need is a JPEG and a credit card. Drop your product photo, enter your budget, and step away. The AI handles creative, placement, targeting, optimization, and even post-campaign learning.

It’s not AI-enhanced—it’s AI-native. Like a fully automated performance-driving Tesla, except it doesn’t crash into a CPM wall.

💡 Bottom line: Meta didn’t pivot to AI. They’re swallowing the entire industry with it—and burping up more conversions than anyone else.

3. 🌊 The Trade Desk – The DSP That Ate the Whole Stack

While most DSPs are still figuring out which privacy regulation they’re violating today, The Trade Desk is out here building Kokai, a generative AI layer that actually works. It’s embedded across two-thirds of their inventory and helping marketers buy media like they’ve got a quantum computer under the hood.

Their retail media play? Deep. Their CTV strategy? Unshakable. Their UID2 identity layer? The only one anyone outside of a pitch deck seems to be using.

It’s not a platform anymore. It’s the operating system of advertising—deterministic, transparent, and growing like someone put it on an Ozempic-for-margins plan.

💡 Bottom line: TTD didn’t wait for the future of advertising. They’re writing it. In real time. In YAML, probably.

4. 📺 Roku – The Streaming Sleeper Cell That Just Went Nuclear

Remember when Roku was just the dongle collecting dust behind your TV? Turns out that dongle became a CTV data juggernaut.

In Q1 2025, 38% of all programmatic CTV ad dollars ran through Roku. Let that sink in. Their Roku Data Cloud isn’t a fancy name—it’s a monetization engine. If you’re streaming it, they’re tracking it, packaging it, and selling it to a brand who now knows you binge true crime on Tuesdays.

Then they casually scooped up Frndly TV, locking in scale like a Silicon Valley company acquiring its own oxygen supply.

💡 Bottom line: Roku stopped being a hardware brand a long time ago. Now? They’re building the adtech mainframe behind your nightly binge.

5. 🧠 Tatari – TV's Revenge Nerd

Tatari is that kid in high school who sat quietly in the back, aced the math test, and now owns the school.

While others treat linear TV like it’s radio with a picture, Tatari turned it into a first-party data engine. They’ve built privacy-safe identity tokens, partnered with Experian, and deliver attribution that doesn’t just measure if someone saw your ad—it measures what they bought afterward.

Their tech makes TV media buying feel like ecommerce: trackable, accountable, and performance-backed.

💡 Bottom line: Tatari didn’t just “modernize” TV. They turned it into a performance channel that makes CFOs giddy.

6. 📡 Samba TV – The All-Seeing Eye of Streaming

You think Google knows you? Samba knows what you watched, when, how long you stayed, and whether you muted it halfway through.

Their Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) tech powers 24 smart TV brands, and their contextual targeting tools make “audience segments” look like stone tablets.

They even bought Semasio, doubling down on smart contextual—so now they know what was on the screen and why you cared.

💡 Bottom line: In a world where everyone's blindfolded by privacy shifts, Samba sees everything—and sells it with precision.

7. 🧬 RTB House – The Eastern European AI Beast

Most retargeting companies feel like they’re trying to revive a dead strategy. Not RTB House.

This Poland-based juggernaut built a deep learning engine that thrives without cookies. Their Context AI system predicts behavior so well, it practically finishes your checkout for you.

They’re now operating across 30+ markets, backed by serious private equity, and expanding into performance video and commerce with frightening speed.

💡 Bottom line: RTB House didn’t pivot away from third-party data. They leapfrogged it—and left everyone else holding the crumbs.

8. 🧪 Omneky – The AI Creative Shop That Doesn’t Sleep

Omneky is what happens when you strap generative AI to a creative director’s brain and plug it into every ad channel on Earth.

Their LLMs generate hundreds of variants in seconds—across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, whatever. And here’s the kicker: it doesn’t just generate, it learns. From performance. And then makes new creative.

They’re not doing “AI-enhanced creative.” They’re doing AI-native campaigns at scale, with results that make traditional creative shops sweat.

