Advertising technology is often criticised in the usual mainstream trades as being over complicated and confusing. Well it's not, it's pretty simple. In its truest sense ad tech effectively powers the digital advertising industry.

I don't joke when I say it's been keeping the internet free since 1993 (the year the first banner appeared). Ad tech keeps content free. We often forget that. But from big legacy publishers down to the smallest content providers, display ads (powered by a myriad of providers) keep the free content coming.

In the programmatic age (that's the current digital advertising cycle we are now in) the definition of ad tech has changed. I see it now as a pure infrastructure and technology category. The pipes are being built by various vendors and I believe we will see a new wave of lean ad tech players building features or differentiated technology on top of the new infrastructure. The open API is coming. And it will herald a new range of innovation in this space.

Yesterday at the AppNexus summit Brian O'Kelley rolled out some numbers around the potential size of the non-search programmatic ad market. He reckons we are looking at a global programmatic market worth $78 billion by 2017. Maybe its hyperbole. Maybe he's spot on. It would be smart not to bet against O'Kelley. He's rarely wrong on these things.

If he is right it would suggest our ad tech space is about to go nuclear over the next three years. What does that mean for the business though? How will the current intermediaries (agencies in particular) fare as we hurtle towards a digital ad market COMPLETELY dominated by programmatic?

Will the massive media businesses (Google, Facebook and Amazon), enterprise players (Salesforce, Oracle) or consultancies (Accenture et al) steal the march on all of them as marketers look to join the data and tech dots across marketing and ad tech?

Now at what forum do you think you will get a glimpse into this future? Where are you likely to see a disciple of marketing technology, like Scott Brinker, explain to us why the worlds of ad tech and martech are colliding - and what the likely fall out will be?

Where too are you likely to see the big enterprise marketing players explain what their strategy is around ad technology?

And are you likely to see an honest and frank conversation about the viability of the current agency model? The current conference spin around 'client service' won't cut it anymore in the programmatic era.

Let's talk about fair renumeration.

Let's discuss what agencies need to do to build a proper sticky business model where clients are almost dependent on them for deep data insights - as well as buying power and creative/strategy nous. And more importantly why agencies HAVE to develop the competencies internally of marrying the myriad tech solutions with a client's first party data (social, mobile, display, search, email, CRM, etc) for a holistic data-driven approach in the programatic space.

Where else will you get a deep dive into the technology and behaviours behind a typical bot? Or even how first party is radically changing the business dynamics of the entire digital advertising space? How we track and provide real attribution across a multi-screen environment? How we fuse creative and data insights? How an open API can power innovation in the industry?

Any idea yet?

Well, there is one event that does its best to engender this conversation, and more - and that's ATS London.

This is our fifth year of doing ATS London, and it has evolved into the must go-to event for the brightest and most influential in the global advertising business.

This year we are holding the event on September 8, which is the same week as dmexco, arguably the greatest digital media show in the world.

We have deliberately put it on in the same week so that our European and global attendees can experience the full force of networking and digital advertising industry insight from the region.

Tickets are now on sale for ATS London. But if you fill out our European Programmatic Survey, you can get 20% of your ticket.

The Early Bird offer finishes at end of June.

Now, here are the five reasons you need to go to ATS London:

1) UNSPONSORED. We are the only major event globally that remains unsponsored. What do you mean? There is no PAY-TO-PLAY at ATS London. You speak on merit - and dependent on how much you will educate our audience.

2) Networking. We attract the best and brightest to all our events globally. But London in particular attracts the real market makers. Our audience are the smartest people in this space. Not hyperbole. But an actual ad tech fact.

3) Honesty. What's the point in dancing around the subjects? It's all in or nothing.

4) We love tech and data. It's all well and good having fluffy high level conversations. But we love the deep dives. How does technology and the execution of data work? If that's not there, you can't talk about programmatic. Simple, really.

5) London. One of the greatest cities in the world, and we're happy to give you another reason to visit.