From Retail to Reality: Uber’s Argyilan on the Rise of Commerce Media

Posted on by Robert Andrews

The advertising industry loves a good origin story, and few executives can claim to have been present at the creation of an entire media category. Fewer still have helped shape the standards that govern it.

One such executive helped birth retail media at Target, scaled it at Albertsons, and now finds herself expanding the definition of what commerce media can become. The journey from launching Target Media Network – later rebranded as Roundel – to leading global advertising at a platform that moves people and delivers goods in real-time represents a logical evolution in thinking about first-party data and consumer moments.

“There are some really important platforms out there that have just fundamentally changed our behavior as consumers, and Uber is one of those,” said Kristi Argyilan, global head of advertising at Uber Advertising, in a video interview with Beet.TV. “And it’s super exciting to build an ad proposition around that.”

The first-party data revelation

Argyilan’s path to commerce media began in 2014 when she left the agency world to join Target. The retailer wanted someone to lead its total media practice, encompassing strategy, measurement, social, and guest engagement.

What she discovered there would shape her career trajectory. “We started to see the emerging value of first-party data when applied to marketing programs, and the immediate increase in effectiveness that we saw by using first-party data versus the data that we had in the industry, which was more based on cookie pools,” Argyilan said.

That realization sparked the creation of what became a multi-billion-dollar industry. Retail media’s appeal lay in offering alternatives to the dominant walled gardens, and the proposition resonated with marketers hungry for options.

Building the standards

Her next chapter at Albertsons involved bringing their retail media practice in-house from an outsourced agency arrangement. The existing setup provided revenue share but failed to deliver on the promise of creating meaningful advertising moments for consumers.

Client feedback during this period proved invaluable. “I had an opportunity to listen to a lot of clients in terms of what they needed from retail media in order for them to continue to invest in it,” Argyilan recalled. The work extended beyond building Albertsons Media Collective.

Collaboration with the IAB to establish retail media standards created benchmarks the industry still uses today. “It continues to give us a benchmark, all of us, a benchmark in terms of what we should be building toward to make it easier for clients to buy,” she said.

The delivery media opportunity

At Uber, Argyilan discovered something broader than traditional retail media. The platform’s unique position – tracking people going places and getting things delivered hour by hour – opened new possibilities for contextual advertising.

Uber Advertising has been expanding its capabilities, recently launching Uber Intelligence, a data and insights platform developed with LiveRamp, and introducing JourneyTV Presents, an in-ride entertainment experience with premium content partners.

“What’s the premise behind the delivery? Does it look like somebody’s, it’s a Sunday night and they’re buying a bunch of lunch materials for their kids’ lunches for school? Are they trying to do a movie night at home?” Argyilan explained. “We have that kind of context to understand what the moment is that someone is having things delivered to their home.”

Advice for the next generation

For young professionals eyeing the industry, Argyilan offered reassurance about artificial intelligence concerns. “Do not let AI scare you away. There’s plenty of really rich, wonderful work for all levels of people to do in the advertising and media space,” she said.

Young professionals possess an advantage veterans cannot replicate: they understand emerging consumer trends because they live them. “They can see it before it becomes like a macro trend,” Argyilan noted.

“As we become more and more technology-driven, as data and technology-driven as an industry, it’s still about human connection,” she said. “I especially welcome all of the different ways that they can help us craft human connection.”

Political Ads Need Better Neighbors, Not Just More Impressions: Channel Factory’s Nate Turner

Posted on by Rob Williams

Political campaigns spend millions chasing voters across YouTube, streaming TV and the open web. They obsess over reach, frequency and CPMs. They track polls with the intensity of day traders watching Nvidia.

But according to Nate Turner, head of political and advocacy at Channel Factory, many campaigns are overlooking a surprisingly basic question: Did the ad show up next to content that actually helped its message?

“The argument for bringing that same contextual rigor for brand campaigns into the political atmosphere is really no different,” Turner said in an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan.

His argument is straightforward. Political advertisers have become experts at counting impressions but are often less skilled at measuring whether those impressions appeared in environments that reinforced or undermined their message.

It’s not just about avoiding disasters

For years, brand suitability conversations have focused on keeping ads away from objectionable content. Nobody wants a campaign spot appearing next to conspiracy theories, AI-generated nonsense or videos intended for children.

Turner agrees that matters. But he argues advertisers should think beyond simple risk avoidance.

“Compliance asks: Did we avoid the bad stuff?” Turner said. “Performance asks: Did the context amplify the message?”

In other words, defense matters. Offense matters too.

He compared the challenge to building a balanced marketing strategy. Staying away from harmful content protects a campaign. Showing up in relevant conversations helps it persuade voters.

An ad about economic anxiety, for example, may perform differently alongside financial news than it would next to celebrity gossip.

“That’s not an accident,” Turner said. “That’s a lever for performance measurement.”

The industry’s favorite blind spot

Turner does not believe campaigns suffer from an awareness problem.

After all, no campaign manager is going to object when told their ads should appear alongside relevant content.

“If you go to any campaign or client and you say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna maximize putting your ads around the right conversations that are relevant for your voters,’ they’re gonna be like, ‘Awesome, no brainer,'” Turner said.

The real issue, he argues, is measurement.

Political advertisers have become highly sophisticated at managing reach, frequency and creative rotation. What they often fail to measure is the quality of the content environment surrounding those impressions.

“You can tell me an ad ran 4 million times, but can you tell me how many of those 4 million impressions were actively working against the message?” Turner asked.

That number exists, he said. The industry simply does not spend enough time looking for it.

When an ad lands versus when it merely appears

Turner believes campaigns should focus on three metrics that rarely receive the same attention as delivery statistics.

The first is contextual resonance, meaning whether the content environment reinforces the campaign’s message or weakens it.

The second is attention quality. That goes beyond whether an ad was technically viewable.

“Did the voter actually receive it? Did it actually land with them? Did it resonate with them?” Turner said.

The third is persuasion lift by environment, which measures how voter recall and favorability differ across content categories.

While those concepts may sound less exciting than another dashboard full of impressions, Turner argues they provide a better picture of whether a campaign is actually changing minds instead of merely renting screen space.

Taking back control

If political advertisers fully embrace contextual measurement, Turner believes campaign planning could change significantly.

Campaigns already have countless tools that tell them how much money should be allocated to Meta, YouTube, connected TV and other channels. What they often lack is visibility into whether the environments surrounding those buys are helping or hurting performance.

A successful campaign, he said, should not be judged solely by whether media was delivered as planned.

The more important question is whether the message moved voters.

“If we get that right, we’re gonna have a better idea of, ‘Hey, a good campaign is not just gonna be did we deliver it? Did we actually get the media mix right?'”

The broader impact, Turner added, extends beyond campaign metrics.

“If we get this right, we’re gonna have better informed voters in the world,” he said.

That may sound ambitious for a discussion about ad adjacency. But Turner believes political advertising works best when messages appear in places where people are engaged, attentive and receptive.

After all, an impression is easy to buy. Convincing someone to care is the hard part.

Adtech’s Real Superpower Is Infrastructure: Magnite CTO David Buonasera

Posted on by Rob Williams

As adtech executives spend most of their time talking about AI, identity and data, David Buonasera has a different obsession: making sure the lights stay on when hundreds of millions of viewers suddenly decide to watch the same sporting event at once.

For the CTO of Magnite, infrastructure has quietly become one of the industry’s most important competitive advantages, especially as live sports, streaming and AI place new demands on advertising platforms.

“Infrastructure isn’t normally seen as a strategic advantage in adtech,” Buonasera said in an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. But the rise of programmatic advertising around major live events is changing that equation.

When the world tunes in at once

The challenge becomes obvious during global sporting events. Buonasera pointed to JioHotstar’s coverage of the Cricket World Cup, where audience demand can surge dramatically in a matter of hours.

Using cloud resources, Magnite was able to rapidly expand server capacity across Asia-Pacific markets to absorb the spike in advertising activity. That approach avoids the traditional alternative of buying hardware months in advance and then watching it collect dust once the tournament ends.

