What has emerged is not that the market is preparing for a crash or heading toward a boom, but rather that 2026 is not so much a recovery as a step towards a structural reset that asks how advertising is bought, measured, and paid for.

Check out our key takeaways from the event.

AI and CFO firewall

The real brake on AI adoption is no longer technology; finance. In Sir Martin Sorrell’s view, large legacy companies will not significantly change the way they operate until CFOs feel real financial pressure. For now, no such pressure exists. As it stands, companies are too profitable and comfortable to force change, making AI “interesting” rather than urgent, largely limited to testing phases and incremental workflow tweaks rather than driving true autonomous operations.

“Until CFOs get these companies to act, unless there’s a tightening of the external economy, which is not happening at the moment, it’s not going to happen in my opinion,” Soler said.

Search Everywhere optimization is the new SEO

One of the quiet changes that surfaced at CES was the ambiguity of discovery and transformation on the surface of conversations and agents. Consumer behavior increasingly moves fluidly between AI-mediated environments, from chat to commerce-enabled social and search. Traditional funnels because product questions are closer to the transaction and bypass familiar landing pages and retargeting groups. In reality, retail media, social, and search are starting to behave more like adjacent layers within a single commerce flow than separate channels.

Purchasing an LLM has been publicly demonstrated, but I am personally skeptical.

Despite the noise surrounding autonomous media buying, Yahoo draws a clear line between workflow and decision-making. Its agent layer is built to compress time and speed setup, trafficking, and optimization, rather than replacing the machine learning systems that actually move funds through auctions.

In fact, under the hood, the bidding logic remains ML-driven, with agents sitting on top of it as a service layer, making the Yahoo DSP platform easy to use, easy to move between, and easy to plug into other systems. In other words, Yahoo DSP is becoming less of a purchasing dashboard and more of a data spine with a productivity layer attached.

“Agentic is cool, but it’s still about data and machine learning,” said Adam Rudeman, GM of Yahoo DSP.

Agencies are turning DSPs into replaceable pipes

For most of the past decade, DSP competition has been driven by inertia as well as performance. Certification programs, proprietary workflows, and platform-specific algorithms made it operationally and culturally costly for agencies to move spend once teams were trained and pipelines were in place.

What is now appearing is a thinning of the outer moat. Agencies are increasingly building custom decision-making, filtering, and scoring layers upstream of their DSPs, allowing them to move their own logic along with them, making execution more portable across platforms and making competition between DSPs more fluid.

“There’s no question that agencies will continue to use DSPs, but they’re asking upstream of those platforms, ‘What kind of decisions can we introduce and apply?'” said Michael Richardson, vice president of product at Index Exchange. “Whereas before they relied on technology provided by DSPs, advertisers and agencies are now looking to customize it themselves.”

CES advertising executives say 2026 will be a year of gradual growth readjustment.

After a year shaped by tariff concerns, geopolitical noise, and ad spending cuts, spending has reversed into the market rather than accelerating, leaving advertisers with cautious optimism heading into 2026, quietly charting modest upside and bracing for downside. The result is a market where revenue increases incrementally, but underneath the allocation logic changes, dollars continue to move from linear to CTV, performance budgets are concentrated in fewer data-reliable platforms, Amazon takes share from both its DSP rivals, and linear and prepaid commitments fade in favor of flexibility.

“We’re starting to see that people are working independently of what’s going on in the economy,” said Tom Szyczewski, vice president of media investments at Goodway Group. “They’re just preparing for the worst, but they’re also planning for the best. So we expect general media spending in the U.S. to be a little different this year.”

It’s not about marketers spending more. It means they spend smarter and feel less anxious about having all the answers in advance. “What we’re seeing heading into 2026 is cautious optimism, but it’s a different flavor than past cycles. It’s not an optimism that’s rooted in stability or certainty. It’s an optimism that’s rooted in adaptability. We’ve spent years getting used to uncertainty, planning in shorter cycles, testing more quickly, moving budgets more fluidly, and stopping waiting for expectations.” Get the perfect signal before you make the call. ”

Numbers you need to know

46.3%: Reddit’s year-over-year increase in U.S. ad spend last November exceeded Instagram’s 22% and TikTok’s 9% year-over-year growth.

$20 billion: Total amount raised in xAI’s latest funding round despite controversy and backlash against Grok

40%: Percentage of marketers worldwide using AI for social media management

200,000: Number of UK small businesses that have signed up to TikTok Shop

What we covered

OpenAI Countdown: Monetization, Advertising, and Google-Style Threats

Last year, while Google was preoccupied with antitrust litigation, OpenAI took free rein in the market. But with one falling off the plan and another ending soon, Google’s goals are firmly back on track. And with so much money running through, OpenAI has to quickly ramp up its advertising business to fund the project.

Pitch Deck: How Amazon is emerging as a proving ground for TV spending

While this isn’t the default buying demographic for TV, Amazon positions its CTV service as a “first-stop shop” for advertisers, making it the easiest place to get spend on TV within your organization. Recent pitch materials provide the full picture.

Virality is no longer just a vibe for MrBeast’s Beast Industries

MrBeast is hiring a Head of Viral Marketing to be responsible for launch, customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and marketing efficiency across our creator portfolio. This shows that this is not just a nice bonus, but a formal way to grow the company.

“This is the future”: Accenture Song moves upstream in advertising

Accenture’s marketing department is now comparable in size to the largest advertising agency, Holdco, and an emerging control layer for marketing services is increasingly dictating how marketing workforces, data, and technology are integrated within large enterprises.

what we are reading

OpenAI secures $50 billion in equity grant pool

Last fall, the AI ​​company set aside $50 billion in employee stock grant pools (equivalent to 10% of the company’s $500 billion value), which far exceeds the payouts of the likes of Google and Meta, but signals that OpenAI will continue to spend heavily on and reward talent, The Information reported.

YouTube has a stronghold on daytime television

According to the New York Times, YouTube’s lead over streaming competitors like Netflix is ​​due to its daytime advantage.

Reddit overtakes TikTok in UK thanks to search algorithms and Gen Z

As a result of changes in search algorithms and Gen Z, Reddit has now overtaken TikTok as the UK’s fourth most visited site, according to the Guardian.

Pinterest announces new CTV shows

Following last month’s acquisition of tvScientific, Pinterest will launch a six-episode series on Roku in March called “Bring My Pinterest to Life on Roku,” according to Social Media Today.