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Agentic AI Is Rewriting Business Models for Ad Agencies: S4 Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell

LAS VEGAS –Sir Martin Sorrell, executive chairman of S4 Capital, has a blunt assessment of advertising’s future. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Sorrell said agentic AI “fundamentally challenges the model.” Strategic and creative under attack Sorrell argued that agentic systems threaten the traditional agency stack. “Strategic and creative is under attack,” he said. “The big question is whether it survives this attack or it doesn’t.” He said client demand is shifting toward mid- and lower-funnel performance. “Everybody’s short-term focused,” Sorrell said. “They want results quickly.” That pressure, he added, puts [...]

Posted on 01/16/2026 at12:45

CES 2026

Recent Videos

Why Boring Brands Fail in the $8.6 Billion Gaming Ad Market

LAS VEGAS — Advertisers are pouring billions into virtual worlds, with U.S. game ad revenues projected to climb nearly 7% to reach $8.59 billion this year. But, while nearly half of gamers purchase items based on in-game ads, a majority still view these interruptions as a distraction from the action. The problem? A lack of channel-specific creativity, where marketers simply transplant [...]

Live Sports Advertising Edges Toward Agentic Automation: NBCU’s Ryan McConville

LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Comcast’s NBCUniversal rolled out an idea that sounds futuristic but solves an old headache: buying live sports ads without losing your sanity. Ryan McConville, chief product officer and EVP of ad products at NBCUniversal, said the company is testing agentic AI to automate live sports buying across streaming and linear TV. That second part matters more [...]

In-Store Media Is Third Pillar of Retail Advertising: Albertsons’ Brian Monahan

LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Albertsons Media Collective outlined how it is tightening measurement, expanding in-store media and using AI to link advertising more directly to sales outcomes. Senior Vice President Brian Monahan said the network is focused on shared growth across brands, merchants and shoppers. “We seek to live up to our name and drive collective growth,” Monahan said in [...]

Cross-Platform Cloud Gaming Comes With PHYND’s Magnite-Powered Ads

LAS VEGAS -- The gaming industry has long been the epitome of fragmentation - mobile gamers on tiny screens, console enthusiasts locked into expensive hardware, and PC players tethered to their desks. Now a new platform aims to unite them all on the largest screen in the house. PHYND is betting that the smart TV already sitting in most living rooms [...]

Agentic Commerce Adds New Lane to Shopping, Not a Detour: Criteo CEO Michael Komasinski

LAS VEGAS - Agentic commerce is expanding how consumers shop rather than replacing existing channels, says Michael Komasinski, chief executive of adtech firm Criteo. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Komasinski said AI-powered assistants should be viewed as an incremental layer that complements search, social and retail media, not a substitute for them. “Traditional search has been fragmenting for [...]

Unified Measurement Across TV and Social Is Finally Arriving: iSpot’s Julie Van Ullen

LAS VEGAS – Advertisers sounded a familiar concern at CES 2026: They still struggle to measure television and video spending across platforms in one unified view. That challenge has persisted for years, Julie Van Ullen, president, CRO of iSpot, said in this interview with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV. The biggest gap has been measurement inside “walled gardens.” “The lack of [...]

AI Agents are Starting to Buy TV Ads for Each Other

The complexity of purchasing premium video across linear and streaming endpoints has long plagued the industry, creating friction that often sends budgets flowing toward simpler social platforms. As artificial intelligence matures from generative creative tools into autonomous transaction capabilities, the machinery of media trading is beginning to mimic the speed of high-frequency finance. But while algorithms accelerate the pace of commerce, the [...]

Inside Reddit’s AI-Powered Push into Self-Serve Media Buying: Stephen Riad

LAS VEGAS – Agentic AI and self-serve tools took center stage at CES in Las Vegas last week, marking a significant shift from assisting advertisers to actually executing media campaigns. Joining me in the bustling Beet.TV studio at the Vdara Hotel, I caught up with Reddit’s Stephen Riad, who was just promoted to EVP of advertising sales. Here, we discussed Reddit’s [...]

WPP Media’s Luis Martinez: Retail Media Reaches ‘Tipping Point’ Beyond Transactions to Brand Building

LONDON — Retail media is evolving from a transaction-focused performance channel toward brand building as companies leverage data and signals to shape customer connections across multiple touchpoints. “Companies can actually use the data in two ways. One is obviously the transaction that will always be there, will remain strong, but also brand building,” Luis Martinez, managing partner for Commerce at WPP [...]