The same dynamic is expected to play out during future FIFA World Cup tournaments and other major live sports broadcasts.

For adtech companies, it is the digital equivalent of preparing a stadium parking lot for a crowd that may or may not show up. The difference is that advertisers are less forgiving when traffic backs up.

AI wants answers faster

The infrastructure challenge extends well beyond sports.

“As the industry is evolving, it’s asking us to do more and more decisioning and do it as fast as we have ever done it,” Buonasera said.

At the same time, platforms are processing increasingly large datasets while supporting AI-driven optimization tools. That has pushed companies to balance the reliability and cost efficiency of traditional data centers with access to cloud-based technologies such as GPUs and AI models.

“Having the reliability of your on-prem infrastructure and its cost efficiency, but also being able to use some of the newest technology in the cloud, like GPUs or AI algorithms, is a huge advantage,” he said.

Buonasera argues that companies locked entirely into either cloud or on-premises systems risk missing important benefits. Magnite’s strategy centers on combining both.

The luxury of saying yes

One of the less glamorous realities of adtech is that growth can become a problem.

“The growth in the adtech ecosystem is incredible,” Buonasera said, noting that incoming requests can increase by more than 100% year over year.

For publishers and broadcasters, the last thing they want to hear is that their technology partner has run out of capacity during a period of rapid growth.

“We have the advantage of always being able to say yes,” Buonasera said.

That answer becomes increasingly valuable as publishers generate more inventory, audience providers contribute larger datasets and AI applications consume additional computing resources.

According to Buonasera, some competitors may eventually face difficult choices about which customers receive priority when infrastructure becomes constrained. Magnite’s goal is to avoid those conversations altogether.

Today’s decisions shape tomorrow’s flexibility

While AI has become the industry’s favorite buzzword, Buonasera believes infrastructure decisions made today will determine which companies are actually able to capitalize on future innovations.

“The decisions you make today are going to define how flexible you can be in the future to try new things and scaling out,” he said.

That requires more than simply adopting a hybrid-cloud strategy. Companies must carefully consider how their cloud and on-premises systems interact, where they are located and how efficiently data moves between them.

As audience data volumes continue to grow and AI workloads become more demanding, Buonasera sees infrastructure moving from a back-office concern to a boardroom priority.

After all, AI may generate the headlines. But if the servers cannot keep up during the next World Cup, nobody will be talking about the algorithm.

Posted in Uncategorized

Kargo’s Alena Morris: CTV Insights Now Drive Video Strategy Across All Channels

Posted on by David Kaplan

MIAMI — Traditional channel-specific approaches give way to comprehensive marketing strategies as brands apply connected TV insights across video campaigns on desktop and social platforms, enabling cross-channel optimization rather than isolated performance evaluation.

“Less and less marketers are thinking about channel strategies. They’re thinking about the holistic marketing strategy,” Alena Morris, vp, product marketing & GTM strategy at Kargo, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE. “What are the insights that I have from CTV? Can I take those learnings and maybe apply it to my video strategy on desktop? Or can I take those learnings and apply it to the video that I’m running on social?”

This shift becomes necessary as consumer identity fragmentation across touchpoints makes comprehensive journey understanding increasingly complex for brands seeking measurable outcomes.

Identity fragmentation complicates insights

Consumer identity exists across disconnected environments spanning open web, connected TV, social platforms, and in-store locations, requiring brands to collect diverse signals including identifiers, contextual information, and real-world behaviors.

“Identity is super fragmented and it makes it hard for brands to understand the entire consumer journey,” Morris said. “There’s a lot of different ways in the ecosystem to slice and dice that and get information.”

This fragmentation extends beyond identity to inventory placement, where consumer attention also becomes distributed across multiple platforms and touchpoints.

The three-part solution

Effective consumer journey mapping requires identity signal collection, strategic inventory placement where consumers spend time, and consistent creative messaging that resonates with brand goals throughout all touchpoints.

“Identity is fragmented, but where consumers are spending time is also fragmented. So brands really need to think about showing up in all of the places and spaces where their consumers might be,” Morris said.

The creative component often gets overlooked despite its importance in delivering consistent, on-brand messaging across fragmented environments.

CTV enables lower-funnel measurement

Connected TV evolution from upper-funnel branding toward lower-funnel outcomes becomes possible through increased data signals and scale that enable foot traffic and in-store outcome connections.

“CTV used to be an upper funnel tactic, so very much like branding and awareness, but now we’re able to tie CTV exposure to more like in store traffic, foot traffic,” Morris said. “It ties more directly to a brand’s outcomes.”

This transformation provides transparency that traditional buyers expect while adding digital targeting precision and real-world outcome measurement.

Cross-channel insights drive optimization

Holistic strategies enable A/B testing and scaled optimization as brands transfer learnings between video formats and platforms rather than treating each channel as isolated investment.

Outcome measurement transforms budget allocation from awareness-based investment toward data-driven recommendations that prove performance across specific areas.

“It changes from something that is like, I’m going to put this budget here and I know it makes an impact, but I don’t really know how it’s impacting my bottom line,” Morris said. “Now it’s like, I’m running on CTV. It’s an important part of my strategy and I can prove out that it’s working in A, B and C areas.”

Travel Media Catches Consumers at ‘Just the Right Place’ for Perception Shift, Says Initiative’s Medford

Posted on by Robert Andrews

The moment a consumer starts dreaming about their next vacation might be the most valuable real estate in advertising. Not too early, not too late – somewhere in the middle of the travel planning journey, brands have a rare opportunity to reshape how people perceive them.

That sweet spot is driving a 30% year-over-year increase in advertiser spending on travel media networks, as marketers recognize the unique mindset of consumers actively researching and booking trips. So, the sector has become one of the fastest-growing segments in commerce media.

“You’re not at the very beginning of the journey, you’re also most of the time not at the very end of the journey, but sometimes in just the right place for a brand to be able to speak to a consumer in a way that can shift that consumer’s perception of that brand for a lifetime,” said Bre Medford, managing director at Initiative, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

The why behind the booking

Travel advertising is seeing a shift away from destination-focused messaging toward intent-driven communication. The question now is: “Why do they want to go there?”

Whether a trip represents a multi-generational gathering, a bucket-list adventure, or a cultural pilgrimage to a concert or sporting event, the answer changes plenty about how brands should approach their messaging. “It’s so important for us to understand the why behind a consumer and what they’re trying to do with travel so that a message can be authentically tied to that purpose,” Medford said.

U.S. travel media network ad spending reached $2.13 billion in 2024, according to Emarketer, representing a 29% increase from the prior year. Projections suggest the figure will climb to $2.96 billion by 2026 as more advertisers recognize the value of reaching consumers during active planning phases.

Precision meets emotion in the AI era

And the integration of artificial intelligence into travel marketing has reignited a perennial debate: how do brands balance precision targeting with the need to forge genuine emotional connections? Medford argued both approaches have distinct and complementary roles.

“There’s never not going to be a role for your hero campaign for your big brand awareness push,” she said. “And there’s also always going to be a role for precision and ensuring that you’re reaching the right person at the right time. That’s advertising at its very core.”

The key, according to Medford, lies in recognizing that AI-powered personalization should enhance rather than replace human-centered strategy. “There’s literature and some studies around what human nature will bring to strategy and how that comes through in the age of AI and how important that is for brands to harness,” she said.

Catching the undecided – and the recently booked

Travel media networks occupy a distinctive position in the marketing funnel because they reach consumers who are already mentally and financially committed to spending. This creates two distinct strategic opportunities for advertisers:

  1. The first targets undecided travelers who may need a perception shift about what certain brands can offer them.
  2. The second, perhaps counterintuitively, focuses on people who have already booked. “If you’ve been on vacation, you’re thinking about your next vacation and you’re thinking about where you want to go next,” Medford said. “What better time to put our brands in front of those vacationers when they’re already in love with the experience that they’re having.”

Industry data shows advertisers have historically concentrated spending on the pre-trip phase, with 62% of brand ad budgets allocated before departure compared to just 18% during transit, according to Emarketer. That imbalance may be shifting as marketers recognize the value of engaging travelers throughout their journey – from initial dreaming through the trip itself and into the post-vacation glow when the next adventure starts taking shape.

