CES 2026: Agentic Advertising and Embracing New Capabilities

One of the biggest takeaways from CES 2026: There's a fundamental shift happening in how the advertising industry thinks about AI. We're moving from efficiency tools to system-level transformation.

The conversation at Scope3’s Agentic Collective lunch brought together leaders rethinking the future of advertising — AgenticAdvertising.org Advisors, Randall Rothenberg and Matthew Egol on creativity’s return, innovation and governance, Swivel’s Joe Hirsch on moving beyond auctions, Digitas Chief Investment Officer Liane Nadeau on reimagining systems, and Scope3’s Brian O'Kelley and Tim Collier on limitless discovery and the context advantage.

Their perspectives revealed five insights that represent the core opportunity of agentic advertising, all grounded in what's now technically possible:

1. From Efficiency to Re-imagination

Stop thinking about AI as a tool for incremental optimization or cost-cutting. The real opportunity is reimagining core systems at orders of magnitude.

CMOs who are positioning themselves as growth drivers (not cost-cutters) are using AI to remake entire business models rather than shaving pennies off media buys. The question "how do we use AI to optimize our current programmatic stack?" bounds us to the past. It's rooted in solving a technical problem. The mindset to embrace: "how does agentic advertising let us do things differently to solve our business problems?"

Liane Nadeau's perspective on system-level reimagination captures this perfectly: incremental gains miss the point entirely. AI's power comes from thinking in orders of magnitude rather than percentage improvements. Brian O'Kelley reinforced this by noting that most of the ad ecosystem isn't even touched by programmatic — second-tier social platforms are demand-constrained, new models are emerging (influencers, chat, retail media). We can't build on old systems and expect to reach these new opportunities. You have to take a beginner's mindset when thinking through what this technological transformation can do.

2. From Commodities to Context

The shift is from impression-based commodity trading to outcome-focused, context-rich transactions that preserve what makes each media opportunity unique.

Context is emerging as the competitive advantage of 2026. Everything you know about your client, their brand values, their business objectives—all of that can now feed into how media is bought and sold. Your strategic knowledge is what makes AI powerful, not just the technology itself. But to unlock that power, the infrastructure has to change.

Today's programmatic systems optimize for "what is this impression worth?"—forcing every outcome to be compressed into a bid price decided in 100 milliseconds. Protocols like AdCP flip this model by enabling negotiation on the actual outcomes that matter: brand lift, conversions, reach against a specific audience, or even sustainability metrics. The currency becomes whatever the relationship is optimized for, not what an auction can measure. As Joe Hirsch framed it, we're building agents that negotiate around outcomes rather than optimize to win bids. Agent-to-agent unlocks what the auction model wasn't built to do.

This structural change enables what Tim Collier called "limitless discovery"—the ability to surface unique inventory and creative opportunities that get buried in programmatic's race to the bottom. In an agent-to-agent world, a publisher can communicate its value in line with the brand's goals within the transaction itself. Think what that could mean for Yahoo's 10,000 ultra-marathon runners, or Netflix's premium content that loses all value when bundled into programmatic auctions. Brian O'Kelley's point about data ownership reinforces this: the traditional programmatic model forces media owners to send buyers their data to arbitrage. With agentic advertising, data owners keep that value.

3. From Fragmentation to Foundational Standards

The infrastructure we build today determines what becomes possible tomorrow, and the industry is finally collaborating on that foundation.

In the past, every platform shift, every privacy regulation, every technical deprecation meant yet another band-aid fix to an already inefficient system. Agentic advertising offers a chance to build on more durable foundations, but only if we establish the right standards together.

This is where governance becomes critical. Matthew Egol's emphasis on innovation and governance hit a core point: you can't have one without the other at this scale. The individuals behind AgenticAdvertising.org are actively working on the protocols, frameworks, and shared standards that let agents negotiate across platforms while preserving what makes each unique. AdCP is just one example: enabling outcome-based negotiation without requiring everyone to use the same auction mechanics or surrender their differentiation.

The goal is to create interoperability. An agent working on behalf of Nike should be able to discover opportunities, negotiate terms, and measure outcomes across Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, and emerging platforms without requiring each to flatten their value into a lowest-common-denominator auction. That requires technical standards, yes, but also governance: Who validates agents? How do we prevent bad actors? What privacy protections are non-negotiable?

All of these questions are being worked out right now in working groups and being tested across real implementations. The companies participating in that process today are shaping how the ad industry will run on tomorrow.

4. From Execution to Strategy

AI is moving creative and strategic work back to the center, not further to the margins.

There's a fear that AI will commoditize creative work. The opposite is happening. As Randall Rothenberg emphasized, creativity is returning to the center of the conversation. When execution costs collapse, what matters most is what you're executing — the strategy, the narrative, the brand expression.

Agentic advertising doesn't replace strategists and creatives. It removes the execution bottleneck that forced them to the sidelines. When an AI agent can handle media planning, trafficking, optimization, and reporting across 20+ platforms, the human work shifts upstream: What story are we telling? What outcomes define success? How does this campaign ladder up to business goals?

This is the inverse of what programmatic did. RTB made execution cheap but forced strategic compression — everything had to fit into a bid request. Agentic advertising makes execution scalable while expanding strategic possibility space.

5. From Impressions to Impact

The ultimate measure shifts from media metrics to business outcomes and real-world impact.

This goes beyond just optimizing for conversions instead of clicks. It's about expanding what "impact" means: brand lift, customer lifetime value, sustainability metrics, community engagement.

When advertising transactions can be structured around outcomes rather than impressions, the definition of success changes. A campaign's carbon footprint can become part of the negotiation. Long-term brand health can be weighted alongside short-term performance. These aren't just feel-good additions—they're competitive advantages for brands and differentiation for publishers.

The measurement infrastructure being built today—by companies like Scope3 and others—makes this possible. You can't optimize for what you can't measure. But once measurement exists, agentic systems can reason about it in ways humans and rules-based systems cannot.

What This Means for 2026

What’s most important: the insights from CES were grounded in what's being built right now. Protocols like AdCP are enabling agent-to-agent negotiation. AI infrastructure is making context-aware execution scalable. Measurement frameworks are expanding beyond impressions.

The question for marketing leaders, agency executives, and publishers is: "are you positioned to capture the opportunity?" The companies reimagining their approach will create new capabilities. Those optimizing the old system will hit diminishing returns.

Agentic advertising is our opportunity to build entirely new rails for how brands and media partners work together. The momentum is early but undeniable—and CES made that abundantly clear.

The future of advertising is being built by a community of practitioners, platforms, and technologists. If you're working on agentic advertising or want to help shape where it goes, join the conversation at AgenticAdvertising.org or explore the Ad Context Protocol at adcontextprotocol.org.