Ep. 132 Programmatic, Fragmentation, and the AI Power Shift with Tom Burke from AI Digital

Summary

AdTechGod Pod – Episode 132
“Programmatic, Fragmentation, and the AI Power Shift”
Guest: Tom Burke (CRO, AI Digital)
Host: AdTechGod
Date: May 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, AdTechGod sits down with Tom Burke, Chief Revenue Officer at AI Digital, to examine the rapidly evolving world of programmatic advertising, the heightened fragmentation of adtech ecosystems, and the transformational impact of AI. Listeners are treated to a candid discussion brimming with industry insider perspectives, from legacy players like AOL and Basis Technologies to the challenges and opportunities shaping 2026—especially the rise of agentic workflows and the essential 5% that keeps businesses unique despite broad AI commoditization.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Tom Burke’s Career Journey & Motivation for Joining AI Digital

[01:19 - 03:54]

• Tom’s path began at the Boston Globe selling newspaper ads, then into digital at Hill Holiday (trafficking ads, agency-side basics).
• Spent formative years at AOL and Basis Technologies—“I always joke I grew up in the industry to a certain extent at Basis...Programmatic was booming, we were learning together what it was and how the industry was changing.”
• Moved back agency-side at PMG before joining AI Digital.
• Drawn to AI Digital by CEO Steven Maglie’s people-centric vision and commitment to innovation:
  • “He talked a lot about being people centric and how he wanted to grow the business to be really people centric and a kind place to work...And then he talked a ton about innovation and what AI was going to do to the industry and how he really wanted to...stay tip of the spear.” (Tom Burke, 02:52)
• Tom evaluates potential roles based on impact: can he influence people, business, and partners?

What is AI Digital?

[04:05 - 05:09]

• AI Digital brands itself as an “AI native media consultancy,” built on three pillars:
  1. Open Garden Approach: “Agnostic to all the platforms, all the data providers, all the LLMs in the space...across DSPs, data providers, AI agents, SSPs, we execute agnostically across all of them.” (Tom Burke, 04:20)
  2. Elevate Technology: Their “agentic copilot across...the entire workflow when it comes to planning, executing and analyzing media.”
  3. AI Digital Labs: An AI consultancy for marketers, focusing on adoption, thought leadership, and product building.

The Evolution & Challenges of Programmatic In-Housing

[05:09 - 09:54]

• Past vs. Present:
  • Early in-housing (2012–13) was relatively straightforward—search, social, then programmatic; DSPs and inventory were commoditized.
  • Today, “There's a lot more platforms, there's a lot more fragmentation. And so we're seeing that pendulum swing back out to strategic partnerships. And I think a lot of agencies and marketers are doing a bit of both.” (Tom Burke, 05:29)
• Cost and Complexity:
  • “Anyone who in-houses today ends up building a team that costs more than just using a third party company to help them.” (AdTechGod, 06:35)
  • The economic threshold is much higher. “She [COO] estimated to do it really well, you'd probably need $20 million in programmatic...That’s really challenging.” (Tom Burke, 08:51)
• Agency Pitching & Value:
  • Shift from showing “sophistication” in programmatic to delivering outcomes, inventory, and data access in a deeply fragmented landscape.

Programmatic Fragmentation and the Operational Strain

[09:54 - 11:25]

• Fragmentation (web, mobile, CTV, data providers) has made programmatic complex, resource-intense, and workflow-heavy.
• AI Digital’s Role:
  • Highly flexible, tailor-made solutions: “We don't want people to fit into our workflows, we want to fit into theirs.” (Tom Burke, 10:33)
  • Can act as an extension of a client’s team or fill gaps specific to client needs: strategy, planning, execution, optimization, deal IDs, special access.

What’s Next: Trends & Excitement for 2026

[11:25 - 13:44]

• AI Digital is growing fast—over 500 employees.
• Two major themes:
  1. Fragmentation as Opportunity:
     • “The reason everything’s getting so fragmented is because we have all these platforms that...have amazing first party data and amazing new inventory...like CTV inventory.” (Tom Burke, 11:57)
     • Platforms like OpenAI spinning up ad managers represent new mediums and challenges—but also exciting, unexplored opportunities.
  2. AI Power Shift:
     • We’re in an “agentic era”—custom agent workflows are being spun up everywhere; AI integration will soon be ubiquitous:
       • “The future...is AI is just integrated in everything and it becomes the operating system. It's almost like electricity. I'd never say, like, oh, this light’s an electric light. I think it’s going to be everywhere.” (Tom Burke, 12:51)

The 5% That Matters: Surviving Commoditization

[13:44 - 15:28]