Brands are Chasing the Wrong 5% of Shoppers: Channel Factory’s Nerissa Valdellon

Posted on by Rob Williams

MIAMI — Marketers like to imagine consumers carefully moving through a neat purchase funnel, progressing from awareness to consideration and finally to purchase. Consumers, meanwhile, are busy bouncing between social feeds, streaming platforms, search engines and shopping apps before buying something they didn’t even know they wanted an hour earlier.

That’s the central message from Nerissa Valdellon, svp of media solutions at contextual advertising company Channel Factory, during an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE.

Valdellon pointed to her own purchasing experience, which she recently detailed at the IAB NewFronts, as evidence that brands need to rethink how they measure and plan campaigns.

“I had a great time at the IAB NewFronts presenting on my own personal purchase journey,” Valdellon said. “What’s so important about that journey is that it highlights the way modern consumers buy today.”

According to Valdellon, consumers now move across an average of seven platforms per day. That reality has made traditional channel-based planning increasingly outdated.

“The journey’s fragmented,” she said. “That is not anything new.”

What has changed, she argued, is the need for brands to show up earlier, before consumers have decided they are in the market for a product.

Goodbye funnel, hello 4S

To explain that shift, Valdellon highlighted the “4S” framework: scroll, stream, search and shop.

The model focuses on consumer behaviors rather than media channels or traditional funnel stages. That distinction matters because today’s shoppers often discover, research and purchase products across multiple platforms simultaneously.

“4S framework matters because it represents and aligns to behavior and mindset,” Valdellon said.

In her view, marketers who still categorize social media as purely a discovery tool and video as purely an awareness tactic are working from a playbook that is rapidly aging.

“Social is being transitioned not to just discovery but also search,” she said. “Video is no longer awareness. Video is actually a key driver in the purchase journey.”

In other words, the old funnel may still exist, but consumers seem determined to sprint sideways through it, loop back around and occasionally knock holes in the walls.

The overlooked 95%

One of Valdellon’s more striking observations involved the small percentage of consumers actively shopping at any given moment.

Only about 5% of buyers are considered “in market,” meaning they are ready to make a purchase. Yet many brands concentrate a disproportionate amount of spending on reaching those consumers.

According to Valdellon, that approach creates both inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

“Brands that only focus on 5%, that’s the most expensive part of the social ecosystem,” she said.

The bigger opportunity lies with the remaining 95% of consumers who are not actively shopping but may become interested through effective marketing.

“They’re missing that 95% where they can build their brand from the moment of discovery and intent,” Valdellon said.

The challenge for advertisers is reaching consumers while they are streaming, scrolling and searching, long before they arrive at the checkout page.

Measuring what matters

Of course, every conference eventually arrives at the same destination: measurement.

Valdellon said Channel Factory helps brands understand which activities are actually driving business results by focusing on incrementality, a measurement approach that examines the additional impact generated by advertising rather than simply tallying conversions.

“We help brands understand what’s driving performance,” she said. “We measure through incrementality.”

The company’s technology analyzes content categories, contextual suitability and performance signals to identify what is influencing outcomes across social platforms.

For advertisers overwhelmed by fragmented consumer behavior, rising media costs and endless dashboards, the message was refreshingly simple: stop obsessing over the shoppers already standing at the cash register and spend more time influencing the much larger crowd still wandering the digital aisles.

After all, consumers rarely wake up thinking, “I should buy that product today.” But after seven platforms, three videos, two searches and one late-night scroll session, they often convince themselves otherwise.

Posted in Uncategorized

Havas Media’s Sarah Karges: AI’s ‘Search Answers Sooner’ is Having a Dramatic Impact on Healthcare Marketing

Posted on by David Kaplan

Artificial intelligence empowers patients with faster access to health information and earlier decision-making capabilities, but healthcare marketers must adapt strategies to intersect these accelerated search behaviors with relevant, timely messaging.

“AI is really part of the entire patient journey and it’s really about being able to, patients can go search for answers sooner. They are more empowered, they’re more knowledgeable,” Sarah Karges, svp, performance investment at Havas Media, told Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein. “There’s more opportunity for us to get this relevant information out there to patients.”

This shift requires precision marketing that focuses on patient journey signals rather than individual identities to deliver helpful information during key search moments.

CTV storytelling plus digital precision

Connected TV brings television’s storytelling capabilities and reach together with digital targeting accuracy, addressing healthcare decisions that typically involve multiple household members including caregivers and support systems.

“CTV really brings together the storytelling and scale of TV with the precision of digital. When we’re thinking about health decisions, rarely are those decisions made alone with one individual,” Karges said. “Being able to really intersect that household moment with that precision of digital and audiences, it really helps us have a more impactful messaging.”

Havas’s approach to marketplaces relies direct publisher connections that provide control and transparency over message serving environments.

Signal-based targeting replaces identity focus

Precision healthcare marketing prioritizes patient journey signals including weather conditions affecting condition flare-ups and over-the-counter product purchases rather than individual patient identification.

“It really means putting the patient, caregiver, and provider at the core of every decision that we’re making and really thinking less about platform channel silos, but more about the entire health journey,” Karges said. “The way that we do this is not really by understanding the actual individual identities of that patient, but more so the signals that inform their patient journey.”

This approach enables relevant, timely messaging that addresses specific health needs and outcomes through comprehensive signal integration.

Privacy responsibility drives partner selection

Managing compliance covering privacy protections represents foundational operational principle rather than new constraint, informing activation partner selection within Havas’s converged AI operating system through rigorous OneTrust verification processes.

“For us, privacy responsibility is not new. It’s foundational to how we operate,” Karges said. “All of our partners are OneTrustVerified before we go to market, for example.”

Personalization focuses on journey signal understanding rather than individual identity recognition to ensure responsible data utilization.

Health equity drives outcomes

Real health outcome impact emerges through media exposure connections to doctor visits and new prescriptions, exemplified by Havas’s health equity marketplace targeting underserved communities distant from pharmacies or healthcare providers.

“We’re really understanding and trying to reach patients that are in underserved communities, whether that be a far distance from pharmacies or a healthcare provider,” Karges said. “How can we use those signals and tie them together with health signals to get access to relevant information for these communities, drive an actual health outcome, and ultimately help serve these underserved populations.”

The initiative demonstrates signal integration capabilities that connect geographic and health data for meaningful community impact and measurable healthcare outcomes.

“We can use these signals to help inform what is going to be most relevant to provide this information so that can be using signals to be proactive instead of reactive, pre-diagnosis, pre-treatment, intersecting those key moments where a patient might be searching about their condition,” Karges said.

MiQ’s Moe Chughtai: Has The TV Industry Adapted To The Reality That ‘The Funnel Is Dead?’

Posted on by David Kaplan

MIAMI — Marketers operate in environments where consumers move from awareness to purchase within seconds, but television’s sell-side infrastructure hasn’t evolved to support this accelerated decision-making reality that tech platforms have successfully embraced.

“Marketers have adapted to that reality faster than the TV sell side has,” Moe Chughtai, global VP at MiQ, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE. “When we talk to marketers, they’re already operating in a world where a consumer can move from awareness to intent to an actual purchase in the matter of seconds, if not minutes.”

This disconnect creates opportunities for TV players who can complement platform capabilities through comprehensive signal integration across watching, browsing, and shopping behaviors.

Completing the consumer picture

Television’s competitive advantage lies in capturing undervalued signals including cross-platform viewing data through ACR and set-top boxes, messy middle browsing behaviors spanning out-of-home to LLM interactions, and comprehensive online-offline shopping patterns.

“There’s phenomenal cross platform signals out there, things like ACR, like set top box data that let you see sort of even behind the walled gardens what consumers are tapping into,” Chughtai said. “Whether that’s seeing an out of home ad or a radio ad or even browsing LLMs these days, all those things influence whether a consumer considers your brand or someone else.”

