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Comcast’s Karen Babcock: AI Can Transform Ads From ‘Interruption’ to ‘Complement’ of Content

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence can reshape advertising from disruptive interruption to emotional complement by matching ad tone to surrounding content, preventing jarring transitions that produce negative attention as opposed to the good kind. “Let’s say someone was watching Good Will Hunting. It’s the iconic scene where Ben Affleck’s in the bar in Boston; it’s energetic, it’s loud, and they cut to an ad break, and the first ad is for Pampers. What a mood killer,” Karen Babcock, vice president of strategy & partnerships for Comcast Advertising, mentioned that example to [...]

Posted on 01/28/2026 at2:12

Tailwinds of Transformation, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2026, presented by FreeWheel

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Open Web Needs Its Own AI Interface in Next Revenue Chapter: Taboola’s Adam Singolda

LAS VEGAS – Adam Singolda sees consumer behavior shifting faster than most media companies expected. Large language models such as ChatGPT are becoming a daily interface for information, he said, but the experience remains uneven across platforms. Some LLMs are ad free, others are ad-supported, while the open web sits largely outside those walled gardens. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan [...]

Streaming Ad Market Matures as Programmatic, AI, Contextual Targeting Accelerate: FreeWheel’s Kathy Argyriou

The U.S. streaming advertising market reached a turning point in 2025 as a surge of ad-supported inventory reshaped pricing, buying strategies and definitions of premium television, says Kathy Argyriou, head of publisher sales at FreeWheel, a unit of Comcast. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Argyriou said the rollout of ad-supported tiers from major streaming platforms drove a sharp increase in [...]

CTV Emerges as Performance Channel Amid Shift to Lower-Funnel Ad Buying: Roku

LAS VEGAS – Roku is leaning into a message advertisers have long wanted to hear: connected TV can now drive measurable business outcomes, not just awareness. Speaking with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES 2026, Lauren Benedict, vice president of global ad sales and partnerships at Roku, said the company is seeing growing demand from marketers to treat CTV as [...]

Best Buy’s Derek Bodurka: Gaming’s Grip on Consumers’ Passion has Lessons for Brands

LAS VEGAS — Gaming purchases differ from typical consumer electronics transactions because they’re driven by passion and escape rather than necessity, creating emotional connections that retailers can leverage for brand partnerships. “A lot of consumer electronics is based on necessity. When we think about gaming, it’s all about the one,” Derek Bodurka, partner and category marketing director at Best Buy Ads, [...]

Swoop’s Kurt Robinson: TV Must ‘Stay The Backbone’ as Pharma Embraces New Delivery Mechanisms

LAS VEGAS — Pharmaceutical advertising has been the backbone of TV ad strategies since the inception of the medium. But maintaining that central role requires embracing new delivery platforms including YouTube and connected TV as consumer viewing behavior shifts. “It’s about staying the backbone [of TV],” Kurt Robinson, evp, business development at Swoop, told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES. [...]

Why Agencies Should Never Fully Outsource Video Buying to AI

LAS VEGAS -- The advertising industry is racing to automate video buying, but one agency executive is urging a more measured approach. Rather than handing over the keys to the machines, Mike Treon, head of CTV and video strategy at PMG, thinks the real opportunity lies in collapsing repetitive workflows while keeping humans firmly in control of strategy and client outcomes. "Anything [...]

2026 Marks Turning Point for Unified, Self-Serve Retail Media: Criteo’s Sherry Smith

LAS VEGAS – The retail media sector is entering a pivotal year marked by consolidation, self-service tools and less fragmentation across retailers, said Sherry Smith, president of retail media at Criteo. Speaking with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES 2026, Smith argued that true growth in retail media networks (RMNs) will depend on brands’ ability to activate campaigns across multiple [...]

Custom Audiences will Take Center Stage at Beet Retreat San Juan: Alliant’s Margo Hock

LAS VEGAS – As the advertising industry debates how quickly agentic AI will move from theory to practice, Alliant says the shift is already tangible inside its business. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Margo Hock, vice president of digital partners, said Alliant’s acquisition of AnalyticsIQ is now entering a critical phase. The focus has moved beyond deal [...]

How In-Store Media Captures Intent at the Moment of Choice: Stratacache’s Chris Riegel

Retail stores are already crowded with visual cues, from packaging to printed signs. The challenge for brands is breaking through that noise without slowing shoppers down. Chris Riegel, founder and chief executive of Stratacache, frames the store as a stage where motion can guide attention and influence choice. “If you think of a retail space as a theater for a consumer [...]

