Streaming Ads Need Less One-Size-Fits-All, More Infrastructure: Google’s Brian Jankovsky
CANNES, France — For years, adtech companies pitched the idea of a single platform that could do everything. Brian Jankovsky, director of entertainment and sports partnerships at Google, says media companies would rather build their own castles than rent a room in someone else’s.
Speaking with Beet.TV dditorial director Lisa Granatstein at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Jankovsky said the defining word for Google’s publisher strategy today is “flexibility.”
“We’ve had to adapt a lot to support our publishers’ businesses over the last few years,” he said.
The reason is simple. Large media companies increasingly want control over pieces of their technology infrastructure rather than outsourcing everything to a single vendor.
“You can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution anymore,” Jankovsky said.
Some publishers want Google to handle only specific functions, such as ad serving or server-side ad insertion. Others still prefer a fully managed approach. Google’s job, he suggested, is to stop insisting it has to be the entire kitchen and become comfortable supplying a few appliances.
“We can plug in as a pipe. We can plug in as a service side ad stitching component. We can be an ad server,” he said.
Sports remain ultimate stress test
If ad technology had an equivalent of running a marathon while juggling chainsaws, it would probably be live sports.
Jankovsky pointed to live events as the clearest example of where infrastructure matters most. Viewers watching a championship match are generally not interested in staring at loading screens, frozen streams or the digital equivalent of a shrug.
“The expectation for the consumer is a beautiful experience between content and ads, no slate,” he said.
To deliver that experience, he argued, platforms need massive global infrastructure capable of serving personalized advertising to huge audiences simultaneously.
According to Jankovsky, research conducted with Boston Consulting Group found that 77% of media partners said they needed the ability to support at least 250,000 concurrent personalized streams. Google’s systems are already operating at far larger scale.
“We’re doing a million a day,” he said. “We’re three times the capacity of where the industry is.”
Cricket delivers big numbers
When asked for a real-world example, Jankovsky did not reach for the Super Bowl or the Olympics. Instead, he pointed to cricket.
Google helped support streaming during the Cricket World Cup in Asia, a tournament that attracts audiences large enough to make even the biggest Western sporting events glance nervously over their shoulders.
“We did over 11 million one-to-one streams concurrently,” Jankovsky said. “We did it effortlessly.”
In the world of streaming infrastructure, 11 million concurrent personalized streams is the sort of figure that causes engineers to either celebrate or immediately look for something stronger than coffee.
Bringing small businesses to TV
While much of the streaming advertising business focuses on major brands, Google sees opportunity in helping small and medium-sized businesses buy television advertising for the first time.
Jankovsky said the company is leveraging the advertiser base it built through Search and YouTube to introduce new demand to streaming publishers.
“A lot of these advertisers are first-time buyers of TV,” he said.
According to Jankovsky, Google brought more than 2,000 new advertisers to partner platforms last year. Many began with YouTube campaigns before expanding into streaming television inventory.
The strategy effectively turns local businesses and emerging brands into potential streaming advertisers, giving publishers access to a broader pool of buyers while helping smaller companies reach larger audiences.
Gemini takes on creative approval pile
If streaming advertising has one universal challenge, it is the growing mountain of creative assets that publishers must review, approve and manage.
Jankovsky said Google has rebuilt its creative review tools using Gemini AI to help automate that process.
“We rebuilt our creative tools on Google Gemini,” he said.
The system can scan thousands of ads almost instantly and compare them against publisher guidelines. Human reviewers still make the final call on questionable submissions, but the platform learns from those decisions over time.
“We’re able to scan thousands of creatives instantaneously,” Jankovsky said.
The goal is to reduce the manual workload without taking publishers completely out of the loop. At least for now, there is still a human somewhere deciding whether an ad belongs on screen, which may come as reassuring news to anyone who has ever seen an internet advertisement and wondered how it got approved in the first place.
For Google, the larger objective is clear: give publishers more control over technology choices, help them attract new advertisers and use AI to manage growing complexity. In an industry that once promised a single solution for everything, Jankovsky’s message was refreshingly less grandiose. Sometimes the future of advertising is not about owning the whole stack. Sometimes it is about being a very reliable pipe.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Google Ad Manager. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France — For years, adtech companies pitched the idea of a single platform that could do everything. Brian Jankovsky, director of entertainment and sports partnerships at Google, says media companies would rather build their own castles than rent a room in someone else’s.
