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Agentic AI and Tentpole Events Drive 2026 Ad Spend Growth

A confluence of major sporting events, election spending, and rapid artificial intelligence adoption is set to make the U.S. advertising market grow faster than many anticipated this year. The IAB expectation shared with Beet.TV suggests a nearly double-digit expansion, suggesting robust health despite lingering economic uncertainty. Underpinning this growth are three distinct drivers: A slate of cyclical events is expected to inject billions in new spending. AI is fundamentally reshaping both the measurement of advertising effectiveness. The operational efficiency of campaign execution for buyers. “The industry is still incredibly healthy,” said Chris Bruderle, [...]

Posted on 04/13/2026 at7:01

IAB NewFronts 2026 | Uncategorized

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Sir Martin Sorrell Marks Beet@20 With Warning That AI Is Upending Advertising

Beet.TV this year turns 20, which in media years is roughly equivalent to surviving several platform extinctions and at least one pivot to video that actually worked. What began with a taping at Google’s Mountain View campus in 2006 has grown into a sprawling archive of about 11,000 interviews tracking everything from early vlogging to programmatic advertising and now AI. The [...]

WPP Media’s Adam Shlachter: ‘Not Everyone Can Solve all of Their Problems’ With Data

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Advertisers must accept that universal data solutions don’t exist, as every dataset contains flaws and limitations that require careful evaluation rather than accepting vendor claims at face value. “The uncomfortable truth that advertisers finally need to accept is that not everyone can solve all of their problems,” Adam Shlachter, client president at WPP Media, told Beet.TV [...]

HappyKids Operator Future Today Brings New Ad Platform for Audience Targeting

The average cost of an ad-free streaming subscription has nearly doubled since 2020, climbing from around $9 to $16 a month. For millions of American households, the math is starting not to add up. That financial pressure is reshaping viewing habits in ways that free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST, is well-positioned to exploit. Audiences are churning off paid tiers and [...]

For Zenith’s Tobias, AI’s Promise Is Mired in Siloed Complexity

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The promise of artificial intelligence in advertising has long been one of simplification and speed, a force to unify disparate signals into clear, actionable insights. In practice, however, the technology is often creating the opposite effect, adding new layers of fragmentation and opacity to an already complex media ecosystem. Instead of a single source of truth, [...]

Ad Context Is King and Programmatic Isn’t the Villain Anymore: Digitas’ Liane Nadeau

NEW YORK – At the IAB NewFronts, Liane Nadeau, chief investment and media officer at Publicis Groupe’s Digitas North America, made a quiet but notable admission: the old rivalry between direct buys and programmatic is over, and frankly, it was getting awkward anyway. “Historically, those two things would’ve been antithetical,” Nadeau said, referring to direct publisher deals and programmatic buying. “You [...]

Infolinks Media’s Mike Freides: Supply Control Enables Real-Time Intent, Not ‘After the Fact’ Optimization

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Controlling supply provides access to real-time user intent and behavioral patterns, while optimization approaches rely on cobbled-together attribution data that limits pre-bid decision-making effectiveness. “When you control the supply, you’re not acting after the fact. You’re not cobbling together that intent based off of cookies or other attribution,” Mike Freides, senior director of Business Development — [...]

Seller Agents are Coming for TV’s 20-Year Ad Ops Problem

The pitch sounds almost too clean: give your ad operations team the output of 15-to-20 people, without hiring a single one of them. For publishers still manually logging into half a dozen ad platforms to manage campaigns, it may also sound overdue. Agentic AI has become advertising's buzziest concept in 2025 and into 2026, but most of the noise has come [...]

Ads Should Tell Stories, Not Interrupt Them: TikTok’s Keiko Mori

NEW YORK – Keiko Mori, head of creative product marketing, North America at TikTok, said the social video platform’s latest ad formats aren’t here to quietly blend in. They are here to make an entrance, preferably the moment you open the app. Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the IAB NewFronts, Mori walked through a slate of new products designed [...]

Sallie’s Marco Steinsieck: Agentic Commerce will Make Transaction Data ‘Noisy’

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Agent-driven transactions that optimize purchases based on price and other factors will disrupt the closed-loop foundation that underpins retail media networks as autonomous systems handle more consumer decisions. “Keep an eye on transaction data as agentic commerce matures. The more we see agents making transactions and optimizing transactions on things like price, I think the closed [...]

