LAS VEGAS – As the advertising industry debates how quickly agentic AI will move from theory to practice, Alliant says the shift is already tangible inside its business. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Margo Hock, vice president of digital partners, said Alliant’s acquisition of AnalyticsIQ is now entering a critical phase. The focus has moved beyond deal [...]

Retail stores are already crowded with visual cues, from packaging to printed signs. The challenge for brands is breaking through that noise without slowing shoppers down. Chris Riegel, founder and chief executive of Stratacache, frames the store as a stage where motion can guide attention and influence choice. “If you think of a retail space as a theater for a consumer [...]

LAS VEGAS — Creative and media teams frequently operate in isolation and optimize independently despite opportunities to integrate contextual signals across both functions for improved campaign performance. “Too often they’re in silos and optimize separately,” Christopher Murphy, svp, strategy and business development at Innovid, told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES. “The fidelity of signals, whether it’s an audience or [...]

LAS VEGAS – For years, buying premium video advertising meant navigating a maze of separate workflows, incompatible systems, and manual processes that kept linear television and streaming in distinct silos. But that fragmentation is now collapsing under the weight of artificial intelligence, which is reshaping how advertisers access and activate across the entire video landscape. "AI is transforming how premium video is [...]

The advertising industry has spent decades perfecting how to reach consumers. Now it faces a new challenge: marketing to machines. As artificial intelligence reshapes how people discover and purchase products, marketers are starting to grapple with ensuring AI agents recommend your brand when consumers ask for help. "I'm calling it B2A marketing," said Sheryl Goldstein, EVP and chief industry growth officer at [...]

LAS VEGAS — Consumers increasingly feel brands don’t care about them as companies reduce brand investment under pressure to prove immediate value, creating disconnection that surfaces in research showing most people believe advertisers pursue transactions rather than relationships. “Something like 71% of consumers have said, ‘I think they’re only after me for my dollars.’ Meanwhile, 50-plus percent of people said brands [...]

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 [...]