These signals create complimentary outcomes to existing platform capabilities rather than competing directly with established tech dominance.

Currency conversations miss brand priorities

Measurement discussions focus excessively on impression currency rather than addressing actual brand challenges, with AI innovation enabling solutions that solve real business problems beyond traditional metric delivery.

“The last couple of years I just feel like we’ve over focused the measurement conversation around currency,” Chughtai said. “No one wants to fly out and talk about the US dollar. It’s the air that we breathe. It’s behind the scenes.”

MiQ’s Sigma platform demonstrates practical application by identifying QSR advertising waste in markets without store locations, providing actionable insights that drive campaign reallocation decisions.

Location intelligence remains underutilized

Despite privacy challenges reducing location data prominence, it represents consumers’ analog experiences during more than half their daily activities when away from screens in real-world environments.

“I think in 2026 it’s one of the most underutilized, undervalued signals of consumer behavior that’s out there because it’s 50% of the time that consumers have in the real world,” Chughtai said.

Partners like Veraset and Cuebiq play essential roles in new media landscapes by connecting CTV advertising to store visit outcomes and enabling comprehensive cross-channel journey mapping.

AI enables team empowerment

Future success depends on connecting diverse signal types through AI-powered platforms that enable campaign managers to analyze data directly without relying on data scientists for insights and activation.

“We’re in an AI first world. The role of marketers, the role of brands, the role of agencies is all about connecting signals together,” Chughtai said. “The most powerful thing is that you’ve got members of your team who care a lot about your brand and with the power of AI for the first time are able to dig really deep in the data themselves.”

Travel Intent Is Marketing Gold, Not Just a Boarding Pass: Adobe’s Doug Wyatt

Posted on by Rob Williams

As marketers continue their hunt for consumers at exactly the right moment, Adobe has found one particularly revealing signal: people who have already shelled out hundreds of dollars to go somewhere.

Travelers, after all, aren’t just booking flights. They’re planning vacations, attending major events, visiting family and documenting every minute of it on their phones. For advertisers, that creates a rare opportunity to reach consumers before, during and after high intent experiences.

“People are often thinking about this before, during, and after the event,” Doug Wyatt, senior director of Americas media at Adobe, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan in the leadup to this month’s “Flight to Cannes” with Kinective Media by United Airlines. “Those moments are prime for marketers to create emotional connections with our customers.”

In other words, if someone is flying across the country for the Super Bowl, a Taylor Swift concert or a long-awaited family reunion, they’re probably more receptive to messaging than when they are comparing prices on paper towels at midnight.

Chasing travelers across the emotional spectrum

Wyatt described travel as a uniquely powerful environment because it combines intent, anticipation and emotion. Unlike many digital signals, travel plans often represent a deliberate commitment of both time and money.

Adobe’s marketing strategy centers on being present throughout the entire journey.

“We have the unique opportunity of being there with people before their trip, during their trip, and after their trip,” Wyatt said. “It’s about really tying into their emotional storytelling.”

The company also sees a natural connection between travel and Adobe’s core products. Millions of consumers use Adobe software to edit photos, create videos and share memories from trips and events.

Those memories, Wyatt noted, often outlast the journey itself.

Turning the Super Bowl into one giant Adobe ad

One example was Adobe’s extensive activation around the Super Bowl, where the company attempted the marketing equivalent of following consumers from the airport gate to the stadium parking lot.

According to Wyatt, Adobe partnered with United Airlines and transit operators Uber and Lyft. The campaign also included branding and experiences inside the stadium itself.

“We partnered with every partner along the way to the Super Bowl,” Wyatt said. “Really wrapping the entire experience with Adobe was powerful.”

The strategy reflects a broader trend among marketers who increasingly want to own an entire consumer journey rather than a single ad impression. Why settle for one touchpoint when you can potentially accompany someone from baggage claim to kickoff?

Vacation memories and business trips require different playbooks

Not all travelers think alike, however.

Someone taking a once-in-a-lifetime vacation is often looking to capture memories and tell stories. A business traveler racing through O’Hare simply wants technology that works.

“The emotional spectrum matters,” Wyatt said.

For vacation travelers, Adobe focuses on creativity and storytelling. For everyday business travelers, the emphasis shifts toward utility and productivity.

“It’s all about usefulness and how can I help people get their jobs done a lot easier,” Wyatt said.

That distinction may sound obvious, but in an industry still prone to treating every audience segment like a generic demographic bucket, it represents a reminder that context still matters.

AI can personalize, but humans still need to provide the emotion

As expected, the conversation eventually arrived at artificial intelligence, because no marketing interview in 2026 is legally permitted to end before someone mentions AI.

Wyatt sees AI as a valuable tool for understanding intent and scaling personalized messaging. He was also careful to draw a line between automation and emotional resonance.

“The message needs to be human,” he said. “People need to feel an emotion.”

He added that AI can help marketers identify signals and customize delivery, but not replace authentic storytelling.

“AI can help with intent signals, but the human touch really matters when it comes to emotional messaging,” Wyatt said.

For media buyers, the takeaway is straightforward: travel data may reveal what consumers plan to do next. Figuring out how to make them care about your brand once they get there remains a distinctly human challenge.

Media Industry Can Help Drive Sandy Hook Promise Mission: Mktg.ai’s Kevin Wassong

Posted on by Rob Williams

The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting remains one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history and a defining moment in the national debate over gun violence. For Kevin Wassong, founder and chief executive of Mktg.ai, hearing firsthand from a parent who lost a child in the attack became the catalyst for a years-long effort to mobilize the media and advertising industries in support of prevention programs.

Speaking with Beet.TV, Wassong described how meeting Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was killed in the shooting, changed the course of his involvement with Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on violence prevention and youth mental health initiatives.

Gun violence remains national challenge

Gun violence involving children and schools continues to be a major public policy issue in the United States. Advocates of stricter gun laws argue that stronger regulations could help reduce shootings, while opponents contend that protecting constitutional gun rights and focusing on mental health, security measures and enforcement of existing laws are more effective approaches. The issue remains one of the country’s most contentious political battlegrounds, with lawmakers, advocacy groups and voters deeply divided on potential solutions.

Against that backdrop, organizations such as Sandy Hook Promise have focused on prevention efforts that seek to identify warning signs among young people before violence occurs.

An emotional encounter

Wassong recalled first hearing Hockley speak at a conference in 2018. She described dropping her children off at school before learning that a gunman had entered Sandy Hook Elementary.

“It ripped my heart out,” Wassong said. “As a matter of fact, even when I speak about it now, I get choked up.”

He said the experience left him convinced that companies in media, entertainment and technology should play a constructive role in addressing societal challenges.

“I’ve always felt that media, entertainment, technology owes it to society to be part of the solution,” Wassong said. “And I think it’s fair to say we’ve been a contributor to some of the issues.”

Following the conference, Wassong approached Hockley with an idea to create a media advisory board that could help amplify Sandy Hook Promise’s message and expand awareness of its programs.

Building a media advisory network

Wassong said he reached out to a number of senior executives across the advertising and media sectors, including Peter Naylor, Doug Rozen, Adam Gerber and others. The group initially gathered for a lunch meeting that laid the foundation for what would become a much larger industry effort.

“We all got together for a lunch down at the Dejay offices. And that kind of kicked things off,” he said.

The advisory board has since grown to roughly 100 members from across the media ecosystem, according to Wassong. Participants contribute what he described as “time, talent, and treasure” through volunteer work, expertise and media support.

Those efforts have helped secure substantial donated advertising inventory for the organization. Wassong estimated that more than $170 million worth of media support has been contributed over time.

Focus on prevention programs

Wassong emphasized that Sandy Hook Promise’s primary mission differs from many organizations involved in the broader debate over gun violence.

“The main difference between what Sandy Hook Promise does and what other organizations do is that they’re about developing programs that allow kids to recognize signs in themselves or others that they might be at risk of perpetrating some event,” he said.

According to Wassong, the organization says its programs have helped prevent school shootings and suicides while reaching millions of students nationwide through educational initiatives. He said more than 41 million students across the United States have received training through the organization’s programs.

