Signal & Noise: Bringing Clarity to Media, Data, Tech and AI

What makes a brand matter when everyone has access to the same data, platforms, targeting tools, and increasingly the same AI?Katie Soo joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging—and incredibly fun—conversation about brand, advertising, media, culture, data, creativity, technology, and leadership.Katie has spent her career at the intersection of all of them. She has held senior roles across Dollar Shave Club, Hulu, Warner Bros., HBO Max, KiwiCo, and DICE, and today serves on the board of Samba TV. She is also Chair of Asia Society Southern California and co-founder of Asian Women Empowered.Her central argument is simple but increasingly important: brand is infrastructure, culture is strategy, and great marketing still requires both art and science.Katie takes us inside the early days of Dollar Shave Club, where storytelling turned an everyday product into something people wanted to identify with. She explains why the pendulum in digital advertising swung too far toward data, optimization, and lower-funnel performance—and why relentless targeting cannot compensate for a brand that gives people no reason to care.We also unpack one of Katie’s favorite experiments from HBO Max: hiring young TikTok-native creators, giving them real ownership, and trusting them to make content for audiences that senior executives themselves might not understand. When one executive complained that the videos weren’t funny, Katie’s response captured the entire philosophy: “They’re not for you.”From there, the conversation goes everywhere.We discuss why one-to-one personalization may be overrated, why cohorts and communities still matter, how counterculture can help brands break through, why marketers need to actually understand the fandoms they’re trying to reach, and what Samba TV’s data and cross-screen intelligence can contribute to better decision-making.But some of the best moments are about leadership.Katie talks about the difference between bosses and leaders, power versus influence, why great executives need the self-confidence to let other people be better than they are, and why creativity dies when talented people are trapped inside rigid corporate systems. Her philosophy, learned from her mother: we are all students of the universe—and the moment we stop learning, it’s time to go.The discussion closes with culture on an even bigger stage: Katie’s work with Asia Society Southern California, the global rise of Asian entertainment and culture, representation in executive leadership and boardrooms, and the responsibility successful leaders have to create opportunities for the generation behind them.This episode has a little bit of everything: AdTech, MarTech, CTV, data, performance marketing, brand, AI, streaming, fandom, culture, creativity, leadership—and even a detour into Japanese sweet potatoes.Katie is smart, candid, opinionated, funny, and an outstanding guest. This is one of those Signal & Noise conversations that goes well beyond marketing.If you build brands, lead teams, buy media, work in advertising or technology—or simply care about why some companies matter to people while others disappear into the noise—this one is worth your time.#SignalAndNoise #KatieSoo #BrandStrategy #Advertising #AdTech #MarTech #Marketing #BrandMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #SambaTV #CTV #Media #Data #AI #Leadership #CompanyCulture #DigitalAdvertising #MarketingStrategy

Why can an AdTech company create real value, generate strong margins, build sophisticated technology—and still get punished by investors?Alex Brownstein, Founder & CEO of AHB Advisors and former Partner at 3C Ventures, joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging, highly entertaining conversation about the economics underneath the advertising technology industry.Alex brings an unusually broad perspective. His career has spanned finance at Credit Suisse, operating experience at LiveIntent, strategy consulting at McKinsey, investing and advisory work at 3C Ventures, and now his own firm, AHB Advisors. That combination gives him a rare ability to look beyond the technology itself and ask a more fundamental question: who is actually creating value in advertising—and who is simply collecting a toll?The conversation starts with the “AdTech discount.” Why do independent AdTech businesses often trade at lower multiples than SaaS and other technology companies? Alex explains why high margins alone don't necessarily translate into premium valuations when revenue is tied to advertising spend, isn't truly recurring, and can disappear quickly when budgets change.From there, they dig into one of Alex's biggest themes: AdTech made a lot of money from complexity. As supply-path optimization, transparency and direct relationships remove layers from the ecosystem, what happens to the DSPs, SSPs and other intermediaries whose economics were built partly around that complexity?The discussion