• Host discusses “peak AI” marketing; Tom agrees, actual capabilities still untapped.
• AI will commoditize the vast majority of marketing and agency tasks:
  • “If 95% of what an agency or marketer does gets commoditized by AI, what's that 5% that makes you special? And I think that’s a really good question we should all be asking.” (Tom Burke quoting AI Digital’s Chief AI Officer, 14:39)
• The core challenge: managing change and homing in on unique, non-automatable strengths.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I always joke I grew up in the industry to a certain extent at Basis. That was a really fun time for me. Programmatic was booming, we were learning together what it was and how the industry was changing.”
  — Tom Burke [01:42]

• “We don't want people to fit into our workflows, we want to fit into theirs.”
  — Tom Burke [10:33]

• “You could do it before, like I said earlier, for a couple million bucks because you could afford a trader and it would be profitable...If you're now on 5, 6, 7 platforms...all the math gets out of whack really quickly.”
  — Tom Burke [08:51]

• “The future of this is AI is just integrated in everything and it becomes the operating system. It’s almost like electricity. I’d never say, like, oh, this light’s an electric light...it’s going to be everywhere and we’re just going to be able to do more, optimize more, have more insight and do more meaningful work.”
  — Tom Burke [12:51]

• “If 95% of what an agency or marketer does gets commoditized by AI, what’s that 5% that makes you special?”
  — Tom Burke (quoting the Chief AI Officer at AI Digital) [14:39]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Tom Burke’s Background & Motivation: 01:19 – 03:54
• AI Digital’s Core Offering Explained: 04:05 – 05:09
• The Realities of In-Housing Programmatic: 05:09 – 09:54
• Handling Programmatic Fragmentation: 09:54 – 11:25
• 2026 Trends & AI as OS: 11:25 – 13:44
• The “Special” 5% Beyond AI Commoditization: 14:39 – 15:28

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Closing Thoughts

Tom Burke and AdTechGod deliver an insightful and approachable take on the modern adtech landscape. From the roots of programmatic to the AI-powered, omnichannel world of 2026, listeners gain a candid primer on what it takes to thrive. The episode emphasizes customization, agility, and the increasingly crucial question: What remains when everything else can be automated?

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTech God.

[B]

Welcome to the AdTech God Pod, where we speak to the revenue leaders of our industry. Today's guest is Tom Burke, the CRO at AI Digital. Tom's worked at many of the great advertising companies, including aol, Basis Technologies, PMG and more. Before we start, I do have to disclose as a sponsored episode, but that does not change the fact that I want to understand more about Tom, his background, and, of course, what AI Digital is doing in the market. Tom, I am excited to have you here. Welcome to the pod.

[C]

Yeah, atg. Good to be here.

[B]

Good to see you again. Loved our prior chat. I'm. I'm really excited to kind of get to know you. You've worked at some incredible companies, had a bunch of people from AOL in the past, but would love to hear your background and what led you to AI Digital. And then we'll, we'll go from there on the chat.

[C]

Yeah, that sounds great. And it doesn't surprise me that you've had a lot of good people from past AOL days. Those were, those are fun days in the industry.

[B]

It's funny, it's. I feel like Everybody comes from three different companies. DoubleClick, AOL, and I think it was like Ad. Com, and then everybody split off from there in some way and works at other great companies today.

[C]

Completely. Yeah, completely, yeah. So I'll give you the quick background. So I started my career back in 2008. My first job actually was at the Boston Globe. I was selling newspaper ads to local businesses. And that's when I really fell in love with. With advertising. I knew that I wanted to get into digital at that time, and so I ended up going over to Hill Holiday. That was my first experience at an ad agency. And I worked on some really cool accounts. Dunkin Donuts, cvs, John Hancock, a few other things. And I would say, like, learn the foundational digital components. There I was like, trafficking ads in Atlas and sending iOS and doing all that kind of work from there. I went to AOL and spent about three or four years there and learned a ton. And then I spent about eight years at Basis Technologies. So Basis. I always joke I grew up in the industry to a certain extent at Basis. That was a really fun time for me. Programmatic was booming. We were learning together what it was and how the industry was changing. And so I really loved my time there. And then after that, went back agency side to PMG and then found my way here and I've been here for about two and a half years through

[B]

it all and working at basis, working at AOL and the others. You have a great perspective and background on the industry and where it's heading. What made you, I guess take the leap and join AI Digital? What sets them apart overall?

