Advertising, marketing and targeting. Right on the bull’s-eye. Success. Choose a goal, define a … [+] task. Purposefulness and insight. Succeed in work.
getty
For those who think the ad business is out of touch with the greater populace, check again. If we’re all living in a time of chaos (from environmental to political to cultural), where is there more chaos than in the media ad business? At the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) I got a grad-level immersion in this chaos and how industry leaders are coping.
Today’s ad business chaos is everywhere but hardly new. Fragmented media platforms and audiences. A plethora of media measurement options but no definitive “one size fits all.” Dominance by a few big tech players. Fears of technology replacing jobs and entire industry functions. Yet according to the IAB ad spending is expected to grow 7.3% in 2025, with more dynamic growth from connected TV (CTV) (+13.8%), social media (+11.9%), and retail media (+15.6%). Most people and industries would easily take that. But ALM demonstrated more than a few chaos-filled potholes to navigate.
Artificial Intelligence – Does anybody know anything?
William Goldman, the legendary Oscar-winning screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride and more, famously said about predicting hits that “Nobody knows anything.” Every speaker on AI, no matter how experienced they are in the technology, made it clear they couldn’t predict what would happen with AI. The financial markets themselves clearly don’t know what to make of AI as the DeepSeek news from China alone took $1 trillion of value out of the stock market in one day this week.
No segment of the advertising business ecosystem – or anyone else’s for that matter – will be spared from impact by the deployment of AI. Still subscribing to – or selling – quarterly market research reports? You might want to see what Morning Consult is up to, as CEO Michael Ramlet showed off AI’s ability to deliver fast, frequent and near real-time consumer insights driving investment decisions, campaign management and many more. But you better get this right. Dory Butler, Verizon’s first SVP for Customer Experience, told me how vital it is that Verizon, given direct interaction with millions of their customers for vital services like mobile and broadband, deploys AI with extra caution given competitors eager to jump on any false steps in customer interactions.
The conference didn’t lack for star power especially on the AI front, rolling out Oscar winners and nominees Ron Howard and Edward Norton. Norton has actually been at the AI game for some time, co-founding market intelligence firm EDO. He expressed great confidence that despite whatever innovations AI may bring about, the vital roles of actors, directors, writers and more won’t be easily replaced by soulless algorithms. And Ron Howard shared a story from George Lucas who years ago expressed his excitement at how technology helped him realize creative visions that analog film simply couldn’t. Howard expects that AI will facilitate such creativity in spades. Comedian and social media maven Hannah Bender professed relief that AI isn’t yet telling sufficiently funny jokes to put her out of business.
But get beyond the rarified air of these media stars, and AI clearly poses a far more existential threat to the business infrastructure of publishers. Unresolved lawsuits have yet to answer questions over what AI companies and their large language models (LLMs) may get away with in crawling for content. IAB’s Anthony Katsur, who runs IAB’s Tech Lab, is looking to technology to give publishers greater control of their content in an AI-crawling world. But he knows as well as anyone that nothing will be easy or predictable in this area.
Does the news business have enough swagger? Can it sell it?
It has been a brutal decade or more in the news business. Newspapers have literally disappeared in hundreds or thousands of communities, cable news is in mortal fear for its life (even Fox News is at the mercy of the Murdoch version of Family Feud), and misinformation and disinformation run rampant on social media and untold talk shows and podcasts. For a news business that depends for its sustenance on both consumer dollars (pay wall subscriptions) and advertising scale, the often-over-used word “existential crisis” isn’t hyperbole.
ALM featured an insightful panel with an experienced and insightful group of news leaders from Bloomberg News, the BBC, the Guardian, the Washington Post, NPR, and Yahoo. What was missing? “Establishment” digital-first publications such as Puck or Politico and maybe most importantly the formerly rogue (not to be confused with Rogan) and now ultra influential mix of podcasters, social media posters and streaming sites from “the Bros” to beyond. Maybe it’s that group that the Washington Post’s Johanna Meyer-Jones had in mind when she said that what the news business needs is to recapture its “swagger” – or at the very least learn how to sell it better.
Maybe we can’t return to the days of the “Scud Stud,” but it’s a dangerous business to cover the world. Jones and company need to let us in on how you do it and why folks should get excited about that. With a flood of news sources, only increasing and increasingly scary in the AI world, the “legit” news business can’t just sell “truth.” Maybe AI can be a tool to micro-message and micro-target to news-hungry audiences outside of geographies and educational groups. I know these companies all preach that they speak to wide audiences. But is it wide enough and most importantly monetizable to sustain this business going forward? Does anybody know anything?
Can the open internet be saved? Who will save it?
The centerpiece of IAB President and CEO David Cohen’s “state of the industry” remarks was his call to ensure the preservation of the open internet in a world of increasingly highly walled gardens from Big Tech and to lesser extent legacy media. That open internet came vibrantly to life roughly 30 years ago and has fueled huge value for consumers, content producers, and tech developers.
But this world depends overwhelmingly on advertising to keep the vast preponderance of content free to users. A future where everyone plays by a complex mix of rules established by increasingly powerful gated digital worlds is by its nature more closed. Innovation is kept proprietary rather than shared. Cohen and the IAB sit in an odd position here, striving to preserve openness but publicly praiseworthy of the successes of Big Tech platforms who have created the walled gardens in the first place. And while the industry might broadly advocate a more laissez faire regulatory policy, abandonment of the Biden Administration’s aggressive actions against Google and its Big Tech brethren by the new administration will do nothing to support a truly open internet.
It seems a suitable time for, as Katsur told me, to “put the lab back in IAB’s Tech Lab.” A lot more aggressive testing and learning – and information sharing – is needed to ensure the open internet remains a viable and vibrant alternative to the one-stop shops offered up by Big Tech.
Does anyone want to talk about cookies? Anyone? Bueller?
Cookie fatigue has set in. Only a year ago, there was nary an IAB ALM conversation that wasn’t dominated by the impending end of cookies, those annoying text files that track your every movement on an internet browser. This year, cookies are still here, and we don’t know when they’re going away, but the industry has simply gone about its business exploring alternatives for the future, seeking to balance consumer privacy and advertiser needs. We just need a new food group to rename these efforts. Any ideas?