LAS VEGAS -- Are the days of B2B marketers waiting around for small business owners to type their needs into a search box numbered? A growing cohort of advertisers is realizing that, by the time someone searches for "freight logistics" or "business insurance," they've already made up their mind - and the bidding war has already begun. So, some portion of B2B [...]

LAS VEGAS — Principal-based media buying can best be seen as a not just an update of traditional “media barter” arrangements, but as a way to solve the problems associated with that old form of agency/publisher deals. As Incon International’s Reid Steinberg notes, principal-based buys can help advertisers unlock additional budgetary spending. On top of that, it can also fund [...]

LAS VEGAS -- The future of premium video advertising may be decided in milliseconds - faster than any human trader could ever react. That's the promise of agentic buying, which enables autonomous systems to optimize campaigns at the line-item level in real time. The technology represents a fundamental shift in how media is transacted, moving from periodic manual adjustments to continuous, [...]

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence models trained on low-quality data risk generating meaningless insights that then degrade further as models train on their own flawed outputs, creating a destructive cycle that obscures actual campaign performance. “One thing that I fear, especially with all the excitement around AI, is that the quality of the training data that goes into a lot of [...]

LAS VEGAS – Media fragmentation is reshaping performance marketing in two ways, said Todd Parsons, Chief Product Officer and President of Performance Media at Criteo. Consumers move fluidly across discovery, consideration and purchase channels, while marketing organizations still operate in channel silos. Speaking with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES 2026, Parsons said the performance stack now needs to be [...]

For decades, the grocery aisle was a static environment where cardboard displays and price tags did the heavy lifting. Now, the physical retail environment is undergoing a digital overhaul designed to rival the programmatic capabilities of the open web - turning brick-and-mortar locations into networked media channels. By integrating sensor technology and centralized content management, retailers aim to close the gap [...]

LAS VEGAS -- The traditional marketing planning cycle is dead. That's the stark message for advertisers trying to succeed on discovery-driven platforms. For brands accustomed to lengthy campaign development timelines, the platforms where consumers now spend their time operate on an entirely different clock. "The speed at which you have to drive innovation and decision making is really going to be different [...]

LAS VEGAS –Sir Martin Sorrell, executive chairman of S4 Capital, has a blunt assessment of advertising’s future. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Sorrell said agentic AI “fundamentally challenges the model.” Strategic and creative under attack Sorrell argued that agentic systems threaten the traditional agency stack. “Strategic and creative is under attack,” he said. “The big question is whether it [...]

LAS VEGAS -- For years, streaming advertisers operated in the dark. They could target specific households with precision, but had little visibility into what those viewers were actually watching when their ads appeared. That opacity may be finally lifting, as publishers are sharing more content data, aggregators like Gracenote are stitching it together, and AI platforms are making sense of signals [...]

LAS VEGAS — Advertisers are pouring billions into virtual worlds, with U.S. game ad revenues projected to climb nearly 7% to reach $8.59 billion this year. But, while nearly half of gamers purchase items based on in-game ads, a majority still view these interruptions as a distraction from the action. The problem? A lack of channel-specific creativity, where marketers simply transplant [...]

LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Comcast’s NBCUniversal rolled out an idea that sounds futuristic but solves an old headache: buying live sports ads without losing your sanity. Ryan McConville, chief product officer and EVP of ad products at NBCUniversal, said the company is testing agentic AI to automate live sports buying across streaming and linear TV. That second part matters more [...]

LAS VEGAS – At CES 2026, Albertsons Media Collective outlined how it is tightening measurement, expanding in-store media and using AI to link advertising more directly to sales outcomes. Senior Vice President Brian Monahan said the network is focused on shared growth across brands, merchants and shoppers. “We seek to live up to our name and drive collective growth,” Monahan said in [...]

LAS VEGAS -- The gaming industry has long been the epitome of fragmentation - mobile gamers on tiny screens, console enthusiasts locked into expensive hardware, and PC players tethered to their desks. Now a new platform aims to unite them all on the largest screen in the house. PHYND is betting that the smart TV already sitting in most living rooms [...]

LAS VEGAS - Agentic commerce is expanding how consumers shop rather than replacing existing channels, says Michael Komasinski, chief executive of adtech firm Criteo. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Komasinski said AI-powered assistants should be viewed as an incremental layer that complements search, social and retail media, not a substitute for them. “Traditional search has been fragmenting for [...]

LAS VEGAS – Advertisers sounded a familiar concern at CES 2026: They still struggle to measure television and video spending across platforms in one unified view. That challenge has persisted for years, Julie Van Ullen, president, CRO of iSpot, said in this interview with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV. The biggest gap has been measurement inside “walled gardens.” “The lack of [...]

The complexity of purchasing premium video across linear and streaming endpoints has long plagued the industry, creating friction that often sends budgets flowing toward simpler social platforms. As artificial intelligence matures from generative creative tools into autonomous transaction capabilities, the machinery of media trading is beginning to mimic the speed of high-frequency finance. But while algorithms accelerate the pace of commerce, the [...]

LAS VEGAS – Agentic AI and self-serve tools took center stage at CES in Las Vegas last week, marking a significant shift from assisting advertisers to actually executing media campaigns. Joining me in the bustling Beet.TV studio at the Vdara Hotel, I caught up with Reddit’s Stephen Riad, who was just promoted to EVP of advertising sales. Here, we discussed Reddit’s [...]

LONDON — Retail media is evolving from a transaction-focused performance channel toward brand building as companies leverage data and signals to shape customer connections across multiple touchpoints. “Companies can actually use the data in two ways. One is obviously the transaction that will always be there, will remain strong, but also brand building,” Luis Martinez, managing partner for Commerce at WPP [...]

LAS VEGAS – Amazon Ads and Publicis Media unveiled new research on interactive video advertising at CES 2026. The joint thought leadership study focuses on interactive formats in streaming TV. “Yes, we're really excited to announce and release the Joint Thought Leadership Study with Publicis Media today at CES,” Maggie Zhang, head of global video measurement GTM at Amazon, told Lisa [...]

LONDON – Linear television viewing is declining across major European markets, driving a corresponding drop in advertising spend, says Andy Jones, VP of broadcast and connected television, EMEA, at PubMatic. The shift is consistent across regions and no longer disputed by buyers or sellers, he said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Future of TV Advertising Global [...]