Innovid’s Christopher Murphy: Creative and Media Are Still Too Siloed

LAS VEGAS — Creative and media teams frequently operate in isolation and optimize independently despite opportunities to integrate contextual signals across both functions for improved campaign performance. “Too often they’re in silos and optimize separately,” Christopher Murphy, svp, strategy and business development at Innovid, told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES. “The fidelity of signals, whether it’s an audience or [...]

AI Is Turning Static TV Ad Packages Into Real-Time, Cross-Platform Orchestration: FreeWheel’s Soo Jin Oh

LAS VEGAS – For years, buying premium video advertising meant navigating a maze of separate workflows, incompatible systems, and manual processes that kept linear television and streaming in distinct silos. But that fragmentation is now collapsing under the weight of artificial intelligence, which is reshaping how advertisers access and activate across the entire video landscape. "AI is transforming how premium video is [...]

Marketing to AI Agents Is the Next Frontier, IAB’s Goldstein Says

The advertising industry has spent decades perfecting how to reach consumers. Now it faces a new challenge: marketing to machines. As artificial intelligence reshapes how people discover and purchase products, marketers are starting to grapple with ensuring AI agents recommend your brand when consumers ask for help. "I'm calling it B2A marketing," said Sheryl Goldstein, EVP and chief industry growth officer at [...]

Omnicom Media’s Joanna O’Connell: Brands Must Access ‘Emotional Availability,’ Not Just Eyeballs

LAS VEGAS — Consumers increasingly feel brands don’t care about them as companies reduce brand investment under pressure to prove immediate value, creating disconnection that surfaces in research showing most people believe advertisers pursue transactions rather than relationships. “Something like 71% of consumers have said, ‘I think they’re only after me for my dollars.’ Meanwhile, 50-plus percent of people said brands [...]

B2B Advertisers are Ditching Search for CTV, Intuit Wants to Help Them

LAS VEGAS -- Are the days of B2B marketers waiting around for small business owners to type their needs into a search box numbered? A growing cohort of advertisers is realizing that, by the time someone searches for "freight logistics" or "business insurance," they've already made up their mind - and the bidding war has already begun. So, some portion of B2B [...]

Icon International’s Reid Steinberg: Principal-Based Buying Shifts Media From ‘Expense Item’ To ‘Profit Maker’

LAS VEGAS — Principal-based media buying can best be seen as a not just an update of traditional “media barter” arrangements, but as a way to solve the problems associated with that old form of agency/publisher deals. As Incon International’s Reid Steinberg notes, principal-based buys can help advertisers unlock additional budgetary spending. On top of that, it can also fund [...]

AI Agents Will Make Millisecond Optimizations Humans Can’t, Dentsu’s McDonagh Says

LAS VEGAS -- The future of premium video advertising may be decided in milliseconds - faster than any human trader could ever react. That's the promise of agentic buying, which enables autonomous systems to optimize campaigns at the line-item level in real time. The technology represents a fundamental shift in how media is transacted, moving from periodic manual adjustments to continuous, [...]

Ampersand’s Justin Rosen: Poor AI Training Data Risks ‘Doom Loop’ of Degraded Insights

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence models trained on low-quality data risk generating meaningless insights that then degrade further as models train on their own flawed outputs, creating a destructive cycle that obscures actual campaign performance. “One thing that I fear, especially with all the excitement around AI, is that the quality of the training data that goes into a lot of [...]

Commerce GO, Agent-Ready APIs Help to Tackle Ad Fragmentation: Criteo’s Todd Parsons

LAS VEGAS – Media fragmentation is reshaping performance marketing in two ways, said Todd Parsons, Chief Product Officer and President of Performance Media at Criteo. Consumers move fluidly across discovery, consideration and purchase channels, while marketing organizations still operate in channel silos. Speaking with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES 2026, Parsons said the performance stack now needs to be [...]

Albertsons Media Collective Targets Real-Time Optimization for In-Store Screens

For decades, the grocery aisle was a static environment where cardboard displays and price tags did the heavy lifting. Now, the physical retail environment is undergoing a digital overhaul designed to rival the programmatic capabilities of the open web - turning brick-and-mortar locations into networked media channels. By integrating sensor technology and centralized content management, retailers aim to close the gap [...]

Speed Is the New Strategy: TikTok on Brands and the Pace of Culture

LAS VEGAS -- The traditional marketing planning cycle is dead. That's the stark message for advertisers trying to succeed on discovery-driven platforms. For brands accustomed to lengthy campaign development timelines, the platforms where consumers now spend their time operate on an entirely different clock. "The speed at which you have to drive innovation and decision making is really going to be different [...]