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Late to Retail Media Means Right on Time: Ace Hardware’s Molly Hjelm

NEW YORK — Ace Hardware may be famous for paint, screws and the reassuring smell of lumber, but now it also sells advertising. Molly Hjelm, head of retail media at Ace, says the co-op’s unusual structure gives it a distinctive angle in the ad business now sweeping retail. “Ace Hardware is a unique business model in that we're a co-op,” Hjelm said in an interview with Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein at the IAB Connected Commerce Summit. “We have 5,200 stores across the U.S and all of them are independently owned [...]

Posted on 04/22/2026 at1:28

IAB Connected Commerce Summit 2026

Recent Videos

Programmatic TV as a Strategy Is Leaving Money on the Table, Tatari Exec Warns

TV's long-running fragmentation problem is driving renewed interest in what the industry calls "convergent TV," the ability to plan, buy, and measure across linear, streaming, and online video through a single platform. The infrastructure supporting such unified approaches has matured considerably since the early days of programmatic and demand-side platforms. "The days of getting a pass on just looking at brand or [...]

Swivel’s Joseph Hirsch: Campaign Optimization Reaches ‘Peak Efficiency’ at Impression Level

NEW YORK — Campaign optimization can now operate at impression level through real-time agent decisioning, representing peak efficiency for advertising technology that traditionally relied on periodic human intervention across broader campaign segments. “Can you decision an impression with an agent as opposed to the way it was done in the past?” Joseph Hirsch, CEO of Swivel, told Beet.TV at the Beet.TV/Horizon Media [...]

Marketers Must Impress Machines in Age of AI: IAB’s Caroline Geigerich

NEW YORK — Commerce media is booming so fast it may soon need its own zoning permit. Caroline Giegerich, vice president of artificial intelligence at IAB, said the sector is expected to reach $105 billion in 2025, roughly triple the size of four years ago, which is the sort of growth chart that makes PowerPoint decks tremble with excitement. But Giegerich [...]

Philo’s Mike Keyserling: CTV’s ‘Paradox Of Choice’ Is the Real Discovery Challenge for Marketers and Media

NEW YORK — Most everyone loves to binge their favorite programs on CTV. But streaming services’ vast content libraries also create decision fatigue that has consumers often pining linear television’s simplicity. Such analog wishes may be the reason that live viewing represents approximately 70% of consumption even on platforms designed for on-demand access, according to Philo CEO Mike Keyserling. “The beauty [...]

Why Legacy Workflows are Holding Brands Back From AI Transformation

If you want to get to the future, you may have to let go of the past. But companies that have operated the same way for 30 or 40 years are finding those very practices now stand as barriers to adopting AI. "The brands that are really achieving a new level of adoption of AI tools are those who are looking [...]

Xumo Sees the TV Home Screen as Streaming’s Most Valuable Ad Real Estate

The remote control used to be simple - flip through channels, land somewhere, stay a while. Now the act of watching television has become its own kind of labor - but that complexity, one executive argues, is exactly where the advertising opportunity lies. Ying Wang, general manager of Xumo Advertising, believes the fragmentation that frustrates both viewers and media buyers can [...]

Retail Media Must Grow Up Fast: Albertsons Media Collective’s Brian Monahan

NEW YORK – Retail media has spent the past few years being treated like advertising’s golden child. Money poured in, decks multiplied and everyone claimed miraculous returns. Now comes the less glamorous phase: proving it. Brian Monahan of Albertsons Media Collective arrived at the Beet.TV AI Media Summit with Horizon Media carrying a message for marketers who are tired of mystery [...]

GSTV’s Kristina Lutz: Gen Z is Looking for Discovery Beyond Social in the Real World

NEW YORK — Physical shopping experiences are far from dead for younger consumers, despite the view that Gen Z lives are primarily lived within the confines of TikTok. That realization is reshaping how brands think about the consumer journey. But there’s a sticking point: how can brands tap into authentic discovery moments that balance digital feeds with real life? “After all [...]

