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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 who may spend hours inside a single experience. Gaming works when it enhances the experience Donovan said brands should show up in ways that add value rather than disrupt play. The goal [...]

Posted on 02/11/2026 at1:38

Where Play Meets Purchase: Gaming as the Next Frontier of Retail Media, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2026, presented by Best Buy Ads

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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 [...]

Market Transparency, AI Reshape Ad Buying in Connected TV: Horizon Media’s Samantha Rose

LAS VEGAS – As viewers gain more control over what they watch and when they watch it, Horizon Media is reshaping how it plans for connected TV. Speaking with Beet.TV at CES 2026, strategic investment lead Samantha Rose said CTV can no longer be treated as a single bucket. Instead, Horizon plans across distinct subcategories, including live CTV, subscription video on [...]

Why CTV Is Becoming the Backbone of Healthcare Marketing: The Trade Desk’s Baron Harper

LAS VEGAS – Healthcare marketers are increasingly treating TV as the starting point for omnichannel strategy as connected TV adoption reaches critical mass and measurement improves, said Baron Harper, general manager of business development at The Trade Desk. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Harper said the industry is moving beyond simply showing up on many platforms toward [...]

How to Succeed in Game Ads: ‘Respect the Game World’

LAS VEGAS – How do you reach an audience that's actively engaged without becoming an unwelcome intruder? The answer, according to one media strategist, lies in understanding that gamers aren't just consumers - they're participants in carefully crafted worlds they care deeply about. "Brands can show up in gaming without disrupting the experience by leading with respect," said Samantha Lim, svp, gaming [...]

For In-Store Media, Relevance Is the New Scale

For years, in-store digital media has chased scale, adding more screens to more stores. However, this approach often overlooked the fundamental component required to turn a shopper’s glance into a purchase: relevance. Now, a more deliberate strategy is taking hold. Retailers are rethinking their in-store networks not as a collection of screens, but as an intelligent infrastructure designed with purpose, according [...]

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 [...]