AI’s next advertising revolution isn’t about making more ads. It’s about making media more valuable
Amsterdam | 8 October 2026
AI AI, agentic media buying, conversational advertising and everything in between.
Yesterday I attended (and spoke at) EGTA’s Marketing & Sales Meeting, specifically the ‘AI Tech Fair’ in (an airport just outside) Amsterdam where a high quality slew of media centric startups revealed their vision of how artificial intelligence could reshape the economics of audio and TV / video broadcasting.
A very high quality room full of slaes product, commercial and innovation leaders from leading publishers such as ITV, Global Media, TF1, RTE, Disney, Bauer, Triton Media and many more.
For years, the advertising industry has been selling attention, measuring how many people watched, listened, clicked or remembered. Audiences are packaged and access sold to them in the hope that advertising produces a commercial result.
The Artificial intelligence track at the conference showcased 10 established, high growth companies challenging the status quo and painting a vision of a new future for audio and TV advertising coming quickly towards us.
The pace of adoption of these new operarting models and technology to not not offer to generate another thousand advertising creatives, write another sales email or save a few hours of administration. Those are useful improvements, but they are not the real prize.
The bigger opportunities are to make every part of the media value chain more commercially productive: identifying advertisers before competitors do, making inventory easier to buy, unlocking value in existing content, developing direct audience relationships, offering real time reporting and connecting advertising exposure to meaningful action.
While each business approaches a different problem, the combined message was remarkably consistent, that the next generation of advertising technology could help publishers capture more of the value they already create.
Shout out to Joanna Burton, long time advisor of Say It Now for the invitation and tens of introductions to this awesome crowd!
Start with the business problem, not the technology
The afternoon opened with a useful challenge from Yuri Loburets, a strategic adviser working in AI commercialisation and partnerships. Before getting excited about another AI demonstration, he encouraged the room to identify the commercial variable that actually needs to change.
Is it the time required to win a new customer? The cost of delivering a campaign? The revenue generated from existing inventory? Or an entirely new source of income?
He divided the opportunity into three categories:
Improve: Deliver existing products and services faster and more cheaply.
Enhance: Increase the value of products and services already being sold.
Expand: Create new revenue streams that were previously uneconomic or impossible.
That framework proved to be a really effective way to understand the presentations that followed. Whilst some technologies promised significant operational savings. Others offered broadcasters more ways to monetise existing inventory or suggested entirely new commercial models.
Saving ten hours of sales administration is valuable, but generating a net new advertiser, securing a higher yield or creating a previously unavailable commercial opportunity could be substantially more impactful.
The commercial engine is becoming intelligent
Spotwise.ai, an advertising intelligence business founded by Roberts Ernests Levics took the stage.
Traditional advertising monitoring can tell sales teams which brands are advertising. However, collecting that information is only the beginning. Someone still needs to analyse it, identify the opportunity, find the decision-maker, prepare the pitch and contact the prospect.
Spotwise demonstrated what happens when AI takes responsibility for that wider workflow. Its technology monitors advertising in near real time, turning broadcasts into structured information containing advertisers, creative messages, placements and other useful commercial signals.
AI agents can then identify advertisers appearing on competitor stations, enrich their details, draft relevant outreach and connect the information to existing CRM systems.
Roberts demonstrated the approach using live advertising detection from the Irish market.
The important innovation is not simply faster monitoring. It is the connection between intelligence and execution.
Instead of giving a salesperson another report to interpret, the platform can help deliver a qualified opportunity ready to pursue.
Spotwise says its technology is already operating across 14 countries, and its agentic operating system launched in July 2026.
For broadcasters, the potential is straightforward: more productive sales teams, faster response to advertisers entering the market and greater access to budgets that might otherwise go unnoticed.
There is also a competitive implication. As these capabilities spread, the advantage will increasingly come from how quickly and intelligently a commercial organisation acts on information, rather than simply possessing it.
The implicit message from Spotwise is to get your sales team a licence now!
What happens when AI agents start buying advertising?
If Spotwise demonstrated how AI can find advertising opportunities, TeknaLab showed how those opportunities could become easier to transact.