also gets into the enormous gravitational pull of Google, Meta and Amazon, why the walled gardens continue to capture so much industry growth, and whether independent AdTech can maintain 10%, 15% or 20% take rates when vertically integrated competitors can price technology dramatically lower.Then comes AI.Will AI create better AdTech businesses by reducing the cost of planning, buying, optimization and reporting—or will it commoditize the very capabilities vendors once charged a premium for? Alex, Brett and Rio explore agentic media buying, the future of DSPs and SSPs, what constitutes a real moat in 2026, and why simply putting AI on top of an inefficient process doesn't necessarily fix the economics underneath it.They also tackle the future of agencies: the limits of the FTE model, principal media, in-housing, technology ownership, consulting, creative strategy and Alex's memorable prediction that the future may require “more Don Drapers and fewer Harry Cranes.”And yes, there are detours into New York vs. San Francisco, Mad Men, AI overlords, consulting economics and why some conversations with Alex are apparently better continued over a beer.In this episode:Why AdTech trades at a discount to other technology categoriesWhy high margins don't equal high-quality recurring revenueGoogle, Meta and Amazon's growing economic powerDSPs vs. SSPs and who really controls the moneyThe shrinking “AdTech tax” and pressure on intermediary take ratesWhether AI strengthens AdTech margins or destroys differentiationWhat a real competitive moat looks like in 2026The future of agencies, FTE pricing and principal mediaWhy independent measurement and verification still matterWhere value—and margin—will ultimately accrue as the industry consolidatesThis is one of those Signal & Noise conversations that could easily have gone another two hours. Alex is one of the smartest and most interesting economic thinkers in AdTech, and we expect to have him back periodically to unpack the financial and economic forces reshaping advertising, media and technology.#AdTech #Advertising #Programmatic #DigitalAdvertising #AI #Marketing #Media #MarTech #ProgrammaticAdvertising #SignalAndNoise

AI is making advertising faster, cheaper, and easier to produce. But is it actually making advertising better?For this special episode of Signal & Noise, Lucas Longacre, Head of Product at Inlightened, joins us as our on-the-ground correspondent at TMRE 2026 (The Market Research Event) in Denver, where he sits down with Dr. Thomas Ramsøy, neuroscientist, author, and Founder & CEO of Neurons, for a fascinating conversation about neuroscience, artificial intelligence, consumer behavior, and the future of advertising.After attending Dr. Ramsøy's presentation, Lucas was so intrigued that he arranged an impromptu interview to dig deeper. What followed was a wide-ranging conversation about how AI is transforming advertising, why marketers may be measuring the wrong things, and what brain science can teach us about creating advertising that actually works.Dr. Ramsøy shares a startling statistic: brand and advertising memory has fallen from roughly 30% to just 5%. Meanwhile, consumer attention to ads has dropped from several seconds to less than two. We're producing more advertising than ever, but people are remembering less of it.And generative AI may be making the problem worse.As marketers rush to generate more content, test more variations, and optimize for clicks and impressions, Dr. Ramsøy argues the industry is overlooking something fundamental: good judgment and a scientific understanding of how people actually respond to advertising.But he's not anti-AI. Far from it.Through Neurons, Dr. Ramsøy has developed technology that uses neuroscience and machine learning to predict how people respond to creative content. Rather than using AI to produce more ads, he believes we can use it to understand which ads will actually work—before spending millions putting them into market.In this episode, Lucas and Dr. Ramsøy explore:🧠 The Collapse of Advertising Attention: Why brand memory has plummeted and consumers are becoming increasingly selective about what they remember.🤖 The Generative AI Paradox: Why producing advertising faster doesn't necessarily make it more effective, and how AI risks accelerating existing mistakes.📊 The Problem with Vanity Metrics: Why optimizing for clicks, impressions, and view-through rates can undermine long-term brand building.🎯 The Four Powers of Effective Advertising: The neuroscience behind stopping power, persuasion power, transmission power, and locking power.🔬 Predicting Consumer Behavior with AI: How Neurons combines neuroscience, predictive models, and generative AI to evaluate advertising and improve creative before campaigns launch.⚡ The Future of Creative Optimization: How predictive, suggestive, and generative AI could transform how brands develop and test advertising.