The shift from traditional television to connected TV has accelerated rapidly, requiring publishers to offer both massive culture-shifting scale and ultra-precise targeting capabilities.

📈 Achieving a scale of 250 million global ad-supported subscribers establishes premium streaming networks as direct rivals to traditional broadcast television for top-of-funnel brand equity.

🛠️ Migrating away from third-party tech partners to own the entire proprietary ad server stack is critical for premium publishers wanting to control data assets and accelerate product roadmaps.

🔄 Capitalizing on a consistent, weekly viewing habit among 80% of an ad-supported base allows brands to maximize creative repetition and long-term brand building rather than just transactional spikes.

🏟️ Reimagining live sports through a unique entertainment lens expands standard fan demographics, transforming traditional sports broadcasts into massive cultural pop-culture events.

⚖️ Unlocking the true potential of connected TV requires a deliberate balance between personalized digital targeting and broad-reach, unified storytelling that drives shared cultural experiences.

🧩 Relying entirely on single hit series integrations is a flawed media strategy since even a top-tier show only captures roughly 1.5% of total platform viewing at any given point.

🔐 Standardizing clean room integrations and advanced data collaboration frameworks is the essential path forward for activating scaled first-party data securely.

📊 Proving television advertising value should focus on holistic return on ad spend and incremental revenue lift across agency dashboards rather than expecting immediate on-screen transactions.

🔗 Nicolle Pangis on LinkedIn

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00:00 Introduction

Achieving true cross-channel attribution remains an uphill battle as walled gardens restrict access to critical log-level data.

📊 Walled gardens continue to choke cross-channel attribution by withholding log-level data, forcing brands to rely on a mosaic of complementary measurement frameworks rather than a single source of truth.

🎯 Strategic mass awareness is shifting toward a hybrid model that blends broad linear reach with hyper-targeted digital video tactics like CTV and YouTube to balance scale and precision.

📺 Premium addressable and data-driven linear television formats frequently fail to generate the performance lift required to justify their steep upfront cost premiums.

👥 Independent content creators should be treated as dynamic ad formats and flexible engagement assets deployed across diverse platform verticals rather than being siloed as a standalone media channel.

📈 Bringing Marketing Mix Modeling in-house can drastically condense operational reporting loops, shifting analytics cadences from lagging annual retrospectives to agile, granular quarterly deployments.

🧪 AI applications in programmatic media yield immediate dividends for algorithmic bidding and supply-path optimization, but agentic decision-making still requires strict human guardrails for multi-million-dollar budgets.

🏗️ Building a high-functioning in-house programmatic operation demands a multi-year road map focused on incremental scaling, specialized talent retention, and direct ad-tech relationship management.

🔗 Javier Bustillos on LinkedIn

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00:00 Introduction

As television viewership shifts, NBCUniversal is proving that premium IP like live sports and reality television can compete with digital channels by integrating advanced programmatic ad tech.

📺 Premium, year-round unscripted programming creates sustained fan communities that offer brands continuous, high-engagement cultural relevance instead of the brief campaign windows typical of limited series.

🚪 Operating systems like Vizio OS are becoming the critical "front door" of television, capturing consumer attention during the search and discovery phase before they enter ad-free environments.

🤖 The traditional boundary between upper-funnel awareness and lower-funnel performance is dissolving as media networks deploy advanced data hubs to compress measurement cycles from months to days.

📱 Embracing automation and programmatic infrastructure in linear and streaming environments allows major networks to onboard thousands of emerging, niche advertisers who were previously priced out of premium TV inventory.

🏈 Real-time, AI-driven content scanning enables hyper-contextual dynamic creative insertion immediately following specific live broadcast triggers, drastically increasing brand resonance.

🎯 Maximizing sports viewership monetisation requires a dual broadcast and streaming infrastructure, recognizing that the vast majority of premium ad impressions still occur on linear television.

🗓️ Establishing consistent, predictable programming blocks across distinct sports leagues creates a unified destination for viewers and a year-round narrative platform for advertisers.

🎪 In-person experiential events act as powerful content factories, allowing brands to super-serve live audiences while generating digital assets that scale across streaming and social platforms.

🔗 Alison Levin on LinkedIn

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00:00 The Power of Year-Round Reality TV Communities and Advertising Integration

After briefly de-emphasizing targeted TV ads during the Discovery merger, Warner Bros. Discovery has rapidly rebuilt its infrastructure to offer clients unprecedented transparency and accountability.

🔄 Warner Bros. Discovery is correcting a four-year-old strategic pivot by aggressively reinvesting in addressable TV advertising to bridge the performance gap between linear and digital video inventory.

