Live programmatic advertising has made big strides in recent years, but it still feels like we’re not quite ready for prime time. After a recent conversation with a friend who works deep in the day-to-day delivery of live programmatic, it became clear that while there’s momentum, the operational and technical gaps are still too wide. These aren't just minor growing pains. They are foundational issues that can break campaigns during the most critical moments.
One of the biggest challenges is that most platforms were not built with live event delivery in mind. They're optimized for on-demand environments where you have more flexibility with timing and less pressure on system resilience. But live is a different beast. You need real-time visibility into everything from pod fill to latency and failover paths. Many platforms offer limited monitoring and even less support when something goes wrong in the middle of a live stream.
Latency is another major problem. During live delivery, even a few seconds of delay can cause pods to drop altogether, which leads to slates being shown instead of ads. This doesn’t just hurt revenue. It creates a bad viewer experience and undermines trust with broadcasters. The root of this often comes back to how systems are built. If your ad call is even slightly delayed or fails to clear the creative quickly enough, you’re going to miss your window.
Creative distribution for server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is also a weak link. Many teams still rely on just-in-time delivery of creative assets. That might work for VOD or less time-sensitive content, but for live events, it’s risky. You need assets prepped, QA’d, and loaded well ahead of time. If something fails to render or transcoding takes too long, you lose your slot. And there are still vendors in the ecosystem who don’t offer proper tools for creative preloading, which forces media buyers to build workarounds.
Then there’s the issue of measurement and tracking. We’re still depending heavily on 1x1 tracking pixels, which might be standard for web-based environments but introduce unnecessary latency in live video. Every added call increases the risk of delays or failed responses. Worse, it can interfere with stream performance. A more modern, lightweight approach to tracking is badly needed for live programmatic to be sustainable.
Things tend to break down most visibly during high-demand moments like major sporting events, political debates, or award shows. The traffic surge in these moments often exceeds what the ad tech stack was designed to handle. QPS spikes can overwhelm servers, cause DSP timeouts, and completely halt delivery. This becomes even more of a problem when multiple SSPs are routing requests to the same buyers, multiplying the load across the chain. Very few systems are built to scale on demand at this level.
DSPs, for their part, still struggle to adapt to the volatile nature of live inventory. Because supply can surge or vanish in seconds, their pacing and bidding algorithms often miss opportunities or overcompensate. Some DSPs even pull back during major events to avoid waste or latency risk, which limits fill when it's most needed. On the buy side, teams are often left guessing how to allocate budget without proper real-time insight into inventory availability.
Vendor support during live events is also inconsistent. When something breaks, getting a real person who understands live delivery and can solve the problem in minutes — not hours — is rare. This puts pressure on internal teams to build redundancies or monitor systems manually, which isn’t scalable.
The question right now isn’t whether live programmatic has potential. It clearly does. But the current state of infrastructure, tooling, and coordination still requires too much patchwork. Teams are duct-taping things together behind the scenes to make it work, and that’s not sustainable long term.
Sam Khoury
Founder, Cedar Consultants
Creative consulting solutions for Adtech