🏢 The Innovation Dilemma: Why smaller organizations may have an advantage in adopting AI, and how established companies can avoid falling behind.👀 The Two-Second Challenge: What advertisers can learn from TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube about capturing attention and making every second count.The conversation also explores AI-generated content labeling, scientific validation, the future of market research, and why human creativity and judgment remain essential.The big takeaway? The future of advertising isn't about creating more content. It's about creating content that actually works.A special thanks to Lucas Longacre of Inlightened for representing Signal & Noise at TMRE 2026 and bringing us this terrific conversation. About Our GuestDr. Thomas Ramsøy is Founder & CEO of Neurons, a company applying neuroscience and AI to predict consumer attention, emotional responses, and advertising effectiveness. He is also the author of How to Make People Buy.Learn more: https://www.neuronsinc.com/#SignalAndNoise #ThomasRamsoy #LucasLongacre #Inlightened #Neurons #TMRE2026 #ArtificialIntelligence #Advertising #AdTech #MarketingAI #Neuroscience #ConsumerBehavior #GenerativeAI #BrandBuilding #MarketResearch

What happens when the numbers say your advertising is working—but the business says otherwise?In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Cimin Ahmadi Cohen, Founder and CEO of Idea Peddler, for a wide-ranging conversation about advertising, ad tech, entrepreneurship, media measurement, and one of the industry’s most persistent problems: ad fraud.Cimin brings a rare perspective. After rising through the ranks of major agencies, she walked away from the traditional agency path and ultimately founded Idea Peddler, an independent, woman-owned agency based in Austin with a satellite office in Santa Fe. She shares the story behind that decision, including how a drive through New Mexico helped give her the clarity to rethink what she wanted from her career and build an agency around a simple idea: doing good work for nice people.We also get into what it means to build a company differently. Cimin talks candidly about being a female founder, creating a workplace that gives parents greater flexibility, building outside the traditional New York agency ecosystem, and why Austin has become such a powerful environment for entrepreneurs and creative businesses.Then the conversation turns to some of the biggest problems in digital advertising.Cimin has become an outspoken critic of what she calls the “attribution illusion”—the idea that marketers can watch metrics like ROAS continue to improve even when revenue, profit, or other real business outcomes remain flat. She explains why platform-reported performance can be misleading, how advertising systems can take credit for sales that were already going to happen, and why marketers need independent measurement rather than allowing the companies selling the media to grade their own homework.That leads to a fascinating discussion about ad fraud, invalid traffic, MFA sites, audience extension, opaque programmatic supply chains, agency compensation models, and the financial incentives that can encourage nearly everyone in the ecosystem to keep more media dollars flowing.We also spend time talking about Dr. Augustine Fu, a repeat Signal & Noise guest and one of the industry's most persistent voices on digital ad fraud. Cimin shares her admiration for his willingness to challenge the industry, bring evidence, and ask questions many people would rather avoid.Other topics include why Cimin believes marketers should scrutinize cheap programmatic inventory, whether brands should audit their agencies more aggressively, the tradeoffs between transparency and principal-based buying, the future role of independent agencies, media in-housing, and how AI could eventually change parts of the media-buying process.It’s a smart, funny, occasionally provocative conversation with a leader who isn't afraid to question some of digital advertising’s most comfortable assumptions.If you work in media, advertising, marketing, ad tech, measurement, or simply want to understand where your digital advertising dollars actually go, this is an episode you won't want to miss.#SignalAndNoise #Advertising #AdTech #DigitalAdvertising #AdFraud #ProgrammaticAdvertising #MediaBuying #Marketing #MediaMeasurement #Attribution #ROAS #AgencyLife #Entrepreneurship #Austin #AI

