Recent Videos
Ubiquitous Video Expands High-Impact Ad Inventory: VideoElephant’s Brian Cullinane
LAS VEGAS – VideoElephant positions itself as a connective layer across the video ecosystem, linking media owners, publishers and advertisers through a vast content library and distribution network. Brian Cullinane, chief commercial officer of VideoElephant, said the company manages roughly 5 million short-form video assets, adding thousands more each day, alongside hundreds of thousands of hours of long-form programming. “At our core, [...]
Contextual Targeting Is Turning CTV Into a Performance Channel: Wurl CEO Dave Bernath
Connected TV advertising is rapidly evolving from a branding medium into a measurable performance channel, driven by advances in contextual targeting, data normalization and artificial intelligence, according to Dave Bernath, chief executive of streaming data and ad-tech firm Wurl. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Bernath said advertisers are increasingly able to use the same digital tools that power performance marketing [...]
Instacart’s Ali Miller Targeting Retail Media ‘Fragmentation’ With Off-Platform Push
LAS VEGAS -- The race to monetize shopper data has turned retail media into the advertising industry’s fastest-growing sector, projected to surpass combined spending on connected TV and traditional television by 2027. But perhaps it is also exacerbating a tangled web of walled gardens, leaving buyers navigating a landscape defined as much by its complexity as its scale. The next phase [...]
Advanced Audience Planning Drives TV’s Next Phase: iSpot’s Dan Hickox
LAS VEGAS – Media budgets are steadily moving from linear television to connected TV, opening new ways for marketers to reach audiences with greater precision, according to Dan Hickox, vice president of business development and partnerships at iSpot. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Hickox said the shift allows brands to activate direct audience targeting while bringing more [...]
Personalization Inside Physical Stores Underpins Retail Media Strategy: CVS’s Paul Lentz
LAS VEGAS – Paul Lentz, head of strategic development at CVS Media Exchange, says personalization inside physical stores is becoming a central pillar of CVS’s retail media strategy. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Lentz said technology investments are helping the drugstore chain tailor the in-store experience to local communities rather than treating its thousands of locations as [...]
Gracenote’s Bill Michels: Scene-Level Targeting Only Works If You Can Do It At Scale
LAS VEGAS — Targeting ads to specific scenes within TV content sounds like the ultimate precision play. The challenge is that precision without scale doesn't spend budgets, and most scene types don't appear frequently enough to matter. “Someone’s in a shower scene, going to sell them soap. How many shower scenes are there? There’s not that many,” Bill Michels, chief product [...]
Marketing Intelligence Adds Value to Growth Partnerships: Nielsen’s Peter Naylor
PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Nielsen is pushing to broaden how the industry views the company, positioning itself not just as a ratings provider but as a full marketing intelligence partner, according to Peter Naylor, chief client officer at Nielsen. Speaking in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Naylor said his mandate is to change how clients think [...]
Index Exchange’s James Wilhite: Gracenote Integration Promises CTV Proof-of-Purchase
LAS VEGAS — Buyers can now verify connected TV purchases at the show level, seeing specific line items, CPMs, impressions, and total media spend rather than trusting that budgets allocated toward major television events actually reached intended inventory. “Before a couple of days ago, it was impossible for a buyer to know exactly what they were buying in CTV in particular,” [...]
Dentsu X’s Maggie Summers: CTV Finally Hit Critical Mass for Performance Marketing
Connected TV advertising has reached a tipping point where impression volume, measurement capabilities, and targeting precision converge to create genuine performance marketing opportunities. “CTV’s finally hit that point of critical mass. So there’s enough impressions in the marketplace to really effectively reach consumers who are in that shopping mindset,” Maggie Summers, EVP and head of Activation at Dentsu X, told Beet.TV [...]
Behavioral Data Holds Key to Unlocking CTV’s True Potential, EDO’s Weiss Says
LAS VEGAS – The quest for meaningful audience metrics in the CTV space continues to challenge advertisers and media companies alike. Could behavioral intent data hold the answer to proving advertising effectiveness? By analyzing real-world search behavior and website visits following ad exposure, companies can create actionable signals from the noise of digital interactions to predict sales outcomes. "We believe that the [...]