Interactive Video Ads Outperform Standard Formats Across the Funnel: Amazon’s Maggie Zhang

LAS VEGAS – Amazon Ads and Publicis Media unveiled new research on interactive video advertising at CES 2026. The joint thought leadership study focuses on interactive formats in streaming TV. “Yes, we're really excited to announce and release the Joint Thought Leadership Study with Publicis Media today at CES,” Maggie Zhang, head of global video measurement GTM at Amazon, told Lisa [...]

Streaming, Social, Retail Media Redraw Europe’s TV Ad Market: PubMatic’s Andy Jones

LONDON – Linear television viewing is declining across major European markets, driving a corresponding drop in advertising spend, says Andy Jones, VP of broadcast and connected television, EMEA, at PubMatic. The shift is consistent across regions and no longer disputed by buyers or sellers, he said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Future of TV Advertising Global [...]

Commerce Media Moves Up Funnel as Brands Test ‘Off-Platform’ Signals

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF – Retail media networks are evolving beyond their own websites, as platforms increasingly leverage transaction data to target consumers across the open web and connected television. U.S. commerce media ad spend projected to reach $69.69 billion in 2025, a 21.8% increase over the previous year, according to data from Emarketer. For Instacart, this means utilizing its digital-only transaction [...]

Live TV, AI Search, Retail Media are Set to Converge: Omnicom’s Megan Pagliuca at CES 2026

LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Megan Pagliuca, Chief Product Officer at Omnicom Media Group, outlined how the agency is responding to fundamental shifts in how consumers discover information, shop and engage with media. Tightly linking live content, AI-powered search signals, influencer marketing and retail media into a single, measurable system is essential. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Pagliuca said [...]

Commerce Data Pushes Retail Media Beyond the Lower Funnel: Criteo’s Nicole Kivel

LONDON – Retail media is no longer confined to on-site placements or last-click conversions. Instead, commerce data is increasingly reshaping how brands plan and activate media across the funnel and across channels, says Nicole Kivel, managing director of Northern Europe at Criteo. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Beet.TV and WPP Media Leadership Summit, Kivel said retail media and [...]

Advertisers Want it All: Mass Audience Reach Plus Advanced Targeting in CTV

LONDON — Advertisers want it all. They crave the mass audience reach that television has always delivered, but they also demand the precise targeting capabilities that digital advertising has trained them to expect. So, as connected TV matures into a dominant force in the media landscape, the industry is racing to satisfy both appetites simultaneously. CTV ad supply is now expanding [...]

With AVA, Havas Pursues Context-First Planning for CTV Brand-Building

LAS VEGAS — The connected TV advertising market has exploded in scale, but some in the industry say it's still searching for the fabled combination of right-moment, right-message. That's the philosophy driving a renewed focus on “context-first planning”, which moves beyond demographic proxies. "We are big believers in context-first planning, and that's important because it allows us to identify growth moments that [...]

We’ve Lost a Great One: CBS’s Radha Subramanyam. Gone at 55

We heard the sad news today that our friend Radha has passed. She had been battling brain cancer for some time. I wanted to say how sad I am, how much we will miss her and how grateful we are for her contributions to the industry. Our deepest condolences to her family. We so appreciated her support of Beet.TV and her [...]

TiVo Ad’s Chris Kleinschmidt: CTV Home Screens Are Billboards With Better Targeting

LONDON — Connected TV home screens function as digital billboards that capture viewer attention before content consumption begins, offering targeting capabilities unavailable in traditional out-of-home advertising. “It is very similar to out of home in the sense that it is a billboard. For lack of a better word, it is a billboard on the homepage of the screen itself, but obviously [...]

Operative’s Tatta: AI can Solve the ‘4D Chess’ of Media Fragmentation

LONDON — As streaming and social platforms muscle their way into the mainstream, the media landscape has fractured into a kaleidoscope of disconnected inventory, with broadcasters, trying to figure out how to sell it across a sprawling ecosystem. The result is often a manual, time-consuming struggle to unify ad sales and present a coherent offering to buyers who increasingly demand cross-platform [...]

Attention Metrics Emerge as the Unifier in a Fragmented Media World

LONDON — The advertising industry has spent years grappling with measurement challenges as media channels proliferate. Now, a new approach is gaining traction: using attention as the common currency that can bridge the gap between disparate platforms. Rather than simply counting whether consumers have seen an ad, marketers are increasingly focused on understanding how deeply they engage with it. This shift [...]