Igor Uroic: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We are recording this session, actually, a day after some of the announcements of Warner Bros. and Netflix. And I think it’s relevant to the topic of change, disruptions and what we see happening in the media landscape in 2026. So, thanks for joining us. I’m Igor Uroic, partner with the Alexander Group. I lead our media and consumer technology practice area within the Alexander Group, and I’m joined by two of my colleagues, Yang Liu and Mark O’Donnell, who are directors that lead various sectors within that on the retail media and consumer tech side, and ad tech side. So today we’ll talk a little bit about what we see happening in 2026 in terms of big changes, big disruptors. So we narrow that down to a couple of topics here. Yang, Mark, thanks for joining us. So, Mark, I’ll start with you. One of the things that you mentioned to me during our conversations that I really liked was this concept of publishers taking control of their own destiny. Tell me more about what you mean about that. What are what are some actions that they’re taking?
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah. So I think it’s a trend that’s started to happen in the past few years, and I expect it to continue and maybe even accelerate, which is publishers looking to actually own more of their revenue directly through the advertiser buying process. Historically, publishers have always, well, usually need to work with agencies in order to be successful, as advertisers historically or brands historically have used those agencies for their ad buying. And obviously that creates, you know, some risk to a publisher’s revenue if an agency decides not to buy or doesn’t recommend buying through them anymore. They, you know, are at risk, obviously of of a big downturn and, you know, productivity or commercial success. And so, I’m already seeing with my clients a lot of shift and focus to going more direct, but it’s a tight rope exercise that has to be walked because agencies obviously still play a big, important role, I think, in the industry. I also think what’s important to be mindful of is if a publisher moves more direct and advertisers are not ready to buy direct, you know, you kind of need both those things to pair up. So I see the shift happening and continuing to happen on both sides, both the advertiser and the publisher wanting to transact more directly with each other. And that puts pressure obviously, on agencies. And then the question I would really have, or what I think will be interesting, is how do agencies react to this? How are they going to stay relevant into the future.
Igor Uroic: But but it sounds like you’re saying the publishers can’t unilaterally make that move, right? They’re still dependent on the agencies, particularly with those that transact for some of the biggest brands, right? So they still have to talk to both of those.
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah. I think as long as an advertiser or a brand is using an agency, you’re not going to give up those dollars as a publisher. You still have to play nice, and that’s going to be important for your business model in the near term for sure. The trend obviously is going more direct, but what I actually think is that you’re going to have agencies trying to get a better foothold or kind of reestablish themselves as thought leaders. They’re going to probably move more consultative than they’ve been in the past. I actually think they’ll probably acquire ad tech companies to be more sticky. I think they’re going to have to make some decisions to reinsert themselves as a necessity in ad buying.
Igor Uroic: What about the self-service aspect that you mentioned? I know I’ve done a bunch of work with folks that are trying to figure out, how do I go down market? How do I provide a service to these customers that, you know, haven’t warranted the type of expensive coverage, right, that you would give to the top? Are you seeing that as well?
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah, I think publishers are the ones I’ve worked with. It’s always a topic of discussion. It’s always a topic of design, of how can we move more to self-service. And it’s not just the long tail of accounts that are small. It’s there’s a big push to unlock self-service capability across lots of different functional aspects for advertisers. So even larger advertisers would have access to it. I think there’s a push for that to drive down cost of sales, but I also think there’s a push to do that because advertisers are moving again, more in-house buying direct, and they want to have more control over what they’re doing and have more access. And so, you know, self-service will facilitate that. So I think it’s it’s not just publishers trying to reduce cost of sales, which I think is a big driver of it. I think it’s also trying to align what you’re offering to what the actual advertisers want and need.
Yang Liu: Hey, Mark, so it sounds like you’re saying, hey, part of the movement for self-serve is because, you know, it’s how advertisers want to transact. So if you were talking to a publisher or a platform today and you said, hey, let’s really get your self-service engine revving, what kinds of pointers would you have?
