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 custom agency intelligence platforms into a frictionless growth engine.

⚡ Ten-person agencies can now run $300 million in ad spend, completely blowing up the old headcount-to-billings model.
🎯 Enterprise brands don't care about a DSP's 50-page feature checklist—they care whether you can untangle vertical-specific data messes where they're forced to pick between reach and precision.
🗣️ Media buyers are ditching manual platform dials for chat prompts, running audience forecasts, RFPs, and live campaign activations straight from a text box.
📬 Marketing stacks are finally bridging physical and digital buys, letting programmatic traders launch direct mail campaigns right alongside connected TV.
🤝 AI agents can take over the day-to-day platform grunt work, but human relationships and trust are still what close enterprise deals.
🧩 You don't need a massive wall of logged-in user profiles to win post-cookie ad tech if you build identity graphs tailored to messy B2B categories like tech, telecom, and finance.

🔗 Giuseppe La Rocca LinkedIn
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00:00 Introduction
2:31 Building programmatic tools for SMB and mid-market advertisers
3:59 Taking SMB lessons into enterprise advertising
5:20 A vertical-specific enterprise strategy instead of generic DSP competition
6:30 Competing during the changing DSP market
8:30 CreatorTV advertisement: creator-led television ads
9:37 Why StackAdapt emphasizes owned technology and simplicity
11:47 Expanding from DSP capabilities to an integrated marketing platform
13:03 Ivy Studio and practical AI workflows
16:11 - Agentic AI will automate tasks, but people remain essential
17:49 - Identity, deterministic data, and StackAdapt’s B2B identity graph
19:38 Industry consolidation, expansion, and priority verticals
21:38 Measuring the full customer journey, including direct mail

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 audience portability.

📺 You don't have to sell physical goods on Amazon to benefit from Amazon DSP—B2B and software brands can tap its streaming inventory and purchase data to reach premium viewers on and off the platform.
🎯 Stacking LinkedIn job roles on top of Amazon buying habits gives you verified, deterministic user profiles instead of relying on fuzzy modeled guesswork.
⚖️ When you're chasing niche job titles on streaming TV, open up your inventory controls to as many premium publishers as possible or your campaign will starve for reach.
📉 Taking an audience profile you've already vetted elsewhere and dropping it into clean first-party streaming environments pays off fast—Quicken slashed its cost per visit by 80% out of the gate.
🔗 IP matching has largely replaced the old TV attribution guessing game by directly tying living-room screen exposure to concrete web actions and conversions.
🧪 Treat your initial run like a controlled lab experiment to establish clean benchmarks before handing the reins over to automated machine-learning optimization.

🔗 Tom Burchill on LinkedIn
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00:00 Intro
1:41 Amazon DSP opportunities for non-endemic advertisers
3:18 TV targeting technology is advancing, but scale remains essential
5:51 Quicken combines LinkedIn and Amazon data in CTV
7:58 Deterministic identity signals strengthen audience activation
9:52 Identity resolution supports customer understanding and prospecting
10:29 Balancing in-market targets with lookalike models
11:34 Controlled testing now, automated optimization next
12:58 Streaming TV evolves from awareness medium to performance channel
14:25 Amazon Marketing Cloud enables portable, actionable audience insights

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.

🎯 If you only run search ads, you're stuck fighting over existing demand; streaming TV is how you actually create demand before someone ever touches a search bar.
📺 Catching someone on the couch with a full-screen Fire TV ad plants the seed while they're unwinding, teeing them up to convert later on Prime Video or retail search.
☁️ Instead of guessing with broken third-party tracking, Amazon Marketing Cloud uses real first-party signals to show exactly which touchpoint sparked the sale.
🤖 Let AI like Performance+ handle the daily bid grinding and micro-adjustments, but keep humans in the driver's seat for campaign strategy and structure.
🔄 Amazon ad spend doesn't have to stay locked inside Amazon—link-out campaigns can send connected TV viewers directly to your own D2C storefront.
📊 Judging top-of-funnel video purely on immediate ROAS is how teams accidentally kill the exact campaigns feeding their sales pipeline; track brand lift and search volume instead.

🔗 Laura Abadías on LinkedIn
🔗 Charlotte Maines LinkedIn
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00:00 Intro
2:01 Epson’s challenge: moving from printer recognition to home-cinema awareness
4:02 Amazon’s full-funnel model across Fire TV, Prime Video, DSP, and sponsored ads
6:28 Identity, privacy, and AI-ready customer data
7:36 AMC connects funnel metrics and explains the path to conversion
11:33 Campaign results: 25 million viewers and more than 80% new-to-brand purchases
12:49 Video as a demand-creation tool rather than an isolated awareness tactic
14:45 Performance+ combines AI optimization with human campaign control
17:22 Link-out campaigns, D2C outcomes, and Alexa+ as future connective infrastructure

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 agility.

