Jeremy Woodlee, General Manager of Infillion chats about the latest trends in adtech that are impacting overall advertising workflows in this catch-up with MarTechSeries:

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Hi Jeremy, what’s most exciting for you in your new role at Infillion?

The business unit that I’m running, Enterprise, is a new expression of an old advertising and technology story. There are so many familiar refrains: data, DSPs, programmatic, PMPs. But now it’s focused on a whole new set of use cases and players– retail media networks, commerce media networks, agencies building their own tech. It’s exciting to take something so familiar, and deploy them in an entirely new context.

As an adtech veteran, how have you seen the industry evolve over the years and what trends do you feel will dominate adtech and martech in the near-term?

There are some fundamental trends that span decades that drive the market movements we see more clearly. The biggest one I see is the democratization of technology. Very sophisticated technology is now easily accessible by the mid-market. AI is the obvious example, but cloud tech has so far had greater effects, as well as SAAS business models for virtually every aspect of the enterprise. The other big trend is how digital touchpoints abound– email, sites, apps, text messages, ecomm, etc. There are so many data points and marketing opportunities. The next 10 years will be about sorting all these changes and opportunities. Big winners will emerge from those that use democratized tech to extract insights from all the data and use them to create better experiences for consumers. This isn’t a new story, by any means, but I think it comes to a head (especially with AI) very soon.

How are you seeing media businesses transform in today’s market: what should their top priorities be in your view through 2025?

The big story in media is the very rapid emergence of retail and commerce media. The first chapter of that story is coming to a close– one that has focused on retailers’ own media and their existing trade marketing relationships. The next chapter is about how they extend their media reach to offsite/programmatic inventory and how they grab brand and performance budgets. It’s a very big opportunity, but one that takes them even further out on a limb into the wild world of digital advertising.

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What would you highlight about the current state of programmatic and how it’s impacting users and providers?

One of the biggest challenges across the programmatic space is getting CTV advertising right. Despite the incredible potential and premium inventory available, the execution across the industry often falls short—think repetitive ad experiences. It’s frustrating because we do have the tools and tech to create a seamless, engaging viewer experience. The opportunity is there; as an industry, we just need to raise the bar.

With AI influencing marketing and advertising workflows and processes, what do you think modern marketing and advertising teams will have to focus on more or be weary of as they deploy various AI powered tools to power their outcomes?

It will take years for these AI tools to be as reliable as we need and expect them to be. So oversight and reviews will remain critical. But everyone should be trying AI all the time. Every role in every type of company in ad tech/digital advertising will be impacted by AI tools in the next 5 years. Everyone needs to experiment and get up that learning curve.

Five takeaways for adtech-ers and martech-ers before we wrap up?

1. We always overestimate the impact of radical tech change in the near term and underestimate it in the long term. This is even more true in AI.
2. Commerce and retail media are here to stay. It’s a very valuable media environment that will eventually extend into every corner of the digital ads space.
3. Don’t sleep on agencies– while they collectively haven’t had the greatest 20 years with the growth of the walled gardens and other ad tech intermediaries, they still have a principle, direct relationship with the most important aspect of the ad ecosystem – the advertisers!
4. Incredible opportunities abound for brands that figure out how to break down internal silos between “advertising” and “marketing” – media vs. email vs. text vs. site/app, etc.
5. Agentic AI won’t eliminate agencies, but will change how agencies operate and should make for easier and more efficient marketing. Additionally, it will open the door for brands and agencies to be even more sophisticated in terms of media types and optimization tactics.

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