For INMA’s first Advertising Initiative Webinar of 2026, initiative lead Gabriel Dorosz brought in three industry experts to offer insights on the changing advertising landscape. Pablo Altieri of Diagonal Minds, Amy Garland of Bully Pulpit International, and Alessandro De Zanche of not just ADZ provided fresh perspectives on predictions for the coming year, along with sound advice on how to strategically prepare for these changes.

Vertical video and AI reshape advertising

Altieri outlined the rapid shifts redefining digital advertising and the mounting pressure on publishers to overhaul their products, data strategies, and video offerings. His assessment reflects a broader trend across the sector: the pace of change has accelerated, and the traditional publishing model is struggling to keep up.

In recent years, he noted, “our industry was mainly focused on how to switch users from the paper to desktop and then to mobile,” whilst the wider digital ecosystem has focused on optimising for personalisation, speed, and mobile‑first consumption. News publishers continue to rely heavily on text‑based articles and legacy ad formats, but with average attention spans dropping to 8.2 seconds in 2025, the gap between what users experience on social platforms and what they encounter on publisher sites has widened.

Between 2024 and 2025, publishers focused on three areas of innovation: first‑party data, AI‑driven editorial tools, and new UX approaches aimed at younger audiences. But Altieri emphasised that what counted as innovation just a year ago has already become standard. Most major publishers now operate DMPs, retailers have launched their own media networks, and programmatic marketplaces offer access to first‑party data at scale.

“If you’re not already there, you’re behind the curve,” he said.

AI adoption has also accelerated, with more than 50 major media groups signing deals with large AI platforms. At the same time, the rise of synthetic content on social platforms has pushed users back toward trusted publishers for verification — an opportunity Altieri said publishers must meet with better user experiences.

The rise of vertical video remains the most significant shift. By late 2024, vertical video views had surpassed horizontal views globally, and 75% of all online video consumption occurred on mobile. Yet most publishers still confine vertical video to their homepages, and Alteri said that is missing out on its full potential: “If we think that the vertical video experience is only on homepages, we may be running in the right direction, but probably the opportunity we have is how to move that into articles and how to actually monetise that.”

He pointed to emerging technologies that allow publishers to convert static display into full‑HD vertical video inventory. Several publishers and e‑commerce platforms have already adopted these tools, enabling them to repurpose social‑ready brand assets and increase video revenue without major integration work.

The declining organic traffic following Google’s 2025 updates will force publishers to expand their monetisation strategies, and Alteri urged them to use first‑party data both onsite and offsite, mirroring social platforms’ moment‑based targeting models: “We know that the user is not coming back every day. So if we have the opportunity to target those users offsite, it’s actually a cost of opportunity of not going into that direction.”

Value, not volume

The way media is bought and how audiences experience it are two areas experiencing a fundamental structural change. In her presentation, Garland illustrated a decisive shift away from the long‑dominant “volume mindset.” For years, impressions were the currency of digital advertising; today, clients demand proof of value, not just scale.

“We’re going beyond just reach, but really how we can optimise for attention and buy influence,” she said.

That means attention, influence, and impact are becoming the new benchmarks. But she cautioned that the transition is messy: attention metrics remain fragmented, definitions vary across platforms, and many tech stacks aren’t yet built to measure what advertisers increasingly want to buy. Without alignment, she warned, there’s a “risk of having additional proxy metrics that aren't tied to actual business outcomes.”

Brand suitability — once a niche concern — has become a central driver of spend. Garland pointed out that the top reason marketers pull budgets from publishers is fear of unsafe or low‑quality environments. She said her agency uses tools like DoubleVerify, but not all publishers can implement them at scale.

Meanwhile, consumers themselves are reinforcing the trend: 64% say the content surrounding an ad shapes their perception of the brand. As a result, premium inventory is commanding higher prices, with U.S. programmatic CPMs more than doubling between 2023 and 2024. Buyers, Garland said, are increasingly willing to pay more for cleaner, controlled environments, often through private marketplaces.

