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 to an ad break, and the first ad is for Pampers. What a mood killer,” Karen Babcock, vice president of strategy & partnerships for Comcast Advertising, mentioned that example to Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan during an interview at CES. “How do we find a way to carry the emotion in an ad break so it complements what’s actually happening in the shows themselves? That is what AI can help us do.”
This approach benefits brands through content identification, viewers through cohesion, and creates anticipation for ad breaks rather than bathroom runs, Babcock noted.
Automation enables focus
Premium video needs automation to remove manual burdens from ad unit creation and placement, freeing talented teams for strategic work rather than shipping tapes, managing spreadsheet versions, or coordinating PowerPoint presentations.
“How do we find ways to enhance and simplify the pitch to pay process?” Babcock said. “Instead of all of the incredibly smart people that work in advertising working on how to previously ship tapes from one place to the other, to now moving Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints across different ecosystems, we can have them focus on strategy and driving outcomes.”
Babcock continued by saying automation drives advertiser outcomes by creating organizational capacity for meaningful conversations instead of administrative coordination.
Agentic buying preserves relationships
Agentic buying doesn’t eliminate personal connections or emotional viewer engagement despite industry fears, but rather simplifies processes to give outcome-focused professionals more time for strategic work.
Babcock alluded to the news, announced a day before this conversation, that Comcast/NBC Universal was partnering with independent agency RPA, FreeWheel, and Newton Research to automate premium video buying across linear TV and streaming using agentic AI. The “proof-of-concept” embedded in the alliance enables agencies to execute and optimize cross-platform video investments in seconds rather than days or weeks, with the first execution featuring a brand’s Q1 2026 campaign including live football playoff games, she said.
“Something that would take days, weeks, months to activate [can now ]take minutes,” Babcock said. “By returning all that time back into the ecosystem, into people’s calendars that we all know are stacked back to back, what do we think we could do next?”
Breaking walled gardens
Babcock also revisited the launch of Universal Ads, which was heralded a year ago as a self-service platform developed with Warner Brothers, Paramount, and others to simplify premium video buying similar to how search and social moved collectively to demonstrate category value.
“We are not precious about having a ‘walled garden’ of only our activities. We know that in order to move and continue to drive value for advertisers, we need to move together,” Babcock said.
She pointed to a comment by Universal Ads Head of Product James Barrow, who spoke about “empathy for the advertiser” by inserting AI into launches and offering platform integration or adoption options.
“The value of interoperability cannot be overstated because without doing that, the idea of premium video at scale becomes a pipe dream,” Babcock said.
Character lifecycle storytelling
Future advertising experiences could weave narratives across commercial breaks. For example, it’s conceivable that networks could show character progressions through retailer visits. Babcock imagines a Real Housewife going to regional supermarket Giant for groceries, Hallmark for birthday cards, Target for gifts. It’s a way of creating anticipation rather than interruption, she said.
“You could actually find ways to get excited to see what happens in the next ad break,” Babcock said.
Contextual targeting could match dinner preparation scenes with meal service ads that foreshadow upcoming episode content, making breaks enhance rather than disrupt viewing.
“If we can find a way to reinvent that — where the ad break is not the bathroom break — that feels like the most important thing that we can work on,” Babcock said.
You’re watching “Tailwinds of Transformation, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2026, presented by FreeWheel” For more videos from this summit, please visit this page.