🎯 Roughly 80% of audience-driven TV campaigns now leverage client-supplied first-party segments, signaling a massive shift toward data-ownership and customized targeting in premium environments.

📉 Traditional media companies must radically streamline their back-end infrastructure to eliminate the crippling operational friction that still makes buying TV inventory too slow and clunky for modern brands.

🤝 Legacy publishers are abandoning old rivalries and uniting within consortiums like OpenAP because collective ecosystem collaboration is the only way to successfully compete against tech titans like Amazon, Google, and Meta.

📉 Direct-to-consumer and small-to-medium digital-native advertisers expect the exact same level of performance, accountability, and transparency from television that they grew up using on Meta and Google.

🌊 Relying on a single persistent identifier like an IP address is no longer sustainable, forcing publishers to adopt flexible, composable data waterfalls that combine multiple deterministic and modeled signals.

📊 By guaranteeing reach and incremental reach through their StreamX solution, networks are successfully using top-of-funnel control as a reliable proxy to prove downstream business lift.

🎭 Pairing high-impact sponsorships like premium series premieres with deterministic retargeting allows brands to orchestrate a complete full-funnel strategy from culture-shaping moments down to precise suppression and competitive conquesting.

🔗 Bridget Jayaram on LinkedIn

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00:00 Introduction

Discover how the future of TV advertising is shifting toward outcome-based measurement and AI-driven optimization coming out of the 2026 upfronts .

📺 Following the 2026 upfronts, publishers and networks are shifting from traditional linear metrics to embrace outcome-based models because they recognize that advertisers make major budget allocations based on direct business performance.

🎯 The traditional debate over alternative audience measurement currencies is largely a publisher-driven concern, while modern brands remain strictly focused on concrete performance and cross-platform ad effectiveness.

🧪 True attribution requires a paradigm shift that treats creative and media as an inseparable equation, proving that creative quality is just as critical to the final business outcome as audience targeting.

⏱️ Holistic media measurement must capture a four-quadrant grid that balances short-term performance metrics like immediate website visits with long-term brand equity indicators like purchase intent and favorability.

⚖️ Advertisers are standardizing multi-touch attribution frameworks that pair conversion rate with lift/incrementality to ensure they are tracking true behavioral causality rather than just hitting consumers who would have purchased anyway.

🤝 The real competitive advantage for publishers lies in moving beyond basic outcome reporting toward actively optimizing campaigns in real time using trusted, neutral third-party measurement signals.

🤖 While building autonomous AI agents for campaign optimization is technically trivial, achieving industry adoption depends entirely on training platforms on verified, historical data that marketers can transparently verify via traditional dashboards.

📈 Although streaming and programmatic buying are gradually lowering the barriers to entry for smaller advertisers, total television ad spend remains highly concentrated within sports and a handful of legacy industries.

🔗 Sean Muller on LinkedIn

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00:00 Introduction to TV Outcomes and Industry Readiness

Jubilee Media founder and CEO Jason Y Lee joins Next in Media to break down how the digital-first studio builds scalable, format-driven IP that captures Gen Z's massive attention span without relying on a single face.

Key Takeaways:

The Creator Economy Flip: Top digital creators no longer view Hollywood as the ultimate graduation point, reversing the media power dynamic as traditional studios now seek out digital-first strategies to survive.

The Attention Span Myth: Massive engagement metrics on 90-minute videos prove that younger audiences aren’t suffering from short attention spans; they are simply starving for unscripted, long-form authenticity.

Format Over Face: Designing repeatable, host-agnostic IP rather than relying on a single charismatic personality eliminates key-person risk and unlocks true operational scalability for digital studios.

Contextual Brand Storytelling: The next frontier of monetization rejects one-off, disruptive advertisements in favor of naturally embedding brands into existing, high-performing video franchises.

The Anti-Echo Chamber Demand: Algorithms have hyper-fragmented public discourse, creating a massive, untapped market of viewers who actively seek out raw, multi-perspective content to escape their own echo chambers.

The TV Screen Takeover: Digital-first production must now default to cinema-grade standards like 4K, as YouTube’s massive growth on connected televisions blends the boundary between streaming networks and independent creators.

The Human Premium in an AI Era: As artificial intelligence commoditizes automated content creation, media companies that double down on raw, real-life human connection will hold the ultimate competitive advantage.

IP Upcycling and Windowing: Legacy distribution strategies like FAST channels and AVOD licensing represent the most lucrative secondary revenue streams for creators sitting on deep libraries of episodic content.