💡 Bottom line: Omneky is building ads faster, better, and smarter than most agencies even know how to brief.

9. 📈 EX.CO – Contextual CTV That Actually Works

Formerly Playbuzz, EX.CO has quietly evolved into a video monetization engine for publishers who don’t want to get steamrolled by YouTube.

They launched AI-driven CTV and DOOH integrations, turned their widget empire into a real-time content intelligence platform, and are helping major media brands unlock real revenue per view.

💡 Bottom line: They took publisher CTV from a sideshow to a revenue machine.

10. 🔍 SilverPush – The AI That Sees What You See

While most contextual tools rely on text or metadata, SilverPush watches your video. Literally.

They use computer vision to scan frames, detect faces, logos, products—even emotions—and serve ads based on what’s actually on screen. It’s contextual intelligence meets Minority Report, minus the creepiness (hopefully).

Operating across APAC, MENA, and LATAM, they’re already powering campaigns with brands that care more about moment-to-moment relevancy than broad demos.

💡 Bottom line: While others guess what you’re watching, SilverPush watches with you—and sells accordingly.

📊 TL;DR – What These Killers Have in Common

🔥 Trait	🧠 Why It Matters
Built with AI, not retrofitted	They don’t bolt AI on—they build it into every layer.
Own the experience	From screen to server, they control the moment.
First-party native or contextual sharp	Because third-party signals are fossils.
Speed > Vision decks	They ship, iterate, and scale before others finish their pitch decks.

🧭 Final Thought:

Everyone else is still figuring out how to sound smart in an earnings call. These companies? They’re writing the next earnings story, one breakthrough at a time.

They’re not just part of the ecosystem. They’re reprogramming it.

If you’re still trying to bolt AI onto your 2018 platform, here’s your warning: you’re playing checkers. These companies are writing chess engines.

Stay bold. Stay curious. Know more than you did yesterday.

And if you're not on this list? Maybe start building. Or start praying.

🧠📺 From Quizzes to Contextual Domination: How EX.CO Quietly Became One of the Most Important Companies in Adtech

Some adtech companies pivot.
EX.CO detonated the map and drew a new one.

This is the story of how a viral quiz widget turned into one of the most advanced video monetization machines on the planet—backed by Disney, loaded with AI, and solving problems publishers have been screaming about for years.

But unlike the typical “pivot” narrative (read: slap a new logo on the same dusty product), this one’s real. This one started as a feature and became an entire company.

🧬 It All Started With… Quizzes and a Video Widget?

Yes. Really.

Back in the Playbuzz days, the second most-used “experience” on the platform—after “What Kind of Bagel Are You?”—was a video renderer.
Built in a pre-AI world, it turned images and text into lightweight video formats. It was a sleeper hit.

That tool—once a simple feature buried behind listicles—quietly became the foundation of EX.CO. And yes, that name stands for what it actually does:

EX.CO = The EXperience COmpany.

Not adserving. Not widgets. Not vanity metrics. Real, contextual, monetizable experiences—built for modern screens.

🎯 Fast-Forward to 2025: The Platform That Grew the Pie

While adtech gets high off its own jargon, EX.CO did something painfully rare: it created a platform that actually grows revenue.

They don’t just take a bigger slice of the existing pie.
They bake publishers a bigger one.
In-house. With machine learning. And a seriously good recipe.

💡 Why EX.CO Is Eating Everyone’s Lunch

🚀 Feature	💥 Why It Matters
Yield Optimization Engine	Built on ML, it selects top-performing demand sources per impression, in real-time.
Contextual Targeting	No cookies, no surveillance. Just pure signal based on content, layout, metadata, sentiment, and more.
CTV + DOOH (Launched Jan 2025)	Rolled out across 20+ partners, then sales paused to optimize IT costs. Why? Their new ML algorithm is sucking compute like it's hosting a crypto farm.
Publisher Control	Ads run on publisher properties. Not YouTube. Not TikTok. No revenue-sharing black box.
Experience-Centric Design	Everything is built for engagement—videos that match articles, layouts that pull dwell time, players that don’t scream “widget.”

