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Retail Media Wants Your Budget, But It Needs to Earn It: Bayer’s Ryan Verklin

NEW YORK – At the IAB Connected Commerce Summit, Ryan Verklin, paid media and retail media senior lead at Bayer, delivered a useful reminder to an industry that sometimes treats every dashboard as a victory parade: winning in retail media requires more than colorful graphs and aggressive sales decks. “What does winning look like in retail media?” Verklin asked, before breaking it into “two different aspects of incrementality.” The first is retail media driving incremental sales. The second is retail media reaching “incremental households that wouldn’t have otherwise been reached without retail [...]

Posted on 04/29/2026 at12:59

IAB Connected Commerce Summit 2026

Recent Videos

POSSIBLE 2026 Tops 7,500 Attendees, Announces Lisbon Expansion

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — POSSIBLE 2026 drew more than 7,500 attendees this week, up from 5,400 last year, as organizers used the event’s momentum to announce an international expansion to Lisbon, signaling ambitions to turn the fast-growing marketing conference into a global franchise. The Portugal launch marks the first overseas edition of POSSIBLE, which has become a major annual gathering for [...]

GMMB’s Erica Monteith: Political Campaigns ‘Can’t Afford to be Locked Into a Single Workflow’

Political advertising is completely unrecognizable from past generations’ expectations of whistle stops and seasonal local TV buys. The always-on nature of politics in an era of intense polarization, razor thin margins in Congress, and now the influence of artificial intelligence tools requires flexible open architecture that integrates multiple data partners, verification tools, and measurement systems to adapt quickly when regulations [...]

AI Shopping Agents are Still in Beta, Need More Training: Mirakl’s Amelia Van Camp

NEW YORK – At the IAB Connected Commerce Summit, Amelia Van Camp, head of agentic commerce at AI firm Mirakl, offered a timely reminder for anyone convinced AI shopping agents are already buying socks, cereal and patio furniture on humanity’s behalf: not so fast. “So agentic commerce is in concept, in theory,” Van Camp said to Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein. [...]

HUMAN Security’s Stu Soloman: What Does It Mean for Advertisers When Half of Online Traffic Is ‘No Longer Human?’

NEW YORK — The artificial intelligence summary is the first thing anyone sees after conducting an online search. The content that follows those summaries are increasingly AI-driven. That creates complex trust scenarios where artificial intelligence agents act autonomously on behalf of humans while learning and adapting to anticipate user preferences without direct oversight. “Over 50% of all traffic on the internet [...]

Horizon Media’s Domenic Venuto: AI Positions Agencies As Strategic Partners, Not Vendors

NEW YORK — Rather than reducing ad agencies to the role of “mere service provider,” artificial intelligence tools just might be elevating creatives and media buyers to strategic C-suite partners that address fundamental business challenges. “For a long time in the agency business, we got relegated to the procurement office. It was all about cost and efficiencies, and we were treated [...]

Creators are Finally Getting Credit for Priming the Pump of Sales

For years, brands have treated influencers as glorified billboards while simultaneously judging them by conversion metrics they were never designed to deliver. The result has often been a mismatch between brand goals and measurement, with creators consistently under-credited for the discovery, trust-building, and purchase intent they generate before a single transaction occurs. That disconnect is finally being addressed as retailers gain the [...]

CTV’s Performance Era Demands Streaming Prove Its Worth: NBCU’s Shepard

The days of connected TV serving merely as a way to chase cord-cutters are over. Streaming has graduated from an incremental reach play into something advertisers increasingly expect to deliver measurable business outcomes. Where brands once viewed streaming as a top-of-funnel branding exercise separate from their performance budgets, they are now demanding evidence that premium video contributes to bottom-line results. "We anecdotally [...]

Beet@20: Peter Naylor of Nielsen Says Personalization Is Coming for Everything

As Beet.TV celebrates 20 years of documenting media’s endless reinvention, Peter Naylor, chief client officer at Nielsen, offered a reminder that the biggest disruption in television didn’t kill advertising. It upgraded it. From its first video shot at Google’s campus in Mountain View in 2006 to thousands of interviews from CES hallways and industry conferences, Beet.TV has logged roughly 11,000 conversations [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]