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Data and Context Drive Performance in Connected TV: OMD’s Tej Desai

As brands try to make sense of a fragmented media ecosystem, performance measurement remains one of the biggest obstacles. For Tej Desai, executive vice president of client leadership at OMD USA, connected TV has emerged as a way forward, particularly as marketers look beyond narrow platform metrics and toward more holistic outcomes. Social remains powerful but siloed Desai said marketers are increasingly focused on understanding success across channels, rather than optimizing within isolated environments. “As an agency, what we’re trying to do is figure out holistically, cross channel, how do we measure success,” [...]

Posted on 02/17/2026 at1:50

Performance Marketing in Streaming TV: The Strategies & Innovations Driving Outcomes, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Wurl

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Fragmentation Meets Focus Even as News Expands: CNN’s Guy Griggs

LAS VEGAS – If the news landscape feels like an all-you-can eat buffet with cable podcasts, newsletters, influencers and social feeds stacked high, this is not your imagination. Guy Griggs, senior vice president of ad sales and client partnerships at CNN, says the industry has splintered in spectacular fashion and he has the receipts from living through it twice. “This is [...]

TransUnion’s Julie Clark: AI Moves From Technology Talk To ‘Outcomes Era’

Artificial intelligence discussions are shifting from theoretical to practical deliverables as the industry recognizes strong data foundations prove critical for realizing AI’s full potential. “We’ve all been talking a ton about AI, but it’s not just the technology, it’s about what we’re actually delivering now. It’s moving into an outcomes era,” Julie Clark, SVP, Diversified Markets, Media & Entertainment at TransUnion, [...]

Spark Foundry’s April Carlisle: LLMs Use Brand Websites as ‘First Source of Truth,’ Not Retailer Sites

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Marketers and agencies are still just scratching the surface when it comes to understanding how generative artificial intelligence tools like large language models are changing the way brands develop their content strategies. For example, brands are now rethinking the role their own websites play in informing AI programs that consumers increasingly rely on. “The LLMs are going [...]

DISH Media Sidesteps IP Targeting Woes With Direct Customer Signals

As the advertising industry grapples with signal loss and the diminishing reliability of common identity markers, the hunt is on for more durable frameworks to connect with audiences, particularly in the booming connected TV space. Some think a direct, authenticated relationship with a consumer, built on deterministic data like a physical address or a verified email, provides a far more stable [...]

Agentic Platforms Speed Up Media Planning for CTV Advertisers: Disney’s Alex Combs

LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Walt Disney Co. showcased a growing push to modernize advertising workflows by combining advanced technology with its storytelling heritage. Alex Combs, vice president of product management, advertising platforms at the media and entertainment giant, said the company is focused on building products that deliver speed, ease and value for advertisers. “Really exciting week,” Combs said in [...]

Contextual Targeting Gains Ground in CTV: Magnite’s Ryan Kenney

LAS VEGAS – Contextual signals are becoming central to how connected TV inventory is bought and sold, as advertisers look for relevance at scale without relying on user identifiers. Ryan Kenney, svp of revenue for SpringServe at Magnite, said viewer choice and passion for content make context a natural fit for the TV environment. “In normal consumption of CTV, viewers are [...]

Twitch’s Sarah Iooss Says ‘Trusted Voices’ are Key to Unlocking U.S. Live Commerce

While live shopping has long dominated Asian markets, its adoption in the United States has hinged less on functionality and more on the depth of viewer connection. As platforms integrate retail capabilities directly into video streams, the focus is turning toward the authenticity of the messenger rather than just the mechanics of the cart. For live stream commerce to truly take hold [...]

Lower Costs Fuel In-Store Media Growth: Stratacache’s Ben Reynolds

The retail industry has seen rapid change over the past year, particularly around in-store media, as falling technology costs and margin pressure elsewhere push retailers to rethink where growth comes from, according to Ben Reynolds, vice president of business development at Stratacache. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Reynolds said lower hardware and installation costs have removed a major barrier to [...]

For AI in Ads to Work, IAB Says Fix the ‘Garbage In’ Problem First

Artificial intelligence is often hailed as the solution to advertising’s most persistent measurement headaches, but could itn be doing more to illuminate the problem than to solve it? After all, AI is only as good as the data it is fed. That means the perennial challenges of fragmented platforms, data silos, and inconsistent taxonomies risk being amplified, not erased, by the [...]

