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Retail Media Must Grow Up Fast: Albertsons Media Collective’s Brian Monahan

NEW YORK – Retail media has spent the past few years being treated like advertising’s golden child. Money poured in, decks multiplied and everyone claimed miraculous returns. Now comes the less glamorous phase: proving it. Brian Monahan of Albertsons Media Collective arrived at the Beet.TV AI Media Summit with Horizon Media carrying a message for marketers who are tired of mystery math. The industry, he suggested, needs fewer vanity claims and more honest accounting. Monahan described Albertsons’ pitch as “couch to checkout,” shorthand for a full-funnel platform designed to follow shoppers from [...]

Posted on 04/20/2026 at2:49

The AI Media Summit, A Beet.TV & Horizon Media Collaboration, presented by Seedtag and The Trade Desk

Recent Videos

GSTV’s Kristina Lutz: Gen Z is Looking for Discovery Beyond Social in the Real World

NEW YORK — Physical shopping experiences are far from dead for younger consumers, despite the view that Gen Z lives are primarily lived within the confines of TikTok. That realization is reshaping how brands think about the consumer journey. But there’s a sticking point: how can brands tap into authentic discovery moments that balance digital feeds with real life? “After all [...]

WPP’s Puma: Why CTV Demands a Dual Strategy of Scarcity and Agility

The connected television advertising market is bifurcating between the abundant dreams of programmatic and the reality of scarce, premium content. The industry may be finding itself in a hybrid model where tentpole events like the World Cup must be booked far in advance, while performance-focused campaigns demand the nimble optimization that digital platforms provide. That is the tightrope the industry is currently [...]

IAB’s Jamie Finstein on CTV and Commerce: Don’t Talk About One Without the Other

NEW YORK — Connected TV and commerce have become inseparably linked as streaming platforms increasingly partner with retailers and closed-loop attribution systems enable direct measurement of advertising’s impact on purchase behavior. “You don’t really talk about commerce anymore without thinking about CTV,” Jamie Finstein, vp, Media Center at IAB, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the IAB NewFronts. “That is playing [...]

Beet@20: Bill Koenigsberg of Horizon Media Says Culture Still Crushes Ego

As Beet.TV marks 20 years of chronicling the media business, Bill Koenigsberg, founder and CEO of Horizon Media, used the milestone to deliver a pointed message to Madison Avenue: swagger is cheap, culture compounds. From its first recording at Google’s campus in Mountain View in 2006 to the maze-like halls of CES, Beet.TV has built an archive of roughly 11,000 video [...]

Horizon Media’s Katy Ferguson: Agencies Need ‘Right People’ to ‘Harness and Leverage’ AI Technology

Artificial intelligence impacts client work through efficiency gains, strategic thinking elevation, and outcome-driving tools, though human intelligence remains essential for navigating AI-driven environments effectively. “Where are we seeing AI really impact what we’re doing from a client perspective? The first is obviously efficiency and saving time,” Katy Ferguson, president, Horizon Media East, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet.TV/Horizon Media [...]

Turn Data and AI Into Measurable Outcomes: Comcast Advertising’s Dawn Williamson

NEW YORK – Artificial intelligence is already being put to work where it matters most: making ads smarter and cheaper, says Dawn Williamson, chief revenue officer at Comcast Advertising. “AI is an incredible asset that we all have,” Williamson said in this interview at the IAB NewFront with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. “One of the things that we are immediately leveraging [...]

TV Home Screens Are Premium Real Estate for Brands: TiVo Ad’s Matt Milne

NEW YORK – The home screen land grab is heating up as brands realize that the most valuable moment in connected TV advertising is not mid-show or even pre-roll. It is the instant a viewer turns the television on, says Matt Milne, president and chief revenue officer of TiVo Ads at Xperi. In this interview at the IAB NewFronts, Milne described [...]

Viant to Acquire TVision, Bringing Attention Metrics Into DSP Wars

Viant Technology Inc. is acquiring TVision Insights, a move that could reshape how television advertising is measured by embedding real-time attention data directly into media buying. The deal brings together Viant’s identity and programmatic capabilities with TVision’s second-by-second “eyes-on-screen” measurement, aiming to give advertisers a more objective view of what actually works across TV. In this recent Beet.TV interview, TVision Co-founder [...]

Comcast’s James Rooke: Premium Video’s Top Priority is Proving Outcomes

NEW YORK - Generally speaking, “performance TV” means delivering measurable outcomes for marketers through return on ad spend demonstration, though the challenge lies in proving television’s effectiveness on a consistent, scalable basis rather than isolated campaigns. “What does performance TV mean for Comcast? It means that we deliver outcomes for a marketer. If you’re a marketer, you want to look at [...]

