In the rapidly shifting landscape of digital advertising, few names have climbed as quickly as StackAdapt. Founded on the principle of using automation to simplify the complex world of programmatic buying, the company has scaled from fewer than 500 employees to over 1,500 in just five years
At the centre of this growth is Yang Han, the platform's co-founder and CTO, who is currently steering the company through a pivotal era for the industry.
The programmatic space is currently grappling with a crisis of confidence. Recent headlines have been dominated by a high-profile rift between the Publicis Groupe and The Trade Desk, centred on accusations of rogue fees, a lack of transparency in pricing, and the controversial practice of auto-enrolling agencies into premium tiers.
Han believes programmatic advertising is at an inflection point. As the industry faces rising scrutiny over opaque pricing, fragmented workflows and misleading performance indicators, he argues that marketers are moving away from a system built around clicks and towards one that is judged on real business outcomes, stronger measurement and greater transparency. He says the most sophisticated marketers are now looking at multiple signals at once rather than relying on a single metric.
“Typically, sophisticated marketers use a trinity of measurements: incrementality lift, media modelling, and actionable attribution to first-party events,” he says. “You want multiple measurements to tell the same story.” For him, this is the clearest sign that digital advertising has matured beyond simple proxy metrics and into a more accountable phase.
The appeal of that approach is easy to understand. Clicks can still tell part of the story, but they rarely explain whether media actually changed behaviour. Han argues that marketers need a better way to understand what their campaigns are really doing, especially in markets where digital and physical outcomes are closely linked.
“Offline measurements are always somewhat probabilistic because they capture a portion of people on specific devices, but it’s never 100%,” he says. “There’s always some extrapolation occurring, though it’s much better than having nothing at all.”
That point is especially relevant in APAC, where brands are increasingly trying to connect media to tangible commercial activity. Han points to implementations in the region, such as Hyatt Asia Pacific, which leveraged destination visitation data to attribute over 62,000 hotel visits to media exposure, and the Hong Kong Tourism Board’s Wine and Dine Festival campaign, which achieved over 100% ROI on media spend through footfall attribution.
Han sees this as a healthy evolution for the industry. The more visibility brands have into outcomes, the easier it becomes to justify and optimise spend. But he is also clear that there is no single source of truth. The reality, he says, varies by marketer and by sector, which is why multiple measurement approaches are needed to build confidence.
Han’s concerns about measurement are tied to a broader frustration with the structure of programmatic advertising itself. The ecosystem is vast and fragmented, with thousands of tools competing for attention, budgets, and data access. To address this complexity, the industry is seeing a shift toward centralised, end-to-end platforms. StackAdapt aims to simplify this process through a unified dashboard that handles planning, execution, and measurement, bolstered by what Han describes as a “vertical cookbook” or a proprietary guide that helps marketers identify the exact measurement tools required for their specific sector and goal.
That integration is also Han’s response to the trust crisis in adtech. Programmatic advertising has long been criticised for hidden fees, unclear margins, and the sense that advertisers are often buying into a system they cannot fully inspect. Han says StackAdapt’s model is built around “all-in pricing” with no hidden fees. “Everything else on the platform is free, including dynamic creative optimisation and third-party data that we ingest ourselves,” he says.
AI is central to that vision, but Han does not present it as a magic fix. To help orchestrate these complex workflows, the platform has integrated Ivy, an AI-powered marketing agent designed to surface performance insights and streamline campaign setup. However, Han is careful to stress that the technology still has limits.
“The biggest barrier is AI building creative from scratch; that’s where marketers are still getting comfortable,” he says. “We’re seeing more use of AI for enhancements, variations, and background changes.” This hybrid model reflects a broader truth about AI in advertising: While it may be capable of speed and scale, brands still prioritise human oversight to ensure creative remains on-brand and compliant.
For Han, the long-term goal is a more autonomous system. “The ‘holy grail’ is a central brain that proactively understands the high-level goal and executes the process independently,” he says. “I think that’s coming in the next few years, but today it’s still much more human-driven.”
The ethics of AI and programmatic are another major part of Han’s thinking. As more brands lean on automated systems, questions around privacy, data use and consent have become harder to ignore. Han argues that the industry must be careful not to confuse data power with data responsibility.
“The biggest challenge is big tech,” he says. “We’re using anonymous identifiers and probabilistic models which makes it harder. We’re respecting privacy laws and vertical-specific rules. I’d rather see us as the ‘white knight’ compared with big tech which knows everything about you,” he says. “In a lot of cases, regulation like GDPR actually makes big tech stronger because they have the leverage while smaller companies are handicapped.”
Advertisers are asking harder questions about what they are buying, how they are being charged and whether the systems they rely on are as efficient as they claim to be. The old assumptions that once supported programmatic are wearing thin. Brands now want proof of impact rather than just impressions. They also want technology that supports growth without making the process opaque.
Han is not arguing that programmatic advertising should become simpler or less sophisticated. He sees AI, measurement, and automation as central to where advertising is heading. His argument is about the terms on which that sophistication is built whether complexity serves the advertiser or obscures what is actually happening to their money.
That is a legitimate debate for the industry. The questions around transparency, measurement, integrity and data ethics in programmatic are not going away, and APAC marketers are asking them with increasing directness.
Source: Campaign Asia Pacific