Douglas Rushkoff has spent decades asking a question that feels more urgent than ever: Are we building technology to serve human beings, or slowly reorganizing human life around the needs of technology?Recorded live at Advertising Week 2026 at MCM Creative Studios in New York City, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Rushkoff—author, media theorist, professor, documentarian, and host of Team Human—for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, technology, human agency, and what we risk losing if intelligence becomes the only thing we value.Rushkoff is not an AI doomer, but he is deeply skeptical of the inevitability narrative surrounding artificial intelligence. While much of the industry is focused on bigger models, greater automation, and the possibility of machine superintelligence, Rushkoff asks a different question: What happens to us along the way?He explains where the idea for “Team Human” came from, beginning with a debate with futurist Ray Kurzweil over whether humanity should eventually “pass the evolutionary torch” to intelligent machines. Rushkoff’s response was simple: human beings are strange, social, emotional, embodied creatures—and that may be a feature rather than a limitation.The conversation gets into how AI can either strengthen or weaken human thinking. Rushkoff argues that using AI before wrestling with a problem can encourage intellectual outsourcing, while using it afterward can help challenge assumptions, explore ideas, and expand perspective. The problem isn’t necessarily the technology. It’s what we ask the technology to do for us.Rio, Brett, and Doug also debate whether AI really represents something fundamentally new or is the logical culmination of the internet; whether language models can ever become truly sentient; why embodiment, emotion, grief, intimacy, and lived experience remain difficult to reduce to computation; and whether intelligence alone is enough to constitute life.They also dig into the economic incentives behind the AI boom, the enormous physical infrastructure required to support it, the environmental trade-offs of data centers and computation, and Rushkoff’s concern that the values of the people and institutions building these systems inevitably influence the systems themselves.At the same time, the conversation explores the other side of the argument: AI’s potential to accelerate scientific discovery, solve enormously complex problems, improve medicine, address climate challenges, and give individuals capabilities that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.This is not a conversation about whether AI is “good” or “bad.” It is about what we want technology to be for—and whether, in the race toward increasingly capable machines, we can remember to stay human.#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #DouglasRushkoff #TeamHuman #AdvertisingWeek #Technology #FutureOfAI #Media #HumanAgency #SignalAndNoise #AdWeek2026 #MCM

What happens when the search result disappears—and the answer itself becomes the interface?Recorded live at Zeta Live 2026 in New York City during Advertising Week, Brett House sits down with Saroop Bharwani, Co-Founder and CEO of Senso, for a deep dive into one of the biggest emerging questions in marketing: Who controls what AI says about your brand?For decades, marketers optimized around search rankings, websites, paid media, and the familiar “10 blue links.” But consumers are increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI assistants for direct answers. As Saroop puts it, the answer is beginning to eat the entire funnel.That creates an entirely new challenge for brands.It’s no longer enough to rank on Google. Brands need to understand whether they appear in AI-generated answers, which sources those models are citing, how they compare with competitors, whether the information being surfaced is accurate—and ultimately whether they can influence the context from which AI systems generate their responses.Saroop explains how his background building technology inside highly regulated industries shaped his perspective on AI. Long before generative AI became mainstream, financial institutions were already wrestling with issues that have suddenly become critical for every enterprise: accuracy, governance, explainability, permissions, data sovereignty, and trust.The conversation explores why context may become one of the most important forms of enterprise intellectual property in the AI era. As agents begin operating across websites, product catalogs, knowledge bases, CRMs, data platforms, and internal systems, companies need a trusted layer that tells those systems what information is correct, who can access it, and where it came from.Saroop also discusses Senso’s Verified Sources approach, creating an audit trail around AI-generated content that can show which sources were used, which humans verified the information, which agents generated it, and how that information changed over time.Brett and Saroop also get into:• Why AI assistants are rapidly changing consumer discovery• The difference between being mentioned, ranked, and cited in an AI answer• New metrics such as mention rate, citation rate, and citation share• Why enterprises should start by measuring how AI currently represents their brands• The growing importance of AEO and GEO• Why fragmented enterprise context is such a major AI problem• How brands can influence AI answers without simply flooding the web with “AI slop”• Why verified content and traceability could become essential to maintaining trust• The widening gap between