AI Is Eating the Internet’s Lunch and Not Picking Up the Check: AJL Advisory’s Lou Paskalis

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Lou Paskalis has a characteristically blunt assessment of artificial intelligence’s growing appetite for content, likening it less to innovation and more to a well-organized heist. “The reason that I think the IAB is correctly calling AI scraping an existential threat to publishers is because it is routinized theft,” the advertising veteran said in this interview at [...]

Dentsu’s Kevin Weigand: ‘Premium Is in the Eye of the Viewer’

NEW YORK – Publisher partnerships must span content, technology, and advertiser relationships rather than focusing on single capabilities, as premium content varies based on individual viewer perception and contextual relevance. “Between content, technology, and advertising relationships, I think a partner that really drives the most value is the one that can span all three,” Kevin Weigand, vp, partnerships, video & audio [...]

Agentic AI and Tentpole Events Drive 2026 Ad Spend Growth

A confluence of major sporting events, election spending, and rapid artificial intelligence adoption is set to make the U.S. advertising market grow faster than many anticipated this year. The IAB expectation shared with Beet.TV suggests a nearly double-digit expansion, suggesting robust health despite lingering economic uncertainty. Underpinning this growth are three distinct drivers: A slate of cyclical events is expected to inject [...]

Sir Martin Sorrell Marks Beet@20 With Warning That AI Is Upending Advertising

Beet.TV this year turns 20, which in media years is roughly equivalent to surviving several platform extinctions and at least one pivot to video that actually worked. What began with a taping at Google’s Mountain View campus in 2006 has grown into a sprawling archive of about 11,000 interviews tracking everything from early vlogging to programmatic advertising and now AI. The [...]

WPP Media’s Adam Shlachter: ‘Not Everyone Can Solve all of Their Problems’ With Data

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Advertisers must accept that universal data solutions don’t exist, as every dataset contains flaws and limitations that require careful evaluation rather than accepting vendor claims at face value. “The uncomfortable truth that advertisers finally need to accept is that not everyone can solve all of their problems,” Adam Shlachter, client president at WPP Media, told Beet.TV [...]

HappyKids Operator Future Today Brings New Ad Platform for Audience Targeting

The average cost of an ad-free streaming subscription has nearly doubled since 2020, climbing from around $9 to $16 a month. For millions of American households, the math is starting not to add up. That financial pressure is reshaping viewing habits in ways that free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST, is well-positioned to exploit. Audiences are churning off paid tiers and [...]

For Zenith’s Tobias, AI’s Promise Is Mired in Siloed Complexity

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The promise of artificial intelligence in advertising has long been one of simplification and speed, a force to unify disparate signals into clear, actionable insights. In practice, however, the technology is often creating the opposite effect, adding new layers of fragmentation and opacity to an already complex media ecosystem. Instead of a single source of truth, [...]

Ad Context Is King and Programmatic Isn’t the Villain Anymore: Digitas’ Liane Nadeau

NEW YORK – At the IAB NewFronts, Liane Nadeau, chief investment and media officer at Publicis Groupe’s Digitas North America, made a quiet but notable admission: the old rivalry between direct buys and programmatic is over, and frankly, it was getting awkward anyway. “Historically, those two things would’ve been antithetical,” Nadeau said, referring to direct publisher deals and programmatic buying. “You [...]

Infolinks Media’s Mike Freides: Supply Control Enables Real-Time Intent, Not ‘After the Fact’ Optimization

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Controlling supply provides access to real-time user intent and behavioral patterns, while optimization approaches rely on cobbled-together attribution data that limits pre-bid decision-making effectiveness. “When you control the supply, you’re not acting after the fact. You’re not cobbling together that intent based off of cookies or other attribution,” Mike Freides, senior director of Business Development — [...]

Seller Agents are Coming for TV’s 20-Year Ad Ops Problem

The pitch sounds almost too clean: give your ad operations team the output of 15-to-20 people, without hiring a single one of them. For publishers still manually logging into half a dozen ad platforms to manage campaigns, it may also sound overdue. Agentic AI has become advertising's buzziest concept in 2025 and into 2026, but most of the noise has come [...]

Ads Should Tell Stories, Not Interrupt Them: TikTok’s Keiko Mori

NEW YORK – Keiko Mori, head of creative product marketing, North America at TikTok, said the social video platform’s latest ad formats aren’t here to quietly blend in. They are here to make an entrance, preferably the moment you open the app. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the IAB NewFronts, Mori walked through a slate of new products designed [...]