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AI Is Turning Static TV Ad Packages Into Real-Time, Cross-Platform Orchestration: FreeWheel’s Soo Jin Oh

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 even being accessed," said Soo Jin Oh, chief commercial officer at Comcast's FreeWheel, in this video interview with Beet.TV at CES 2026. "It's really turning static packages into speed, simplicity [...]

Posted on 01/21/2026 at6:09

Tailwinds of Transformation, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2026, presented by FreeWheel

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Marketing to AI Agents Is the Next Frontier, IAB’s Goldstein Says

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 [...]

Omnicom Media’s Joanna O’Connell: Brands Must Access ‘Emotional Availability,’ Not Just Eyeballs

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 [...]

B2B Advertisers are Ditching Search for CTV, Intuit Wants to Help Them

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 [...]

Icon International’s Reid Steinberg: Principal-Based Buying Shifts Media From ‘Expense Item’ To ‘Profit Maker’

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 [...]

AI Agents Will Make Millisecond Optimizations Humans Can’t, Dentsu’s McDonagh Says

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, [...]

Ampersand’s Justin Rosen: Poor AI Training Data Risks ‘Doom Loop’ of Degraded Insights

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 [...]

Commerce GO, Agent-Ready APIs Help to Tackle Ad Fragmentation: Criteo’s Todd Parsons

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 [...]

Albertsons Media Collective Targets Real-Time Optimization for In-Store Screens

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 [...]

Speed Is the New Strategy: TikTok on Brands and the Pace of Culture

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 [...]

Agentic AI Is Rewriting Business Models for Ad Agencies: S4 Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell

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 [...]

CTV Advertisers Blend Audience and Context as AI Unlocks Millions of Content Signals

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 [...]

Why Boring Brands Fail in the $8.6 Billion Gaming Ad Market

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 [...]

Live Sports Advertising Edges Toward Agentic Automation: NBCU’s Ryan McConville

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 [...]

In-Store Media Is Third Pillar of Retail Advertising: Albertsons’ Brian Monahan

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 [...]

Cross-Platform Cloud Gaming Comes With PHYND’s Magnite-Powered Ads

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 [...]

Agentic Commerce Adds New Lane to Shopping, Not a Detour: Criteo CEO Michael Komasinski

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 [...]

Unified Measurement Across TV and Social Is Finally Arriving: iSpot’s Julie Van Ullen

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

AI Agents are Starting to Buy TV Ads for Each Other

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

Inside Reddit’s AI-Powered Push into Self-Serve Media Buying: Stephen Riad

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

WPP Media’s Luis Martinez: Retail Media Reaches ‘Tipping Point’ Beyond Transactions to Brand Building

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