Next in Media

The programmatic advertising landscape is facing a massive shakeup as boutique agencies leverage natural-language AI to manage hundreds of millions in media spend without traditional holding-company bloat. StackAdapt’s Giuseppe La Rocca, why winning enterprise ad tech no longer requires matching legacy DSP feature matrices, but rather unifying direct mail, vertical-specific identity graphs, and cu...

Connected TV is leaving behind its reputation as an awareness-only vehicle as media buyers pair deterministic LinkedIn professional data with Amazon DSP supply to convert high-intent viewers directly on the glass. Monks' North American digital investment lead Tom Burchill breaks down the media planning behind Quicken’s 80% cost reduction and details how Amazon Marketing Cloud unlocks real-time aud...

When Epson launched its high-end LightStudio home-cinema projector to consumers who only knew them for desktop printers, relying on lower-funnel search ads was a dead end. Live from Amazon Unbox, Amerge's Laura Abadias and Amazon's Charlotte Maines, discuss how connecting Fire TV, Prime Video, and Amazon Marketing Cloud drove 25 million viewers and an 80% new-to-brand purchase rate. Key Highlights...

As corporate titans like Unilever commit half their marketing budgets to creators, brand leaders face an aggressive operational reset across media, infrastructure, and measurement. Former YouTube executive Tara Walpert Levy breaks down why the creator economy must be treated as an enterprise capability—demanding automated ad-tech plumbing, CFO-level financial accountability, and real-time content...

Nestlé Global Head Daniele Tundo and CreativeX CEO Anastasia Leng unpack how Fortune 500 brands build the operational infrastructure needed to professionalize creator partnerships and measure real business impact. From integrating creative observability tools to applying core advertising hygiene standards on paid boosts, this masterclass reveals what it takes to scale creator investments beyond va...

Discord Global VP of Advertising Adam Bauer breaks down why marketers must stop treating gaming as a niche vertical and start targeting it as an active consumer behavior. Discover how Discord's new self-service Ads Manager, real-time PlayQuest+ rewards, and community-led brand servers are reshaping digital advertising for Gen Z. Key Highlights 🎮 Treat gaming as an active habit people lean into, n...

Spy Ninjas President Shelly Soriano breaks down how the YouTube-native serialized franchise scaled to 47 million subscribers and expanded beyond digital video into live entertainment, licensing, and retail. She reveals why keeping production values intentionally accessible maintains viewer trust, how a $25 million investment fuels their expansion, and why traditional entertainment talent must adap...

IQVIA Digital’s Justin Rosen reveals how addressable TV and CTV targeting are evolving beyond basic reach to demand high-fidelity data, rigorous privacy compliance, and proven closed-loop measurement. From identity resolution to the trap of the AI doom loop, discover how top media professionals connect upper-funnel audience quality directly to real-world business results. Key Highlights 🎯 Basic C...

Betches senior video producers Tess Tregellas and Madeline Mahoney reveal how they transformed a viral social media premise into their flagship scripted comedy series Sisters. They outline the operational mechanics of building an in-house creator studio, maintaining a sponsor-free first season to protect brand voice, and driving multi-platform distribution completely organically. Key Highlights 🎬...

As The Trade Desk confronts negative growth guidance, executive turnover, and a 15% workforce reduction, media analysts Brian Wieser and Luke Stillman dissect the structural missteps behind the company's valuation drop. They reveal how an insistence on open-web transparency manifestos lost ground to buyer demands for price, convenience, and direct supply path performance. Key Highlights 🎯 Markete...

Traditional sports broadcasts are evolving into multi-platform cultural ecosystems driven by social media, gaming metaverses, and athlete creators. NBA Take-Two Media CEO Andrew Perlmutter explains how media brands can build participatory off-court entertainment that converts casual viewers into lifelong fans. Key Highlights 🏀 Live sports remain one of the few shared cultural anchors, using baske...

Rushed methodology changes implemented mid-season by Nielsen have severely shaken the NFL's confidence in standard television ratings. NFL Chief Data Officer Paul Ballew explains how media fragmentation is forcing leagues and networks to demand radical transparency or switch to new transactional metrics. Key Highlights 📉 Changing ratings math in the middle of ad sales season destroys trust and th...

