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In-store Is Retail Media’s Blind Spot: Michele Roney of Mars United Commerce

LAS VEGAS – For all the precision lavished on ecommerce pixels, the physical store remains retail media’s great shrug. Speaking with David Kaplan at CES 2026, Michele Roney, executive vp of retailer CX at Mars United Commerce, put it bluntly. “The gaps in the shopper experience as it relates to retail media are hands down in-store,” she said. Brands can model every click online, but once shoppers grab a cart, it is mostly mass advertising with a hope and a prayer. “We’ve spent a lot of time on every pixel within a website,” Roney [...]

Posted on 03/04/2026 at12:24

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Horizon Media’s Alex Stone: AI Dynamics Making Deal Negotiations ‘Take More Time’

LAS VEGAS — While artificial intelligence is supposed to simplify all kinds of processes, the relative newness of agencies’ AI embrace is still complicating enterprise partnership negotiations, particularly when it comes to structuring contracts around new AI dynamics, pricing models, and technical integration requirements. “There’s certainly more time spent on contracts and on the principles and dynamics to make some of [...]

TVision’s Yan Liu: AI Enables Scene-Level Targeting Beyond ‘Genre Blocking’

Brands routinely block entire news or music categories despite content variation within those genres, missing advertising opportunities that artificial intelligence can identify through granular scene-level analysis rather than broad categorical exclusions. “Many brands just block the entire news category. Is every news bad for your brands? I don’t think so,” Yan Liu, CEO and co-founder at TVision, told Beet.TV contributor David [...]

Gen AI Ads: Consumers More Bearish Than Ad Execs, and the Gap Is Widening

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. - The advertising industry's rush to embrace AI-generated creative may be outpacing its understanding of how audiences actually receive it. New research suggests ad executives are misreading their own consumers - and the misalignment is getting worse, not better. A study conducted by Sonata Insights in partnership with the IAB found that young consumers remain considerably less hostile [...]

TV Buyers Need Better Signals Not Just More Floss Data: Alliant’s Suvadip Choudhury

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO – At the Beet Retreat San Juan, Suvadip Choudhury, head of television partnerships at Alliant, delivered a reality check to the TV ad business. Yes, we have more data than ever. No, that does not mean we should blindly chase every shiny behavioral segment that appears in a dashboard. “The TV industry has done a great job [...]

Walmart Connect’s Mayward: Why Retail Media Must Live Off-Site

Retail media is breaking out of the digital shopping aisle. For years, the category has been synonymous with sponsored product listings and banner ads on a retailer’s own website or app. Now, however, the strategy is expanding to find customers wherever they are spending their time. That means following shoppers to the connected TV in their living room, the social media [...]

In-Store Retail Media Is the Untapped Giant: SMG North America’s Sean Crawford

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Sean Crawford, managing director of SMG North America, has a simple message for brands chasing the next shiny thing: most shoppers are still, very literally, shopping. “I think in store for retail media is a hugely untapped opportunity here,” Crawford said in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, pointing to categories like grocery [...]

IAB’s Zoe Soon: Media Agencies Increasingly Consider Creator Economy ‘A Must Buy’

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Perhaps it’s because the creator economy is so unlike traditional forms of media that it’s still not quite seen as “essential” by advertisers as much as consumers do. But that appears to be changing, as brands shift from tacking creators onto campaigns to building storytelling with influencers at the center. “About 50% of U.S. buyers now consider [...]

Trustworthy Data Beats Shiny AI at CES 2026: Horizon Media’s Dominic Venuto

LAS VEGAS — At CES 2026, Domenic Venuto, chief product and data officer at Horizon Media, delivered a reality check to anyone dazzled by flashing AI demos: “The data capabilities that matter most are the ones that you trust.” Venuto has been busy rolling out Horizon’s Blue AI native platform, which takes client data, enriches it with Horizon’s own assets and [...]

AI Is Everywhere, but Human Marketers Still Get the Credit: Horizon’s Jeremy Flynn

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – The modern CMO is no longer satisfied with charts about impressions and reach, according to Jeremy Flynn, head of product at Horizon Media. He said the job now extends well beyond buying ads and into proving that marketing actually grows the business. “The demand from the CMO is changing beyond just marketing,” Flynn said in this interview [...]

