October 9, 2026  |  SIGN UP

Jim Cooper
DIGIDAY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Advertising Week New York 2026 is officially in the rearview and it will be marked as the year that AI firms and agencies tried to platform and sell AI – something that increasingly fills people with impending dread.

“I see scary things,” one usually unflappable and gimlet-eyed Wall Street analyst told me over drinks. A lot of the work to assuage concern, as we reported this week, is falling to media agencies which are working furiously to create systems and capabilities to assure brands that humans won’t let the machines take over. Although we also reported that S4 Capital is now letting agents churn away on media work largely unsupervised for days.

But, in this short week alone, agencies Dentsu’s Carat, Tinuiti and Stagwell Media introduced new initiatives and partnerships to better monitor and measure near-term AI optimization and scaling for clients worried about rogue AI behavior. We’ll have to see if their pitches land.

At the close of ADWNY, uncertainty is the only certainty.

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