CEO Mohamed Laaouissi introduced AIYA, an agentic media trading infrastructure designed to connect advertising buyers and sellers through AI agents.
The idea is that an agency could describe its campaign objectives, budget and audience in natural language. An AI agent would then communicate with a broadcaster’s systems, discover suitable inventory and return a proposal.
Much of the administration currently handled through emails, spreadsheets and telephone calls could happen in minutes. Crucially, TeknaLab’s proposition is designed to preserve the broadcaster’s commercial authority. The media owner sets the rules, controls the inventory and retains approval over the transaction.
A documented French pilot involving Values.media, TeknaLab and sales house Adtlas used AI agents to organise a connected television campaign that delivered 237,400 impressions in December 2025.
It remains an early example rather than evidence that the entire market has transformed. However, it demonstrates that agents can participate in real advertising transactions, not just produce hypothetical media plans.
Underlying these developments are emerging standards including the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), alongside work by IAB Tech Lab on agentic advertising infrastructure. For broadcasters, this creates an interesting strategic question.
If advertisers increasingly use AI assistants to plan media, how discoverable will your inventory be to those agents?
In an agent-led buying environment, making inventory machine-readable and commercially accessible could become as important as having an effective sales website or a well-connected sales team.
But accessibility cannot come at the expense of pricing control, commercial judgement or ownership of the advertiser relationship. Agentic advertising should make the broadcaster easier to buy from, not easier to bypass.
From anonymous audiences to valuable relationships
A second major theme emerged around audience engagement.
Broadcasters have spent decades building valuable relationships with audiences through trusted content, programmes and personalities. Much of the commercial value of those relationships is realised through advertising impressions.
Digital platforms have developed a different model, combining media exposure with user identity, behavioural data, participation and direct commercial action. Several exhibitors argued that broadcasters can develop more of these capabilities without surrendering their audiences to third-party platforms.
Choicely demonstrated how AI is dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of building native mobile applications. Executive Chairman Heikki Rotko and CEO Kaius Meskanen showed how publishers and broadcasters can create applications, alter their appearance, introduce new features and manage audience participation with relatively little development work.
In a live demonstration, changes made through the application builder appeared immediately on a connected mobile device. I was sat next to Michel Dupont who created a wordle type game in just a few minutes as the talk was progressing on stage. As someone who has spent a lot of time overseeing the build of mobile apps this was truly impressive.
Choicely has established credentials in entertainment, including its work with Love Island, where mobile applications support second screen audience engagement alongside television broadcasts. Commercially, this matters because interactive applications can support paid voting, subscriptions, sponsorship, commerce and other revenue opportunities beyond conventional advertising.
AI makes these experiences quicker and cheaper to create, opening possibilities for smaller broadcasters, individual programmes and shorter-lived events.
Waveplus IO approached the same challenge from a broader perspective.
Its proposition is to connect content, applications, data and commerce into continuously evolving digital experiences.
Rather than treating someone as an anonymous viewer during one programme and an unrelated visitor on another platform, broadcasters could develop a more continuous understanding of that person’s interests and actions across connected touchpoints.
An initial interaction could lead to a personalised offer, a booking, a purchase or another relevant experience.
Waveplus presented a model in which these journeys can be created and refined by commercial teams, with pricing linked to measured audience actions rather than conventional software licences alone.
There is a shared commercial principle behind both companies. The opportunity is to move from selling access to audiences towards building relationships that create value repeatedly.
Advertising becomes a conversation
That ambition extended beyond mobile applications and into a the often overlooked ambient channel, voice.
Say It Now presented a different approach: using the voice assistants already present in consumers’ homes to turn conventional advertising into two-way conversations.
CEO Charles Cadbury challenged the established broadcasting model by asking why advertising remains largely a one-directional experience when humans are naturally inclined to interact and in fact a 2 way conversation continues to be the best way to build a trusted relationship.
The company’s technology uses existing inventory across audio or television advertising but adds a voice call to action.
A listener might hear a campaign for a holiday and ask Alexa to open a brand experience, explore a product, request information or receive a link on their mobile phone.
The important point is that broadcasters do not need to change their inventory or distribution infrastructure.
Any existing advertising impression can become the starting point for a measurable interaction.
