CIMM Summit XV

Fuel before a full day of content. Attendees can grab breakfast, network with peers, and get settled in before sessions begin.

CIMM leadership kicks off the day with key research highlights and an update on the organization’s YTD progress.

A leading perspective on the future of the media and advertising market.

Senior industry leaders take stock of recent progress, explore future challenges and opportunities, and discuss industry priorities.

Few people have witnessed the evolution of modern advertising from as close a vantage point. In this fireside conversation, two industry leaders share hard-earned lessons, revisit the industry’s biggest turning points, and discuss what’s next for media, measurement, and marketing.

Get caffeinated, grab a snack or check up on email.

TV and video measurement has made real progress linking ad exposure to business outcomes, but data quality, identity, causation and consistency remain open challenges. This panel of industry leaders examines where attribution stands today, where it still falls short, and what’s needed to build a more rigorous, comparable measurement marketplace, drawing on themes from CIMM’s forthcoming work on attribution and outcomes.

Consumer AI shopping agents are creating a new class of customer—one that never sees an ad, never clicks a link, and evaluates brands through structured data rather than traditional persuasion. Machine Marketing explores how this shift breaks existing measurement and marketing infrastructure, requiring a Dual-Channel strategy: one engine for human attention and another for machine verification. Systems built to keep bots out are becoming the frontline gatekeepers determining whether these new customers will even be allowed in the store; if you allow them in, the new measurement question becomes: how do you measure a customer who never sees an ad, never clicks, and may never interact with your brand in ways that you can see?

AI is rapidly evolving from a collection of tools into foundational infrastructure for the media and advertising ecosystem. As it becomes embedded in how media is planned, bought, sold, delivered and measured, AI has the potential to reshape everything from measurement and identity to data collaboration, audience creation and workflow automation.

Senior executives from AWS, Snowflake and Extreme Reach will explore what happens as this infrastructure becomes increasingly intelligent—and what it means for transparency, interoperability, accountability and trust across the industry. The discussion will examine a bigger question: what does the media and advertising ecosystem look like when AI becomes part of the infrastructure of the market itself?

For thirty years, digital advertising has run on a proxy for a person and billed as if it were the person. Identity 1.0 assumed a cookie was a human. Identity 2.0 tried to close the gap two ways: walled gardens asked for a login and got the real thing; the open web bought terrestrial graphs and stitched them to device IDs that were built maximize scale, not truth. Probabilistic inference, multi-hop supply chains, and match rates that rewarded saying yes did the rest. Now consolidation is forcing a reckoning. So what’s next?

Truthset CEO Scott McKinley argues we’re entering Identity 3.0: authenticated addressability, where identity is declared rather than inferred, resolution is deterministic, and accuracy is validated on every connection. This session explores what that shift means for agencies, brands, and publishers, and what the next generation of identity looks like in practice.

Passion is measurable. Passion is valuable. And passion is predictive of performance.
For decades, media has been measured by who brands reach. Today, marketers can understand how audiences engage.
New research from FOX Advertising and Harris demonstrates that fandom is more than enthusiasm for content – it’s a measurable indicator of deeper consumer engagement that translates into stronger outcomes for brands.
Because when consumers are emotionally invested, they don’t just watch differently – they respond differently.

AI is beginning to reshape how TV and video advertising effectiveness is measured — from faster data processing and automated analysis to new approaches to attribution, experimentation, optimization and causal inference. This session explores where AI can materially improve outcomes measurement, where the risks of opacity and false precision remain, and whether it can help create a more responsive, scalable and decision-useful measurement ecosystem.

The media and advertising industry has no shortage of standards,but publishing a standard doesn’t guarantee adoption, consistent implementation or accountability. Across measurement, programmatic, CTV, identity, privacy and transparency, the challenge is increasingly about what happens after standards are created.

This panel will explore whether the industry needs stronger mechanisms for implementation and assurance, from accreditation and independent audits to certification, adoption scorecards and procurement requirements. Using models such as MRC accreditation and the IAB UK Gold Standard as reference points, the discussion will examine who should be responsible for driving adoption and ask a fundamental question: what would a stronger, more transparent model of industry accountability look like?

As political campaigns gear up for the midterms, addressable TV is becoming an increasingly important tool for reaching the right voters with greater precision across MVPD platforms. Hosted by Ampersand, this session will explore how high-quality identity data, audience matching and attribution can strengthen political advertising – improving targeting, reducing waste and helping campaigns understand what is actually driving response. The discussion will also examine what it takes to build trust and effectiveness into a data-driven political TV marketplace.

