Advertising Week New York 2026: CTV Enters the Agentic Era?

At this year’s Advertising Week New York, many CTV conversations centered on how to prove what the channel delivers. On a Tuesday panel, PubMatic’s Nicole Scaglione argued that CTV should answer for business outcomes and attribution. And buyers say they see progress coming: EMARKETER reports that 47% of U.S. ad buyers expect CTV to make its biggest strides in measurement and attribution over the next 12 months. 

Those CTV discussions at AWNY increasingly overlapped with AI, which 87% of the ad industry already uses in ad decisions. Some in the industry pointed to an emerging category called the Unified Media Platform (UMP), which uses AI agents to shift budget mid-campaign across an advertiser’s existing buying platforms, within limits the buyer sets. But for all the efficiency AI promises, panelists kept coming back to trust, and whether marketers can explain and defend what these tools recommend.

Our Take
The promise of agentic buying is simple: an AI agent moves budget toward what’s working while a campaign is still live. But an agent can only chase the signals it’s given, and clicks get harder to earn as AI answers resolve more searches on their own. Even before agents arrived, 76.9% of U.S. marketers said last-click attribution is convenient but not truly accurate. An agent trained on clicks would inherit that blind spot and act on it faster.

We think that gives an edge to channels built without the click. Performance TV never had one to fall back on, so advertisers have learned to judge it on outcomes like incremental lift. MNTN’s VP of Product Marketing, Matt Collins, made that case on AWNY’s Innovation Stage in “AI Performance Anxiety: Why the Only Cure Is an Unclickable Screen.” As agents take on more of the buying, outcome signals may be the most useful thing a channel can hand them.

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