Resources & Next Steps:

Subscribe to Next in Media on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Key Episode Timestamps:

00:00 Jubilee's Mission and Content Philosophy

Gen Alpha has completely fragmented away from traditional TV, leaving advertisers scrambling to connect with kids and parents across YouTube, FAST channels, and gaming platforms. 

This week, Mike sits down with Emma Witkowski, VP of Media Solutions at WildBrain, to unpack the massive market disconnect in children's media, the power of nostalgia in family co-viewing, and how upcoming privacy regulations like COPPA 2.0 are rewriting the rules of digital targeting.

Key Highlights:

📺 The Great Gen Alpha Fragmentation: Children's media consumption has shattered across Netflix, YouTube, FAST, social, and gaming platforms, completely ending the era where a single traditional network like Nickelodeon could capture the majority of the audience.

🔌 The Linear Co-Viewing Ad Dollar Gap: While toy and entertainment brands have successfully followed kids to digital spaces, a major market disconnect remains with non-endemic advertisers whose linear TV budgets failed to migrate alongside the parents they were trying to reach.

🛑 The Death of Traditional Tracking Metrics: Regulatory protections like COPPA make standard digital tactics like cookies, pixels, and multi-touch attribution entirely obsolete in children's media, forcing buyers to shift their mindset from tracking to context and from targeting to trust.

🛋️ The Rise of "Shared Screen Time": Shared viewing remains a vital family bonding ritual—with nearly nearly all parents watching alongside their kids weekly and over half doing so daily—yet it continues to challenge standard digital reporting because impression-level verification of who is watching is fundamentally impossible.

🚀 Single-IP FAST Channels as Fandom Hubs: Single-franchise FAST networks are seeing massive year-over-year audience growth by leaning into consistent, curated curation that gives super-fans a dedicated, lean-back destination to immerse themselves in trusted IP.

🧸 Nostalgia as a Direct Purchase Driver: Modern parents deliberately choose content featuring the beloved characters they grew up with, creating an emotional connection that drastically boosts brand recall, purchase intent, and consumer product sales.

📜 The High Operational Stakes of COPPA 2.0: Emerging regulations expanding legal protections up to age 17 and limiting algorithmic AI targeting will severely challenge automated ad resellers, leaving structurally compliant, human-vetted, publisher-direct environments as the safest bet for brands.

💰 A Critical Content Sustainability Crisis: Premium educational and kids' programming faces an existential funding threat from the decline of public broadcasters and linear ad revenue, making direct publisher relationships essential to ensure ad dollars are reinvested back into the content ecosystem rather than lost to third-party reseller leakage

Resources & Next Steps:

Emma Witkowski

Chapter Timestamps:

00:00 Audience Fragmentation and Platform Challenges

In this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields sits down with Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads, to talk about Amazon's rapid transformation into a full-funnel advertising powerhouse. Alan walks through how he joined Amazon mid-COVID in 2020 and within a few years helped land an 11-year NFL deal, launch Prime Video ads, and close an NBA partnership that made Prime Video a year-round sports network. 

He and Mike dig into what's working in the upfront market, why Amazon sees retail media and streaming as one unified full-funnel business, and how Amazon DSP's partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Roku, and others now reach 90% of household audiences. They also get into the growing role of Twitch and creators as a mid-funnel marketing lever, and why Alan believes the future is AI agents — not just for creative optimization, but for full campaign orchestration.

🏈 From COVID Hire to Year-Round Sports Network: Alan joined Amazon in July 2020 and within months helped land an 11-year NFL deal, followed by Prime Video ads and the NBA — turning Amazon into a full-year live sports destination.

📺 Prime Video as the Biggest Ad-Supported Streamer: Flipping the switch in January 2024 made Amazon the largest premium ad-supported streaming platform overnight, though the team had to scramble for scatter dollars outside the upfront window.

🚀 Amazon Is Democratizing Live Sports Advertising: Amazon brought 80 net-new advertisers to the NFL and 30 to the NBA in year one — opening up inventory that was previously an exclusive club.

🔗 Retail Media and Streaming Are the Same Business: Alan pushes back on treating Amazon's retail and streaming sides as separate, arguing the real value is a single full-funnel offering from brand awareness to measurable outcomes.

📡 The Amazon DSP Reaches 90% of Households: Partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Roku, Spotify, and SiriusXM extend Amazon's authenticated graph well beyond its own properties.

🎮 Creators Are a New Mid-Funnel Marketing Lever: Twitch's 105 million monthly viewers are increasingly bundled with Prime Video and sports buys rather than treated as a standalone offering.