Amazon’s Charlotte Maines: Vast Authenticated Reach Brings Advertisers’ Storytelling From ‘Doorstep To Bedroom’
LAS VEGAS — Amazon’s nearly total reach — 90% of U.S. customers across authenticated devices — means that advertisers can tell personalized stories that follow consumers throughout their day, from users’ Fire TV's in their living room to bedtime Alexa smart speaker podcasts. “If you think about it as an advertiser, [there are] so many different unique touchpoints and ways to [...]
AI Now Underpins the Marketing Operating System: Nissan’s Allyson Witherspoon
PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Nissan Motor Corp.’s chief marketing officer and global brand advisor Allyson Witherspoon says artificial intelligence has moved from a side experiment to the backbone of the automaker’s marketing organization. AI as the foundation of planning, measurement and creative Speaking with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Witherspoon said AI now underpins nearly every part of Nissan’s marketing [...]
Market Transparency, AI Reshape Ad Buying in Connected TV: Horizon Media’s Samantha Rose
LAS VEGAS – As viewers gain more control over what they watch and when they watch it, Horizon Media is reshaping how it plans for connected TV. Speaking with Beet.TV at CES 2026, strategic investment lead Samantha Rose said CTV can no longer be treated as a single bucket. Instead, Horizon plans across distinct subcategories, including live CTV, subscription video on [...]
Why CTV Is Becoming the Backbone of Healthcare Marketing: The Trade Desk’s Baron Harper
LAS VEGAS – Healthcare marketers are increasingly treating TV as the starting point for omnichannel strategy as connected TV adoption reaches critical mass and measurement improves, said Baron Harper, general manager of business development at The Trade Desk. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Harper said the industry is moving beyond simply showing up on many platforms toward [...]
How to Succeed in Game Ads: ‘Respect the Game World’
LAS VEGAS – How do you reach an audience that's actively engaged without becoming an unwelcome intruder? The answer, according to one media strategist, lies in understanding that gamers aren't just consumers - they're participants in carefully crafted worlds they care deeply about. "Brands can show up in gaming without disrupting the experience by leading with respect," said Samantha Lim, svp, gaming [...]
For In-Store Media, Relevance Is the New Scale
For years, in-store digital media has chased scale, adding more screens to more stores. However, this approach often overlooked the fundamental component required to turn a shopper’s glance into a purchase: relevance. Now, a more deliberate strategy is taking hold. Retailers are rethinking their in-store networks not as a collection of screens, but as an intelligent infrastructure designed with purpose, according [...]
Comcast’s Karen Babcock: AI Can Transform Ads From ‘Interruption’ to ‘Complement’ of Content
LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence can reshape advertising from disruptive interruption to emotional complement by matching ad tone to surrounding content, preventing jarring transitions that produce negative attention as opposed to the good kind. “Let’s say someone was watching Good Will Hunting. It’s the iconic scene where Ben Affleck’s in the bar in Boston; it’s energetic, it’s loud, and they cut [...]
Open Web Needs Its Own AI Interface in Next Revenue Chapter: Taboola’s Adam Singolda
LAS VEGAS – Adam Singolda sees consumer behavior shifting faster than most media companies expected. Large language models such as ChatGPT are becoming a daily interface for information, he said, but the experience remains uneven across platforms. Some LLMs are ad free, others are ad-supported, while the open web sits largely outside those walled gardens. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan [...]
Streaming Ad Market Matures as Programmatic, AI, Contextual Targeting Accelerate: FreeWheel’s Kathy Argyriou
The U.S. streaming advertising market reached a turning point in 2025 as a surge of ad-supported inventory reshaped pricing, buying strategies and definitions of premium television, says Kathy Argyriou, head of publisher sales at FreeWheel, a unit of Comcast. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Argyriou said the rollout of ad-supported tiers from major streaming platforms drove a sharp increase in [...]
CTV Emerges as Performance Channel Amid Shift to Lower-Funnel Ad Buying: Roku
LAS VEGAS – Roku is leaning into a message advertisers have long wanted to hear: connected TV can now drive measurable business outcomes, not just awareness. Speaking with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES 2026, Lauren Benedict, vice president of global ad sales and partnerships at Roku, said the company is seeing growing demand from marketers to treat CTV as [...]





