Ad Week Europe: Media buyers face AI disruption, broadcasters embrace ad tech and retail media goes luxe

Advertising Week Europe returned this year with a clear message: If marketers want to stay competitive, they must modernize their ad tech stacks.

That’s because AI is becoming deeply embedded in the day-to-day work of media buyers — from campaign planning to execution to reporting — offering major gains in efficiency and performance, even as it brings potential disruption.

Beyond the AI boom, advances in ad tech are unlocking new advertising tools for brands investing in connected TV (CTV) and retail media.

Here are three of the biggest trends from this year’s conference.

AI-boosted campaigns

Connecting the dots across the customer journey is still a challenge for brands. AI has the potential to fix that.

“Companies like us find it really hard to join together the consumer journey and piece it together,” said Sameer Amin, VP of data-driven marketing and media at Reckitt, during a session on agentic AI.

Poor interoperability across platforms makes things even harder, he said. To solve this, Reckitt deployed AI agents — autonomous tools that can scan the media landscape, execute campaigns and report results back to marketers. The payoff: improved efficiency and time savings.

According to Amin, AI accelerated campaign concept development by 60%. It also yielded 50% in time savings for post-campaign media reporting with “much higher levels of consistency.” That freed up Reckitt’s marketers to focus on strategy, consumer segmentation and product innovation.

David Billings, VP, U.K. and Ireland at Empathy Lab — the company behind Reckitt’s AI models — stressed that the tools are built for planning, not activation. He said API integrations with demand-side platforms (DSPs), for example, could help marketers act on AI agents’ recommendations.

“You can build multiple agentic models, like for insight generation and post-campaign reporting,” he said. “These are essentially co-pilots.”

AI is also behind the growth of smarter audience targeting tools. For instance, these can help brands describe their ideal customer to an interface powered by a large language model, which then produces a custom audience segment compatible with their DSP of choice.

Toyota used these AI-created audiences in a campaign and saw a 39% lower cost –per lead compared to typical contextual targeting, said Mateusz Rumiński, VP of product at PrimeAudience. The start-up uses open web data to help media buyers invest in the most relevant publisher content.

Meanwhile, Alison.ai is using AI to break down the elements that drive creative performance. In a session in AI and creativity, Elad Brindt Shavit, VP Europe at Alison.ai, showed how the company’s technology can detect creative attributes like atmosphere, facial expressions and text placements. One insight: Simply moving the logo from right to left of the screen doubled view-through rate across certain channels.

This kind of analysis is useful for marketers navigating the black boxes of social media. They don’t know why ads worked, said Brindt Shavit, who used to work at Meta. Marketers can take these learnings and apply them to their campaigns across the web, he added.

“Creative is the new optimization,” said. “From targeting to audiences to attention, now you can turn creative to datasets.”

With all these AI innovations, could media planners and buyers become obsolete? Not so fast, said Reckitt’s Amin. “AI isn’t going to replace your job. But someone who knows how to use AI better than you will.”

Broadcasters embrace ad tech

Britain’s Channel 5, part of Paramount, recently rebranded as 5 to unify its linear and streaming offerings.

Behind the pithy new logo, the public broadcaster now sports a single ad server under the hood. “That means we can create a single programmatic deal that covers all of our connected TV in the market and give you scale and the ability to do cross-platform frequency cap,” said Zach Belmont, VP of international programmatic revenue at Paramount.

Likewise, Channel 4 is also investing in its ad tech. The broadcaster now uses clean rooms to match its 29 million registered users with advertiser and retailer data — giving brands new targeting capabilities while preserving user privacy.

“Advertisers want more. They want enhanced targeting capabilities, they want price controls,” said Alexandra Wright, programmatic and data leader at Channel 4.

Retail media goes luxe

Luxury advertisers are turning to retail media for storytelling, not just sales. In the process, they are redefining what retail media can be used for.

“There is an element of storytelling. When you buy luxury, you buy brand heritage,” said Roxanna Larizadeh Nassif, managing director of retail media at Brainlabs, during a session on retail media and luxury.

The evolution means luxury brands are using retail media to blend brand building with performance. “Retail media for luxury means that the ads are even more hyper-targeted, and you’re less trying to build awareness and more focusing on consideration and conversion,” she said.

The U.K.’s leading luxury retailers, Harrods and Selfridges, have both established retail media networks in the past six months, signalling that retail media is maturing into a channel fit for high-end brands.

“Historically [retail media] was all about grocery and beauty,” said Larizadeh Nassif.

“But now we’re seeing luxury [and] jewelry, apparel, furniture. It can be anything really.”