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Senior execs from NBCUniversal, Amazon‘s AWS, Adobe and ad agency WPP discussed the tricky balance between embracing AI and safeguarding IP during a panel discussion Monday at CES.
“We’ve been talking about personalization for decades,” said Hannah Elsakr, VP of GenAI New Business Ventures at Adobe. To that point, she continued, “Nobody wants to see the same ad three times.” Most ad content, she added, “is dead on arrival after a week, maybe two weeks. … We’ve talked about a promo taking two-plus weeks to execute. Now with AI – and with I want to put the word ‘responsible AI’ out there – you can do it in hours.
Programmers and advertisers are “in a fight for attention,” Elsakr said. “So, being able to be relevant and let the fan drive the narrative, that, to me, is the new definition of personalization of the brand.”
Kristina Shepard, EVP of Streaming & Performance Sales & Partnerships at NBCU cited a number of initiatives at the media giant that are designed to take advantage of the speed of AI tools.
Buyers and sellers of ad time can now use AI “to get down, not just to a show or an episode, but to a scene level,” Shepard said. “Contextual targeting in some regard has gotten a bad rap because it has seemed very basic, right? An advertiser would say, ‘I want to reach women 25 to 54, give me the top 100 shows.’ Now, AI can allow us to actually identify scenes. For example, there might be an advertiser who wants to be the first ad in an ad pod right after a holiday kiss. How do we make that advertiser really, really relevant in that moment?”
AI can create “a great marriage between the viewer and the advertiser experience,” Shepard added. “We basically beta-tested this with a luxury brand, you know, doing contextual targeting in VOD content in 2026, you’ll see this in live” at upcoming NBCU events like the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics.
One scenario, she said, would be enabling creative messages to allude to what is happening in a live sporting event. “Imagine a touchdown happens in the third quarter of a game and that next ad pod says, ‘Congratulations for the touchdown brought you by said brand.'”
In the case of the luxury brand, she added, NBCU research found that viewers got 27% more enjoyment from that experience, and search engagement jumped 56% for the brand. Search and purchase intent, the so-called “lower funnel” parts of the advertising experience (as opposed to upper-funnel efforts to create awareness), are “the holy grail for all advertisers,” Shepard said. NBCU’s experience “shows the benefit that television can be both an upper and lower funnel medium.”
Samira Panah Bakhtiar, General Manager of Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports at AWS, pointed to the larger context in which all viewing and advertising is occurring.
“I think we have to think about where the audiences are,” she said. “Gen Z right now is spending 54% more time on social and they’re spending 26% less time on traditional viewing experiences. And if you look at some of the creators right now who are really able to capitalize themselves in a marvelous way.” She cited Dude Perfect or Mr. Beast, whose valuations are “rivaling more traditional brands.”
The emergence of creators “isn’t just an anomaly. These are creators who have very, very loyal fan bases who have learned how to be able to really cultivate production level content and higher media executives and get institutional investment and have figured out ways to be able to only create that content, but distribute that content at scale.”
Any companies “seeking this to reinvent themselves, or be able to capitalize on this moment,” she said, need to “really pay attention to the multi-generational preferences that exist in the viewing sphere right now.”
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