Advertising Week opens on an industry in the middle of a rebuild

The through-line at Advertising Week New York this year is implementation, not experimentation. "We've moved quickly from experimentation to implementation," said Alistair Hill, CEO of brand-uplift firm On Device, and his worry is trust: "faster optimization means little if nobody can trust the data and measurement behind it." Kochava CEO Leslie Amadi flagged that CFOs are now in the room on costs and security teams are watching how first-party data could leak into AI models. The creator economy is the other pole: AWNY's global president Ruth Mortimer expects around 2,500 creators, up from 1,000, and she and chief creator officer Dhar Mann have set a target of $100 million in creator deals over 12 months. But the scepticism is audible: "Creators don't just want the invite to help promote ticket sales. They want real deals to come from it," said Adam Wescott, CEO of Home Game Studios. Mortimer's own summary is the honest one: "We're all going to live with uncertainty forever."

The crux

The ad industry is rebuilding around AI and creators faster than it can settle the questions of cost, trust and measurement, and the gap between implementation speed and verified measurement is where value is being destroyed or captured.

Sell-side read

Publishers have a narrow window to be the trusted party in this rebuild, because measurement and first-party data integrity are exactly what buyers cannot get from a creator or an AI vendor alone. The executives saying they are going to AWNY "mainly to listen" are the same buyers publishers need to be selling verifiable attention to.

Watch

Whether the $100 million creator-deal target survives contact with actual CMO budgets, and what measurement vendors announce at AWNY this week.