frontier AI development and enterprise adoption• Why human judgment, taste, and governance still matter• What happens when AI systems move from answering questions to proactively recommending products• And the increasingly blurry line between an advertisement and an AI-generated product recommendationThe conversation comes at an important moment for Saroop and Senso. Zeta Global recently announced an agreement to acquire Senso, bringing its AI discovery and verified-content capabilities into a much larger marketing technology ecosystem.If AI assistants and agents increasingly become the front door through which consumers discover brands, products, services, and information, the implications are enormous.The next marketing battleground may not be the search results page.It may be the answer itself.#SignalAndNoise #ZetaLive #AdvertisingWeek #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #AI #AEO #GEO #AnswerEngineOptimization #MarketingTechnology #MarTech #AdTech #Senso #ZetaGlobal #ChatGPT #AgenticAI #FutureOfMarketing

What happens when marketing stops being a collection of channels, campaigns, and technologies—and starts becoming an intelligence function?Recorded live at Zeta Live 2026 in New York City, during Advertising Week, Brett House sits down with Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global, for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, customer intelligence, the changing role of the marketer, and what the next generation of marketing organizations will look like.Ed brings a unique perspective to the discussion. After decades advising some of the world’s largest companies—including senior roles at McKinsey and Deloitte—he made the move from adviser to operator at Zeta. His view of marketing is refreshingly straightforward: ultimately, marketers are responsible for creating profitable customers.That means moving beyond impressions, clicks, ROAS reports, and other activity metrics toward understanding where real growth opportunities exist. Ed breaks the challenge into four fundamental capabilities: recognizing a pocket of opportunity, reaching it, delivering something relevant, and measuring the result.From there, Brett and Ed explore why identity and signals are becoming foundational to modern marketing. Personalization is no longer enough. The opportunity is precision: understanding not only who someone is, but what they need, when they need it, and when a genuine transition or buying moment is occurring.The conversation also turns to one of the biggest changes facing marketers: consumers increasingly have AI agents sitting between themselves and brands. Marketers have spent decades learning how to influence people emotionally. But as Ed points out, LLMs “think and do”—they don’t feel. That creates an entirely new constituency that brands will need to understand, influence, and remain discoverable to.Brett and Ed also dig into the changing marketing organization: the rise of the technically fluent marketer, Ed’s earlier thinking around the Chief Marketing Technology Officer, why hyper-specialization may give way to broader marketing roles, and how AI could finally begin breaking down some of the organizational silos that have existed for decades.They also discuss AthenaOS, Zeta’s vision for an intelligence layer spanning enterprise data and AI; why proprietary context may become some of a company’s most important intellectual property; the importance of both data sovereignty and AI sovereignty; and how agencies, technology companies, and brands may divide responsibilities in this new operating model.And, naturally, they finish with the big question: Is AI going to kill us all—or unlock an extraordinary new period of human progress?This is the third Signal & Noise conversation with a Zeta Global executive, following our discussions with Christian Monberg, Chief Technology Officer, at Cannes Lions, and Neej Gore, Chief Data Officer, at POSSIBLE. A huge thank-you to the Zeta team for welcoming Signal & Noise to Zeta Live and providing an incredible setup for the conversation.For anyone thinking about the future of marketing, AI, customer intelligence, MarTech, AdTech, agencies, or the modern enterprise, this is one you won’t want to miss.#SignalAndNoise #ZetaGlobal #ZetaLive #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Marketing #MarTech #AdTech #CustomerIntelligence #MarketingTechnology #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI

