I’m missing the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year. I’ve gone to practically every one for the past 20 years, and I finally got a break.

I had thought for years that CES would feel more special by taking a year off. It’s kind of like the Olympics or the World Cup; a little more distance helps clarify where the big shifts are.

And often the wow factors are not exactly life-changing. Last year, the most exciting prototype that stands out was an SUV that carried around a drone in the back that could fit two human passengers. I’d have never remembered the name: the Xpeng AeroHT Land Aircraft Carrier.

When we had an AI Marketers Guild call this week, the coolest thing someone said they read about was a robot vacuum that climbs stairs. It’s impressive. The vacuum itself won’t change many people’s lives, but for people with mobility challenges, innovations like this can make a difference especially when such a robot can go and fetch someone their meds and a cup of coffee, or go out and hold your place in line for when the next Labubu drops (sorry, my brain’s still stuck on 2025 fads for a while longer).

The innovations that matter most for marketers tend to be more about software, and that doesn’t make great fodder for exhibit halls. A browser-based version of Alexa is hard to turn into.a showstopper. Amazon will find far more success integrating its products with ChatGPT, Gemini, and others anyway, as much as it would love all your data — just like everyone else.

CES for the ad industry is always a funny beast of a show designed for the year’s kickoff planning meetings, and it’s a grand annual industry reunion. I miss all that, even if many of the people I enjoy seeing there happen to live or work close to my home office that is literally on Madison Avenue. There’s still something special about CES, and I’ll be back. But, just like even a few days mostly offline during the holiday stretch can be just the refresh you need, a year off from your go-to conference can give you fresh eyes for when you return.

If you have been following it or did make it out there, share what’s most interesting to you. You can see a few other highlights below.

— David Berkowitz, Chief Community Officer, Marketecture Media

Who: Agency Principals, Operations Leads, Procurement Teams, Brand CMOs

What: Major agency holding companies at CES 2026 are pivoting away from pitching AI as a experimental concept and toward integrating it as core business infrastructure. Systems like WPP Open, Omnicom’s Omni+, and Stagwell’s "The Machine" were showcased not as future promises, but as active software platforms that automate media planning, audience definition, and content production.

Why it matters: The agency model is shifting from selling hours to outcomes powered by proprietary software, signaling a move toward hybrid SaaS-and-service compensation models. Any readers of Madison Avenue Manslaughter have been waiting for this to materialize. Is this really the era Michael Farmer anticipated?

(The Drum)

Who: Performance Marketers, Social Media Buyers, Community Managers

What: Reddit officially unveiled Reddit Max, its new AI-powered automated campaign type. Built on Reddit Community Intelligence, the tool analyzes more than 23 billion posts to automate targeting, bidding, and creative rotation. It moves away from the black box model of other platforms by providing Top Audience Personas reporting, showing exactly which types of users (e.g., "Ambitious Home Cooks") are engaging.

Why it matters: AI is finally making niche contextual targeting scalable. Early tests show a 17% lower CPA, allowing brands to enter hyper-specific community conversations with creative that feels native rather than intrusive.

(Adweek)

Who: Media Planners, Ad Tech Product Leads, TV Sales Executives, Programmatic Buyers

What: NBCUniversal, RPA, FreeWheel, and Newton Research have launched the industry’s first agent-to-agent media buy. Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI agents successfully negotiated and optimized a single video investment across both linear TV and Peacock streaming in seconds. The pilot is specifically focused on live NFL Playoff games in Q1 2026, marking the first time AI agents have automated live sports inventory on linear television.

Why it matters: The vending machine era of programmatic is evolving into a concierge era of agentic buying; marketers will soon stop managing line items and start managing agents trained on their specific brand outcomes and safety guardrails.

(NBCUniversal)

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