Nothing Is Sacred Anymore, Not Even Mickey Mouse

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO

Last year’s CES was all announcements and promises. This year, the ad industry showed up with receipts (although it couldn’t help itself and rallied around a buzzword again, this time “agentic AI”—you can safely ignore this as noise).

Major players are now letting AI into their core business, not just bolting it onto the edges. NBCUniversal ran the first-ever AI agent-to-agent media buy across linear and digital—including live sports. Selling ad inventory is their business, and they’re now letting machines negotiate it. IAB Tech Lab released an agentic roadmap designed to scale these machine-to-machine transactions across the programmatic ecosystem.

Reddit is playing a similar game with a twist. Their new “Max Campaigns“ automate targeting, creative selection, and budget allocation—which sounds like every other black-box product until you realize Reddit is leaning into transparency as a differentiator. “Top Audience Personas” shows advertisers exactly which AI-clustered personas are eng…