[C]

Yeah, I got really lucky that I got introduced to the CEO here, Steven Maglie, and we had breakfast and we're just talking about the industry and I love the way he thinks and I love the way he thought about the business. At the end of the day when him and I were talking, he was talking a lot about the shifts in the industry and some of the tailwinds that, that were helping the business. He talked a lot about being people centric and how he wanted to grow the business to be really people centric and a kind place to work. And then he talked a ton about innovation and what AI was going to do to the industry and how he really wanted to and really wanted to invest to stay tip of the spear. And that's the kind of company that I wanted to work for. I think about my jobs, I think about can I have an impact on the people, can I have an impact on the business, can I have an impact on the partners? And if I can impact those three things, I'm usually pretty happy and been able to do it here in spades.

[B]

Real brief because I'm familiar with AI Digital but maybe people listening are not. Can you give us the elevator pitch of what AI Digital does in the market and what sets you guys apart overall?

[C]

Yeah, AI Digital. So we're at a very macro level. We're an AI native media consultancy and that comes to fruition in I would say three different buckets. The first bucket is really our approach in market and so we call our approach open Garden. And what that means is we want to be agnostic to all the platforms, all the data providers, all the LLMs in the space. And so that that really is across DSPs, data providers, AI agents, SSPs, we execute agnostically across all of them. So that's the first pillar. The second pillar is our technology which we call elevate. Elevate is for lack of a better way to describe it, really like a gentic copilot across really the entire workflow when it comes to planning, executing and analyzing media. And then the third big pillar is what we call AI Digital Labs and that's our AI consultancy that really works with marketers to help adopt, do thought leadership and build product around AI.

[B]

Awesome. I know that when we were chatting before recording, there was like a. We kind of dug in a little bit about the agency model in housing programmatic today, I guess. What problems are they trying to solve by doing so? And do they really understand the strategic value behind in housing or not? I'd love to hear your perspective.

[C]

Yeah, in housing has shift a ton, I would say, over the past 12 to 14 years. Like I do think that, that if you look at the goal of in housing back in, call it 2012, 2013 is fundamentally different than now. And so when people first started in housing, realistically people had in house search and social and. And so the next thing to in house was programmatic. And at that time back in 2013, it was relatively easy. Most DSPs were commoditized. People had access to the same inventory and the. And the same data. And so people could do it for a couple million dollars in media spend. If you look at it now, I think that people still want to in house and I think they still want to in house for things like control and transparency and those types of things. But ultimately it's much, much harder. There's a lot more platforms, there's a lot more fragmentation. And so we're seeing that pendulum swing back out to strategic partnerships. And I think a lot of agencies and marketers are doing a bit of both.

[B]

You're right. It was really one or two places to go to and you could access 90% of the web. And the fragmentation, especially when you start talking into connected television, if you start talking to other mediums, it's gone well beyond just web experts, mobile experts, there's connected television experts, there's DSPs that focus on each, there's a dozen data providers. It's so fragmented that from what I've experienced and what I've seen is anyone who in houses today ends up building a team that costs more than just using a third party company to help them. So it requires a ton of resources and knowledge to do so. How do you think that has changed the way agencies pitch for new clients? What do you think is their benefits or lack thereof of doing so?

[C]

Yeah, so, so, and before I answer the pitch, answer to atg, if you don't mind. What, what you just said is so spot on. And I know marketexture recently, y' all just wrote an article recently about how people are choosing DSPs. And so much around that is around inventory and data and what's available and it's almost impossible to get it all in one Spot and so people just need more. Right. It's really chall to dovetail that into your pitch question. I think before and when I say before three, four, five years ago, when people talked about in house and Programmatic and their pitch and winning new business, it showed sophistication. It showed, hey, we understand this. We have traders and buyers and we're in these platforms. I believe that brands still want sophistication, but at the end of the day they want outcomes and they want the ability to access inventory and data to reach their consumers wherever they are. It's so fragmented now and the consumer journey is no longer really limit linear. And so to have access to all this stuff is just really important.

[B]

It's funny because we've touched up on, you know, the technical capabilities. We touched up on really the ramping up of teams and staff and support that you need. How do you think overall it impacts the margins? That's often a delicate topic of where the margins go and how you optimize your clients budgets. But where does I guess the economics of it all stop making sense Overall?

[C]

Yeah, it's really a math equation depending on how an agency is pricing programmatic and if they even have a strategy on it. So if an agency is typically taking, you know, call it a 15% management fee and they're running a certain amount of programmatic, it really is a, it's, it's a math equation on when does it make sense. I think the challenge that we're seeing now is that you could do it before, like I said earlier, for a couple million bucks because you could afford a trader and it would, and it would be profitable. If you're now on 5, 6, 7 platforms, all those platforms have minimum spends. You need a couple traders to manage it. All the math gets out of whack really quickly. And so the question is how much spend do you really need to run through it for it to be profitable and is that the goal of it? I was talking to our COO recently and she estimated to do it really well, you'd probably need $20 million in programmatic and that will get you access to eight to 10 platforms. You build the workflows, you have a team that runs it. But that's really challenging.

