Attention is no longer the gatekeeper. For two decades, digital marketing has been engineered around one dominant design: the ad unit. Paid search. Pre-roll. Display. We optimized bids, refined audiences, and scaled reach with precision. Marketing became a predictable, capital-efficient growth engine. That engine still works, but the interface that governs decision-making is changing, and that changes what drives performance. Marketing is shifting from a system optimized to win attention to one optimized to win recommendation. As AI increasingly shapes what consumers see and choose, competitive advantage depends less on distribution scale alone, and …

The Advertising Research Foundation's CIMM East Conference began where last year's left off: on an advertising "currency fiesta," per Fox Senior Vice President-Research & Data, Ad Sales' Kym Frank, who famously made that quip in 2025.