Walmart Connect’s Khurrum Malik: CTV Plus Linear TV Delivers 55% Reach Increase

LAS VEGAS — Walmart Connect’s evolution from retail media network to comprehensive digital platform enables storytelling from “couch to cart to sales,” with research showing CTV advertising combined with linear TV delivers 55% reach increases. “About a year ago, we launched Vizio, and we now have the ability to tell a story from a brand solution perspective on TV,” Khurrum Malik, [...]

Beyond the Niche: Unity Exec Urges Marketers to Rethink Gaming

Marketers have poured billions into streaming and social, yet gaming, a medium commanding comparable scale and engagement, remains oddly underfunded. The disconnect, according to one industry veteran, lies in outdated perceptions rather than genuine limitations. "We've created a medium and an opportunity that continues to expand in terms of the number of monthly active users, continues to grow in the amount [...]

IRIS.TV’s Field Garthwaite: Contextual Targeting Enables Privacy-First CTV Performance

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. — Connected TV is emerging as a performance channel, thanks to new ways of marshalling data that allow advertisers to zero in on consumers who are open to a brand’s offer. The only challenge, it seems, is convincing advertisers of the possibility after years of such promises by CTV platforms. “Historically, there hasn’t been a lot of [...]

AI’s 97% Problem: Chatbots Barely are Making a Dent in Search, Analyst Finds

Search may be stubborn. Despite the breathless hype surrounding “zero-click” AI search, the predicted exodus of consumers from traditional search bars to chatbots has yet to materialize. New data suggests that standalone AI tools still command a negligible fraction of the time users spend hunting for information online. "AI is revolutionizing search, but maybe not in the way that a lot of [...]

Canvas Worldwide’s Paul Woolmington: AI Without Human Judgment Creates ‘Race to the Bottom’

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence provides speed and efficiency but lacks taste and aesthetic judgment, making human oversight essential to prevent automation that eliminates human input entirely. “What we’re missing is this notion of taste and judgment,” Paul Woolmington, CEO of Canvas Worldwide, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES. “Taste is very aesthetic and I think it’s going to be [...]

For Retail Media in Gaming, It’s a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’ Says KINESSO’s Owen

The advertising world is obsessed with capturing fleeting consumer attention across a multitude of distraction-laden screens. But one environment, more than most, boasts undivided focus. Unlike passive television viewing or social media scrolling, which are often accompanied by a second screen, gaming demands a player’s full concentration. This is the opportunity for retail media, a market which Forrester projects will grow to [...]

Standards Meet Scale in Retail Media to Deliver for Brands: DG Media’s Austin Leonard

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Retail media standards are no longer a side conversation for the most patient people in the room. They are front and center, especially as more brand dollars flow into the channel. Speaking at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Austin Leonard, vice president and general manager of the DG Media Network at Dollar General, said the pressure from [...]

Audio Gets Programmatic: Lisa Coffey of IHeartMedia Says ‘Guaranteed Human’ Wins Trust

LAS VEGAS – If you have ever wished broadcast radio could behave a little more like digital, Lisa Coffey says the wish is being granted, with a beta label and a confident smile. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES, the chief business officer of IHeartMedia said the long running mission is finally turning into shipping product. “The project of making [...]

Retail Media’s Easy Money Is Gone – Now Comes the Hard Part

For years, retail media networks enjoyed a relatively effortless revenue boom, riding the e-commerce wave and leaning on supplier budgets that seemed inexhaustible. That era, according to one close industry observer, is over - and what comes next will separate the serious media businesses from the rest. The sector is hardly collapsing. Global retail media spending is projected to climb from [...]

Dentsu’s Will Swayne: Advertising Enters Its Third Phase, ‘The Algorithmic Era’

LAS VEGAS — Media planning for 2026 must acknowledge advertising’s evolution from broadcast-focused 30-second spots and “eyeballs” by instead relying on precision targeting to meet the demands of the “agentic and algorithmic era.” “We’re in a new era of advertising — the third era,” Will Swayne, global practice president for Media and Integrated Solutions at dentsu, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan [...]

IAB’s Caroline Giegerich: Over-Labeling AI Use Could Create Consumer ‘Fatigue’

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Excessive artificial intelligence disclosure labeling could be too much of a well-intentioned thing. Aside from stoking consumer burnout on one hand, the impact could potentially harm advertisers by highlighting AI usage that splits audience perceptions between creativity and inauthenticity. “The risk of transparency is if you over label everything, consumers will just tune out and have a [...]