What CES 2026 Revealed About the Future of Advertising

Across the showroom floor and speaker sessions at the CES 2026 show in Las Vegas, conversation shifted away from what might be possible in the future toward how emerging technologies, platforms, and partnerships will reshape advertising in the year ahead.

For marketers, the most important takeaways and themes from the 2026 show centered around structural changes in the industry, rather than new devices or incremental platform updates. 

Agentic AI is beginning to redefine how media planning and buying are executed at scale.

Live sports and premium video continue to consolidate power as the last truly mass-reach environments.

Creator-led storytelling is a core growth lever for brands seeking relevance and trust.

As commerce media matures, the distinction between ‘retail’ and ‘media’ is rapidly disappearing. 

With nearly 150,000 attendees and more than 4,100 exhibitors, CES 2026 underscored the complexity of change facing marketers and business leaders today.

At the show, “agentic” shifted from buzzword to clear product roadmaps, with platforms showing early versions of AI that translate objectives into decisions across planning, creative, and optimization levers. Disney positioned its latest upgrades as dynamic workflows, pairing automation and AI with premium inventory while highlighting new capabilities unveiled at its Global Tech & Data Showcase. 

Several announcements emphasized how quickly automation is moving into execution that has historically been managed manually. Reddit, for example, introduced Max Campaigns (in beta), an automated campaign type designed to optimize targeting, creative rotations, ad placements, and budget allocation in real time, alongside AI-driven audience reporting. Regardless of the solution, these innovations are more in reach than ever before, with partners ready to meet brands where they are today through turnkey tests and pilots.

Commentary across multiple sessions at CES 2026 reinforced that live sports remain the most concentrated source of audience attention, and platform investments are increasingly being built around these moments. Some, like Disney, explicitly tied its advertising tech roadmap to the scale and cultural impact of live sports and tentpole events, framing its tech and measurement investments as an enabler for brands across live sports and streaming at once. NBCUniversal is doing the same, thanks to its integrated programming slate for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. With live viewership set to surge globally, thanks to the 2026 FIFA World Cup in June 2026 and the Winter Olympics in February, CES-stage commentary pointed to how media owners are operationalizing live media as a more addressable, measurable ecosystem, with several measurement announcements from TikTok, NBCUniversal, and Disney.

Creator strategy was discussed at length as an increasingly growing and unique programming and distribution model that integrates talent with commerce. Pinterest took to the stage to spotlight a premium, creator-hosted lifestyle series, Bring My Pinterest to Life, designed to move viewers from watching to saving through Pinterest, with integrated brand partners including Wayfair and Michaels, and a planned March debut on Roku. 

The inaugural Variety Business of Creators Summit shared insights into the evolving role of creators across entertainment, media, and brand partnerships, illustrating that creator influence now extends well beyond short-form social content and into broader business strategy and storytelling. Discussions spanned how creator-led IP is influencing streaming and FAST platforms, as well as cross-platform audience engagement.

As commerce media continues to expand beyond retailer-owned placements to a broader set of shoppable, addressable platforms, CES 2026 showed how the lines between discovery and conversion are blurring, particularly in conversational and content-led experiences. Walmart is testing ads within Sparky, its AI shopping assistant in the Walmart app, where sponsored prompts can appear in response to shoppers' questions. The company also described how “Marty,” its supplier- and advertising-facing AI agent, is being used to generate recommendations for sponsored search campaigns, with plans to expand availability and formats. 

Hot off the heels of CES, Walmart and Google announced plans to launch a new intelligence experience that pairs Gemini with Walmart and Sam’s Club’s shopping ecosystem. Google also launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard for agentic commerce that works across the shopping journey. 

The tech show revealed that commerce intent is increasingly embedded in premium video and programmatic environments. Pinterest’s CTV programming push is explicitly designed to connect viewership to shopping actions, blurring the historical boundary between media exposure and purchase behavior. And outside the home, DIRECTV unveiled digital-out-of-home inventory through Place Exchange, Basis, and The Trade Desk.

Taken together, the signals from Las Vegas point to an industry focused on operationalizing the latest innovations to deliver scale and business transformation. For marketers, the opportunity now lies less in chasing novelty and more in understanding how these shifts intersect—across platforms and partners—to create more integrated, measurable marketing ecosystems in the year ahead.