What happens to the enterprise marketing stack when AI becomes more than another feature—and starts changing how data, technology, people, and decisions actually work together?Recorded live at Advertising Week 2026 in New York City at MCM Creative Studios, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with two longtime friends of the show and two of the smartest voices in data and marketing technology: Zack Wenthe, Director of Product Marketing & Customer Data Evangelist at Tealium, and Adrian Bolosan, Head of ISV GTM, AMER Enterprise & Emerging at Databricks.This conversation goes well beyond the usual AI talking points. It’s a wide-ranging discussion about how enterprises are actually adapting their MarTech and AdTech stacks for an AI-driven world—and what’s real versus the latest industry hype.The conversation starts with one of the industry’s favorite words: composability. Has the composable stack actually won? Or has it become another catch-all marketing term? Zack and Adrian explore why enterprises are moving applications closer to their data, the growing role of federated architectures, and why flexibility increasingly matters more than buying another monolithic platform.From there, the discussion gets into the foundation underneath every AI strategy: data. AI is only as useful as the signals feeding it. The group discusses data collection, tag management, governance, identity resolution, consent, context, and why enterprises need to understand what data they have before trying to unleash agents on top of it.They also tackle one of the biggest unresolved questions in marketing technology: Where should decisioning live? In the data cloud? The CDP? The CRM? Or directly inside the activation channel? The answer may increasingly depend on the moment—combining historical intelligence from platforms like Databricks with real-time signals captured at the edge.The conversation then turns to how AI is changing the marketing organization itself. The traditional marketing technologist is evolving into the marketing engineer—someone who can connect systems, data, agents, models, and workflows while understanding the business problem being solved. At the same time, marketers are gaining the ability to interrogate enterprise data through natural language instead of waiting on analysts, engineers, or data science teams.Rio, Brett, Zack, and Adrian also dig into:The resurgence of tag management in an agentic worldWhy context may matter more than perfect one-to-one personalizationIdentity resolution and the changing economics of third-party identity“Perishable moments” and the need for real-time customer decisioningHow AI could break down data and organizational silosThe rise of disposable, use-case-specific applicationsWhether the predicted “SaaSpocalypse” is actually happeningHow AI is changing consulting, systems integration, and enterprise technology buyingWhy the companies that win with AI will combine strong data foundations with people who know how to turn technology into business outcomesFor anyone working in MarTech, AdTech, customer data, enterprise AI, cloud data platforms, advertising, or digital transformation, this is an outstanding conversation about where the enterprise tech stack is headed.A huge thank-you to Tealium, one of the sponsors that helped make our Advertising Week possible and an ongoing sponsor of Signal & Noise. And a special thanks to MCM Creative Studios for hosting Signal & Noise LIVE during Advertising Week 2026.Hosted by: Rio Longacre & Brett HouseGuests: Zack Wenthe, Tealium | Adrian Bolosan, DatabricksRecorded live: Advertising Week 2026 | New York City#ArtificialIntelligence #EnterpriseAI #MarTech #AdTech #CustomerData #CDP #DataCloud #MarketingTechnology #AIinMarketing #AgenticAI #ComposableArchitecture #DataStrategy #DigitalTransformation #MarketingEngineering #CustomerExperience #Databricks #Tealium #AdvertisingWeek #AdvertisingWeek2026 #SignalAndNoise

What happens when everyone has access to the same AI?In this special live episode of Signal & Noise, recorded in front of an audience at MCM Creative Studios during Advertising Week New York, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Matt Krepsik, CEO of MediaRadar, and Vas Bakopoulos, SVP and Head of Industry Research at MMA Global, for a fast-moving conversation about AI intelligence, marketing, creativity, and competitive advantage. The discussion starts with new research from MediaRadar examining how advertising and media professionals are actually using AI. Among 500 industry professionals surveyed in July 2026, 87% said they actively use AI in advertising and media decisions, while 92% reported changes to products, services, or pricing as AI reshapes the industry. But widespread adoption raises a much bigger question: If everyone has the same tools, where does real differentiation come from? Matt and Vas dig into the tension between AI adoption and AI trust: data provenance, outdated information, hallucinations, proprietary data, governance, and why brands need to think carefully about the intelligence and data sitting underneath their models. The conversation explores why the competitive advantage may increasingly live not in the model itself, but in the data, memory, skills, guardrails, workflows, and proprietary knowledge surrounding it. From there, the panel goes deep on what AI means for the future of advertising: agency operating models, in-housing, the ad-tech supply chain, creative intelligence, and the opportunity to finally reconnect