Rob Williams

MIAMI BEACH, FL – Retail media was once the cute little side project of digital advertising, quietly selling sponsored cereal placements and hoping nobody asked too many questions about attribution. Now it has become one of the industry’s loudest growth engines. U.S. commerce media advertising rose 18% to $64.3 billion in 2025, according to IAB […]

NEW YORK – At the IAB Connected Commerce Summit, Ryan Verklin, paid media and retail media senior lead at Bayer, delivered a useful reminder to an industry that sometimes treats every dashboard as a victory parade: winning in retail media requires more than colorful graphs and aggressive sales decks. “What does winning look like in […]

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — POSSIBLE 2026 drew more than 7,500 attendees this week, up from 5,400 last year, as organizers used the event’s momentum to announce an international expansion to Lisbon, signaling ambitions to turn the fast-growing marketing conference into a global franchise. The Portugal launch marks the first overseas edition of POSSIBLE, which has […]

NEW YORK – At the IAB Connected Commerce Summit, Amelia Van Camp, head of agentic commerce at AI firm Mirakl, offered a timely reminder for anyone convinced AI shopping agents are already buying socks, cereal and patio furniture on humanity’s behalf: not so fast. “So agentic commerce is in concept, in theory,” Van Camp said […]

As Beet.TV celebrates 20 years of documenting media’s endless reinvention, Peter Naylor, chief client officer at Nielsen, offered a reminder that the biggest disruption in television didn’t kill advertising. It upgraded it. From its first video shot at Google’s campus in Mountain View in 2006 to thousands of interviews from CES hallways and industry conferences, […]

NEW YORK — Ace Hardware may be famous for paint, screws and the reassuring smell of lumber, but now it also sells advertising. Molly Hjelm, head of retail media at Ace, says the co-op’s unusual structure gives it a distinctive angle in the ad business now sweeping retail. “Ace Hardware is a unique business model […]

NEW YORK — Commerce media is booming so fast it may soon need its own zoning permit. Caroline Giegerich, vice president of artificial intelligence at IAB, said the sector is expected to reach $105 billion in 2025, roughly triple the size of four years ago, which is the sort of growth chart that makes PowerPoint […]

NEW YORK – Retail media has spent the past few years being treated like advertising’s golden child. Money poured in, decks multiplied and everyone claimed miraculous returns. Now comes the less glamorous phase: proving it. Brian Monahan of Albertsons Media Collective arrived at the Beet.TV AI Media Summit with Horizon Media carrying a message for […]

As Beet.TV marks 20 years of chronicling the media business, Bill Koenigsberg, founder and CEO of Horizon Media, used the milestone to deliver a pointed message to Madison Avenue: swagger is cheap, culture compounds. From its first recording at Google’s campus in Mountain View in 2006 to the maze-like halls of CES, Beet.TV has built […]

NEW YORK – Artificial intelligence is already being put to work where it matters most: making ads smarter and cheaper, says Dawn Williamson, chief revenue officer at Comcast Advertising. “AI is an incredible asset that we all have,” Williamson said in this interview at the IAB NewFront with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. “One of the […]

NEW YORK – The home screen land grab is heating up as brands realize that the most valuable moment in connected TV advertising is not mid-show or even pre-roll. It is the instant a viewer turns the television on, says Matt Milne, president and chief revenue officer of TiVo Ads at Xperi. In this interview […]

Viant Technology Inc. is acquiring TVision Insights, a move that could reshape how television advertising is measured by embedding real-time attention data directly into media buying. The deal brings together Viant’s identity and programmatic capabilities with TVision’s second-by-second “eyes-on-screen” measurement, aiming to give advertisers a more objective view of what actually works across TV. In […]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Lou Paskalis has a characteristically blunt assessment of artificial intelligence’s growing appetite for content, likening it less to innovation and more to a well-organized heist. “The reason that I think the IAB is correctly calling AI scraping an existential threat to publishers is because it is routinized theft,” the advertising […]

Beet.TV this year turns 20, which in media years is roughly equivalent to surviving several platform extinctions and at least one pivot to video that actually worked. What began with a taping at Google’s Mountain View campus in 2006 has grown into a sprawling archive of about 11,000 interviews tracking everything from early vlogging to […]

NEW YORK – At the IAB NewFronts, Liane Nadeau, chief investment and media officer at Publicis Groupe’s Digitas North America, made a quiet but notable admission: the old rivalry between direct buys and programmatic is over, and frankly, it was getting awkward anyway. “Historically, those two things would’ve been antithetical,” Nadeau said, referring to direct […]

NEW YORK – Keiko Mori, head of creative product marketing, North America at TikTok, said the social video platform’s latest ad formats aren’t here to quietly blend in. They are here to make an entrance, preferably the moment you open the app. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the IAB NewFronts, Mori walked through […]

Michael Krans is trying to pull retail media out of the margins and into the center of the marketing playbook. The head of retail media at department-store chain Macy’s is on a mission to turn the Macy’s Media Network from a transactional afterthought into something closer to a marketing nerve center. “We are attempting to […]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – If there is one thing Christa Klausner would like the industry to stop doing, it is obsessing over “tension.” Yes, commerce media networks want control. Yes, agencies want flexibility. No, this is not a reality show. “Tension is kind of a strong word,” said Klausner, executive vice president of commerce […]

NEW YORK – At the IAB NewFronts 2026, Abbey Thomas of Anoki AI had a message that might make media buyers do a double take: thanks to a new partnership with Allen Media Group, advertising in news may no longer feel like a reputational gamble. Speaking with David Kaplan of Beet.TV, Thomas laid out how […]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – At the Beet Retreat San Juan, Beth Gross, head of commerce media at Yahoo DSP, described a business that is trying to serve two masters without upsetting either. On one side, Yahoo helps brands tap into commerce data and signals to improve campaigns. On the other, it helps retailers and […]