The nonprofit also works with advertising agencies BBDO and PhD on public service campaigns that have received industry recognition, including Emmy Awards.

Seeking broader participation

Wassong said the advisory board continues to recruit participants from across the advertising, media and marketing sectors. He encouraged individuals and companies interested in supporting the effort to reach out directly to him or to Sandy Hook Promise leadership.

Despite the growth of the initiative, Wassong said the ultimate objective is to make the organization’s work unnecessary.

“We’re really excited by that and the work that we’ve been doing, with the ultimate goal, by the way, of being obsolete,” he said.

Marketers are Drowning in Choices, Noise and AI Agents: Criteo’s Ed Dinichert

Posted on by Rob Williams

MIAMI – At the POSSIBLE conference, marketers arrived looking for clarity. Instead, they found another 47 measurement frameworks, 112 AI startups and at least three people claiming they had finally solved incrementality.

For Ed Dinichert, chief customer officer at Criteo, that chaos is precisely the point.

In an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Dinichert described an advertising industry struggling with fragmentation across channels, measurement systems and an increasingly crowded marketplace of AI-powered promises. His prescription was surprisingly simple: stop looking for magic bullets and start climbing the staircase one step at a time.

The identity crisis nobody expected

Having joined Criteo about five months ago, Dinichert said his biggest surprise wasn’t the technology itself but how differently the company is perceived compared with what it actually does.

“The biggest surprise has been really the difference of perception between what Criteo is perceived and what it is really about,” Dinichert said.

While many advertisers still associate Criteo with its historical roots in performance marketing, Dinichert emphasized the scale of the company’s commerce data assets. He pointed to a shopper graph that reaches 750 million users globally each day, maps 5 billion product SKUs and processes roughly $3 billion in daily transactions.

Performance, he said, has been a company obsession for two decades.

“There’s a thousand engineers at Criteo that have been improving the performance algorithm to deliver performance,” Dinichert said. “Performance has been an obsession in this company.”

Welcome to the fragmentation Olympics

Asked about the biggest challenge facing marketers, Dinichert didn’t hesitate.

“It is definitely fragmentation,” he said.

The problem extends from small businesses to large enterprises. Marketers face an expanding list of channels, platforms and retail media networks, all promising superior results. For smaller businesses operating with tighter budgets, choosing where to place their bets can feel less like media planning and more like a high-stakes game show.

Adding to the challenge is what Dinichert called “noise.”

“Everybody’s AI right now,” he said.

That observation may qualify as the least controversial statement uttered at POSSIBLE all week.

Dinichert advised marketers to focus on trust and testing rather than getting swept up by every new AI-powered pitch deck promising autonomous campaign management, infinite optimization and perhaps world peace.

Incrementality remains advertising’s unicorn

If fragmentation is the industry’s headache, measurement may be its migraine.

Dinichert said one of the dominant themes he heard throughout POSSIBLE was marketers’ search for incrementality.

“What I heard the most in the last 36 hours is everyone is searching for incrementality,” he said.

His view was refreshingly realistic.

“If someone cracked incrementality in the last 20 years, it would be a mainstream model. And it’s not,” Dinichert said.

Rather than pursuing a perfect solution, he argued marketers should define their own measurement frameworks and identify the closest practical approximation to incrementality for their business.

In other words, advertising may never discover the Holy Grail. The best available option may be a very good metal detector.

When AI actually does something useful

Despite his skepticism toward AI hype, Dinichert described one emerging application that caught his attention.

He pointed to the growing use of Model Context Protocols, or MCPs, which allow AI systems to interact with software platforms and business tools.

As an example, he cited a recent project involving Dentsu in France, where an LLM was able to connect with Criteo’s systems and facilitate campaign execution through existing APIs. The effort demonstrated a practical use case beyond the conference-stage promises currently flooding the market.

“That’s real,” Dinichert said. “That’s a company, like, they delivered.”

He expects adoption to take time, noting that some of the most innovative implementations are coming not from massive engineering organizations but from smaller teams willing to experiment.

Criteo bets on simplicity

A major part of Criteo’s current strategy centers on Criteo Go, a self-service platform launched in April.

According to Dinichert, it represents the company’s first intentionally designed self-service user interface in its 20-year history. Early feedback has focused on usability and onboarding, particularly for smaller merchants.

The platform includes an AI-driven onboarding process that can automatically ingest product catalogs from Shopify stores, configure tracking tags and prepare campaigns with minimal manual effort.

Dinichert also said the company’s agentic technology has produced performance improvements that exceed results from some managed-service campaigns.

“We have enough uplift of this agentic technology being better than our managed service capabilities by 28% in performance,” he said.

For marketers exhausted by complexity, the pitch is straightforward: fewer buttons, fewer spreadsheets and hopefully fewer emergency meetings about attribution models.

Whether that promise holds up may determine whether Criteo becomes known for what it was, or what Dinichert hopes it is becoming.

Publicis Health Media’s Diana Bernstein: Can Healthcare Marketers Balance Personalization With Privacy Requirements?

Posted on by David Kaplan

MIAMI — Healthcare marketing faces the challenge of delivering relevant, personalized messaging while maintaining strict data privacy compliance, requiring sophisticated approaches that gather cross-device signals without compromising patient confidentiality.

“We have to make sure that we’re doing this in a very data privacy safe way and making sure that we’re delivering that messaging to ultimately help them to get to where we need,” Diana Bernstein, EVP, Investment Marketplace at Publicis Health Media, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE. “We work very closely with our creative teams who are developing creative that’s resonating with the audience in a way that it’s more real to them.”

This balance becomes critical as healthcare journeys require non-linear messaging strategies that adapt to different patient stages without repeating identical advertisements.

Non-linear journeys demand sequential messaging

Healthcare patient paths require cross-environment and cross-device signal gathering to understand complex journeys and deliver appropriate messaging whether focused on education, consideration, or action.

“The healthcare journey is not a linear journey. Data and identity really helps us gather signals across different environments, different devices in order to really understand better that patient journey,” Bernstein said. “We don’t want to be running the same ad over and over again. We want to be sure that we’re helping that audience through their journey.”

This approach enables relevant messaging delivery that matches specific patient journey moments rather than generic repeated exposure.

AI accelerates fragmented CTV optimization

Artificial intelligence breaks down complex datasets to enable quicker data-led investment decisions in real-time, particularly important for navigating connected TV’s fragmented landscape without replacing strategic thinking.

“Within optimization and decisioning, it’s really helping break down those complex data sets and allowing us to make quicker data-led investment decisions in real time,” Bernstein said. “When you’re dealing with a space like CTV that’s very fragmented, being able to have that speed and agility is super important.”

AI enables smarter planning and in-flight optimization while maintaining human strategic oversight for healthcare-specific requirements.

Outcomes extend beyond media metrics

Better healthcare marketing outcomes require measurement that connects media exposure to real-world actions including education, physician consultations, and prescription lift rather than traditional awareness metrics.

“Better outcomes is going beyond just media metrics and it’s actually delivering outcomes, real life outcomes,” Bernstein said. “We really truly want to deliver upon whether that’s education, whether that’s consideration and having somebody reach out to a doctor, have those conversations, or eventually take action such as script lift.”

Precision targeting reduces waste while measurement ensures media exposure translates into meaningful healthcare decisions and behaviors.

“What we’re able to do is have that precision to reduce the waste. We’re able to make sure that measurement is very important within the whole mix of things to make sure that we are taking that media exposure and making sure that it’s actually delivering outcomes,” Bernstein said.

Outcome-Based Optimization Is the Key to Unlocking CTV’s Full Potential

Posted on by Robert Andrews

The connected TV advertising market is hurtling toward $30 billion, but the real opportunity doesn’t lay in scale alone – it’s in proving that ads actually work.

That’s the thesis driving FreeWheel’s recent partnerships with Stagwell and Walmart Connect, both of which prioritize what the industry calls “outcome-based optimization” – the ability to tie advertising exposure directly to consumer actions, whether that’s purchasing a product, downloading an app, or simply remembering a brand.