planning, creative, activation, and measurement.And then comes one of the biggest ideas of the conversation: when everyone has the same box of AI-powered crayons, the advantage shifts back to the painter.Matt and Vas make the case that the future of marketing will place an even greater premium on taste, craft, judgment, perspective, and distinctive ideas. AI can accelerate production, analyze enormous numbers of permutations, and expose new opportunities—but it still takes people to decide what is worth creating in the first place. It’s thoughtful, provocative, occasionally irreverent, and a lot of fun—exactly what a live Signal & Noise conversation should be.A huge thank you to MCM Creative Studios for giving us an incredible home for the evening, and especially to MediaRadar, the main sponsor of our Advertising Week activation, for helping make this special live event possible. This was also a milestone for Signal & Noise: our first episode recorded in front of a live studio audience. If you work in advertising, media, marketing, AI, data, or creative, this is one you’ll want to hear.Topics include: • AI adoption in advertising • AI trust and data provenance • Proprietary data • Brand data sovereignty • AI governance • agency transformation • In-housing • Creative intelligence • Taste and craft • Human creativity • Advertising measurement • Agentic AI • The future of marketing#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AdvertisingWeek #Advertising #Marketing #AdTech #MarTech #MediaRadar #MMAGlobal #CreativeAI #AgenticAI #MarketingAI #SignalAndNoise

If AI can execute in seconds what agencies once billed for in hours, what should clients pay for next?Filmed live at Advertising Week 2026 at MCM Studios in New York City, this episode of Signal & Noise features Adam Woods, Global Chief Product Officer, and Amy Crowther, CEO, Americas, at Incubeta. They join hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House for a candid conversation about the future of agencies, the economics of AI, and what it takes to connect technology, talent, and data around better business outcomes.Building an agency operating system means more than assembling a collection of tools. Adam and Amy discuss how agencies can bring creative, media, measurement, and client-owned intelligence into a more connected way of working—and why changing how people work is just as important as changing the technology.From creative production and data infrastructure to client relationships and pricing, this conversation gets into the practical decisions behind agency transformation.In this episode:• Beyond billable hours: How AI challenges staffing-based fees and traditional service models, and why the real opportunity is in how agencies reinvest efficiency gains.• Connecting creative and media: Why clients still struggle with the gap between creative ideas and media execution, and how shared performance data can give teams a stronger starting point.• Creative intelligence in practice: How understanding which assets work—and why—can inform production, testing, and optimization, rather than leaving creative teams waiting for feedback.• Client-owned data and intelligence: Why brands should build on their own knowledge, how fragmented tools create disconnected data, and what agencies can do to help clients retain control.• Measuring business impact: Moving beyond click-through rates, cheap impressions, and platform-reported success to questions about profitable growth, customer acquisition costs, and incremental contribution.• Bringing brand and performance together: Why short-term results need to be understood alongside long-term brand investment, and how agencies can help CMOs make a stronger case to CFOs.• Making transformation practical: Why the starting point may be as simple as getting a brand’s creative assets consistent, proving value, and building momentum from there.• Rethinking the value exchange: When to challenge an RFP, why trust matters, and how outcome-based pricing can work when costs, incentives, and shared goals are realistically aligned.Adam brings a product and technology perspective to building connected capabilities. Amy grounds the discussion in the realities of leading teams, educating clients, and turning those capabilities into work that makes a difference.Together, they make the case for an agency relationship built around informed decisions, shared accountability, and measurable value. AI expands what is possible; the harder work is deciding what to build, how to deploy it, and which problems are worth solving.Watch or listen, then tell us: What should the agency of the future be accountable for—and how should clients pay for it?Subscribe to Signal & Noise on YouTube or follow on Spotify for more conversations about data, technology, AI, and the people shaping advertising.#SignalAndNoise #AdvertisingWeek2026 #AdWeek2026 #Incubeta #FutureOfAgencies #AgencyTransformation #CreativeIntelligence #AgenticAI #MarketingEffectiveness