As US video ad spend reaches $82 billion, media buyers are demanding granular audience targeting capabilities alongside bottom-funnel performance metrics. IAB Vice President Chris Bruderle breaks down the shifting dynamics between CTV and social video, the rise of multimodal contextual AI, and why live sports platforms must prove direct ROI to capture long-tail budgets. Key Highlights 🎯 Targeting...

Traditional media buying breaks down when attitudinal audience data gets lost between upstream research and downstream media activation. Bright Mountain's Andy Davidson and Deep Focus's Kyle Krueger unpack how synthetic personas, unified YouTube-to-CTV strategies, and responsible creator management keep ad campaigns aligned and effective. Key Highlights 🔄 Audience research usually gets mangled li...

Ace Hardware's RedVest Media is rewriting the retail advertising playbook by turning a late market entry into a strategic advantage across its 5,200 store footprint. Head of Retail Media Molly Hjelm joins Mike Shields to explain why friction-free Pacvue integration, closed-loop endemic attribution, and re-embracing physical stores outperform legacy off-platform tactics. Key Highlights ⏰ The Late-...

Collective CIO Natalie Silverstein joins Next In Media to explore how creators are evolving into full-fledged media networks and what it takes for brands to scale authentic partnerships in a hyper-fragmented landscape. Natalie, also breaks down real-time crisis agility, strategies for training AI language models on video content, and how to combat the algorithmic reach recession with targeted paid...

Recorded live at Cannes, Wpromote CEO Andrea Bendzick exposes why agile independent agencies are eating traditional holding companies' lunch while everyone else scrambles to build overpriced tech platforms. She maps out how mixing performance marketing, smart M&A, and hard revenue-backed brand metrics gives modern agencies an unbeatable edge. Key Highlights ⚖️ Independent agencies sit in a sweet s...

Cadent President Doug Rozen unpacks the hidden organizational silos and ad frequency nightmares plaguing modern video advertising at Cannes. Discover why shifting from audience persistence to contextual TV and total video planning is the ultimate fix for bruised brand performance. Key Highlights 📺 Internal agency silos are ruining the viewer experience by slamming consumers with the same ad over...

Spotify is shifting from a traditional audio platform into a powerful multi-format ad engine driven by advanced data targeting and transparent, value-exchange sponsorship models. Through innovative automated tools and natural language API plugins, the streaming giant is eliminating traditional production barriers so brands of all sizes can easily deploy high-ROAS campaign creative. Key Highlights...

Recorded live at Cannes, this episode explores the shift from surface-level ad efficiency to true business effectiveness in a hyper-fragmented media landscape. VaynerX's Jon Morgenstern delivers a masterclass on navigating the creator economy, leveraging YouTube's cross-screen dominance, and using common-sense attribution to cut wasteful ad spend without harming the bottom line. Key Highlights 🤝...

Relying solely on programmatic CTV auctions locks brands out of premium live sports and high-value cultural moments while racking up heavy middleware fees. This deep dive reveals how direct-to-ad-server tech and large language models are restructuring streaming media execution to protect brand safety, automate delivery, and enforce flawless frequency capping. Key Highlights 🏎️ The streaming landsc...

YouTube has officially outgrown traditional media taxonomies to become a unique, multi-surface ecosystem spanning streaming, social, and commerce. This week, Tinuiti's Sean Odlum explains how brands can leverage first-party CRM data and the Ads Data Hub, to bypass mobile-heavy biases and measure true impact across every screen. Key Highlights 🇨🇭 YouTube operates as a media "Swiss army knife" that...

The traditional retail media playbook is undergoing a massive transformation as platforms shift away from transactional clicks toward holistic, real-world shopping experiences. This week, Sam's Club VP and GM Harvey Ma, breaks down how their membership data and cross-enterprise synergy with Walmart are setting a new standard for full-funnel brand measurement. Key Highlights 💳 Every single purchas...

As streaming behavior dominates the living room, Vizio's operating system has claimed the top spot in U.S. television sales by turning the home screen into an active search and discovery storefront. In this exclusive Cannes interview, Chief Revenue Officer Mike O'Donnell explains how partnering with Walmart Connect allows advertisers to move beyond last-click attribution and track the complete cus...

SharkNinja has rewritten the modern commerce playbook by embedding a "threshold of virality" directly into pre-product development and abandoning rigid, weekly campaign reviews for hourly optimization. Global Head of Media Dave Kersey shares how this social-first, digital-only approach skyrocketed the brand to the top of TikTok Shop ecosystems globally while establishing a hyper-transparent, API-d...