Speaking with Beet.TV dditorial director Lisa Granatstein at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Jankovsky said the defining word for Google’s publisher strategy today is “flexibility.”
“We’ve had to adapt a lot to support our publishers’ businesses over the last few years,” he said.
The reason is simple. Large media companies increasingly want control over pieces of their technology infrastructure rather than outsourcing everything to a single vendor.
“You can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution anymore,” Jankovsky said.
Some publishers want Google to handle only specific functions, such as ad serving or server-side ad insertion. Others still prefer a fully managed approach. Google’s job, he suggested, is to stop insisting it has to be the entire kitchen and become comfortable supplying a few appliances.
“We can plug in as a pipe. We can plug in as a service side ad stitching component. We can be an ad server,” he said.
Sports remain ultimate stress test
If ad technology had an equivalent of running a marathon while juggling chainsaws, it would probably be live sports.
Jankovsky pointed to live events as the clearest example of where infrastructure matters most. Viewers watching a championship match are generally not interested in staring at loading screens, frozen streams or the digital equivalent of a shrug.
“The expectation for the consumer is a beautiful experience between content and ads, no slate,” he said.
To deliver that experience, he argued, platforms need massive global infrastructure capable of serving personalized advertising to huge audiences simultaneously.
According to Jankovsky, research conducted with Boston Consulting Group found that 77% of media partners said they needed the ability to support at least 250,000 concurrent personalized streams. Google’s systems are already operating at far larger scale.
“We’re doing a million a day,” he said. “We’re three times the capacity of where the industry is.”
Cricket delivers big numbers
When asked for a real-world example, Jankovsky did not reach for the Super Bowl or the Olympics. Instead, he pointed to cricket.
Google helped support streaming during the Cricket World Cup in Asia, a tournament that attracts audiences large enough to make even the biggest Western sporting events glance nervously over their shoulders.
“We did over 11 million one-to-one streams concurrently,” Jankovsky said. “We did it effortlessly.”
In the world of streaming infrastructure, 11 million concurrent personalized streams is the sort of figure that causes engineers to either celebrate or immediately look for something stronger than coffee.
Bringing small businesses to TV
While much of the streaming advertising business focuses on major brands, Google sees opportunity in helping small and medium-sized businesses buy television advertising for the first time.
Jankovsky said the company is leveraging the advertiser base it built through Search and YouTube to introduce new demand to streaming publishers.
“A lot of these advertisers are first-time buyers of TV,” he said.
According to Jankovsky, Google brought more than 2,000 new advertisers to partner platforms last year. Many began with YouTube campaigns before expanding into streaming television inventory.
The strategy effectively turns local businesses and emerging brands into potential streaming advertisers, giving publishers access to a broader pool of buyers while helping smaller companies reach larger audiences.
Gemini takes on creative approval pile
If streaming advertising has one universal challenge, it is the growing mountain of creative assets that publishers must review, approve and manage.
Jankovsky said Google has rebuilt its creative review tools using Gemini AI to help automate that process.
“We rebuilt our creative tools on Google Gemini,” he said.
The system can scan thousands of ads almost instantly and compare them against publisher guidelines. Human reviewers still make the final call on questionable submissions, but the platform learns from those decisions over time.
“We’re able to scan thousands of creatives instantaneously,” Jankovsky said.
The goal is to reduce the manual workload without taking publishers completely out of the loop. At least for now, there is still a human somewhere deciding whether an ad belongs on screen, which may come as reassuring news to anyone who has ever seen an internet advertisement and wondered how it got approved in the first place.
For Google, the larger objective is clear: give publishers more control over technology choices, help them attract new advertisers and use AI to manage growing complexity. In an industry that once promised a single solution for everything, Jankovsky’s message was refreshingly less grandiose. Sometimes the future of advertising is not about owning the whole stack. Sometimes it is about being a very reliable pipe.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Google Ad Manager. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
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