📣 The Publisher Lineup (Aka: This Isn’t a Pilot)

Forget the pitch-deck logos. Here’s who’s actually working with EX.CO right now:

📰 Gannett (Yes, that includes USA Today and the rest of their network)
🖥️ Ziff Davis Tech (Hello Mashable, PCMag, etc.)
🏛 Advance Publications
📰 Hearst Newspapers
🎯 Arena Group (Think Sports Illustrated and Parade)

And yes, Nasdaq dropped, but they aren’t hurting for business. They're too busy pausing CTV/DOOH onboarding because demand outpaced their compute infrastructure.

Let me say that again: they paused sales because their machine learning algorithm was consuming too much processing power.
That’s not a bottleneck. That’s a flex.

🏆 Not Just Hype—Real-World Validation

EX.CO has quietly won more meaningful awards in the past two years than most companies do in a decade of shouting:

🥇 Digiday Best Video Platform
🥇 Best Sell-Side Programmatic Platform
🥇 Business Insider’s Hottest Martech Company

This isn’t participation trophy stuff. These are peer-reviewed, competitor-crushing wins.

📺 What Makes EX.CO Matter Right Now

While everyone else in adtech plays musical chairs with acronyms—SPO, UID2, EUID, DSP+SSP—EX.CO just asked:
What if we helped publishers make real money from video, contextually, on their own turf?

And then… they did it.

In CTV.
In DOOH.
On every publisher page, app, and outlet that wants more than leftovers from YouTube.

📊 TL;DR – Why EX.CO Is in a League of Its Own

🔥 Trait	🧠 Translation
ML-Powered Yield Engine	No guessing. Just data-backed bidding, tuned per impression.
Full-Stack Video Monetization	From web to CTV to out-of-home—one platform, multiple formats.
Publisher-First Strategy	Not just a pitch. It’s in the tech architecture.
Experience-Native Philosophy	Their legacy was engagement. They never forgot it.
Infrastructure Scale	They're literally too busy to take on new business right now. That’s a good problem to have.

🧭 Final Thought: When a “Widget Company” Out-Innovates the Industry

EX.CO’s story is what happens when a company stops trying to be viral—and starts trying to be vital.

They didn’t chase trends. They watched the problems pile up—YouTube dependence, cookieless panic, poor CTV yield—and then quietly built the system to fix it.

Real ML. Real revenue. Real control.
And for once, it’s not the platforms winning—it’s the publishers.

If you're a media brand still handing your video revenue over to Google because “it's easy,” this is your wake-up call.

EX.CO didn’t pivot. They evolved. Now they’re leading.

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday.
And if you're a publisher? Ask yourself:
Why does YouTube own your audience and your paycheck?
Then call EX.CO. Before your competition does.

🔒 What You’re Missing in ADOTAT+

The Industry’s Burn List. The Companies That Can’t Pay Their Bills. The Ones Hoping You Don’t Notice.

You’ve seen the headlines.
You’ve read the Q1 press releases.
You’ve watched executives say “we’re optimistic about the second half” with the same conviction as someone saying “we should totally hang out sometime.”

But behind the LinkedIn spin cycle lies the real story:
Companies facing insolvency, desperate M&A attempts, and teams left wondering if their next paycheck is going to bounce harder than their CPMs.

Here’s what you’re not getting in the free version of ADOTAT:

💀 The Real Walking Dead List

Everyone wants to talk about who's building with AI. But few are talking about:

Companies down to weeks of cash runway
Late payments to partners disguised as “payment schedule recalibrations”
And board members frantically texting buyers with phrases like “open to conversations”

We have the internal memos. The off-the-record confirmations. The cash burn math.

You want the list? It’s in ADOTAT+.

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🔥 The AdTech Extinction Watchlist: NINE companies that may not make it to 2026

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