“What outcomes do when they’re tailored to specific advertisers is help lift the yield and CPM that a publisher can have in a way that buyers are okay with because it’s justified as a more efficient and opportune buy,” said Jon Mansell, vp of US revenue, demand at FreeWheel, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

Stagwell partnership pushes curation to the edge

FreeWheel’s partnership with Stagwell, announced in April, represents what Mansell described as “the innovative edge of what is happening in the agency business.” The collaboration integrates FreeWheel’s Curation Hub and Buyer Cloud into Stagwell’s media acquisition layer, giving the agency holding company direct access to premium video inventory.

The arrangement allows Stagwell to aggregate publisher inventory and route it through whatever buying mechanism suits a given campaign. “They could buy it in any DSP or if they’re working through some sort of agentic activation plan, they can do that through this curation hub as well,” Mansell said.

The emphasis on “proximity to inventory” happens amid a shift away from intermediary-heavy supply chains toward more direct relationships between buyers and sellers. For agencies, that proximity translates into greater transparency and, theoretically, better pricing.

Walmart Connect brings retail data to the living room

The Walmart Connect partnership operates on similar principles but adds a retail dimension that Mansell said publishers are eager to embrace. The retail media giant’s proprietary measurement capabilities allow advertisers—particularly those selling products through Walmart – to optimize campaigns based on actual purchase data.

“One of the things that they’re able to bring into the CTV space that I think all publishers are really excited about is we need more outcome-based optimization,” Mansell said. The ability to connect ad exposure to sales data addresses a longstanding criticism of television advertising: that its effectiveness is difficult to prove.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been pushing for standardized Conversion APIs to improve CTV measurement, acknowledging that ecosystem fragmentation and limited tracking identifiers have hampered advertisers’ ability to link impressions to outcomes. Retail media networks like Walmart Connect offer a workaround by providing closed-loop measurement within their own ecosystems.

Premium signals find a home in programmatic

Beyond outcome measurement, FreeWheel is working to translate traditional television buying criteria into programmatic signals. Metrics like ad load, co-viewing factors, and production quality – staples of upfront negotiations—have historically been absent from programmatic transactions.

“As an ad server and an exchange, we are able to find a way to lift those metrics out of traditional buying and put them into the programmatic ecosystem so that a bidder can actually see them and optimize toward them,” Mansell said. The goal is to preserve the quality assurances that made premium television inventory valuable while enabling the efficiency of automated buying.

This bridging function positions FreeWheel as what Mansell called a neutral party “sitting in the middle just holding the transaction.” Whether that neutrality holds as the company’s parent, Comcast, competes with other media giants remains an open question for some buyers.

Walmart Connect Partners with Yahoo DSP, Magnite to Expand Retail Media Reach

Posted on by Rob Williams

Walmart Connect is expanding the reach of its retail media business beyond its own platforms, allowing advertisers to access Walmart audiences through a new partnership with Yahoo DSP and Magnite. The move aims to simplify programmatic buying while extending Walmart’s commerce data into connected television and other offsite media environments.

The initiative, announced this week by Ryan Mayward, general manager and senior vice president of Walmart Connect, allows advertisers to activate Walmart audiences and access closed-loop measurement through demand-side platforms they already use rather than requiring them to buy exclusively through Walmart’s own tools.

Walmart Connect’s retail media data will be enabled on the supply side through Magnite and Yahoo DSP is the first certified DSP to access the inventory..

“Today, we are announcing a more flexible approach to buying offsite retail media, making Walmart Connect’s audiences and measurement more accessible across the media landscape,” Mayward wrote in a company blog post.

The announcement comes as Walmart’s advertising business continues to grow faster than the retailer’s core operations.

In its fiscal first quarter, Walmart reported global advertising revenue rose 37% from a year earlier, with growth across all segments. Walmart U.S. advertising revenue increased 36%, significantly outpacing the company’s overall revenue growth of 7.3% to $177.8 billion.

In this video interview from CES in Las Vegas earlier this year, Mayward shares details about its retail media strategy with Beet.TV. This video was previously published.

Retail media moves beyond closed ecosystems

Retail media networks have become one of the fastest-growing segments of digital advertising, but marketers have often faced operational hurdles when trying to use retailer data outside of the retailer’s own properties.

Walmart’s latest effort seeks to address that challenge by allowing advertisers to use Walmart audience data within existing programmatic workflows while maintaining Walmart-controlled data governance and measurement capabilities. According to the company, Magnite’s technology will support audience decisioning across multiple demand-side platforms while preserving access to Walmart’s first-party data.

The company said the approach can help advertisers connect media exposure directly to sales outcomes at Walmart stores and online. Walmart cited internal data showing that offsite display campaigns delivered a median 52% rate of new-to-brand customers in 2025.

“Advertisers are looking for simpler ways to activate high-quality data across their programmatic investments,” Adam Roodman, general manager of Yahoo DSP, said in a statement included in the blog.

Connecting shopper marketing and national media

The expansion also reflects a broader trend in advertising as retailers, media companies and technology platforms seek to bridge the gap between brand-building campaigns and sales measurement.

Walmart said making its audiences, signals and measurement tools available across more buying environments can help advertisers evaluate performance from awareness through conversion while expanding the role of connected television in commerce-focused advertising.

Mayward framed the effort as a way to help advertisers navigate a fragmented media landscape while improving efficiency.

“At Walmart Connect, we’re bringing the precision of retail data for audience targeting and measurement into advertisers’ existing media mix, making it easier to extend reach, build consideration and measure performance without adding operational complexity,” he wrote. “The result is a more streamlined experience that helps advertisers use media spend more efficiently.”

The initiative is currently operating in a closed proof-of-concept phase and is expected to become more broadly available at a later date, according to Walmart.

Posted in Uncategorized

Cuebiq’s Zora Senat: Do Media Publishers Know What Ads Will Actually Resonate With Their Targeted Audiences?

Posted on by David Kaplan

MIAMI — Media companies have invested heavily in identity infrastructure and first-party data capabilities to reach specific consumers at precise moments, but many still lack insights about which creative messages will connect with those carefully targeted audiences.

“Media publishers right now have an enormous opportunity to take advantage of the data that they have in-house,” Zora Senat, chief commercial officer at Cuebiq, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE. “They know precisely how to target a specific consumer in a specific place at a specific time, but what they don’t know is what sort of advertisement will resonate with that consumer.”

This gap represents where behavioral intelligence becomes critical for media company differentiation beyond targeting capabilities alone.

Marketers gain strategic business influence

Behavioral intelligence applications extend far beyond advertising optimization as marketers assume broader organizational roles that inform sales strategy, packaging decisions, store operations, business continuity planning, and site selection.

“Marketers are taking on a more strategic role across the business. They understand the value of first party data, combining it with unique and differentiated insights,” Senat said. “Marketers have a seat at the table in terms of informing the strategies of everything that surrounds advertising, not just the ad spend.”

This elevation requires sophisticated data combinations that support strategic decision-making across multiple business functions.

Transaction data completes location insights

Cuebiq’s partnership with Affinity Solutions combines location tracking from 10 million daily active users with transaction data from 3,000 financial institutions covering 95 million adult consumers, enabling attribution beyond store visits to actual purchase behavior.

“With Affinity Solutions, we have access to information at the card level. We join that information with our panel and then we’re able to say, ‘This person walked into your store, but they also made a purchase or they walked into your store and made an incremental amount of purchase,’“ Senat said.

This combination addresses client demands for complete funnel measurement using deterministic data rather than modeled approaches.

Outcomes need measurement frameworks

Different stakeholders prioritize varying success metrics, from store visits to sales lift to brand awareness, requiring measurement systems built on clean, composable data that adapts to diverse business objectives.

“One advertiser cares about in-store visits and another one might care more about sales lift and brand awareness,” Senat said. “Having good quality data at the foundation that can be configurable to the use case, configurable to the business that you’re trying to make an impact with” becomes essential.

Cuebiq’s deterministic device-level relationships provide up to 100 pings per device daily, creating high-velocity datasets for various outcome configurations.

