StackAdapt rethinks DSPs for the post-dashboard world

Even in the age of AI, dashboards remain central to how marketers engage with DSPs and plan their advertising campaigns. 

In announcing its Ivy Studio advertising hub today, StackAdapt put forth a vision for advertising’s future, where AI agents help marketers turn business objectives into business outcomes. 

Ivy Studio is built on Ivy, StackAdapt’s AI engine, and uses agents to help marketers analyze advertising context, uncover opportunities, recommend actions, and execute work from a unified hub. 

Even today, most advertising platforms are built around reactive workflows, requiring users to navigate dashboards, reports, and interfaces before taking meaningful action. StackAdapt believes the differentiator for AI agents in the advertising space will come from how well their marketers work with them to understand advertising, not simply from their existence.

A paradigm shift for adtech and DSPs?

Adding AI interfaces to software platforms is hardly news. But dashboards and reactive decision-making are so ingrained in how marketers work with DSPs that StackAdapt is moving to de-emphasize dashboards and prepare its platform for a world where marketers (and many others) will engage with software via agents rather than traditional user interfaces like dashboards.

Instead of navigating menus and reports, StackAdapt will communicate with an agent built to understand digital advertising. While that isn’t groundbreaking, it puts some space between what StackAdapt offers marketers and what marketers can do by cobbling together their advertising data and their off-the-shelf LLM of choice. 

Over the past 10–15 years, marketers have seen the rise of campaign management systems, then marketing operating systems, and now agentic marketing platforms. But marketers’ time remains scattered across multiple platforms, including social platforms like LinkedIn and Meta, programmatic tools like Google Ads, data tools like Tableau and Looker Studio, and martech apps like their CRM and CDP. 

The natural language interface of Ivy Studio isn’t as interesting as it would have been just a few years back. The differentiator for StackAdapt will be how well the tool translates those natural-language goals into actual outcomes. If it works, StackAdapt will get a leg up on its competition, at least for now.