Network, eat in the communal areas, or grab a quiet bite.

In just the last couple of years, the industry has finally come to recognize that connecting online identifiers to genuine human beings and their characteristics is fraught with error. The problems in this identity resolution pipeline have been well illustrated by work that CIMM, Truthset, ARF, and others have done. But it’s time to move beyond gnashing our teeth over the problem. How do we address it?

This panel will bring together experts in the field who are developing the next-generation identity resolution processes using modern tools including AI.

Fragmentation isn’t something to be eliminated, it’s the reality of today’s television ecosystem. The real challenge is building a complete and consistent understanding of those viewing behaviors, not just where people are watching. Historically, most TV datasets have provided a singular perspective, whether that’s cable set-top box data or Smart TV ACR data, each offering valuable, but inherently incomplete, views of TV behavior. Bringing these complementary datasets together creates a more comprehensive and representative picture of how audiences engage with television, enabling a more interoperable and impactful TV measurement ecosystem.

As the CTV landscape has matured and resellers crowd the open web inventory, media buyers are seeking greater transparency to ensure that advertiser dollars are well directed. Following Viant’s acquisition of TVision, the unique combination of direct supply and robust contextual signals with person-level attention presents new opportunities to transform the way that buyers think about value, going beyond reach and overlaying performance signals such as co-viewing and attention. This discussion will shed light on the performance optimization opportunities for advertisers and how a more direct and transparent marketplace creates value for brands and publishers alike.

CTV has inherited much of digital advertising’s identity infrastructure, but television viewing operates very differently from the open web. Charlie Johnson, SVP & GM, LocID, and AJ Kintner, Global Head of Business Development, LG Ad Solutions, will explore how first-party signals, IP and supporting infrastructure can help connect audiences when persistent identifiers are unavailable — and why those challenges become more complex across global markets. The session will ask a fundamental question: does CTV need more identifiers, or better infrastructure to make the signals it already has work?

Programmatic execution is now core to how the US TV market trades inventory, but the operational controls that govern linear TV, like frequency capping, competitive separation and creative identification, don’t always carry over cleanly to streaming and CTV. Relevant standards exist, but they often apply at the campaign or platform level rather than system-wide, creating gaps buyers may not realize are there. This panel explores where those control gaps show up, what’s at stake for advertisers and premium publishers, and practical steps the industry can take to close them.

New approaches to the methodology, scope, speed and cost structure of market research.

Get caffeinated, grab a snack or check up on email.

For over a century, audience measurement was a discipline based on the science of survey sampling. But the availability of large scale data assets, new tools, and new technologies have transformed the practice of audience measurement into one of data science. Now, the advent of AI is poised to revolutionize the discipline yet again. What are the implications? What will the new landscape look like? Hear from some of the industry”s foremost practitioners.

Reach and frequency have long been foundational to media planning, but they don’t tell the full story of whether advertising actually works. Emerging measurement capabilities are giving advertisers a deeper view into the quality of an impression,from creative effectiveness and emotional response to attention, context and audience receptiveness.

Bringing together Wantent, DAIVID and Peer39, this panel will explore how new metrics and AI-powered measurement are expanding the definition of advertising value. The discussion will examine how these approaches complement traditional reach-based planning, their connection to business outcomes, and what it will take for quality-based measurement to become a more standard part of how media is planned, evaluated and optimized

Get caffeinated, grab a snack or check up on email.

The industry agrees quality matters but still trades mostly on impressions. In this session, FreeWheel and Mediaprobe will present research showing that a large share of advertising effectiveness is influenced by decisions the supply chain already controls, including ad load, pod design, break position, and content context, and show how those decisions can be turned into a single placement quality score. The session explores what changes once quality becomes a signal in the ad server: how inventory gets packaged, how it gets priced, and what sellers and buyers each have to do differently.

Creative asset identifiers have long been embedded in linear TV workflows, but their use and persistence are far less consistent across streaming, CTV, local television and programmatic supply chains. This session explores why identifiers get lost or fragmented as creative moves through the ecosystem, and what that means for measurement, optimization and media waste. The discussion will also set the stage for CIMM’s new research into current adoption, barriers to end-to-end implementation, and the potential economic value of a more consistent industry-wide approach.

Stay for drinks and discussion with peers.