New year is traditionally a time for resolutions - so what better way to start the year than have Shirley Marschall prescribe some goals for the ad tech industry...

Welcome back and happy New Year! 

Did you have a good break? Maybe you disconnected properly: notifications off, social media paused, quality time with friends and family, all in (or out in this case) style. Or maybe you binge-watched Netflix etc in your PJs, phone permanently in hand. Either way: good for you.

And a heartfelt get well soon to everyone who went skiing and came back with a little cast-on-the-leg souvenir. A seasonal classic.

Now that we’re a few days into the new year, the more interesting question is probably not how your break was, but how your New Year’s resolutions are doing. Made any? 

And what do New Year’s resolutions even look like in 2026?

Is diet and exercise still a thing now that we have Ozempic?

Is reading more books or learning a new language still relevant now that we have GenAI? (Learning how to use AI, of course, being the notable exception)

Is less screen time on the list or did we accept that we’ll eventually all die mid-scroll anyways?

Looks like our New Year’s resolution list just got a whole lot shorter, outsourced to drugs, algorithms, and automation. If that’s not efficient, what is? 

And now that we have all this additional time on our hands, it makes it a pretty good moment to ask what ad tech’s New Year’s resolutions might look like.

No, not the usual vague, comforting jargon of transparency, efficiency, privacy-first, AI-powered… We’ve had plenty of that. Three resolutions, then, none of them particularly radical.

Resolution 1: Fewer declarations of death

Mark Ritson has a great resolution idea: "Let’s make a disciplinary New Year’s resolution to lay off the fascination with marketing death." Yes please! 

Marketing loves declaring things dead. Cookies, linear TV, agencies, publishers, attention spans, the internet. Even entire business models. Almost everything was massacred at some point in 2025. Because if something doesn’t fit the narrative of the moment, it must be dying…preferably loudly and preferably on LinkedIn. It sounds decisive, visionary, ahead of the curve.

Needless to say that most of these things aren’t dead. Some are changing, fragmenting, or simply becoming less convenient for a particular story- or profit line. And the 'death of' declaration also conveniently avoids the harder work of understanding how things actually evolve.

So here’s a modest New Year’s resolution: Let’s dial back the fascination with death metaphors. No more 'end of' headlines unless there’s credible evidence of large-scale behavioural replacement (not just a PowerPoint and a hopeful forecast).

Resolution 2: AI without the smoke screen

Ready or not, here we go again: another 'year of AI'. Yes, AI will continue to reshape workflows. Yes, it will automate tasks that used to take teams weeks. And yes, it is a genuinely powerful technology.

But the surrounding noise has made it incredibly difficult to understand what’s actually happening, what’s real. Between breathless hype, existential panic, and opportunistic rebranding, AI has become a smoke screen… one that makes it hard to tell what is a meaningful step forward and what’s just a cash grab with an AI label. In ad tech, an industry already dense with complexity, this lack of clarity is especially exhausting.

So instead of more pilots, demos, decks, and loosely defined "AI-powered" promises, here’s a better New Year’s resolution: be honest about AI.

Justin Scarborough summed it up perfectly: "I would rather work with a partner who has no 'AI' but a solid product than one who sells me a bag of BS." That sentiment shouldn’t be controversial, yet somehow it still is.

And the growing AI backlash isn’t a rejection of the technology itself. It’s a rejection of how it’s being used, marketed, and explained. Or not explained at all.

Surprised? Let these words by José Miguel Sokoloff sink in: "If you’re going to remove humans from the equation when it comes to making the product, designing the product, marketing the product - and say 'humans are a pain in the ass, they’re only good if they buy' - people are going to see right through that and punish you hard."

Resolution 3: Ad tech stack Marie Kondo style 

Does your ad tech stack bring you joy?

Ad tech loves shipping new products, versions, features, roadmaps, acronyms… all meant to fix targeting, measurement, identity, attention, and everything in between. What it doesn’t love is maintaining or retiring what came before. Because upkeep, deprecation, and honest sunsetting are deeply unsexy.

Take measurement. We started with clicks. Then came views, ROAS, incrementality, MMM, attention scores. We added brand lift, MTA, and every proprietary KPI imaginable. Almost none of it was ever retired. The result? Contradictory dashboards, messy optimisation and still no shared understanding of what success actually looks like.

Or targeting. We started with cookies. Now we juggle first-, second-, and third-party data, universal IDs, hashed emails, contextual signals, clean rooms, CDPs, and DMPs. What was meant to streamline targeting now resembles a data taxonomy war zone.

And formats? We just keep adding more. Banners, in-stream, native, shoppable, 5/10/15/60/x seconds video ads, pause ads. No format is ever declared obsolete, because someone, somewhere, might still be monetising it…

So here’s a New Year’s resolution: treat your ad tech stack like a cluttered closet. Every time you add something new, something old, cracked, or pointless needs to go...

Ok, enough wishful thinking...

When resolutions meet reality, the priorities are usually very clear: grow profit, 'unlock the flywheel' (the perpetual-motion dream we’ll no doubt hear a lot more about this year), and keep stakeholders happy.

The rest is New Year’s rhetoric.

Shirley Marschall is ExchangeWire's weekly columnist - find her on LinkedIn where she's making sense of ad tech