LONDON — The ad industry is far past the “experimental stage” of artificial intelligence use cases, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the messy complexity associated with the transition is over. “You have to wallow in the mud, which is there’s so much change happening and it’s such transformative change,” Ramsey McGrory, President of Mediaocean’s omnichannel platform Prisma, told Beet.TV contributor Robert [...]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. — Best Buy can tie almost all its transactions back to individual customers, an ability the company considers market leading that’s based on precise measurement and attribution across the complex consumer electronics purchase path. “We have a 93% revenue identification rate. So what that means is 93% of our transactions we can tie back to a customer [...]

LONDON — Is friction the fundamental mechanism of advertising, stopping a consumer in their tracks to show them something they did not ask for? Many in the industry have long sought to make ads a complement to user activity. Now "agentic commerce", where AI software acts on behalf of consumers to find and purchase goods, suggests a future where promotional messaging must be [...]

LONDON — The promise of interactive television advertising has been around for decades. In the UK, "press red" buttons on satellite remotes teased a future of viewer engagement that never quite materialized. The problem was, the hardware wasn’t as ready as consumers may have been. Now, with streaming devices packing more processing power, that long-awaited future may finally be arriving. "The desire [...]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. – Premium connected television inventory, especially live sports, is poised for a programmatic overhaul, but technological hurdles and a need for clearer metrics are holding back a full transition, said Jean Fitzpatrick, executive vice president of commercial strategy at IPG Mediabrands. Speaking at the Beet Retreat LA to Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Fitzpatrick dissected the supply- and [...]

LONDON — Some advertisers have progressed beyond measuring attention as a signal to using it as a planning currency for more than a year. Still, many others are just beginning to analyze attention metrics from existing campaigns. “I know a sport brand, for instance, which has been using attention from a planning perspective for over a year now. Whereas there’s some [...]

LONDON – Contextual advertising may be one of digital media’s oldest ideas, but advances in artificial intelligence are pushing it into new territory, said Brian Gleason, chief executive of contextual advertising platform Seedtag. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Beet.TV and WPP Media Leadership Summit, Gleason traced the evolution of contextual advertising from its roots in niche publishing to [...]

LONDON — The television industry remains hobbled by a double standard that gives tech giants an unfair advantage when competing for advertising dollars, according to a senior executive at one of America's largest media companies. Traditional media companies continue to operate at a competitive disadvantage because they're held to stricter measurement requirements than their technology-focused rivals, creating what amounts to an [...]

LONDON – Connected television and ad-supported streaming are moving firmly into the mainstream, creating rapid growth opportunities and new challenges for advertisers and the programmatic ecosystem, said Cadi Jones, SVP, EMEA, at Index Exchange. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Beet.TV and WPP Media Leadership Summit, Jones said CTV and ad-supported video on demand, or AVOD, adoption is accelerating [...]

In-store retail media is maturing beyond pilot programs toward enterprise-wide networks as national brands commit repeat investments and standardized measurement becomes urgent rather than aspirational. “We’re seeing that national brands are shifting real media dollars [from online] to in-store with repeat investments. That demand for standardized KPIs has really become urgent, and that’s causing a lot of retailers to start aligning [...]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. – Could the narrative around connected TV be shifting? Once seen as a pure-play brand-building medium, a growing chorus of vendors and agencies now pitches CTV as a bottom-funnel conversion driver. But for some, this view represents a fundamental misreading of both the medium and marketing itself. Benoit Vatere, Chief Media Officer at beverage brand Liquid Death, believes [...]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. – Linear TV ad budgets have gone from a steady migration to connected TV to a full-on deluge after two decades of industry predictions. The shift has followed linear viewership rates that push buyers toward direct insertion order deals seeking CPM guarantees and impression volume. “I’ve been saying this for 20 years, but linear dollars are actually [...]

NBCUniversal today announced a suite of new cross-platform data and technology products that promises to enhance the consumer experience and prove real-time impact for advertisers.  Chief among NBCU's solutions was the introduction of LIVE Total Impact, which the media giant is billing as industry’s first cross-platform tool designed to leverage real-time viewership of live tentpole moments and extend engagement across [...]

LONDON — Advertisers have faced the perennial issue of balancing identity-focused ad targeting with the need to respect these same consumers’ demand for privacy. The promises of agentic AI seem to grow on a daily basis, but the still-emerging tech just may be the one to solve this targeting dilemma for marketers and media buyers. “The problem from an advertiser perspective [...]

As connected television matures, contextual targeting is set to become more intelligent, more dynamic and far more creative, according to Jessica Brown of WPP Media, speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. Looking ahead to CES, Brown said she’s focused on three key trends in contextual CTV: using AI to scale relevance, bringing context into live moments, and reshaping creative to match [...]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. – As artificial intelligence reshapes nearly every corner of modern media, Spark Foundry president Steve Birnbaum says its most transformative effect can be summed up in a single word: streamlining. From how agencies use data to how brands connect with consumers, AI is helping reduce complexity, accelerate decisions and surface insights that once took teams countless [...]

Publishers facing traffic declines from artificial intelligence-powered search summaries might have one engaging tool to fight back. “Video can't that easily be replaced by an AI summary. Even if you do video to text and you can summarize it, it doesn’t replace the experience of watching a video,” Shachar Orren, co-founder, CRO and CMO at EX.CO, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. [...]

LONDON - The exploding retail media advertising sector may have hit a roadblock on its path to maturity, with a persistent lack of common measurement rules hindering its potential for scaled investment. To overcome this, the industry must move toward a future where standardized measurement is the default setting, not the exception. This is the view of Jason Wescott, global head of [...]

LONDON - The programmatic supply chain has become a tangled web, and holding companies are demanding help to cut through it. That's why Google Ad Manager is doubling down on its agency-facing partnerships, responding to growing pressure from major buyers who want closer relationships with premium publishers and clearer paths through an increasingly complex ecosystem. "Over the last several years, we've had [...]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. — Retail media is rapidly evolving from a performance-driven niche into a foundational layer across the entire advertising ecosystem, according to analyst and consultant Andrew Lipsman, speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat LA. Lipsman argued that the industry’s understanding of retail media remains too narrow. While brands often see it as a branch [...]