Next in Media

Traditional sports broadcasts are evolving into multi-platform cultural ecosystems driven by social media, gaming metaverses, and athlete creators.

🏀 Live sports remain one of the few shared cultural anchors, using basketball as a natural entry point into fashion, music, and lifestyle programming.

🔗 Andrew Perlmutter on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

Rushed methodology changes implemented mid-season by Nielsen have severely shaken the NFL's confidence in standard television ratings.

📉 Changing ratings math in the middle of ad sales season destroys trust and throws billions in ad deals into chaos.

🔗 Paul Ballew on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

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.

🎯 Targeting Outweighs Raw Performance: Hitting sales numbers isn't enough anymore—media buyers want to know exactly which audiences drove those conversions before committing budgets.

📱 Why Social Beats TV for Small Businesses: Social platforms are pulling away from CTV by giving smaller advertisers easy self-serve AI tools and direct in-app checkout.

🌐 The Open Web Isn't Dead: Web video is still a $20 billion market because publishers are using native video to keep audiences engaged as search traffic drops.

📊 A View Isn't Equal Everywhere: Real measurement normalizes cross-platform data under one framework without pretending a TikTok scroll carries the same weight as a living room CTV impression.

🛡️ Ad Fraud Is a Transparency Problem: Buyers aren't panicking about sudden fraud spikes; they're anxious because publishers still won't clearly disclose where programmatic ads actually run.

🤖 Smart AI Beats Blunt Keyword Blocking: Multimodal AI actually understands video context, saving brand-safe news and pop culture content from being needlessly blocked.

🔗 Chris Bruderle on LinkedIn

00:00 Introduction

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.

🔄 Audience research usually gets mangled like a game of telephone once an agency hands off a campaign brief to platforms and creators. 📺 TV networks ingest data much faster now, letting buyers target real-time viewer interests instead of relying on six-month-old demographic reports.

🔗 Andy Davidson on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

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.

⏰ The Late-Mover Edge: Launching a network today means skipping years of clunky tech builds and plugging straight into mature e-commerce and delivery setups.

🤝 Meet Advertisers Where They Work: Brands hate learning new dashboards; plugging into existing buying platforms like Pacvue removes friction and gets campaigns funded faster.

🏢 Co-Ops Require Local Buy-In: You can't force thousands of independent store owners into a corporate playbook—you have to prove the model boosts local store revenue first.

📈 Big-Ticket Items Drive Market-Wide Sales: High-priced hardware like grills won't hit impulse CPG conversion rates, but they pull in massive overall revenue across entire markets.

📊 Standard Measurement Builds Instant Trust: Using accredited third-party platforms like CitrusAd gives brands reliable metrics, whereas legacy tools like Marketing Mix Modeling fail in retail media.

🏷️ Physical Aisles Drive the Real Volume: E-commerce gets the attention, but most transactions happen in physical stores, making in-store signage essential for moving product.

🛑 Off-Platform Expansion Kills Retail Context: Dumping shopper data across the open web strips away the store context, breaking closed-loop attribution and frustrating endemic brands.

🔗 Molly Hjelm on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

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.

📺 YouTube Creator Networks: Creators aren't just making one-off sponsored videos anymore—they're running multi-show media networks with their own IP.

🤝 Scale Without Losing the Soul: Pulling off massive creator runs like L’Oréal’s (think thousands of activations) doesn't mean producing generic slop.

⚡ Real-Time Crisis Agility: Social platforms run on outrage, and minor issues turn into viral fires fast.

🤖 Targeting the AI Audience: LLMs are becoming a key target audience, and they love structured content. Writing scripts and captions with clear, direct Q&As helps AI models pick up your video as an authoritative answer.

📐 Matching ROI to the Surface: You can't measure all creator content the same way.

🏢 Creator Marketing Goes Core: Major ad holding companies buying up influencer agencies isn't a fluke; it's proof that creator strategy is now table stakes for every serious media plan, not a side experiment.

🧠 The Limits of Tech: AI can overhaul campaign data and software tools, but it can't read a room.

🔗 Natalie Silverstein on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

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.

⚖️ Independent agencies sit in a sweet spot where they're big enough to handle massive brands but agile enough to pivot while legacy holding companies stay stuck.

🛠️ Wasting capital building proprietary AI platforms is a trap when you can simply own your measurement and partner up for execution.

🧠 AI belongs in the trenches clearing out manual grunt work and sorting platform data so your senior talent has space for real strategy.

🚀 Building brand credibility from scratch takes way too long to win client trust, making smart agency acquisitions the fastest route to scale.

📺 Traditional TV commercials are dying off because creators need to be actual co-producers across streaming and social, not just hired actors.

🤖 Autonomous AI agents need strict human guardrails on day one instead of being left alone to manage ad spend.

🔗 Andrea Bendzick on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

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.

📺 Internal agency silos are ruining the viewer experience by slamming consumers with the same ad over and over.

🔗 Doug Rozen on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

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.

📺 The Pivot to Video: Platforms can't survive on audio alone anymore; they have to mix in music videos, video podcasts, and live events to keep modern fans hooked.

🤝 The Win-Win Ad Model: Giving users a visual takeover with fewer commercial breaks builds real goodwill while driving up actual returns for brands.

🔌 Prompt-to-Purchase Ads: Hooking AI models like Claude straight into the ad API means anyone can script and launch a campaign from a command line without needing an agency.

🔓 Killing the Paperwork: Ditching manual insertion orders for instant programmatic buying opens the door for thousands of smaller advertisers who used to be priced out.

📊 Free Measurement Built-In: Native brand lift data and conversion APIs remove the expensive barriers that usually stop brands from tracking true performance.

🧠 Tracking Daily Habits: Tapping into billions of real-time signals—like skips, listening history, and playlist creation—gives brands a direct line to what users actually like.

🎤 Fixing the Audio Bottleneck: Free text-to-speech AI tools solve the old problem of audio ads being too slow and expensive to make, letting brands spend more budget on runtime.

🔗 Per Sandell on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro

Recorded live at Cannes, this episode explores the shift from surface-level ad efficiency to true business effectiveness in a hyper-fragmented media landscape.

🤝 Economically speaking, creators need brands far more than brands need creators to fund their operations, despite the cultural relevance they offer in return.

📺 YouTube has officially evolved past platform debate, shifting into an undisputed, ubiquitous streaming giant that requires agencies to bridge the gap between CTV and social budget buckets.

🚀 Top-tier creators function effectively as independent mini media companies, but they succeed through platform coexistence rather than attempting to directly compete with tech giants like Meta or Amazon.

📉 The industry is facing a critical pivot away from legacy efficiency metrics like programmatic cost-per-view toward outcome-driven, actual business effectiveness.

🗳️ Organic social media acts as a true meritocracy where superior content wins naturally, serving as a brutal reminder that you cannot simply buy your way out of poor engagement.

📊 Cross-platform measurement remains highly probabilistic due to fragmented view definitions across TikTok, Reels, and YouTube, challenging the industry's desire for a master deterministic plan.

🛍️ Scaling creator integration effectively requires leveraging platform-native tools like TikTok Shop ecosystems rather than relying entirely on traditional legacy talent agencies.

🔗 Jon Morgenstern on LinkedIn

00:00 Intro