Advertising Week Briefing: AWNY distills the industry’s existential drift

The pace of change, from AI to global instability to the fracturing of media itself — has caught even seasoned marketers off balance. Ad Week New York doesn’t escape that. If anything, it distills it. For many of the 20,000-plus attending, this year feels like Q4’s ceremonial kickoff, and more like a pulse check. 

Take longtime industry analyst Karsten Weide, for instance. He will make the trip into Midtown despite the Penn District’s chaotic sprawl, to get a steer on whether the ad tech industry still has a handle on the bigger picture, or if it’s lost in the weeds. 

“I want to learn what ad tech’s mitigation strategies are,” he continued. “Publishers are seeing on average between 25 to 30% decreases, which isn’t just bad news for them, it’s bad news for ad tech because there’s less inventory for them to help monetize.”

And when it comes to monetization few players are commanding more attention than Amazon. The company is showing up in force, capping off a year where its ad ambitions have gone from aggressive to foundational. Eight execs are slated to appear, including Eran Metzer, head of global ad tech services at Amazon Ads, head of sports brand partnerships Amy McDevitt and head of U.S. video and live sports sales Danielle Carney. The entourage underscores how Amazon has become a gravitational center for large swathes of the industry.

If Amazon is becoming foundational to advertising, AI is becoming foundational to everything — and Ad Week, more than ever, is where the industry goes to figure out what that actually means.

“I expect to see proof of concepts and tech demos to show what chat-based interfaces with the internet might look like and how they’re monetized,” said Ankur Srivastava vp of product management at PubMatic. ”A new realm of chat based advertising will come up.”

It’s this kind of deeper, more structural anxiety that’s expected to creep into conversations this week. Granted, Ad Week New York always comes with a dose of introspection. This year, though, it feels closer to a reckoning — and not just on the sidelines. 

Onstage, the shift is just as clear. 

Nowhere more so than in the surge of creator-focused programming. More than 150 creator speakers are on the schedule, with some sessions expected to draw the biggest crowds. Of the 20,000 registrants, over 2,000 have signed up for creator-related sessions, according to Ruth Mortimer, global president of Advertising Week. 

None of this is to say business won’t get done. It will. That part of the week still hums along. But as the event calendar swells, Ad Week’s real value may now lie in what it exposes not just what it promotes. 

“We’re there [ad Ad Week] but not in a big way in terms of investment, panels or activations like we do at Possible,” said Kerel Cooper, GumGum’s CMO. “Instead, it’s really about setting up agencies and brands and hosting dinners. It’s more one-on-one and strategic for us.”

It’s a no-frills approach — one that’s served many companies well. Rather than compete with the giants who tend to dominate the stage, some ad firms are choosing to stay lean. With CES, Possible, Cannes and Dmexco already crowding the calendar, Ad Week still has a place but it no longer holds the spotlight it once did.

Creators claim a bigger stage at AWNY

Ad industry tentpole events have tried to court creators in recent years by ingraining them in programming — from Cannes Lions and SXSW offering a specific creator track beginning in 2024.

Advertising Week New York is no stranger to that trend, after creating a special half day programming in 2021 centered around creators. New this year, AWNY has expanded how it wants to appeal to creators with a new Creator Lounge and four programming tracks devoted to covering off “the creator economy in all angles,” said Ruth Mortimer, global president of Advertising Week, including sports and creator investments.

It’s an opportune time to do so: with Goldman Sachs forecasting the value of the creator economy to double to around $480 billion by 2027.

The conference is scheduled to feature over 150 different creator speakers. Of the 20,000 registrants to the event, over two thousand are registered for creator-related activities, Mortimer said.

In 2021, the event highlighted how creators were part of the bottom of the marketing funnel. Now, that conversation has expanded to how creators are also at the top of the funnel — “the strategic people you’re working with as your media channels, your strategic thinkers who have a big audience that can understand how to reach new audiences,” Mortimer said, adding, “The difference has been the focus on where in the marketing funnel creators live.”