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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Yahoo has entered ad tech’s curation fray, focusing on supply-side intelligence tie-ups amid a host of partnership announcements as part of its Consumer Electronic Show activity.  

It’s a positioning it hopes will differentiate it from rival demand-side platforms, such as The Trade Desk, claiming its approach can help simplify the growing complexity of the programmatic ecosystem. 

In particular, Yahoo claims it will help sophisticated advertisers manage transparency challenges and supply path optimization with CTV — an intuitive key topic of conversation at CES — while granting them more control.  

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TikTok may be facing a potential existential crisis here in the U.S., as a Jan. 19 deadline approaches which could possibly see it shut down or sold to another company.

But that’s not stopping Omnicom Media Group from expanding its partnership with the popular social video platform, as the holding company focuses on a series of search-related moves during CES this week. 

Does Omnicom Media Group know something about TikTok’s future that the rest of the world seemingly doesn’t? If so, it’s not saying, as OMG executives declined to comment on TikTok’s impending status, except for chief product officer Megan Pagliuca acknowledging the agency network is “closely monitoring the situation. The way we’re working with them is business as usual. The consumers are still there.” 

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Reddit is rolling out several new tools for marketers that aim to demystify the platform and help advertisers engage more with users.

A new free tool for marketers called Reddit Pro Trends aims to help marketers track trends and communities in real time across the platform by analyzing keywords and phrases within Reddit conversations. Reddit also has a new ad format called AMA Ads, which gives marketers more ways to use paid media to reach the right types of users that might be interested in the platform’s “Ask Me Anything” conversations.

The updates, announced on Tuesday at CES, aims to surface contextually relevant real-time mentions of brand, topics and categories so marketers know where they should focus both paid and organic content. Pro Trends is powered by several machine learning tools such as named entity recognition, which uses natural language processing to help advertisers track more than 100,000 “smart” keywords. (For example, it’ll help a marketer know when a user or subreddit is talking about “apple” the fruit versus Apple the company.)

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Omnicom continued to focus on advances and changes in search during CES this week, announcing a partnership with Amazon Ads and Omnicom’s Flywheel unit that enables access to five years of purchase data — a move Amazon is announcing today for its Amazon Marketing Cloud clean-room solution, and an expansion from the current 13 months of data.

The deal gives Omnicom Media Group and Flywheel first-to-market access in the U.S. to the expanded data, with the goal to extend it globally. Again, much of the flow of information will also run through Omnicom’s operating platform Omni, as it did with Omnicom’s announced search deal with Google yesterday.

Via a beta test, Flywheel customers are able to access five years of purchase history to see how consumers’ purchase habits and conversions have evolved or changed in that time, which allows brands to adjust their strategies accordingly.

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As it has done at most major media tentpole events the last few years, Omnicom and its media arm, Omnicom Media Group, will take advantage of the attention around the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas to unveil a series of partnerships with major platforms.

This year’s focus for OMG going into CES revolves around search — given the research the company conducted in late 2024 that reveals just how much search is changing.

The first of four partnerships, Digiday has learned, is with Google — the granddaddy of search. OMG and Google have struck a two-pronged partnership that starts with a planning tool and ends with AI-driven agentic support for investment and creative decisions for search-driven efforts.

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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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Have you ever planned a vacation using just TikTok to search your destination(s)? That’s more common these days than it used to be, thanks to the changing habits of consumers, who spend more time on social platforms or engaging with influencers.

According to new research coming out of Omnicom Media Group — aptly called The Future of Search — search has essentially evolved from a channel to a behavior, thanks to some of the above consumer adaptations as well as advances in AI and algorithmic application of content across the social sphere. 

Joanna O’Connell, Omnicom Media Group’s chief intelligence officer for North America, spearheaded the research but assembled a variety of team members from influencer shop Creo, cultural specialists Sparks & Honey, commerce shop Flywheel as well as design and research departments. S&H even did a Boolean query to see the latest cultural chatter on the topic. 

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