[B]

Yeah, when I think about in housing overall and I think about the effectiveness of managing multiple DSPs, how effective that is, how challenging that is, how complex it's become over the years. We just touched up on all the various platforms, the multiple walled gardens, the open web access that you have, it puts a Ton of strain on workflow operational processes. Where do you primarily fit into that? Where does AI digital play a role in kind of simplifying this whole, often very complex ecosystem?

[C]

We're really not one size fits all, which I love. Like we always say, we don't want people to fit into our workflows, we want to fit into theirs. And so we customize solutions based on, based on the different partners and what the marketer needs. You know, we have some agency or brand partnerships who don't have programmatic teams and we truly act as an extension of their team and we do everything from strategy to planning to execution to insights to optimization. We have some partners who do some things in house and some things they don't have the ability to do. So for their in house team, we're helping them optimize supply or we're Giving them deal IDs that are going to drive outcomes and then we're giving them access to platforms and inventory they don't have access to. And so it's really, it really depends on the partner and we're really customized solutions depending on what they need.

[B]

I want to kind of shift back to the overall advertising industry. We touched upon a lot from in housing to supply sources, data partners, etc. But what are you like really, and I like to say bullish on moving into the second half of 2026. We obviously read the news and a lot of it is doom and gloom, but that's not reality, especially for you guys. I hear you're growing really, really fast, but what are you really excited about? What are the trends that you guys are leaning into and how do you feel the remainder of the year is going to look?

[C]

Yeah, we are growing fast, which has been so much fun. We just surpassed the 500 person mark which we were excited about. I think there's a lot to be excited about if I was to bucket the two big challenges we're dealing with. It's fragmentation and it's change management with AI. I also think those are the two most exciting things that we have going for us. So from a fragmentation standpoint, the reason everything's getting so fragmented is because we have all these platforms that for the first time ever have amazing first party data and amazing new inventory like CTV inventory. Really cool attribution solutions that they're building. Right. And the challenge is that it's hard to navigate it all and it moves so fast, but the opportunity is we have data and attribution and inventory that we've never had before. You know, when you look at OpenAI and them spinning off an ad manager. That's really interesting. Consumers are spending time there. It's a whole new medium that we've never bought inventory in before. And that's challenging, but it's also incredibly exciting. Right. So I actually think the fragmentation creates opportunity. It's just hard to navigate. So I'd say that's the first one and then the second one is, you know, everyone's talking about AI. I'm so excited to see where it goes. Like right now I think we're seeing companies spin up a lot of agents and we're in this kind of agentic era and we're doing the same thing. We're building a ton of agents. The agents are helping workflows, they're providing a lot of value. The future of this is AI is just integrated in everything and it becomes the operating system. It's almost like electricity. I'd never say, like, oh, this light's an electric light. Right. I think it's going to be everywhere and we're just going to be able to do more, optimize more, have more insight and do more meaningful work. That's really exciting to me.

[B]

Yeah, it's funny, I posted on Twitter a couple days ago and I know everybody hates Twitter, but don't hate me for it, I still like it. But I posted on Twitter the other day, I said, have we reached peak AI in ad tech? And people literally responded with we've reached peak AI marketing in ad tech, but we've only started to scratch the surface of its capabilities. And some people came at me like, what are you talking about? We haven't even started. And other people were like, oh, you're amazing. Like, yeah, like thanks for sparking the convo. And I totally agree. I think we haven't even really started to roll it out in the, the full potential yet. We talk about operational adopt stuff, we talk about obviously workflow and optimization for supply side. There's so much more to roll out and automate with these agents that I don't even think we've even scratched the surface. I think the next two years are going to be absolutely wild and it's going to change how we work in digital overall.

[C]

Yeah, I agree and I do love that. I think that that's spot on. I, I think that insight's spot on. You know, the challenge for a lot of folks and a lot of marketers and I think like the mid sized businesses in general, you know, large businesses and enterprises are embracing this wholeheartedly and they are helping navigate the change management. It's going to be real. It's going to be a lot of change management. Our chief AI officer talks a lot about if 95% of what an agency or marketer does gets commoditized by AI, what's that 5% that makes you special? And I think that that's a really good question we should all be asking. It's how do we drive the change and how do we embrace AI and how do we make sure that we're all future proofed? But then what is that 5% that makes us special? I think is a really important question

[B]

most businesses ask Tom, thank you again for joining me today. This was a great episode. And thank you again for all your support and everything you've done with Market.

[C]

Yeah, it's always fun. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for

[B]

the people about the people.

[A]

Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates, so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget to Slack Community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.