The development and implementation of an effective advertising technology (adtech) roadmap begins with an assessment of the systems currently in place. Marketing executives should conduct a complete inventory and assess the functionality and user adoption levels of their various advertising tools. When finalizing an action plan, consider the costs, resource requirements, and impact to other initiatives. This report describes an expanded six-step process for assessing an organization’s current advertising technology ecosystem and provides a downloadable Excel tool to perform the assessment.

The adtech market is shifting as buy- and sell-side vendors expand capabilities to go after each other’s customer bases. At the same time, marketers and publishers face mounting pressure to simplify their adtech stacks as they prepare for rapid change driven by AI agents. This report introduces a durable framework for understanding the modern adtech stack and explains how to use it to evaluate, rationalize, and future-proof investments.

AI agents and bots are rapidly becoming a material share of digital traffic across B2B and B2C journeys. Marketers struggle to measure, attribute, and influence these nonhuman interactions, while security teams can detect, classify, and mitigate them, but the two groups rarely operate from a shared taxonomy or playbook. B2B marketing, B2C marketing, and security leaders should read this report to learn how to jointly approach AI agent and bot traffic.

Anthropic is betting that ads in ChatGPT specifically will ignite a change in consumer behavior. Consumers, for their part, think differently.

Join Forrester experts and your peers for an interactive presentation that will dive deeper into Forrester’s 2026 Predictions for media and advertising.Key takeaways: Understand the changing technology, consumer, and market dynamics in store in 2026. Uncover new insights based on Forrester’s research and expert analysis.Prepare your team and your organization for what’s ahead. Target audience level: all levels

Join Forrester experts and your peers for an interactive presentation that will dive deeper into Forrester’s 2026 Predictions for B2C marketing.Key takeaways: Understand the changing technology, consumer, and market dynamics in store in 2026. Uncover new insights based on Forrester’s research and expert analysis.Prepare your team and your organization for what’s ahead. Target audience level: all levels

Explore Forrester’s latest research on brand safety and suitability for 2026. Learn how marketers can balance risk, relevance, and ROI with strategic frameworks and insights from 2025 trends.

Brand safety has gotten more complex as audience fragmentation and policy shifts reshape media strategies. Large platforms like Meta deprioritize brand safety because their scale and campaign performance retain advertiser spend regardless of content moderation policies. Smaller platforms and open web publishers, by contrast, lean on brand safety as a differentiator to win ad budgets. This report explains the economic and strategic factors behind these decisions.

Tensions flare when it comes to principal media — the polarizing practice of reselling media inventory at an undisclosed margin. Critics claim conflicts of interest. Evangelists praise great rates. The reality? It’s a business necessity for advertisers and partners under budget and revenue pressure. When marketing, agency, and media executives apply transparency, principal media can be a winning strategy for all involved. This report helps media and other marketing executives understand how to apply disclosures to principal media programs.

Marketers face an unfathomable amount of content online, with more uploaded every second. A layered contextual strategy helps them avoid certain ad inventory and proactively seek out other types to achieve cost-effective performance without eroding brand identity. This report explains Forrester’s Contextual Strategies Hierarchy Of Needs Framework in detail and provides best practices for implementation.