Mark O’Donnell: Well, I mean, one, it’s actually understand your customer set and their needs. So going back to, if you’re trying to create self-service for your customers, you should actually truly understand are they still buying through an agency? are they buying direct? What elements of self-service do they actually want? Sometimes self-service is as simple as just being able to access reports they don’t want to actually talk to like a client service or account manager. They just want to be able to see is my my ads or my campaigns. Are they actually performing? So, it’s understanding your customer needs. It’s also understanding the value of your customers. So, like that’s the typical segmentation you should do. And you might have different levels of service or self-service for your long tail versus your large enterprise accounts. So I would say it really comes down to if folks are thinking about building a self-service platform, understand your customers, understand how you segment them and then understand how self-service fits into their buying patterns. Maybe another topic that’s worth bringing up for thinking about the future and where the industry is heading is the type of media buying folks are thinking about. One that has stood out to us, you know, as an organization or as a group, is live events. It’s always been something that people have are focused on, but there’s been a lot of shifting in the industry of where dollars are being spent and live experiences, live events seem to be at the forefront of a lot of focus. And I know Igor, we chatted about that.
Igor Uroic: Yeah, I still see that as one of the top areas or categories of spend. And as we as I think back through the course of 2025, you know, when we chatted with, with clients at IAB, ALM or at CES or others, right, where leaders are basically saying, look, this is one area where we’re particularly still, US and globally, people are making big bets. Live, experience, sports, women’s sports particularly and then also expanding into some, you know, sport areas that maybe potentially aren’t native or endemic the to the US side of things. So think about Formula One or soccer, right? And those things are where companies are making, you know, big bets and spending disproportionately relative to other areas. We see that with organizations that aren’t your typical, you know, don’t immediately come to mind, but maybe after a year or two now they do. Monday night basketball is now coming up on some of the streamers. Prime picked up, uh, Thursday football. You’re starting to get all these non-traditional organizations, if you will, or, you know, companies picking up live events, and particularly sports is an easy one, right? So, those things are still very much a big avenue of spending that we’re seeing across the board.
Yang Liu: Yeah. I think there’s going to be so many partnerships that come up with these tentpole events that you mentioned. Right? We’ve got the World Cup coming up. We’ve got the Winter Olympics. You saw last time with the last Olympics, NBC really expanded coverage. You really got to go in and to Peacock, I believe it was, and see every single event live, right? And I think with that, they’re probably going to borrow from that strength on the Winter Olympics. You’ll probably see some contextual content get created around the World Cup, but I’m really excited because I don’t think we’ve ever been in a space before where there are so many different content avenues for those live and experiential.
Igor Uroic: Yeah. I mean, the other thing that’s also happening here, Mark, is, you know, you’ve got companies that have additional business models, like Amazon, where we know that more than half of the consumers are on their digital device when they’re looking at something, right, whether it’s live or whether they’re streaming. So all of a sudden you have the ability to make quick purchases, right? As you’re, you know, watching that soccer event or that Formula One event or World Cup, Yang, as you mentioned. So it’s almost a natural adjacency for those organizations to try to branch out into that. And, you know, as consumers, I mean, I start to see it, right? And I think you guys probably do as well.
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah, I would say, yeah, if you think about the custom ability of just the advancement of you think about how Peacock has their platform, Amazon Prime has theirs, and how you can get the very tailored content that you want for these really large events. And then you pair in the transactional nature of how you can actually buy what advertisers want you to buy right then and there. It’s a very exciting future for, I think, the media industry for sure. I guess to that point, you know, I would be curious how AI plays into the landscape moving forward. I know it’s been, at least for the last 2 or 3 years, a hot topic maybe to a level of exhaustion, but it obviously is not something that’s going away. And from what I’ve seen, it’s something that’s impacting certain types of media buying. So I know, Yang, you were chatting a lot about what you speculate will happen or how AI will impact the industry. What are your general thoughts there?
Yang Liu: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s obviously still the hot topic, but I think digging into a couple of tactical examples going forward might be more helpful. There are two that come to mind for me. And it falls in the general theme of broader monetization of AI. And what I mean by that is, you know, you’ve got a lot of these AI service providers now that have proven, hey, the service works. You’re getting kind of constant traffic from a user’s perspective. You’re getting, in some cases, subscription models. But that’s only, you know, one form of revenue, right? As you as you really start proving the efficacy of what you offer, and you’ve got affinity now tied to it, then you open up the doors for a couple of things. One is kind of this natural evolution of what traditionally in the media world, we think of as search engine optimization, right? That’s basically like client partners or like, you know, different service provider partners will tap into search engines and come up with reasons why they’re result should be the top of the top of your list, right when you search for something. Well, now, with generative engine optimization, it’s more than just, you know, searching any single topic, right? It starts becoming content, starts becoming quality of content starts bringing into contextualization of that content. And you might get several results all in one. Right?
Igor Uroic: How do you define that, Yang – generative engine optimization? Besides the words themselves, like, what does it what does that actually mean? I think folks in the media landscape know what SEO is and why we should spend against it, right? Or, you know, be mindful of how do you maximize dollars there?
