ORLANDO -- In advance of this week's Association of National Advertisers' Advertising Financial Management Conference here I spoke with Ralph Pardo, CEO of Omnicom Media North America and a speaker at the event, about today's ever-changing media environment. My first question: What excites him most about media.

After half a century covering the media marketplace, I thought I had seen every conceivable model for funding ad-supported media buys. Until I met Piyush Puri.

The notion that AI is all facts, no emotion is belied by the connection between humans and chatbots. If this seems odd, it's no different than brand love, superfans, or evangelists.

In advance of the ANA's upcoming Advertising Financial Management Conference in Orlando, I had a wide-ranging conversation with PR Council President Kim Sample, who will be speaking at the event about the intersection of PR and procurement and the ever-increasing role of AI.

YouTube may be the largest "audio" medium in the world, but it's a tiny player in terms of audio ad sales. Which explains why it hired SiriusXM as its rep.

A year after the ad industry launched an ethical AI certification program, publishers in its ad-supported media supply chain now have one too.

Three years after the client-side began benchmarking programmatic transparency, the IAB Tech Lab is jumping in with a new supply- and agency-side council.

The just-published report - the first in a planned series of ongoing studies - also finds there is no rule of thumb for effective frequency. "It depends," says Chief Intelligence Officer Joanna O'Connell.

I'm writing this for those not fortunate enough to attend the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Audience X Science conference in New York City. You will want to pay attention, because one session in particular -- the ARF's Tracy Adams' and Paul Donato's review of Phase 3 of its attention measurement validation initiative -- is all about it. You can read my previous commentaries on Phase 1 and Phase 2, but this year's session, dubbed "Attention As Signal, Or Beyond," demonstrated how many in the industry are now using attention metrics to judge relative media …

Imagine consumers delegate shopping to agents. Businesses will no longer sell to humans. They'll be selling to smart technologies. No need to communicate with people. No need for marketing.