Metric Mouseketeers
Ad Tech Insights
Disney Unveils New Ad Tech at CES 2026
The story: At its annual Tech and Data Showcase during CES, The Walt Disney Company unveiled a suite of AI advancements that signal a broader shift in how ad tech approaches planning, creative, and measurement. The updates included a video generation tool for creating CTV-ready commercials, an AI-powered planning tool designed to make campaigns more intentional and outcome-focused, and Custom Relevancy, which allows advertisers to bring their own models to inform ad decisioning.
Disney also introduced the Disney Advertising Brand Impact Metric—a unified measurement framework that combines attention, brand health, and search to illustrate the halo effect of brand performance. The Brand Portal within Disney Compass now integrates with data providers including Affinity Solutions, CINT, EDO, Innovid, and VideoAmp, delivering category benchmarks alongside AI-generated performance summaries.
Meanwhile, publishing executives interviewed by Digiday say KPIs are undergoing a fundamental shift. Traffic and scale are no longer primary indicators of success, giving way to metrics like conversion, engagement, registrations, and subscriptions. Publishers are redesigning their sites to increase stickiness, aiming to extract more value from fewer visits. At the same time, resources are being directed toward tracking AI visibility—measuring how often publishers are mentioned or cited within AI-powered search tools.
The takeaway: A clear pattern is emerging across media categories. AI is moving from experimental to operational. Measurement systems are consolidating multiple signals into unified views. And organizations are increasingly prioritizing transparency over black-box optimization. Retail media networks face the same choice: build AI systems with auditable logic and retailer control, or rely on opaque platforms where decisioning disappears into algorithms optimized for someone else’s business model.
Extra Industry Insights
- IAB Europe 's Marie-Clare Puffett identified measurement, standardization, and harmonization as the biggest issues holding European retail media back, stating that accountability requires standards adoption at scale.
- Puffett also expressed excitement about in-store retail media as digitization of physical stores creates opportunities for meaningful point-of-sale metrics over the next two years.
- Media executives entering 2026 are recalibrating around AI advertising revenue opportunities after a challenging 2025 marked by search algorithm changes and copyright disputes, with publishers like Dow Jones integrating generative AI into everything from client research to real-time media plan refinement while building analytics tools to track AI visibility across search platforms.
- At CES 2026, industry conversations centered on the infrastructural requirements for advancing agentic advertising, with uncertainty around how AI-based search is consuming the open web while publishers experiment with building in-house media buying AI agents to automate RFP analysis, planning, and curation.
Kevel Catch-up
📝 PUBLISHED: Kevel blog "Direct Offers Explained: How to Deliver High-Intent Promotions Without the Black Box”
Google’s Direct Offers deliver real-time promotions at moments of purchase intent—but rely on opaque AI decisioning. This guest post by Kevel’s VP of Retail Media Dylan Hulser explains what Direct Offers are and how retailers can build the same high-intent experiences with Kevel, using transparent, first-party logic and full control.
Recommended by LinkedIn
👉 Read the full article here
Keep Learning
WATCH �� In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, Sam Wright , Strategic Leader at Kevel, explains why businesses of all sizes can establish retail media networks if they have a core business and route to talk to customers, how organizational alignment from C-level down to execution teams determines success, and why fintech companies sitting on transaction-level data are uniquely positioned to build powerful commerce media networks (Viewing time: 36:03).
READ → This article from Digiday explores off-site media, and how it allows brands to connect with consumers earlier in the purchase journey while maintaining access to retailer first-party data for targeting and measurement, creating opportunities for upper-funnel awareness campaigns that complement on-site conversion tactics.
LISTEN → In this episode of Unlocking Retail Media, Sam Wright, Strategic Leader at Kevel, explains why businesses of all sizes can establish retail media networks if they have a core business and route to talk to customers, how organizational alignment from C-level down to execution teams determines success, and why fintech companies sitting on transaction-level data are uniquely positioned to build powerful commerce media networks (Listening time: 36:03).