🤖 AI Agents Are the Big Upfront Story: Alan predicts that the integration of premium content with AI-driven ad tech — from creative adaptation to chat-based campaign execution — will define this upfront season.

📈 The Upfront Market Is Showing Positive Signals: Despite macro headwinds, Alan says agency conversations reflect focus rather than anxiety, with demand clustering around scarce inventory like live sports and custom sponsorships.

🔗 Alan Moss on LinkedIn

🌐 Learn more about Amazon Ads

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00:00 Cold open

In this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields sits down with Kristina Canada, CMO at Net Conversion, a 19-year-old independent marketing and analytics agency based in Orlando that's in the middle of a serious growth push — with a new Chicago office, a recent acquisition of CTV specialists Elevate the Outcome, and a philosophy rooted in measurable business outcomes over vanity metrics.

Kristina and Mike dig into why independent agencies are experiencing a renaissance right now as clients seek out agility and transparency. They unpack Net Conversion's approach to making CTV a true performance channel without losing the brand-building benefits, and get into the agency's pragmatic but skeptical stance on AI — from arguing with Google reps about Performance Max to building their own internal chatbot and copilot tools for analysts.

🏢 The Independent Agency Renaissance: Clients are gravitating toward independents for agility, transparency, and freedom from holdco conflicts of interest.

📺 CTV as a Performance Channel: Net Conversion splits CTV into demand capture and demand creation, applying measurement rigor without forcing direct-response KPIs on brand-building.

🤖 AI as Co-Pilot, Not Pilot: The agency's internal mantra is "everyone gets an intern" — they've built their own chatbot but remain vocal skeptics of handing everything to PMAX.

🔍 AI Search Is Merging Paid and Organic: Kristina advises shifting from keyword matching to intent matching, and shares early learnings from piloting ads inside ChatGPT.

🤝 Against Principal-Based Buying: When agencies pre-buy media, incentives shift away from the client — Net Conversion keeps its model firmly aligned with client outcomes.

📈 Undervalued Platforms: Reddit and YouTube are two channels Kristina says deserve more attention from performance-minded advertisers.

🔗 Kristina Canada on LinkedIn

🌐 Net Conversion

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00:00  Cold open

In this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields sits down with Andrew Yaffe, CEO of Dude Perfect, to talk about how the iconic trick-shot brand has evolved into one of the most diversified properties in digital media. Eighteen months into the role after a long run at the NBA, Andrew walks through Dude Perfect's three-part strategy of content, products, and experiences — including a 22-city summer tour, middle-grade novel series, new outdoors channel, and experiential concepts.

Mike and Andrew dig into why Dude Perfect now looks more like a sports league than a creator business, what made their Xfinity co-created ad the best-performing spot on YouTube, and why reaching the family unit has become one of the most valuable propositions in fragmented media. They also cover YouTube's role in the upfront, the long-form content shift, the wishlist for better cross-platform measurement, and Andrew's reluctant NBA Finals pick.

🏗️ Tripling Headcount in 18 Months: Andrew has scaled Dude Perfect from a small content team into a much larger operation spanning production, commercial, and product.

🎯 Three Buckets — Content, Products, Experiences: Dude Perfect's strategy spans far beyond YouTube, including a live tour, board games, sporting goods, and a novel series.

📺 A Media Business, Not a Creator Business: Andrew argues Dude Perfect's partnership model with brands like BODYARMOR looks more like a sports sponsorship than a one-off creator deal.

🤝 The Xfinity Co-Creation Playbook: Andrew breaks down how Dude Perfect, YouTube, and Xfinity built one of the platform's standout ads of the past year, earning C-level accolades.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 The Family Audience Is the Moat: Reaching kids and parents simultaneously is a near-extinct value proposition in fragmented media — and Dude Perfect owns it.

📱 As Big as the NBA on TikTok: Dude Perfect's TikTok following rivals the NBA's, and their multi-platform strategy reaches different audiences with different content than YouTube.

⏱️ Longer Content Is Working: Watch time and retention now drive the strategy, leading to 40-minute videos and a new variety show being built like a network TV asset.

🎬 Format and Talent IP Is the Real Unlock: New talent and ownable formats like Squad Games and All Sports Golf are how Dude Perfect extends the franchise beyond the original five.

🎢 Trick Shot Town, Not a Theme Park (Yet): Andrew clarifies Dude Perfect’s experiential roadmap — what's actually being built in Austin, and the bigger vision for their own family entertainment concept. 

🌐 Dude Perfect on YouTube 

🔗 Follow Andrew Yaffe on LinkedIn 

🎧 Subscribe to Next in Media on Apple Podcasts

00:00  Cold open