During the presentation, Say It Now demonstrated an MSC Cruises example in which listeners could respond verbally to an audio advertisement and continue towards browsing available cruises as well as a recent campaign booking test drives for Audi.
The commercial proposition combines additional inventory value, first-party engagement signals and measurable campaign outcomes.
There is already evidence of the model in practice. An IAB UK case study with Tesco and MediaCom describes an actionable audio campaign in which listeners used Alexa to request reminders about Christmas offers. The published results included 2,911 conversions and a reported session conversion rate of approximately 29%.
That figure measures what happened after users entered the voice experience, not the proportion of all advertising impressions that converted. The distinction is important when assessing effectiveness, nonetheless, the principle is significant.
Broadcasters have always been effective at creating awareness and stimulating demand. Conversational technology provides another way to capture and respond to that demand in the moment the consumer is interested.
It also creates a different form of evidence for advertisers. Rather than relying only on estimated exposure or subsequent site visits, they can begin measuring intentional responses and the outcomes of the conversation. Full funnel measurement from impression to outcome in an ambient channnel is finally in sight for audio and TV.
This fits an increasingly important direction for the industry: making awareness-led channels more accountable without undermining what makes them powerful in the first place.
The hidden value in the content broadcasters already own
Another theme concerned content libraries and the enormous amount of commercially valuable information that remains difficult to access.
AskGVT, developed by GVTLabs, introduced technology designed to understand video at a much more detailed level. Rhys McLachlan, formerly responsible for advanced advertising at ITV, described a system capable of analysing video at the level of individual moments, understanding not only what appears on screen but also the surrounding context. This potentially opens important opportunities in advertising adjacency.
Instead of selling sponsorship around a broad programme genre, a broadcaster could identify highly specific moments relevant to an advertiser, such as particular products, activities or situations. The same understanding could help production and editorial teams retrieve relevant archive material rapidly. Its underlying proposition is that video content becomes more valuable when its meaning is searchable.
GVTLabs has also extended its AskGVT technology into creator video discovery, where content can be searched using questions rather than conventional metadata. This is commercially significant for broadcasters with extensive archives. Content that has already been produced and paid for may contain advertising and distribution opportunities that conventional cataloguing cannot economically reveal.
A related but distinct problem was represented by Snicket Labs.
Although CEO Michael Duffy was scheduled to demonstrate its technology, travel delays prevented that presentation from taking place. Its products nevertheless addressed an important part of the afternoon’s wider theme.
Snicket Labs, previously known as Ad Signal, has developed two relevant capabilities.
Its Match technology identifies duplicate and near-duplicate video, helping organisations reduce storage requirements, streamline clearance and manage multiple advertising versions. The company says the technology can reduce storage and operational costs by up to 60%, using fingerprinting rather than generative AI.
Its Assure platform provides independently verified television playout information and supports reporting to the UK’s audience measurement system, Barb. These technologies reveal an important point about innovation. Not every valuable solution needs a large language model. The practical ability to identify, classify, verify and manage content can deliver substantial commercial and operational value.
Together, AskGVT and Snicket Labs demonstrate how broadcasters can potentially extract more from the assets they already own, whether through new advertising products, improved workflows or lower operating costs.
Better advertising needs more than automation
One of the afternoon’s most interesting contrasts came from eve.AI.
While many exhibitors focused on automation, emotional effectiveness specialist Oliver Spitzer reminded the audience that the ultimate purpose of advertising is to influence human behaviour.
eve.AI uses research into emotional responses to assess advertising creative before campaigns go live.
Spitzer explained how years of physiological research had informed the development of an AI model designed to predict characteristics including attraction, trust, relevance and emotional engagement. Rather than generate more advertising, the technology is intended to help advertisers select and improve creative with greater potential impact.
The company claims it can deliver testing in approximately 20 minutes, replacing research projects that traditionally cost around €10,000. Such speed and cost comparisons remain vendor claims and need evaluating against independent validation and actual business outcomes.
A memorable example involved a German telecommunications advertiser during a promotional period dominated by loud, urgent messaging. The proposed response was to whisper.