🏢 Stop boxing creators into a single media line item; treat them as a core company capability that injects speed and cultural relevance straight into your product and brand strategy.
⚙️ Pouring half your ad budget into creators won't work on manual spreadsheets—brands need automated, third-party ad tech to handle creator matchmaking, logistics, and tracking at real scale.
📊 The free pass from finance is over, and creator campaigns now have to prove their worth the old-fashioned way: hard sales, clean marketing metrics, and bottom-line profit.
🎬 Legacy networks will burn cash if they treat creators like expensive movie studios instead of running high-volume, low-cost rosters that adapt to audiences on the fly.
🤖 AI pays off when creators use it behind the scenes for workflow heavy lifting like ideation, editing, and auto-dubbing—not when platforms flood feeds with cheap, fully synthetic junk.
📺 TV and creator video aren't in a winner-take-all fight; the ad dollars are stacking across both, so smart marketers have to pull cash from social, linear, and streaming pots at the same time.

🔗 Tara Walpert Levy on LinkedIn
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00:00 Intro
00:55 Unilever’s creator-budget commitment and the challenge of scale
2:17 Creators as a capability rather than a single budget line
3:01 Building cross-platform creator infrastructure
4:07 AI’s promise and unresolved boundaries in creator content
5:09 Measuring creator marketing against sales and profit
6:25 Social video, television, and streaming compete for creator budgets
7:19 Advice for traditional media: more creators, lower cost, faster optimization
8:06 Brand experimentation, organizational change, and CEO-level relevance

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 vanity metrics.

🏗️ Stop splitting creator campaigns across PR and media teams—run it as its own unified practice with a single budget and clear rules.
🧼 The moment you put paid ad dollars behind an organic creator video, it has to follow basic advertising rules to actually build your brand. 🔍 Audit creator videos against your proven ad effectiveness data before throwing real ad spend behind them.
📊 Cap your creator spend around 10% to 20% of your total media budget, as performance tends to drop off past the 30% mark.
🌐 Platform-native tools are fine for trends, but major advertisers need one central platform to run creators across all channels.
🛡️ Prevent brand safety disasters by using knowledgeable ground teams for pre-launch checks rather than burying creators in endless approval chains.

🔗 Anastasia Leng on LinkedIn
🔗 Daniele Tundo on LinkedIn
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00:00 Intro
2:20 Nestlé’s three waves of creator marketing
4:22 CreativeX’s role as a creative observability layer
6:08 Nestlé’s infrastructure audit and global operating model
7:34 Centralizing creator activation, approval, and technology
8:12 Applying Nestlé advertising learnings to creator ads
9:45 Integrating CreatorIQ and CreativeX before paid amplification
10:20 Authenticity for organic posts, advertising standards for paid work
11:11 Using creator learnings to improve traditional branded advertising
13:10 Balancing creator authenticity with long-term advertising impact
15:05 Creator-spending growth and apparent budget limits
17:21 Platform partnerships versus cross-platform control
18:51 Brand safety, governance, and the limits of creator-specific blame
21:17 Organic creator value and the role of paid boosting
23:19 Selecting creator content for paid media rather than standardizing everything
24:12 Creator content, LLMs, and consistent brand messages

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.

🎮 Treat gaming as an active habit people lean into, not just another passive channel on a spreadsheet.

🚫 Gen Z blocks and skips forced ads, so reaching them requires optional perks with a clear give-and-take.

⚙️ Self-serve ad tools make it easy for mainstream brands to launch, track, and scale rewarded video campaigns.

⚡ Real-time SDK integrations drop rewards directly into a game the second a player hits their goal.

🔄 Rewarded gameplay challenges give players who haven't logged in for a month or more a real reason to come back.

🛠️ Building custom assets for one virtual world lets you reuse them across platforms like Roblox and Fortnite to save budget.

🔗 Adam Bauer on LinkedIn
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00:00 Intro
4:19 Identity resolution for cross-channel marketing
4:52 Discord’s deliberate, opt-in advertising strategy
8:36 Self-service buying and the expansion beyond gaming
11:10 PlayQuest+ and real-time in-game rewards
13:47 Why in-game advertising is gaining renewed momentum
15:20 Gaming budgets, participation, and measurement
18:25 Gaming as an essential consumer behavior, not a vertical
19:55 e.l.f. Cosmetics as a nontraditional Discord community example
21:35 Discord’s upcoming products and immersive Mission activations

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 adapt to platform-native storytelling.

🤼 Borrowing WWE's formula—big characters mixed with unscripted improv; gives digital shows a proven blueprint for keeping fans hooked long-term.
🪆 Fancy Hollywood cameras can actually hurt engagement on YouTube; keeping video production simple makes creators feel relatable and lets kids play along at home.
🎪 Turning online fans into real-world visitors at physical venues like theme parks builds a profitable business that platform algorithms can't touch.
📱 Simply copy-pasting the same video to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube doesn't work; each platform has its own audience and requires tailored content.
📊 When platforms tweak how they count views, creators have to show advertisers the difference between passive scroll-by views and real, intentional watch time.
🎯 Kids and parents respond much better to brands when products are built into the storyline or video challenge instead of sitting in standard ad breaks.

