This edition of Digiday’s daily CES Briefing looks at the need for brands to adopt SEO strategies for dealing with AI agents, an interview with Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar about agency compensation models in the AI era and how Dotdash Meredith has used OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product D/Cipher.

SEO for the agentic AI era

Expect to hear a lot about search engine optimization in 2025. Except it won’t be called that.

“It’s no longer about search engine optimization. It’s about answer engines,” said Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi.

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This edition of Digiday’s daily CES Briefing examines how brands and agencies are seeing a need to change payment structures to account for AI tools handling some agency work, what marketing and media execs may have missed on the CES show floor and how Disney’s tech showcase reflects real-time bidding finally being fast enough for live sports.

Agency compensation models in the AI era

A change to how clients pay agencies seems inevitable in the AI era. How the agency compensation model should change, though, is anyone’s guess. But it has very much been a topic of discussion during CES this week.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing features an interview with Stagwell’s Mark Penn about the landscape for agencies and a recap of a session from OpenAP’s Audience Summit on the disconnect with streaming ad data.

10 Questions with Stagwell’s Mark Penn

AI is one backdrop for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. But the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger is another, particularly for the advertisers and agencies in attendance, such as Stagwell, which has been billing itself as a challenger to the incumbent agency holding companies. 

On Tuesday, Digiday sat down with Stagwell CEO and chairman Mark Penn to hear how the Omnicom-IPG merger is coloring his company’s conversations with clients, what Stagwell is up to with its own recent M&A activity and what the potential TikTok ban and agentic AI era mean for advertisers.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at some of the top trends and developments to keep an eye on in 2025.

• The year-in-preview
• Honey’s boo boo
• Netflix’s newest sports deal, Google’s tracking change, Hollywood’s hard times and more

The year-in-preview

If 2024 felt less monumental than recent years when it comes to the TV, streaming and digital video industry, that may be because its ultimate legacy will be to serve as preamble to what may be an especially significant year.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing looks at how the agentic era of AI looms over CES and then recaps a session that highlights the underlying issue of everything becoming an ad network.

The artificial intelligence age is passing into the so-called “agentic” era, in which large language models power tools that can take actions on people’s behalf, like booking a full trip itinerary. So of course this temporal shift would show up at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week.

As with the agentic era overall, its presence at CES has still been pretty nascent as of Monday, technically the day before CES officially kicks off. 

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Despite serving as the unofficial kickoff to the advertising and media industry’s calendar, this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas doesn’t necessarily set the industry’s agenda for the year. But it does help to put it in motion.

Advertisers and agencies come to Sin City with their budgets planned out for the year, and with the annual technology showcase as the backdrop, they meet with publishers, platforms and tech vendors to map out how exactly to spend that money.

“You’ve already set the groundwork back in October [when many brands set their annual marketing budgets]. This is that ‘come to Jesus’ moment of, ‘You committed to me a million dollars. What are we doing this year?’” said Mark Wagman, managing director of data and technology at MediaLink, the UTA-owned consulting firm that will host the “Marketing Reinvented” session track during CES. “It’s a little bit of like, ‘What’s on the table and what’s coming?’”

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks back at the top topics and trends that overtook the TV, streaming and digital video industries in 2024.

• Year in review
• WBD’s trial separation, LinkedIn’s TikTok clone and more

Year in review

2024 followed a year in which Hollywood experienced a once-in-a-generation work stoppage. So it’d be hard to designate 2024 as “unprecedented” or “seismic” or any of the lofty labels typically affixed in retrospect when trying to surmise the magnitude of a year. With that said, 2024 made a solid case for its place in the history book of the TV, streaming and digital video industry.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the role that two old-school advertising tactics can play in the still-developing CTV ad market.

• See TV
• Streaming’s TV watch time share peaks
• TikTok loses bid to avoid ban, Comcast and WBD bundle up, Paramount set to slim down, and more

See TV

Maybe the connected TV ad market needs to get more traditional to advance.

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Programmatic advertising methods like retargeting can be powerful for pushing interested customers over the line into making a purchase. But the approach can lose potency if the proverbial funnel isn’t regularly refilled with new prospective customers. 

“Over time, in order to compete and continue to grow, you need to expand your funnel. Otherwise you risk to optimize yourself to the ground and run out. If you continue to sharpen a pencil, at some point you run out of pencil,” TripAdvisor’s Matteo Balzani said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, which was recorded live during last week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville.

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Supply path optimization needs optimizing. 

The umbrella term for programmatic ad-buying upkeep has been around for more than a half-dozen years. In that time, SPO has increased in importance. Programmatic reselling has become more rife, ad tech has become more commoditized, and last year’s MFA mania called into question how much insight – not to mention control – brands actually have over where their ads appear.

Naturally then, as the programmatic marketplace evolves, so do advertisers’ methods of managing that supply chain. 

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When it comes to artificial intelligence technologies affecting the ad industry, programmatic marketers would naturally be toward the tip of the spear. After all, their roles originated as machines disrupted traditional buying methods. And now AI-based ad buying tools are similarly changing the nature of their roles. 

During this week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville, Tenn., agency executives convened behind closed doors and opened up about how the insertion of AI has impacted their abilities to optimize clients’ campaigns and how they are having to adapt and define the value they bring to the table. The executives were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor, and a selection of what they had to say is excerpted below.

AI-powered ad buying has a transparency problem

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at streaming service owners’ latest quarterly earnings reports, as well as some recent studies regarding streaming subscriber sentiment.

• Time to renew
• Nielsen’s currency change-of-mind, Showtime’s time to shine and more

Time to renew

What subscription fatigue? Based on streaming service owners’ latest quarterly earnings reports, people are still willing to shell out for paid subscriptions.

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