Broadcast television still delivers unmatched reach trust and influence across every screen that matters, according to the trade group.
Your audience knows you are targeting them and they are not running for the hills.
AI is becoming part of the infrastructure for brand discovery and comparison, along with content creation.
AI literacy is becoming cultural literacy, making brand presence inside AI ecosystems matter as much as a presence in social feeds.
Seventy four percent of the average grocery cart is made up of habitual purchases, while only 26% is up for grabs. That sliver is a battlefield for advertisers.
Netflix's global reach is closing in on 1 billion people, with 315 million paid subscribers as of Q4 2025.
CMOs now expect media to drive growth, relevance and transformation all at once.
Consumers feel informed and optimistic, but they are also alert, cautious and paying close attention to how AI shows up in content and advertising.
The smartest media strategies will balance automation and humanity, scale and specificity, speed and meaning.
Consumers aren't looking for brands to fix everything, but to understand the mood without making it worse.
Nearly two thirds of Americans say having ads in AI search results would make them trust those results less.
Pringles led the pack with the biggest bump in purchase intent among viewers, followed by Hellmann's Mayonnaise and Ritz crackers.
Rating information, crucial for brand safety, is often missing from FAST programming.
As much as 40% of open-web CTV spend may be wasted because of faulty data inputs, according to Truthset.
Everyone agrees AI is transforming TV advertising, but fewer than one-third of advertisers actually trust it to do advertising tasks for them.
Viewers responded to the beverage brand's commercial by doing what modern audiences do best: searching first and asking questions later.
Media has become the connective tissue between brands and consumers in an increasingly algorithmic ecosystem.
Roughly six in ten U.S. women say they are at least somewhat likely to watch this year's game, marking a notable jump from last season.
Food and drink, parking and lodging see nearly double the lift of other categories on NFL game days.
AI-driven improvements could unlock up to $26 billion in incremental media investment and another $6 billion in productivity gains, according to IAB estimates.
IAB's 2026 Outlook predicts faster growth, bigger bets on AI and a collective industry shrug toward "agentic" everything.
More than a third of marketers say they can't prove incremental return on ad spend.
Discovery, consideration and even purchase are increasingly happening inside AI interfaces, often without a click, a visit or a polite thank you to the brand that supplied the data.
Roughly 40 percent of media buyers now view retail media as a full-funnel solution, according to survey data.
Eighty-two percent of ad executives believe Gen Z and millennials feel positive about AI-generated ads. Only 45% of those consumers agree.
Distinctive brand assets now deliver significantly more impact than star appearances alone, with updated modeling showing these assets generating more than double the effectiveness of before.
Invalid clicks contaminate conversion data, mislead bidding algorithms, inflate acquisition costs and push spend toward campaigns that appear effective on paper but fail to generate revenue.
Data richness, while critical for targeting and performance, increasingly sits alongside regulatory risk, consumer scrutiny and platform-level privacy controls.
The findings sharpen the brief at a moment when sports remain one of the last scaled, live audiences. The data shows that attention is not disappearing, but it is becoming conditional.
Lower-funnel marketing is frequently focused on confirming decisions rather than creating them.