Outcomes, AI and Data Dominate the Beet Retreat Berkshires: NYSE Interviews Tameka Kee
The advertising industry has spent years building an ecosystem complicated enough to require its own ecosystem map. At the Beet Retreat Berkshires, key leaders responsible for buying ads, selling them and building the machinery in between gathered to figure out how to make the whole thing work better.
Tameka Kee, advertising futurist and senior correspondent for Beet.TV, offered her take on the biggest themes from the retreat in an interview with Ashley Mastronardi, reporting on behalf of the New York Stock Exchange.
Kee described the Beet Retreat as a rare convergence of brands, agencies, publishers, connected-TV companies and advertising technology platforms. Instead of communicating through emails, Zoom calls and increasingly ambitious acronyms, they were gathered in the Berkshires to talk face to face.
“Everyone is here together to try to solve problems, to try to collaborate and to try to make everything work more effectively,” Kee said.
Getting away from the Zoom grid
Location matters, too. The Beet Retreat takes the industry away from the usual urban conference circuit and gives participants more opportunities to actually spend time together.
“It’s tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the city,” Kee said. “So people get to form these closer bonds and relationships even as they’re moving their business forward together.”
Mastronardi asked whether getting together in person still matters in a post-pandemic world where virtually everyone has become capable of conducting a meeting while staring into a webcam.
“Oh, absolutely,” Kee said. “There’s something to be said for, you can have a Zoom call like we’re doing now. But when you actually get to sit and literally break bread with someone,” the conversation changes.
Those encounters can reveal how another company is tackling a problem, whether a technology could be useful or whether two teams have more in common than their respective corporate organizational charts might suggest.
“And there’s just something also fun about getting together in the same space,” Kee said.
Advertising wants outcomes, preferably measurable ones
Kee identified three major trends running through the retreat. The first was the industry’s growing obsession with outcomes.
Advertisers have always wanted results, of course. Nobody ever presented a marketing budget to the chief financial officer with the stirring promise that it would generate absolutely nothing.
What’s changing is the ability to define those results much more precisely.
“The advertising industry has always been focused on outcomes,” Kee said. But the convergence of data, information and AI is creating “a focus on figuring out how to deliver the outcomes for advertisers in very specific and granular ways.”
For some advertisers, the desired outcome is an immediate sale. For others, particularly automakers and other companies selling expensive products, the path from seeing an advertisement to buying something can be much longer.
That makes signals such as store visits and website activity important parts of measurement.
“How do you define outcomes and how do you deliver more granular outcomes for advertisers?” Kee said, summarizing one of the central questions.
AI finds something to do besides terrify employees
The second major theme was artificial intelligence, because apparently it’s now illegal to hold an advertising conference without discussing AI.
But Kee noticed a change in the conversation.
The focus wasn’t primarily on machines eliminating jobs. Instead, attendees were talking about how AI could help employees become more productive and how companies are creating new positions because of the technology.
“It’s less around job loss and sort of efficiency creation and more around how people can upskill their teams and get them to do more with AI,” Kee said.
Companies also are thinking about how they hire for new AI-related roles.
“That was really nice to kind of see maybe a little bit of a difference from some of the conversations around how AI is taking jobs,” Kee said.
For an industry that has spent much of the past couple of years wondering whether a chatbot was coming for everybody’s paycheck, that qualifies as almost cheerful.
Three rivers of data start converging
Kee’s third theme was the convergence of commerce, connected-TV and creator-economy data.
Commerce signals from retailers such as Walmart Connect and Amazon increasingly can be combined with information generated by CTV and creators. That combination is opening new ways for marketers to connect advertising exposure with consumer behavior and ultimately sales.
Data itself remains enormously valuable, though the industry’s relationship with it has changed.
“There’s a phrase from years ago, people used to say data is the new oil,” Kee said. “I think it is definitely the equivalent of that.”
The advertising business once had so much easily accessible consumer information that restraint wasn’t necessarily its most conspicuous quality.
“I think for years our industry was kind of drunk off of very cheap, very plentiful data,” Kee said.
Privacy rules including Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation helped change that attitude. Advertisers became more aware of the value of consumer information and the need to explain how it’s collected and used.
Data still can make advertising more useful when applied intelligently. It can help marketers avoid bombarding people with irrelevant messages and instead show advertising that has some chance of being useful.
The goal, Kee said, is to help consumers move toward a purchase or build a relationship with a brand “without annoying them.”
In advertising, where showing somebody the same commercial 37 times remains a surprisingly persistent technological achievement, that’s no small ambition.
Agentic advertising goes under the hood
The final day of the Beet Retreat included breakout discussions on measurement, outcomes, commerce media and AI. Unlike traditional panels, the breakouts are structured as roundtables where attendees can participate in the discussion.
The leaders of those sessions then return to share their findings with the broader group.
Kee was particularly interested in a discussion that ventures deeper into agentic advertising, where AI-powered agents can participate in buying and selling media.
“Lots of people are talking about how agents, basically bots, are able to buy and sell ads,” Kee said. “Now we have some actual campaign examples of what that really looks like.”
The session promised to “get under the hood of one of the agents and see how it’s all working and coming together,” she said.
The retreat concludes with a closing plenary that brings together insights from the sessions and invites attendees to contribute their own observations.
That seems fitting for an event built around getting different parts of advertising into the same room. The industry may not solve outcomes, AI, measurement, commerce media, CTV and the future of data during a few days in the Berkshires.
But at least everyone knows which problems they’re arguing about.