Yang Liu: So my understanding of GEO is similar in the sense that you’re still trying to bring forward the top, you know, answer to whatever question you’re typing into search or AI, right? It could be like one of those ChatGPT-based systems. But now you might get several answers, you know, all at once. Right? It’s not just a – hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z task, and here you go, here’s one link to follow. Now it becomes kind of a web of contextual answers which say, hey, you’re looking for ways to you know, change the oil in your car, what brands could you be considering? They might actually feed you the step-by-step video, products, like the actual components and tools you need to use all at once, right? So then your answer is really comprehensive. And now what’s happening is you’ve got channels like ChatGPT, like Google, as your intermediaries to provide these solutions through their AI. But it’s going to cause this where, where I come back to monetization is you might look at different basically pay-to-play models to be at the top of those results. Right. So you’ve got all sorts of different players in that space. You could have actual service providers, you could have retail, e-commerce, but everyone’s going to want to have some skin in the game to make sure that they kind of come to the top of GEO results, just the same way they were coming to the top of SEO results.
Igor Uroic: So are you seeing any of this in, you know, our Alexander Group clients that you’re starting to work with or, you know, is anyone doing it well yet?
Yang Liu: I think folks are still, I mean, as far as the actual AI providers, right? Like I think of the last time you did a Google search these days. Now you see GEO as actually the top result. You don’t actually see some of the results from an SEO perspective until you kind of filter through the GEO, right? So I think GEO is going to become more and more native. It’s probably not at the forefront of every, you know, major search platform yet, but it’s kind of the start of what other generative AI search tools are to begin with. A lot of folks will say these days, they use Copilot, ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines. So I think there’s going to be a lot of competitiveness in this space as well.
Mark O’Donnell: Do you think that there’ll be – I’m just thinking as you’re talking through this – a future where you ask a question, how do I change my oil? Or, you know, what’s the best running watch, or whatever you might have a question about? And it pops up an AI response, but it’s then tagged ‘sponsored content’ in very small print at the bottom. Similar to what we’ve historically seen a lot of the native advertisement, but it’s AI-generated and it’s very much on the, you know, very forward about what they’re pushing in terms of a potential solution to your question.
Yang Liu: Sure. I think there’s going to be this thin line between being, you know, truly agnostic when it comes to the answers that they provide, but also thinking about effective solutions and services that exist out there. I think it’s kind of prime for AI to be ad-supported in the future, right? We think of all these other services that are ad-supported. It may not be, Mark, to your point, that the answer they provide you is just product pushing. That might be a little too thinly veiled, but it could be that, you know, certain providers, certain client partners start thinking about, well, hey, this answer that you just received was sponsored by so and so. and that kind of brings up the second major theme in monetization. I think all of these kind of native AI providers are going to need to start thinking about partnerships, need to start thinking about really sales roles, quite frankly, that could think about, well, what if I do entertain an ad-supported solution in the future, who might my partners need to be? How do I garner attention from those partners? How do I produce a, you know, sales organization internally that can go out and sell that partnership effectively, manage that partnership effectively? Because very much, I believe that could be a strong source of recurring revenue alongside the actual service subscription going forward.
Mark O’Donnell: That makes sense. Well, something I read recently was OpenAI doesn’t expect, or at least analysts in the industry don’t expect them as an organization to even be profitable until end of the 2030s. And so I would imagine they’re starting to think about how they can create revenue streams outside of just service. And I think you’re right, an advertising or media angle is something that would definitely, probably bring them to that profitability line a lot sooner.
Yang Liu: Yeah, absolutely. And right now to kind of sell through, you know, why am I a good partner for potential advertisers? You already have a lot of good data on just the efficacy of the offering, the user base. Look at monthly active users in the platform. A lot of these kind of digital platforms historically have relied on those stats in the beginning to then create the business case for some sort of ad-supported solution going forward.
Igor Uroic: Yeah, I mean, a lot of companies ultimately do succumb to that revenue stream, right? Whether they initially if they started that, of course. But if that wasn’t their core model, I mean, we see it in what’s happening with the streaming side of things and the price differentiation between various levels of ad-supported versus not, and here we are. Well, thanks, guys. I think these are, you know, some of the top things that we think we’ll continue to see through 2026. So thanks for grabbing some time here to chat with us. If there are more issues or things you want to reach out to us; any of the three of us within our media practice can go a little bit deeper into these topics or others as it relates to your go-to-market model. So thanks for spending a little time with us.
