2027 Call for Content Topics: 

AI and the Future of Audiences: Definition, Discovery and Measurement
How does AI change our definition of target audiences? As AI becomes more deeply embedded in marketing, the key question is no longer just how marketers and agencies use it for insights, creative development, media buying, and advertising execution, but also how it is redefining audiences. AI-powered search, assistants, and autonomous agents can increasingly discover, evaluate, compare, recommend, and potentially purchase products on behalf of people. This creates a new layer between brands and consumers and raises fundamental questions about audience definition, visibility, measurement, and attribution. 

In August 2026, the IAB’s recent Measuring Visibility in the AI Era framework highlights the emerging challenge of evaluating brand presence and performance within AI-powered discovery, while also pointing to the need for greater consistency and rigor in measurement. With that in mind, we welcome research, strategies, tools, and case studies that help organizations understand and navigate this emerging environment, including but not limited to:

• Examples of AI-mediated discovery and brand visibility, including how brands enter consideration sets and how presence, prominence, portrayal, credibility, and persuasion can be evaluated.
• The changing definition of audiences, including how marketers distinguish human audiences, traditional non-human activity, and AI agents acting on behalf of consumers.
• New approaches to targeting, measurement, attribution, and outcomes when AI systems increasingly influence or make decisions on behalf of consumers.

Consumers & AI: Changes in Creative and the Advertising Marketplace
There is a growing body of work examining how people do and do not respond to AI-generated creative. As AI makes it faster, cheaper, and easier to produce high-quality video and other media assets, it lowers barriers to entry and expands who can create and distribute content. This shift raises important questions about the business’s economics, the variety of material in the market, and the number and diversity of voices now able to participate. At the same time, it brings unintended consequences, including the spread of misinformation and other risks tied to the scale and speed of synthetic content. We welcome perspectives, evidence, and examples that help illuminate how audiences are responding to these changes and what they may mean for the future of media and marketing, including but not limited to:

• Audience response and creative effectiveness, including the effects of AI-generated versus human-created content on attention, trust, persuasion, and brand outcomes. 
• The changing economics and supply of creative, including implications for production costs, personalization, creative diversity, agencies, creators, and barriers to entry. 
• The broader consequences of synthetic content, including authenticity, misinformation, copyright, consumer trust, and the potential for AI to change the volume and variety of advertising audiences encounter.

Strategies to Succeed in Today’s Multi-Media World 
We welcome evidence on what works across legacy channels, streaming, social video, creators, gaming, retail media, and emerging formats such as video podcasts. We are seeking planning and optimization approaches that address cross-platform reach and frequency, attention and engagement quality, creative fit to context, and the realities of walled-garden measurement. We also invite rigorous work on targeting and segmentation—based on income and life stage, observed behaviors, or psychological characteristics such as attitudes, motivations, and mindsets—that demonstrates in-market performance, validation, and responsible activation, including privacy and fairness. Especially valuable are:

• Case studies, experiments, and measurement frameworks that illustrate how marketers make decisions when perfect data is unavailable.
• What was measured, what trade-offs were made, how uncertainty was communicated, how causal claims and partner quality were evaluated, and how the results changed investment decisions. 
• Submissions that link media, measurement, and targeting decisions to brand and business outcomes are especially encouraged.

Audience & Cultural Understanding
Marketing to diverse audiences now requires more than demographic segmentation—it demands cultural fluency, contextual awareness, and a clear understanding of how identity, values, and media behaviors intersect. We welcome submissions that identify best practices for inclusive marketing amid rising sociopolitical polarization, such as:

• How brands navigate differences in race, ethnicity, gender, ideology, geography, and the media ecosystems people inhabit. 
• Share frameworks and evidence that help teams balance authenticity and representation with brand safety and reputational risk, and that demonstrate what drives impact—on trust, relevance, and business outcomes—in today’s complex cultural landscape.

Media Quality: From Exposure to Impact
Reach and exposure remain fundamental to media measurement, but not all exposures are equal. As media environments become more fragmented, marketers increasingly need to understand the quality and potential value of an exposure, not simply whether an ad was delivered, but whether characteristics such as viewability, attention, context, environment, engagement, and other signals help explain differences in advertising effectiveness.

As attention measurement becomes more established and standardized, we invite submissions that move beyond familiar debates to show how attention can be defined, measured, and applied to improve decisions and outcomes. What does attention add beyond conventional exposure measures and other indicators of media quality? Under what circumstances does it predict meaningful outcomes, and can quality measures improve planning, buying, optimization, and media allocation? 

We welcome empirical research, experiments, cross-platform comparisons, case studies, and practical perspectives that help advance the industry’s understanding and application of media quality. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Rigorous tests of when attention metrics do and do not predict real-world outcomes, such as sales, retention, loyalty, memory, creative quality, and long-term brand equity; and of how attention is operationalized in planning, buying, creative evaluation, optimization, frequency strategy, and media allocation
• What attention data reveals about cumulative exposure, wear-in, and wear-out. 
• Differences in media quality across platforms, formats, and environments, including TV, CTV, digital video, social, audio, OOH/DOOH, gaming, immersive environments, and emerging forms of media.
• The relationship between quality, cumulative exposure, and frequency, including wear-in, wear-out, effective frequency, and the potential value of different types or sequences of exposure.
• Submissions that identify limitations and blind spots—such as bias, validity, comparability, and privacy—and propose stronger frameworks, hybrid measures, standards, or complementary metrics are especially encouraged.

The Future of Video Currency and Cross-Media Accountability 
We welcome research and case studies on how privacy changes are reshaping identity and exposure measurement—shifting the industry from deterministic matching to privacy-first probabilistic approaches—and on the implications for accuracy, bias, and scalability. Submissions should examine:

• Cross-platform partnerships between major data owners and independent measurement providers
• What they enable, where they fall short, and how well results reconcile across sources. 
• Practical, hybrid paths forward that combine panels, ACR, first-party and publisher data, and modeling to deliver credible deduplication, reach/frequency, and outcome linkage. 
• Effective frequency across linear TV, CTV, digital video, and social platforms, distinguishing incremental from redundant exposures, and translating cross-platform frequency into meaningful campaign outcomes.

The 2027 Media Marketplace: Planning with Forecasts, Fragmentation and New Inventory 
As the media landscape becomes more fragmented and newer inventory continues to emerge, planners, sellers and marketers need practical, real-time marketplace intelligence to guide growth and governance. We’re seeking work that demonstrates how market forecasts, spending trends and channel performance data can inform smarter decisions about budget allocation, channel mix, upfront strategy, inventory packaging, product development and investment justification. We’re also interested in:

• How organizations evaluate and manage emerging monetization opportunities, including non-endemic advertising, homepage and owned-property monetization, advertiser fit, sales-team decision rules, customer-experience risk, and the guardrails needed to ensure that revenue growth does not outpace brand strategy.
• Topics may span TV, CTV, OOH/DOOH, social, digital video, mobile, gaming, programmatic and retail media, with an emphasis on translating complex market signals into clear planning, sales and monetization strategies.