But the most profound changes are happening on the audience side. Garland emphasised that younger consumers no longer seek news — news finds them, often through culture, creators, and niche communities. Influencers, memes, and fandoms have grown dramatically since 2020, while followings for politicians, magazines, and news organisations have declined. With 91% of 18‑ to 25‑year‑olds believing mainstream pop culture “no longer exists,” publishers must build verticals that feel native to these fragmented interests. She pointed to The New York Times’ expansion into sports, cooking, and games, and Puck’s journalist‑as‑influencer model as examples of where the industry is heading.

Finally, Garland addressed the “TikTok‑ification” of news, or the rise of short‑form vertical video as a default mode of consumption. Today, 90% of consumers watch TikTok‑style clips on publisher sites, creating a brand‑safe alternative to social platforms. But this shift will force advertisers to rethink creative formats, measurement expectations, and even team structures, as social‑first buyers increasingly enter the publisher ecosystem.

However, Garland said that those who embrace vertical video and build niche-aligned content experiences will find a payoff: “This provides a new brand safe environment for media buyers to place their short-form video content.”

Overcoming infinite quality

To wrap up the Webinar, De Zanche offered a sort of strategic wake‑up call for publishers preparing for 2026. Rather than focusing on emerging trends, De Zanche asked the existential question facing the industry: what do you do when quality becomes infinite?

“We can see it as an issue, or we can see it as an opportunity,” he said. “I see it as an opportunity and I’m very optimistic providing that we know what we are doing and we approach it strategically.”

Publishers must understand what the true product is: “The product is media,” he declared.

The advertiser is the secondary customer and the audience is the primary customer, because “if there is no audience, there is no advertiser.”

Lose sight of that, he warned, and publishers risk eroding the very asset that makes their advertising propositions valuable.

De Zanche outlined three forces reshaping the media landscape: zero‑click search, generative AI, and the structural flaws of the open programmatic marketplace. Each, he argued, requires publishers to rethink long‑standing assumptions.

Zero‑click search, the “elephant in the room,” is already rewriting the rules of discoverability. As platforms increasingly answer queries without sending users to publishers, acquisition and retention strategies must be rebuilt from the ground up. In this environment, user experience becomes non‑negotiable. Advertising, he said, must be reframed as one channel within a broader revenue ecosystem, not the default engine of growth. And brand suitability must be understood as a two‑way street: publishers should be as selective about advertisers as advertisers are about publishers.

The second force — GenAI — poses a deeper, more uncomfortable challenge. The threat isn’t a flood of low‑quality content; it’s the moment when AI produces content that is “high enough quality” to be indistinguishable from human work. When quality becomes abundant, it becomes cheap. And when it becomes cheap, it stops being a differentiator. In that world, trust — provenance, accountability, and human editorial responsibility — becomes the true currency of value.

“When audiences can’t reliably tell human from synthetic, then the value moves toward who stands behind the content,” he said.

This leads to De Zanche’s sharpest critique: the open programmatic marketplace which structurally dilutes premium publishers’ value. Programmatic created what he called the “delusion of infinity” — infinite reach, infinite inventory, infinite data — while the only thing that wasn’t infinite was quality. Now, even that scarcity advantage is at risk.

He proposed a bold solution: a two‑tier ecosystem. Tier two is the open marketplace as it exists today. Tier one is a premium, owned‑and‑operated environment built on bundled assets, direct audience relationships, and trust. “The catch is we, as publishers, need to make this distinction visible,” De Zance said. “We need to build a tier one environment, but if we sell them through generic pipes, they will get tier two pricing and treatment. We must force advertisers to see the difference.”

De Zanche closed with a message that was both urgent and optimistic: the time to build trust is before you need it. Those who start now, he argued, will thrive in the next era of media.

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