🔗 Shelly Soriano on LinkedIn
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00:00 Introduction
1:56 Spy Ninjas’ franchise model, audience, and scale
2:38 Soriano’s digital-business background and the company’s revenue mix
6:14 Brand partnerships for children and family audiences
8:18 Authenticity over expensive production
10:42 YouTube’s rise, platform-specific strategy, and short-form opportunity
13:01 Spy Ninjas HQ: the Las Vegas live entertainment business
14:10 Algorithm stability and changing definitions of YouTube views
16:27 The $25 million investment and plans for expansion
17:40 The need for specialized creator-economy talent
19:53 Improving advertising infrastructure for creator media
21:11 The Creative Class: training the next generation of digital-entertainment workers

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.

🎯 Basic CTV targeting is now standard; the real edge comes down to data precision, scale, and accuracy.
🔒 Privacy can't be a post-campaign checklist—it has to start upfront with anonymized datasets and double-blind matching.
⚠️ AI speeds up media buying operations, but if your underlying audience data is bad, automation just speeds up your failure.
🤝 Addressable TV pays off quickest for brands sitting on strong first-party data who can directly link ad views to offline conversions.
📊 Outcome measurement is taking over as the true test of ROI, even if traditional panel ratings stay around to settle the bills.
🏛️ Clean rooms make cross-platform tracking possible across walled gardens by analyzing campaign performance without physically moving sensitive consumer data.

🔗 Justin Rosen on LinkedIn
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00:00 Introduction
2:46 TV targeting becomes standard, while data quality becomes the differentiator
5:28 Shared goals across advertisers: accurate targeting and real outcomes
6:39 Pharmaceutical targeting: privacy compliance as the starting point
8:43 Fierce Pharma discussion: meaningful signals and the link to outcomes
10:56 AI can accelerate workflows, but cannot correct weak data
13:27 Addressable-TV growth depends on first-party data, simplicity, and trust
15:00 Nielsen’s continuing role and the rise of outcome-based measurement
16:35 Holistic cross-platform measurement and publisher transparency
18:06 Data clean rooms enable privacy-safe collaboration across walled gardens
19:50 Identity resolution is a foundational element of marketing accuracy
20:51 Measurement everywhere: flexibility across client identity systems

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.

🎬 Short-form skits let you test creator chemistry and prove audience interest before committing big budgets to long-form shows.
🔒 Keeping your first season sponsor-free protects your characters and tone, making the show much more attractive to advertisers later.
⚡ A lean in-house crew skips Hollywood's endless development cycles, letting you film polished episodes in just a few days.
📐 Frame horizontal shots with vertical cutdowns in mind to get free organic reach across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.
🎭 Casting guest stars with dedicated niche followings sneaks your show right into brand-new algorithmic communities.
🤝 Sponsor deals actually work when brands trust your sarcastic, natural voice instead of forcing corporate ad scripts.
📲 Turning audio podcasts into video vodcasts fits how people actually watch content—streaming YouTube on their living room TV.

🔗 Tess Tregellas on LinkedIn
🔗 Madeline Mahoney on LinkedIn
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00:00 Introduction
1:22 Introduction to Betches and the interview guests
2:18 Roles at Betches and the company’s video-first transformation
5:57 From a real-life coincidence to a scripted sister comedy
7:17 Short-form, premium long-form, and production quality
09:24 Why Betches produced the show in-house
12:15 Sponsor-free first season and a more natural future brand opportunity
15:10 Writing for one-minute clips and learning platform behavior
17:49 Betches’ in-house talent model and external creator network
19:18 Branded content works when partners trust the Betches voice
20:30 Season two and a potential streaming adaptation
21:27 Advice for brands and publishers entering bigger video formats

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.

🎯 Marketers care about price, performance, and convenience—not speeches about saving the open web.
👁️ Founder vision works early on, but ignoring market feedback once you're big creates massive blind spots.
🧩 Buyers are sick of bloated tech stacks and want a simpler, direct path to ad inventory.
📺 Connected TV won't fetch crazy software margins when brands manage it like standard TV budgets.
🤝 Going straight to brand clients burns bridges with the agencies that built your business.
💸 Taking a 20% cut of ad spend works in boom times, but buyers won't tolerate high fees in a slowdown.

🔗 Brian Wieser on LinkedIn
🔗 Luke Stillman on LinkedIn
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00:00 Introduction
2:04 Analysis of recent earnings, market valuation drops, and the 15% workforce reduction.
3:06 Marketers prioritize performance, pricing, and convenience over open-web transparency debates.
5:02 Jeff Green's persistent founder mindset versus changing organizational market dynamics.
09:34 AdTech tech stack collapse and the industry-wide push toward supply path optimization.
11:49 Sustainability challenges regarding total platform take rates exceeding 20%.
13:50 Leveraging newly hired executive talent to challenge internal consensus.
18:38 Missed capital allocation and acquisition opportunities during peak equity valuation.