Media Tech Talk Jason Barnes (Pubmatic) - Media Tech Talk #018
Mar 30, 2026
Jason Barnes, Chief Revenue Officer APAC at PubMatic and programmatic advertising leader. He discusses the shift from inventory to audience signals. He outlines PubMatic’s AI and cloud bets, CTV and commerce priorities for 2026. He explains agentic AI, AdCP enabling agent-to-agent commerce, and how platforms can help publishers surface niche inventory.
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Episode notes
First Party Data Is Returning Pricing Power To Publishers
- First-party data and privacy changes are enabling supply-side power to return to premium publishers.
- Jason says publishers exposing quality first-party signals helps rebalance pricing power away from walled gardens.
Place Calculated Long Term Bets Not Reactive Moves
- Be proactive and place long-term bets instead of reacting to disruption.
- Pubmatic invested early in supply path optimization, header bidding, cloud infrastructure and now AI and GPU partnerships like NVIDIA.
Keep Humans In The Loop With Agentic Automation
- Keep humans in the loop when deploying agentic automation and add guardrails for critical systems.
- Jason cites the AWS Cairo incident that deleted code and caused a 13-hour outage as a cautionary example.