The wider lesson is valuable. AI can help marketers challenge creative conventions and understand the likely effects of their advertising before investing substantial media budgets.
For broadcasters and sales houses, this opens an opportunity to offer effectiveness services alongside the media itself.
But AI-generated emotional scores should be treated as predictive tools, not unquestionable evidence of how every audience will respond. Creative testing still needs validation against real-world performance.
First-party data becomes a commercial asset
If the afternoon had a recurring concern, it was ownership and control.
Media companies want to make greater use of AI, but they understandably do not want their data, relationships or commercial decisions absorbed into somebody else’s platform.
AUDIENCES presented an interesting answer to that problem. Co-founder Matt Wilkinson argued that one of advertising’s largest untapped opportunities lies in the customer intelligence companies have already accumulated in their cloud data warehouses.
The challenge is not necessarily collecting more data. It is making that existing intelligence usable across advertising channels while maintaining appropriate security and control.
AUDIENCES enables organisations to activate first-party customer information directly from their own cloud environments, reducing the need to transfer underlying datasets into additional intermediaries.
The potential benefits include better audience selection, suppressing existing customers from inappropriate acquisition campaigns, finding similar prospects and measuring commercial outcomes. Matt highlighted work with Saga, the travel and cruise business.
In a reported connected television campaign using Sky AdSmart and customer intelligence activated through AUDIENCES, approximately £100,000 of incremental media investment was associated with £1.1 million in incremental booking value.
The company’s published Saga case study also reports a 33% booking uplift between exposed and control groups. These results are encouraging, although they should be understood as reported campaign outcomes rather than a guarantee that similar results will be replicated elsewhere.
The strategic implication goes beyond a single campaign. If advertisers can more easily connect the customer intelligence they already own to broadcaster inventory, television and audio could become more attractive channels for measurable growth.
The value of a broadcaster’s advertising offering would then be determined not just by its audience reach, but by how effectively it can connect that reach to the advertiser’s commercial objectives.
AI implementation is becoming a core business discipline
The final presentation brought the conversation back to practical implementation.
Amsterdam-based technology studio Bit described its approach to turning emerging technology into working solutions.
Managing Director Paul de Kuyper discussed collaborations with Talpa, including automated content classification and improved access to information stored across different internal systems. One particularly useful example involved AI-assisted advertising compliance.
The technology analyses audio, video and text to help identify potential regulatory problems before advertising goes live.
The broader initiative has developed into ReclameChecker, made available through Screenforce in September 2026. This is a practical illustration of AI improving an existing industry process without replacing the need for human judgement. It also demonstrates the potential for collaboration.
Rather than every broadcaster independently creating and maintaining identical technology, some capabilities can be developed collaboratively and made available across the wider market.
Bit’s work also highlighted another emerging requirement: connecting internal data and systems so that future AI agents can access useful organisational knowledge. An intelligent assistant has limited value if the information it needs remains locked in incompatible databases, departmental systems or inaccessible documents. The ability to structure, connect and govern that information may prove as important as choosing the AI model itself.
The bigger picture: a new commercial operating model for media
Taken together, the afternoon’s demonstrations revealed something more important than a collection of interesting products, they showed how almost every stage of the advertising value chain could become more intelligent, interactive and commercially measurable.
Spotwise demonstrated how advertising intelligence can become proactive sales execution.
TeknaLab showed how advertising inventory could become accessible to AI-powered buyers.
Choicely, Waveplus and Say It Now demonstrated different ways to convert passive audiences into participating customers.
AskGVT and Snicket Labs illustrated opportunities to extract additional value from existing content and broadcast operations.
eve.AI showed how technology could help improve creative effectiveness.
AUDIENCES demonstrated how first-party customer intelligence can be activated more directly and securely.
And Bit provided examples of how organisations can build the infrastructure and processes needed to make these capabilities useful in practice.
What became clear across the egta AI Tech Fair is that broadcasters still possess considerable competitive advantages: trusted content, established advertiser relationships, valuable audiences and extensive intellectual property.
AI offers new ways to make those assets work harder.
The real opportunity is not to become more like the global technology platforms. It is to build a commercially intelligent media business that uses technology to strengthen the advantages broadcasters already possess.
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