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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 selecting the shows they’re passionate about,” Kenney said in an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. “And it’s no secret that buyers prefer to target that way as well.” Challenges of [...]

Posted on 02/15/2026 at2:17

The Road to CES 2026: Planning and Buying CTV the Way Viewers Watch, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Gracenote

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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 [...]

Marketing Intelligence Adds Value to Growth Partnerships: Nielsen’s Peter Naylor

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Nielsen is pushing to broaden how the industry views the company, positioning itself not just as a ratings provider but as a full marketing intelligence partner, according to Peter Naylor, chief client officer at Nielsen. Speaking in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Naylor said his mandate is to change how clients think [...]

Index Exchange’s James Wilhite: Gracenote Integration Promises CTV Proof-of-Purchase

LAS VEGAS — Buyers can now verify connected TV purchases at the show level, seeing specific line items, CPMs, impressions, and total media spend rather than trusting that budgets allocated toward major television events actually reached intended inventory. “Before a couple of days ago, it was impossible for a buyer to know exactly what they were buying in CTV in particular,” [...]

Dentsu X’s Maggie Summers: CTV Finally Hit Critical Mass for Performance Marketing

Connected TV advertising has reached a tipping point where impression volume, measurement capabilities, and targeting precision converge to create genuine performance marketing opportunities. “CTV’s finally hit that point of critical mass. So there’s enough impressions in the marketplace to really effectively reach consumers who are in that shopping mindset,” Maggie Summers, EVP and head of Activation at Dentsu X, told Beet.TV [...]

Behavioral Data Holds Key to Unlocking CTV’s True Potential, EDO’s Weiss Says

LAS VEGAS – The quest for meaningful audience metrics in the CTV space continues to challenge advertisers and media companies alike. Could behavioral intent data hold the answer to proving advertising effectiveness? By analyzing real-world search behavior and website visits following ad exposure, companies can create actionable signals from the noise of digital interactions to predict sales outcomes. "We believe that the [...]

Amazon’s Charlotte Maines: Vast Authenticated Reach Brings Advertisers’ Storytelling From ‘Doorstep To Bedroom’

LAS VEGAS — Amazon’s nearly total reach — 90% of U.S. customers across authenticated devices — means that advertisers can tell personalized stories that follow consumers throughout their day, from users’ Fire TV's in their living room to bedtime Alexa smart speaker podcasts. “If you think about it as an advertiser, [there are] so many different unique touchpoints and ways to [...]

AI Now Underpins the Marketing Operating System: Nissan’s Allyson Witherspoon

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Nissan Motor Corp.’s chief marketing officer and global brand advisor Allyson Witherspoon says artificial intelligence has moved from a side experiment to the backbone of the automaker’s marketing organization. AI as the foundation of planning, measurement and creative Speaking with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Witherspoon said AI now underpins nearly every part of Nissan’s marketing [...]