From Cologne to Miami: The Brilliance & Drive of Christian Muche

The former German Yahoo marketing and sales executive stood up the wildly successful digital industry expo DMEXCO in Cologne in 2008, during the financial crisis, eventually drawing the global digerati, including Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and nearly the entire digital industry. In 2021, in the aftermath of the pandemic, he launched his next act, POSSIBLE, an expo and conference in Miami Beach [...]

Gaming Offers Commerce, Not Clutter, to Brands: Acxiom’s Elizabeth Donovan

LAS VEGAS – Acxiom is framing gaming as a serious commerce channel rather than a novelty ad placement. Elizabeth Donovan, global head of commerce and retail media networks, said success depends on relevance, restraint and respect for gamers. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Donovan said gaming is first a community. Brands that interrupt gameplay risk alienating players [...]

LiveRamp’s Scott Howe: AI Needs ‘Permission At The Center’ Or It ‘Can’t Possibly Be Reputable’

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Ad success in using artificial intelligence depends on strong first-party data signals combined with consumer permission to operate reputably as the world shifts from recognition-based to permission-based systems. “How do you feel about a nameless, faceless algorithm making decisions about what offer you get, what credit score you have, even what content you should view next if [...]

Intuit SMB MediaLabs’ Meg Beaudet: Deterministic Data Turns CTV Into ‘True Performance Channel’

LAS VEGAS — Connected TV’s real value as a performance channel happens when advertisers can know exactly who sits in front of the screen, enabling precise targeting that reaches people in their most relaxed, engaged living room state. It’s been a “holy grail” hope since CTV’s earliest days. And in many ways, that hope is being realized now. “Deterministic data is [...]

Index Exchange’s Andrew Casale: Containerization Brings Buyside Decisions ‘Closer to the Sell Side’

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Buy-side decisions are moving closer to publishers. The shift, enabled by the IAB’s artificial intelligence maintenance “containerization project,” brings greater focus to where ad impressions actually originate rather than sending requests to distant infrastructure and waiting for responses. “Historically, the sell side operated at great lengths to the buy side. We would send requests out to infrastructure, [...]

Ubiquitous Video Expands High-Impact Ad Inventory: VideoElephant’s Brian Cullinane

LAS VEGAS – VideoElephant positions itself as a connective layer across the video ecosystem, linking media owners, publishers and advertisers through a vast content library and distribution network. Brian Cullinane, chief commercial officer of VideoElephant, said the company manages roughly 5 million short-form video assets, adding thousands more each day, alongside hundreds of thousands of hours of long-form programming. “At our core, [...]

Contextual Targeting Is Turning CTV Into a Performance Channel: Wurl CEO Dave Bernath

Connected TV advertising is rapidly evolving from a branding medium into a measurable performance channel, driven by advances in contextual targeting, data normalization and artificial intelligence, according to Dave Bernath, chief executive of streaming data and ad-tech firm Wurl. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Bernath said advertisers are increasingly able to use the same digital tools that power performance marketing [...]

Instacart’s Ali Miller Targeting Retail Media ‘Fragmentation’ With Off-Platform Push

LAS VEGAS -- The race to monetize shopper data has turned retail media into the advertising industry’s fastest-growing sector, projected to surpass combined spending on connected TV and traditional television by 2027. But perhaps it is also exacerbating a tangled web of walled gardens, leaving buyers navigating a landscape defined as much by its complexity as its scale. The next phase [...]

Advanced Audience Planning Drives TV’s Next Phase: iSpot’s Dan Hickox

LAS VEGAS – Media budgets are steadily moving from linear television to connected TV, opening new ways for marketers to reach audiences with greater precision, according to Dan Hickox, vice president of business development and partnerships at iSpot. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Hickox said the shift allows brands to activate direct audience targeting while bringing more [...]

Personalization Inside Physical Stores Underpins Retail Media Strategy: CVS’s Paul Lentz

LAS VEGAS – Paul Lentz, head of strategic development at CVS Media Exchange, says personalization inside physical stores is becoming a central pillar of CVS’s retail media strategy. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Lentz said technology investments are helping the drugstore chain tailor the in-store experience to local communities rather than treating its thousands of locations as [...]

Gracenote’s Bill Michels: Scene-Level Targeting Only Works If You Can Do It At Scale

LAS VEGAS — Targeting ads to specific scenes within TV content sounds like the ultimate precision play. The challenge is that precision without scale doesn't spend budgets, and most scene types don't appear frequently enough to matter. “Someone’s in a shower scene, going to sell them soap. How many shower scenes are there? There’s not that many,” Bill Michels, chief product [...]