That was the question that closed Tuesday's MediaPost upfront panel discussion, but the bigger question throughout might well have been "What's an upfront?"

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.