Warner Bros. Discovery’s Bridget Jayaram breaks down the network's aggressive return to addressable TV advertising, revealing how traditional media giants are deploying first-party data, convergence strategies, and performance guarantees to win back ad dollars from tech platforms like Meta and Google.

iSpot CEO Sean Muller joins Next in Media to break down how the post-2026 upfronts are shifting the TV advertising landscape toward trusted, outcomes-based measurement, the reality of AI-driven optimization, and what brands actually care about moving forward.

Jubilee Media founder and CEO Jason Y. Lee joins the podcast to break down how the digital-first studio builds scalable, format-driven unscripted content, navigates brand partnerships on hot-button topics, and bridges the gap between YouTube and traditional Hollywood.

This week, Mike is joined by WildBrain’s VP of Media Solutions, Emma Witkowski. Together, they dive into the major advertising disconnect in the kids' media space, how nostalgia is driving family shared screen time, and the way upcoming privacy rules like COPPA 2.0 are completely reshaping digital targeting.

Alan Moss, Amazon's ad sales chief, explains how the company stitched together sports, streaming, retail media, and AI into a single full-funnel pitch — and why that matters heading into this year's upfronts.

Net Conversion CMO Kristina Canada on why independent agencies are having a renaissance — and how her team is using CTV, AI skepticism, and radical transparency to take on the holdcos.

Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe joins Mike Shields to unpack how the iconic trick-shot brand has scaled into a diversified media company. They dig into their family-audience moat, its co-created Xfinity ad with YouTube, the BODYARMOR partnership, and why Andrew thinks his company looks more like a sports league than a creator business.

Lenovo CMO Emily Ketchen joins Mike Shields to talk about operationalizing AI across marketing, managing an agentic workforce, marketing a new tech category, and the Sundance-winning creator campaign behind Lenovo's Gen Z push.

In this episode of Next in Media, I sit down with Michael Wolf, CEO and Founder of Activate Consulting, to break down the findings from the firm’s 11th annual Technology and Media Outlook. Michael walks us through Activate's "Attention Clock" and how multitasking stretches the average American's day well past 24 hours, leaving brands to fight for partial attention while still paying like they're getting all of it. We also get into the state of television. Michael explains why TV is more fragmented than Madison Avenue admits, why YouTube still doesn't get full credit despite dominating CTV, and what the Paramount-Warner deal actually changes. From there, we turn to predictions: Michael makes the case for virtual product placement as the next frontier in creator and in-game ads, and explains how sports gambling is changing live sports. He closes with his biggest sleeper story of 2026: spatial computing and the data layer that will power it. Key Highlights: ⏰ The Attention Clock Hits 32 Hours a Day: Activate's research shows multitasking is pushing daily media consumption past the limits of a 24-hour day, leaving advertisers fighting for partial attention. 📺 TV Is More Fragmented Than Anyone Admits: Even the biggest TV players hold surprisingly small slices of total viewership, and a merged Paramount-Warner barely moves the needle. 🎬 Why YouTube Still Isn't "TV" to Madison Avenue: YouTube dominates CTV but lacks the big simultaneous tentpole events that brand advertisers use to reach huge audiences at once. 🛒 The Shopping Journey No Longer Starts at Google: For younger consumers, product discovery now begins directly at Amazon, Target, and Walmart — reshaping how brands think about the funnel. 🎮 Virtual Product Placement Is the Next Ad Frontier: Michael argues the future of in-game and in-content ads is authentic integration powered by AI, not interruption. 🎰 Sports Gambling Is Quietly Saving Long-Form Sports: In-game betting and prop bets are driving Gen Z viewers to watch entire games front to back. 👓 Spatial Computing Is the Most Underrated Story of 2026: Nearly every major tech company is betting on AI glasses and spatial devices, but the real battleground will be the visual data layer in the cloud.   Resources & Next Steps: 💡 Download the full Tech & Media Outlook at activate.com 🔗 Follow Michael J. Wolf on LinkedIn 🎧 Subscribe to Next in Media on Apple Podcasts   Chapter Time Stamps: 00:00 Cold open – Why YouTube is winning on every screen 1:29 Introducing Michael Wolf, CEO & Founder of Activate Consulting 2:31 Activate's Attention Clock: 11 years of measuring multitasking  4:35 How fragmented is TV viewership, really?  6:33 How YouTube quietly took over social and CTV 7:46 Why video is eating the internet 8:54 Why Madison Avenue still hesitates to treat YouTube like TV 12:05 Sponsor break: Why the household graph is a differentiator 13:24 What the Paramount-Warner deal actually changes 14:45 Why CTV still isn't built for small brands  15:54 AI, personalization, and the future of video creative  16:22 The bottleneck holding back creator marketing  18:01 How can video games finally get advertising right? 19:19 Live sports, Gen Z, and the gambling effect 20:54 Michael's biggest sleeper call for 2026  24:17 Wrap up and thanks

Explore how the "cookie apocalypse" evolved into a hyper-fragmented identity landscape where iPhone users, cookieless browsers, and diverse CTV signals have created massive monetization gaps for the unprepared.  I sit down with Intent IQ’s Fabrice Beer-Gabel to reveal why the future of programmatic advertising isn't a choice between deterministic or probabilistic data, but a high-stakes race to balance scale with the 99% accuracy required to prevent AI from amplifying inaccuracies at scale. Episode Takeaways: 🌐 The "Cookie Apocalypse" didn't disappear; it simply evolved into a hyper-fragmented landscape of "idealist" environments across 150 million iPhone users and 70 million cookieless desktop browsers. ⚖️ True identity accuracy isn't a binary choice between deterministic and probabilistic methods but a strategic effort to strike the perfect balance between massive scale and reliable user recognition. 🌍 Global compliance requires a nuanced, jurisdiction-specific approach because adopting a single "strictest" standard unnecessarily limits reach and creates a massive competitive disadvantage. 🌉 Bridging the gap between proprietary "data spines" and "biddable identifiers" is the only way to actually translate deep audience insights into real-world programmatic transactions. 🤖 AI acts as a powerful force multiplier for identity resolution, but it poses a systemic risk by amplifying bad data into "inaccuracy at scale" if the initial training sets are flawed. 🕷️ Publishers face a sustainability crisis as non-monetizable crawler traffic now outweighs human visitors by a staggering 200-to-1 ratio. 📈 Mastering identity resolution delivers a massive ROI punch, with the potential to double advertiser reach and lift publisher ad revenue by as much as 60%.Time Stamps: 00:00 Introduction to Identity Resolution Challenges and Intent IQ Overview  1:53 The Fragmented Identity Landscape and Signal Constraints  4:06 Deterministic vs Probabilistic Identity Debate  5:33 Mobile Identity Evolution and Cross-Platform Similarities  7:25 Regulatory Complexity and Compliance Strategies  9:36 Intent IQ's Business Model and Client Examples  12:45 Walled Gardens vs Open Ecosystem Competition  15:00 AI's Impact on Identity Resolution and Industry Transformation  17:54 Agentic AI and Content Protection Concerns  19:38 Identity Accuracy Crisis and AI Amplification Risks  21:45 ROI Impact and Business Outcomes  22:50 Strategic Advice for Brands in a Changing Landscape