Brand affinity insights drive differentiation

Publishers can enhance targeting precision by incorporating behavioral data that reveals consumer brand preferences and purchase agnosticism, enabling more strategic advertisement selection beyond demographic and timing optimization.

“We can tell you exactly what brands consumers have an affinity toward or which consumers are a little bit more agnostic between certain brands,” Senat said. “That’s the type of information that every advertiser’s going to want to capitalize on.”

For The Trade Desk, Travel Data Is the ‘Why’ Behind Retail’s ‘What’

Posted on by Robert Andrews

When you search for a flight to Barcelona, you’re not just planning a vacation. You are broadcasting intent – about your income, tastes, upcoming spending, and emotional state. That signal, argues one executive, is among the richest data a marketer can get.

Travel data, combined with retail purchase signals, can form what he calls “a complete picture of a consumer’s intent”.

“Travel is such a powerful media moment because it is telling you more about a person’s intent and where really their mindset is,” said Matthew Fantazier, VP of retail data partnerships at The Trade Desk, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “What they’re feeling in the moment, what they’re excited about – it tells you a little bit more about where their heart is.”

Retail tells you what; travel tells you why

The distinction Fantazier draws: data reveals purchasing behavior, while travel data illuminates the context behind it. A consumer buying sunscreen in January means something different if they’ve just booked a Caribbean cruise than if they’re simply restocking a bathroom cabinet.

“When brought together, it creates a really complete and powerful picture of what the consumer is looking to achieve in that moment and how to best message them,” he said.

The Trade Desk’s role, as Fantazier described it, is to serve as the connective tissue. “The Trade Desk really comes into this ecosystem by pairing this first-party travel data with premium inventory, measurement, identity to really stitch together this picture for an advertiser to be able to activate against this data in a meaningful way,” he said.

Following the journey, not just the destination

What makes travel data particularly compelling for advertisers, Fantazier argued, is its longitudinal nature. Unlike a single e-commerce transaction, a trip unfolds across multiple touchpoints – research, flight booking, hotel selection, activity planning – each one generating a fresh signal and a fresh opportunity.

“Travel is a real journey,” he said. “We know that people are researching, they are booking a flight, then maybe they book a hotel or other items. So there’s really a moment to create influence with a consumer because you don’t just have one shot to connect with them.”

That sequential engagement is the key to what Fantazier called “in-the-moment storytelling” – the ability to tailor messages as consumer intent evolves, rather than relying on a static audience segment. “You are really following them along that journey,” he said. “You get a more complete picture of what they’re intending to do, so you can more tailor that message to their mindset and really create a meaningful message to that person based upon what we know about them.”

Commerce media’s expanding orbit

The conversation took place as part of Beet.TV’s “Flight to Cannes” Leadership Series, presented by Kinective Media by United Airlines – itself a signal of how seriously travel companies are positioning themselves as media and data businesses.

United Airlines’ Kinective Media unit is among a growing class of travel-based retail media networks seeking to monetize first-party data.

The Trade Desk has been expanding its commerce media infrastructure more broadly. In April 2025, the company partnered with Pacvue and Skai to enable unified activation and measurement across more than 250 commerce media partners – a move designed to give advertisers a more coherent view of performance across fragmented retail channels.

TV Measurement Needs Maslow’s Hierarchy, More AI, Fewer Dashboard Hostages: EDO CEO Kevin Krim

Posted on by Rob Williams

MIAMI – At the POSSIBLE conference, Kevin Krim, president and chief executive of media-measurement firm EDO Inc., arrived with a message that probably startled at least a few ad executives wandering Miami Beach meeting halls in search of cold brew and attribution models: the future of TV measurement apparently runs through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Yes, that Maslow. The pyramid from Psych 101.

Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Krim compared the evolution of TV measurement and AI-enabled advertising tools to the climb from basic survival toward “self-actualization,” which isn’t usually a phrase heard near a retail media cocktail reception.

“In our industry, AI can help us move up that pyramid,” Krim said. “Get the basic needs solved so much more easily and readily, and give us back more time, and in some cases, more money, to pursue those higher order needs.”

This may be the first time in advertising history that “share of voice metrics” and “human fulfillment” have appeared in the same sentence without irony.

Krim said EDO is trying to accelerate that climb through ChatEDO, the company’s LLM-powered interface that gives marketers quicker access to TV intelligence data. Or, put differently, fewer people trapped in dashboard purgatory exporting CSV files until midnight.

TV wants credit for more than ‘awareness’

Krim spent much of the interview making the case that television deserves to stop being treated like the decorative throw pillow of the media mix.

“TV is a brand and demand medium,” he said, arguing that TV advertising now drives measurable consumer behaviors including searches, website visits, app usage and even interactions with AI chatbots after viewers see ads.

That matters because the industry has spent years worshipping at the altar of closed-loop attribution from search and social platforms while TV sat in the corner muttering, “I helped, too.”

According to Krim, the data increasingly supports television’s role deeper into the funnel.

“What we’ve revealed by watching the customer journey and seeing the behaviors that are triggered by exposure to TV,” he said, is that viewers often move directly into action after exposure to ads.

Sports continue printing money for everyone involved

Krim also weighed in on why live sports rights continue costing approximately the GDP of a small island nation.

“Live sports and other live events are really the engine that drives this ecosystem,” he said.

According to EDO’s data, engagement rates for ads in live sports programming are “significantly higher” on a per-person basis compared with other types of content.

Which helps explain why media companies continue backing armored trucks full of cash up to leagues for rights packages while executives publicly insist they remain “disciplined allocators of capital.”

Krim said sports create uniquely engaged audiences who care not only about the game itself but also the ads surrounding it. In media terms, that is basically the Super Bowl’s entire business model.

AI creative means more ads, not fewer humans

On the creative side, Krim took a relatively balanced position amid the current AI gold rush, where every software vendor now promises to “unlock storytelling at scale,” usually while generating six-fingered consumers holding melted hamburgers.

“The human will stay at the center of creativity,” Krim said. “Taste and judgment are just unique human traits.”

Still, he argued AI dramatically lowers production costs and allows marketers to generate far more creative variations than before.

“The idea that we need one or two perfect creatives for a campaign, were really based on a scarcity mindset,” he said.

Krim’s broader point was that marketers should stop obsessing over a single perfect ad and instead let performance data determine which creative executions work best for different audiences and campaign moments.

In other words, the future of advertising may involve fewer “big swing” creative bets and more machine-assisted Darwinism for 15-second spots.

ChatEDO tries to rescue marketers from dashboard captivity

Krim also detailed the scale of EDO’s data infrastructure, which includes 375 million ad airings and 2.6 million creatives collected over roughly a decade.

Before ChatEDO, extracting insights often required specialized power users navigating complicated dashboards while the rest of the organization waited helplessly nearby asking Slack questions like digital Oliver Twists begging for another pivot table.

“What ChatEDO does is put that powerful database at the fingertips of users,” Krim said, allowing marketers to ask simple or complex questions and get answers “in 15, 30 seconds instead of minutes or hours.”

That speed, he argued, frees agencies, brands and networks to focus less on hunting for data and more on optimization and business outcomes.

Or, in Maslow terms, finally escaping the bottom of the pyramid where ad ops teams survive entirely on caffeine and screenshots.

Fluent’s Matt Conlin: Programmatic Infrastructure Hasn’t Caught Up to Post-Transaction Performance

Posted on by David Kaplan

MIAMI — Post-transaction advertising delivers measurably stronger results than traditional display, but the programmatic infrastructure built to serve the open web may be holding marketers back from realizing its full potential.

“The unique thing about post-transaction is high-impact inventory, and it’s brand safe because a real person just made a purchase, which drives incredibly strong performance and click-through rates,” Matt Conlin, co-founder & CCO of Fluent, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE. Fluent sees 2.5% click-through rates from post-transaction placements, compared to the 0.25% CTR typical of traditional display. “Programmatic was built on the open web where there were a lot of display ads cluttering a publisher’s webpage. Programmatic was not built to support that type of performance.”

