October 14
Two things were clear at Advertising Week NY. The first is that it’s still a rather cramped, overrun affair with long lines for everything and no food on site.
The second was the dominant topic on stage this year: platforms and agencies are racing to put AI agents in charge of more advertising work, while keeping a human hand on the wallet. Meta, TikTok, OpenAI and agency groups are folding creative, targeting, buying, shopping and measurement into AI-driven workflows. The agents can recommend and prepare, but people must still approve. The biggest hurdle to AI adoption in advertising is trust, not technology.
In my mind, there were five big stories that spun out of this topic throughout the week:
1. Meta wants the whole campaign in the chat
Meta seems to be on a mission to turn its "AI assistant" into an out-and-out operating system for advertising. The company is testing agents for conversational campaign creation, creative generation, targeting and budget changes. Advertisers can review and approve actions before they go live. Ads Creative Studio is also expanding. Last but not least, Meta is testing direct checkout in Messenger with Shopify, so shoppers can buy inside the conversation.
For agencies, Meta's agentic steps, and those of others, are a strategic threat. The more platforms automate, the less manual campaign work clients may need help with. Agency value will have to come from the parts a platform is poorly placed to provide: judgment, distinctive creative, cross-platform strategy and an honest account of performance.
Much of this remains in testing, so let's keep the champagne in the fridge for now. Still, Meta has the scale to make its experiments industry practice.
2. ChatGPT wants to become a buyable medium
ChatGPT will soon show labeled visual ads beside generated images, starting this month in the U.S. It has also added measurement partners, including Haus, Measured and WorkMagic. DoubleVerify and IAS are piloting brand-suitability evaluations, and DoubleVerify has also launched ChatGPT ad attribution.
That is the unglamorous plumbing that makes the glamorous new channel commercially credible. Budgets have stayed at test levels because buyers could not prove anything worked, or confirm their brand was placed somewhere respectable. A conversational channel can be fascinating and still go nowhere if the CMO cannot see how it performed. This week was OpenAI's first serious attempt to fix that.
3. TikTok wants to own the journey from discovery to checkout
TikTok announced an ad network that lets U.S. advertisers reach what it says are nearly 400,000 outside apps from inside TikTok Ads Manager. The company also added Buy Direct checkout, a shopping assistant and Smart+ Creative Selection, which pulls advertiser assets, AI creative and creator content into one workflow. Its ads connector (an MCP server) for outside AI agents is also live.
Read together, the plan seems to be to own discovery, the purchase and the advertising in between, and rent out the rest of the mobile web as inventory to boot.
4. The upfronts get an agent, and agencies a lease on life
Not to be outdone by the tech giants, legacy media owners and agency networks banded together to automate the sacred cow of the television business: upfront commitments. NBCUniversal, FreeWheel, Carat and Newton unveiled a buying agent designed to route upfront dollars across linear and connected television against actual business outcomes. Meanwhile, shops like Stagwell and Tinuiti rushed to roll out their own agentic orchestration engines.
Agencies are terrified of disintermediation by platform automation, so they are positioning themselves as the indispensable arbiters of governance. The pitch to the C-suite is simple: let the machine do the heavy lifting at lightning speed but pay us to make sure it doesn't accidentally set your budget on fire.
5. Apple's blocklist loomed over Advertising Week
Apple's adtech blocklist wasn't an Advertising Week announcement, but it was the week's most unsettling shadow story. Its iOS 27 changes cut Safari and other Webkit-based browsers off from selected ad tech companies, including The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, ID5, Permutive and Audigent, though The Trade Desk's ad server reportedly later received a reprieve.
Identity providers have no equivalent fix. The implications reach beyond the companies named. If advertisers can identify fewer users across the open web, publishers may find their inventory harder to target and less valuable. Meanwhile, platforms with their own logged-in audiences keep their advantage. Apple can frame this as privacy protection. The industry's concern is that a single private company may be setting selective rules for a huge portion of advertising at large.
Agents are slowly closing in on actually spending campaign money. But first we have to figure out who sets their permissions, who owns their data and who verifies their work.