WPP’s Puma: Why CTV Demands a Dual Strategy of Scarcity and Agility

The connected television advertising market is bifurcating between the abundant dreams of programmatic and the reality of scarce, premium content. The industry may be finding itself in a hybrid model where tentpole events like the World Cup must be booked far in advance, while performance-focused campaigns demand the nimble optimization that digital platforms provide. That is the tightrope the industry is currently [...]

IAB’s Jamie Finstein on CTV and Commerce: Don’t Talk About One Without the Other

NEW YORK — Connected TV and commerce have become inseparably linked as streaming platforms increasingly partner with retailers and closed-loop attribution systems enable direct measurement of advertising’s impact on purchase behavior. “You don’t really talk about commerce anymore without thinking about CTV,” Jamie Finstein, vp, Media Center at IAB, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the IAB NewFronts. “That is playing [...]

Beet@20: Bill Koenigsberg of Horizon Media Says Culture Still Crushes Ego

As Beet.TV marks 20 years of chronicling the media business, Bill Koenigsberg, founder and CEO of Horizon Media, used the milestone to deliver a pointed message to Madison Avenue: swagger is cheap, culture compounds. From its first recording at Google’s campus in Mountain View in 2006 to the maze-like halls of CES, Beet.TV has built an archive of roughly 11,000 video [...]

Horizon Media’s Katy Ferguson: Agencies Need ‘Right People’ to ‘Harness and Leverage’ AI Technology

Artificial intelligence impacts client work through efficiency gains, strategic thinking elevation, and outcome-driving tools, though human intelligence remains essential for navigating AI-driven environments effectively. “Where are we seeing AI really impact what we’re doing from a client perspective? The first is obviously efficiency and saving time,” Katy Ferguson, president, Horizon Media East, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet.TV/Horizon Media [...]

Turn Data and AI Into Measurable Outcomes: Comcast Advertising’s Dawn Williamson

NEW YORK – Artificial intelligence is already being put to work where it matters most: making ads smarter and cheaper, says Dawn Williamson, chief revenue officer at Comcast Advertising. “AI is an incredible asset that we all have,” Williamson said in this interview at the IAB NewFront with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. “One of the things that we are immediately leveraging [...]

TV Home Screens Are Premium Real Estate for Brands: TiVo Ad’s Matt Milne

NEW YORK – The home screen land grab is heating up as brands realize that the most valuable moment in connected TV advertising is not mid-show or even pre-roll. It is the instant a viewer turns the television on, says Matt Milne, president and chief revenue officer of TiVo Ads at Xperi. In this interview at the IAB NewFronts, Milne described [...]

Viant to Acquire TVision, Bringing Attention Metrics Into DSP Wars

Viant Technology Inc. is acquiring TVision Insights, a move that could reshape how television advertising is measured by embedding real-time attention data directly into media buying. The deal brings together Viant’s identity and programmatic capabilities with TVision’s second-by-second “eyes-on-screen” measurement, aiming to give advertisers a more objective view of what actually works across TV. In this recent Beet.TV interview, TVision Co-founder [...]

Comcast’s James Rooke: Premium Video’s Top Priority is Proving Outcomes

NEW YORK - Generally speaking, “performance TV” means delivering measurable outcomes for marketers through return on ad spend demonstration, though the challenge lies in proving television’s effectiveness on a consistent, scalable basis rather than isolated campaigns. “What does performance TV mean for Comcast? It means that we deliver outcomes for a marketer. If you’re a marketer, you want to look at [...]

AI Is Eating the Internet’s Lunch and Not Picking Up the Check: AJL Advisory’s Lou Paskalis

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Lou Paskalis has a characteristically blunt assessment of artificial intelligence’s growing appetite for content, likening it less to innovation and more to a well-organized heist. “The reason that I think the IAB is correctly calling AI scraping an existential threat to publishers is because it is routinized theft,” the advertising veteran said in this interview at [...]

Dentsu’s Kevin Weigand: ‘Premium Is in the Eye of the Viewer’

NEW YORK – Publisher partnerships must span content, technology, and advertiser relationships rather than focusing on single capabilities, as premium content varies based on individual viewer perception and contextual relevance. “Between content, technology, and advertising relationships, I think a partner that really drives the most value is the one that can span all three,” Kevin Weigand, vp, partnerships, video & audio [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]