This infrastructure mismatch explains why post-transaction inventory remains largely outside programmatic ecosystems despite delivering perfornace comparable to branded search.

Commerce media reaches third growth phase

After maximizing endemic advertiser onsite inventory and expanding offsite audience targeting, commerce media enters phase three through new ad verticals and surface area that go beyond traditional placement strategies.

“As both of those first two phases of growth have started to plateau, the next natural stage are what are the other types of ad verticals we can introduce to our shoppers to enrich the experience?” Conlin said.

New opportunities include order return pages, summary pages, loyalty sections, and in-store experiences — moments when purchase intent is high and consumer attention is still fully engaged. That post-transaction window, when a shopper’s excitement and trust are at their peak, is where Fluent believes the most underutilized value in commerce media sits.

Personalization requires privacy balance

Effective commerce advertising depends on relevance — but relevance requires data, and data requires trust. The challenge is building personalized ad experiences on shopper insights while maintaining privacy compliance and delivering the conversion signals advertisers need to close the loop.

“How do we create the most relevant and personalized ad experience possible based on what we know about a shopper? And how do we do that in a privacy safe way that respects privacy but also delivers the personalization that shoppers have come to demand?” Conlin said.

Data flows bidirectionally, with retailer insights informing advertiser targeting while conversion feedback enriches commerce partner’ understanding of their own customers.

Prioritize customer experience

Success in commerce media’s next phase won’t just come from innovation — it will come from knowing what not to compromise.

“The winners are ultimately those that preserve the best experience possible for the shoppers, keep their customers loyal and coming back time and time again, while also introducing appropriate ways for brands to participate in that customer journey,” Conlin said. “Those that are focused on driving GMV while also creating rich customer experiences.”

Sustainable growth, in Conlin’s view, means treating shopper loyalty as the asset worth protecting — not a variable to optimize against.

Warner Bros. Discovery Gives Advertisers Real-Time Campaign Controls With New Dashboard

Posted on by Robert Andrews

The days of waiting until a campaign ends to find out whether it worked may soon be over.

Warner Bros. Discovery has unveiled a real-time measurement and attribution dashboard that lets marketers monitor and optimize campaigns while they’re still running – a shift from the traditional post-campaign reporting model that has long frustrated brands seeking agility.

“For the first time, we are giving clients the capability of looking at their campaigns while they’re running in flight and optimizing them with our third-party partners,” said Ed Romaine, group svp and head of revenue marketing at Warner Bros. Discovery, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

From passive viewing to active participation

The dashboard was among several announcements WBD made during the upfronts, including a cross-platform advertising suite called “Unbreakable” designed to engage fans across linear television, digital, and social platforms simultaneously.

The concept emerged from data showing that brands running messages across both TNT Sports linear broadcasts and Bleacher Report’s digital and social platforms saw an average 70% brand lift. “The idea with Unbreakable is that a brand can show up in the right way for a fan wherever they happen to be consuming our content,” Romaine said.

The framework operates around four pillars:

  1. Pulse captures real-time fan energy through features like live polls appearing simultaneously on linear broadcasts and Bleacher Report.
  2. Engage encourages debate among fans.
  3. Reward offers exclusive access to experiences.
  4. Highlight brings fans to the forefront during live game action.

“All of these things are able to be sponsored and brought to you by a brand,” Romaine said. “But at the core is the viewer and the actual fan experience.”

Interactive formats show early promise

WBD’s push into interactive advertising formats is already yielding measurable results. The company’s “Moments” product, which places brands within specific scenes across its content library, has generated a 19% increase in viewer engagement on average.

Shoppable formats are proving particularly effective, with the company reporting a 13% jump in purchase intent. The newly introduced shoppable pause ad builds on an existing product that had already achieved a 15% increase in mobile scans and an average return on ad spend of 2.5.

“The reason that we decided to include the pause feature as part of the shoppable product is that we wanted a captive audience,” Romaine said. “The pause enables us to increase that efficacy even further by letting people actually look at the product that’s in front of them and decide if they want to purchase it or not.”

AI-powered creative optimization on the horizon

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how WBD approaches ad creative. Dynamic creative capabilities now allow the company to adjust what an ad looks and feels like in real-time, making messages more contextually relevant to the content surrounding them.

The company is developing what it calls “agentic experiences” that will let brands specify their desired outcomes and have the system automatically optimize creative placement. “When the viewer is looking at a specific scene and there’s the perfect intent to show that brand in the most suitable surrounding, that’s how the creative will inform itself,” Romaine said.

The Unbreakable suite is also set to expand beyond sports in the coming months. Romaine pointed to home competition programming as a natural extension, where similar interactive experiences could populate across WBD’s home and design websites, social platforms, and television episodes. “We want to make the experience for our brand partners as turnkey as possible,” he said, “which is why we introduced those products at the upfront.”

Crossmedia’s AI Is Built to Free Planners From Excel Hell

Posted on by Robert Andrews

For many in the media planning and buying world, the daily work remains full of manual processes and disconnected spreadsheets.

But, as artificial intelligence continues its march across the industry, some are seeing an opportunity to rewire that legacy system. The goal is to create an integrated ecosystem that automates the grunt work, freeing up human talent to focus on innovation and higher-level strategy for clients.

That is the approach at independent agency Crossmedia, which has spent the last 18 months building its own modular operating system to streamline the entire media investment process. The system is designed to reduce the “enormous amount of time and manpower” spent on manual tasks, said Kaitlyn Mcinnis, executive director, integrated investment lead at Crossmedia, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

Building a learning loop

At the core of the agency’s effort is a platform called XMOS, led by the company’s CTO, Jess Lewis. The system works by ingesting a client brief and then pulling from a wide array of data sources, including first-party data, multi-touch attribution and marketing mix models, and competitive intelligence to generate a recommended plan, according to Mcinnis.

“It’s doing our reach frequency curves, channel allocations. And of course, there’s human application to that,” Mcinnis said. “So we’re going in, we’re reviewing those, we can change them, modify them. And essentially it’s pulling away all of that manual lift on our teams.”

Crucially, the system is designed as a closed loop. It tracks campaign performance data from the marketplace and feeds it back into the model, creating a cycle of continuous improvement. “Ultimately when we go into marketplace, it’s then grabbing the performance of it and feeding it back into the module operating system,” she added. “So the next time that we’re brief from our clients, it’s pulling from past performance, so it’s iterating and evolving over time.”

Beyond efficiency to innovation

The primary target for this automation is what Mcinnis described as a “fragmented environment” where planners, buyers, and performance teams all operate in separate spreadsheets. This makes even simple historical queries a significant challenge. “When clients come in and they’re like, ‘Hey, what is my spend in my performance of the last five years?’ It takes an enormous amount of time and manpower to run around,” she explained.

The IAB projects US ad spending growth will accelerate through 2026, largely fuelled by the transition of AI from pilot programs to core operations. This includes the rise of so-called “agentic” AI systems, like a proof-of-concept unveiled by NBCUniversal to plan and optimize TV campaigns, which automates tasks that once took days.

For Mcinnis, the ultimate benefit extends beyond simple efficiency gains. “What AI is doing for us is it’s decreasing the manpower so that we can have the actual strategic mindset to pause and think about what we’re putting together,” she said. It provides the “time and space to be able to innovate and put together really great recommendations and optimizations for our clients.”

Human governance is paramount

Despite the emphasis on automation, Mcinnis insisted that human judgment remains an indispensable part of the process, particularly when it comes to final approval. The potential for AI to produce flawed or biased outputs means a human backstop is non-negotiable.

“Humans have to be at the forefront in the final governance and sign off,” she stated. “And that’s because AI can hallucinate. It has biases and as humans, we are accountable for our clients’ investments. And ultimately we’re accountable and responsible for what hits consumers.”

Mcinnis believes independent agencies are well-positioned to maintain this balance, tying it to a people-first culture. She argued that indies have an advantage in an era of rapid technological change. “Culture isn’t being lost here and I do think that Indies do have a leg up on that right now because we’re paying attention to that people-first mentality,” she said, citing her company’s founding pillars of “trust, reason and the pursuit of happiness.”