You’re watching coverage from Beet Retreat Berkshires 2026. For more videos from this event, please visit this page.
The advertising industry has spent years building an ecosystem complicated enough to require its own ecosystem map. At the Beet Retreat Berkshires, key leaders responsible for buying ads, selling them and building the machinery in between gathered to figure out how to make the whole thing work better.
Tameka Kee, advertising futurist and senior correspondent for Beet.TV, offered her take on the biggest themes from the retreat in an interview with Ashley Mastronardi, reporting on behalf of the New York Stock Exchange.
Kee described the Beet Retreat as a rare convergence of brands, agencies, publishers, connected-TV companies and advertising technology platforms. Instead of communicating through emails, Zoom calls and increasingly ambitious acronyms, they were gathered in the Berkshires to talk face to face.
“Everyone is here together to try to solve problems, to try to collaborate and to try to make everything work more effectively,” Kee said.
Getting away from the Zoom grid
Location matters, too. The Beet Retreat takes the industry away from the usual urban conference circuit and gives participants more opportunities to actually spend time together.
“It’s tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the city,” Kee said. “So people get to form these closer bonds and relationships even as they’re moving their business forward together.”
Mastronardi asked whether getting together in person still matters in a post-pandemic world where virtually everyone has become capable of conducting a meeting while staring into a webcam.
“Oh, absolutely,” Kee said. “There’s something to be said for, you can have a Zoom call like we’re doing now. But when you actually get to sit and literally break bread with someone,” the conversation changes.
Those encounters can reveal how another company is tackling a problem, whether a technology could be useful or whether two teams have more in common than their respective corporate organizational charts might suggest.
“And there’s just something also fun about getting together in the same space,” Kee said.
Advertising wants outcomes, preferably measurable ones
Kee identified three major trends running through the retreat. The first was the industry’s growing obsession with outcomes.
Advertisers have always wanted results, of course. Nobody ever presented a marketing budget to the chief financial officer with the stirring promise that it would generate absolutely nothing.
What’s changing is the ability to define those results much more precisely.
“The advertising industry has always been focused on outcomes,” Kee said. But the convergence of data, information and AI is creating “a focus on figuring out how to deliver the outcomes for advertisers in very specific and granular ways.”
For some advertisers, the desired outcome is an immediate sale. For others, particularly automakers and other companies selling expensive products, the path from seeing an advertisement to buying something can be much longer.
That makes signals such as store visits and website activity important parts of measurement.
“How do you define outcomes and how do you deliver more granular outcomes for advertisers?” Kee said, summarizing one of the central questions.
AI finds something to do besides terrify employees
The second major theme was artificial intelligence, because apparently it’s now illegal to hold an advertising conference without discussing AI.
But Kee noticed a change in the conversation.
The focus wasn’t primarily on machines eliminating jobs. Instead, attendees were talking about how AI could help employees become more productive and how companies are creating new positions because of the technology.
“It’s less around job loss and sort of efficiency creation and more around how people can upskill their teams and get them to do more with AI,” Kee said.
Companies also are thinking about how they hire for new AI-related roles.
“That was really nice to kind of see maybe a little bit of a difference from some of the conversations around how AI is taking jobs,” Kee said.
For an industry that has spent much of the past couple of years wondering whether a chatbot was coming for everybody’s paycheck, that qualifies as almost cheerful.
Three rivers of data start converging
Kee’s third theme was the convergence of commerce, connected-TV and creator-economy data.
Commerce signals from retailers such as Walmart Connect and Amazon increasingly can be combined with information generated by CTV and creators. That combination is opening new ways for marketers to connect advertising exposure with consumer behavior and ultimately sales.
Data itself remains enormously valuable, though the industry’s relationship with it has changed.
“There’s a phrase from years ago, people used to say data is the new oil,” Kee said. “I think it is definitely the equivalent of that.”
The advertising business once had so much easily accessible consumer information that restraint wasn’t necessarily its most conspicuous quality.
“I think for years our industry was kind of drunk off of very cheap, very plentiful data,” Kee said.
Privacy rules including Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation helped change that attitude. Advertisers became more aware of the value of consumer information and the need to explain how it’s collected and used.
Data still can make advertising more useful when applied intelligently. It can help marketers avoid bombarding people with irrelevant messages and instead show advertising that has some chance of being useful.
The goal, Kee said, is to help consumers move toward a purchase or build a relationship with a brand “without annoying them.”
In advertising, where showing somebody the same commercial 37 times remains a surprisingly persistent technological achievement, that’s no small ambition.
Agentic advertising goes under the hood
The final day of the Beet Retreat included breakout discussions on measurement, outcomes, commerce media and AI. Unlike traditional panels, the breakouts are structured as roundtables where attendees can participate in the discussion.
The leaders of those sessions then return to share their findings with the broader group.
Kee was particularly interested in a discussion that ventures deeper into agentic advertising, where AI-powered agents can participate in buying and selling media.
“Lots of people are talking about how agents, basically bots, are able to buy and sell ads,” Kee said. “Now we have some actual campaign examples of what that really looks like.”
The session promised to “get under the hood of one of the agents and see how it’s all working and coming together,” she said.
The retreat concludes with a closing plenary that brings together insights from the sessions and invites attendees to contribute their own observations.
That seems fitting for an event built around getting different parts of advertising into the same room. The industry may not solve outcomes, AI, measurement, commerce media, CTV and the future of data during a few days in the Berkshires.
But at least everyone knows which problems they’re arguing about.
You’re watching coverage from Beet Retreat Berkshires 2026. For more videos from this event, please visit this page.