Future Today’s Tim Ware: Direct Deals Drive CTV Success

Direct publisher relationships are appearing more essential for tapping into connected TV benefits by enabling buyer goal identification, KPI alignment, and optimal signal sharing within bid stream data compared to open marketplace alternatives with unproven supply, contends Tim Ware, vp, Future Today Marketplace at Future Today. “The need for a direct deal is more important than ever to fully take advantage [...]

Horizon Media’s David Campanelli: CTV Performance Measurement Still Requires ‘Extra Step’ to Action

Artificial intelligence already drives outcomes through embedded decisioning engines across demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and social media. Still, despite the ever-accelerating industry adoption of AI, there’s still a widespread tendency to underestimate how extensively AI optimization currently impacts campaign performance. “AI is really changing outcomes and not just workflows in media because first it’s embedded in really any decisioning engine that [...]

Commerce Media’s Easy Growth Days Are Over. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Is the honeymoon over for commerce media? After five years of what one industry leader calls "easy growth," the sector now faces harder questions about sustainability, shared language, and whether it can truly integrate into the broader advertising ecosystem. With ad spend forecasted to exceed $150 billion across the US and Europe, according to IAB research, commerce media has become too [...]

Omnicom Media’s Analytics Chief: For AI, Guardrails will Set Business Outcomes Free

The data has never been more abundant. The problem is what to do with it. Three-quarters of U.S. buy-side leaders now believe traditional ad measurement approaches are underperforming, according to a February 2026 eMarketer report, a figure that suggests the dashboard era may have run its course. The answer, said Holly Yonosko, chief analytics officer at Omnicom Media, is not more [...]

Retail Media Wants to be More Than a Line Item for Marketers: Macy’s Michael Krans

Michael Krans is trying to pull retail media out of the margins and into the center of the marketing playbook. The head of retail media at department-store chain Macy’s is on a mission to turn the Macy’s Media Network from a transactional afterthought into something closer to a marketing nerve center. “We are attempting to move beyond Macy’s Media Network being [...]

Xumo’s Marcien Jenckes: CTV Home Screen Is the Place Where ‘Engagement Moments’ Happen

In this ever-fragmented media landscape, advertisers are forced to visit numerous destinations to find audience segments, while integrated ecosystems provide unified access that functions like an “easy button for connected TV.” “Fragmentation makes buying audiences hard. You have to go to a bunch of different places to find a little piece of the audience that you’re looking for,” Marcien Jenckes, president [...]

Chalice’s Ali Manning: Brands Should Use AI for Growth, not Just Efficiency

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Companies that focus artificial intelligence implementation with an eye toward business growth, rather than expense reduction, will outpace competitors. The view is that AI’s transformative power should drive real outcomes that matter to brands rather than operational efficiency alone. But getting brands to accept that remains a challenge. “Who’s going to leap ahead of their competition [...]

Commerce Media Needs Less Drama, More Co-Building: Digitas’ Christa Klausner

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – If there is one thing Christa Klausner would like the industry to stop doing, it is obsessing over “tension.” Yes, commerce media networks want control. Yes, agencies want flexibility. No, this is not a reality show. “Tension is kind of a strong word,” said Klausner, executive vice president of commerce media at Publicis Groupe's Digitas North [...]

Partnership with Allen Media will Make News Advertising Cool Again: Anoki AI’s Abbey Thomas

NEW YORK – At the IAB NewFronts 2026, Abbey Thomas of Anoki AI had a message that might make media buyers do a double take: thanks to a new partnership with Allen Media Group, advertising in news may no longer feel like a reputational gamble. Speaking with David Kaplan of Beet.TV, Thomas laid out how AI-powered contextual analysis is turning what [...]

For WBD’s Steinhauser, Agentic AI Still Early Stage But With Meaningful Momentem

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The ad industry talks a lot about removing friction. Warner Bros. Discovery is trying to do it by threading agentic AI into its advertising workflows and rebuilding its ad tech stack from the ground up around open, API-driven architecture. WBD has already moved parts of its ad workflow through agentic systems, freeing staff from low-value tasks [...]

Commerce Media Needs Transparency, Teamwork and Fewer Hidden Fees: Yahoo DSP’s Beth Gross

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – At the Beet Retreat San Juan, Beth Gross, head of commerce media at Yahoo DSP, described a business that is trying to serve two masters without upsetting either. On one side, Yahoo helps brands tap into commerce data and signals to improve campaigns. On the other, it helps retailers and commerce partners build their own media [...]