CES Briefing: Ad industry peeks at the ‘agentic’ era & confronts low-quality ad experiences

By Tim Peterson • January 8, 2025 •

Keep up to date with Digiday’s annual coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. More from the series →

This edition of the daily CES Briefing looks at how the agentic era of AI looms over CES and then recaps a session that highlights the underlying issue of everything becoming an ad network.

The artificial intelligence age is passing into the so-called “agentic” era, in which large language models power tools that can take actions on people’s behalf, like booking a full trip itinerary. So of course this temporal shift would show up at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week.

As with the agentic era overall, its presence at CES has still been pretty nascent as of Monday, technically the day before CES officially kicks off.

Samsung and Google have each unveiled plans to bring AI features to their respective connected TV platforms. To be clear, having Google’s Gemini read off a news briefing on the big screen isn’t exactly a paragon of the agentic era. But for AI agents to become commonplace, LLMs need to become ubiquitous (or so it would seem) as well as more sophisticated. And they are.

In its CES presentation on Monday, Nvidia — the company whose processor technology effectively underpins the AI age — introduced blueprints for agentic AI tools, which it described as “the building blocks for developers to create the next wave of AI applications that will transform every industry.”

During a panel as part of CES’s Digital Hollywood: Hollywood & Innovation conference track on Monday, Google’s director of partnerships Aaron Luber cited the search giant’s Gemini 2.0 large langauge model introduced in December as indicative of the agentic era.

“We think about Gemini 1.0 as that ability to understand information and Gemini 2.0 as finally a moment for it to be really helpful. So the agentic era is really true because of what are the capabilities now in terms of multimodality,” Luber said.

A focus on the utility of large language models seems likely to be a theme of this year’s CES. There will be a ton of talks about AI throughout the Las Vegas Convention Center, down the Las Vegas Strip and around the Aria Resort & Casino, where advertising and media executives tend to congregate. But there’s been talk about AI for more than two years, since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT.

“Last year we heard a lot about the potential and experimentation of AI in different ways. It’s quickly become imperative for the marketers and media companies to show some real use cases where it’s applied. This week we’ll hear a lot more from practitioners,” Christopher Vollmer, managing director of UTA-owned consulting firm MediaLink that is hosting the “Marketing Reinvented” track during CES, said in an interview with Digiday.

When advertisers will need to enter the agentic era seemingly remains a ways away, though. Search is likely the area to experience the most disruption from AI agents, which helps to explain why Luber would want to make a point of tying Google’s updated LLM to the onset of the agentic era. But Vollmer said that disruption is “probably a few years away.”

At the least. If Google’s recent AI-related search updates are any indication, it may take a minute. In 2023 Google introduced its Search Generative Experience, but those AI-capable search results have “been very black box” and “unfamiliar territory that nobody has gotten to test or scale,” said Deanna Cullen, head of media investment at Wpromote, in an interview.

“Test the new offering, that’s the theme for the industry. You see first movers but not necessarily an exodus away from anything,” she said.

Could the agentic era be impactful for advertisers? Eventually, sure. And CES — the domain of jetpacks and self-driving cars — is the perfect context in which to expose advertisers to the next generation of AI tools. But for now, it’s a shiny new toy.

“It’s a nice-to-have versus a need-to-have,” said Cullen. “For us, the functionality comes down to how much is it really going to move the needle to tap into it.”

Ads aren’t good enough to be everywhere

“Everything’s an ad network” has been a running joke inside the Digiday newsroom. But LG Ad Solutions CMO Tony Marlow seemed pretty serious when he floated the idea of electric cars one day being equipped with LG screens so that someone could watch an ad-supported show while at a charging station.

“That’s an advertising opportunity that didn’t exist,” Marlow said during a “Digital Hollywood” session on streaming advertising.

OK, but is it an advertising opportunity that should exist?

Companies are coming up with all kinds of ways, old and new, to stuff ads in people’s faces. Marlow’s hypothetical example is little more than Gas Station TV for the EV era. Uber, meanwhile, has created its version of Taxi TV with its JourneyTV product that puts TV screens in ride-sharing vehicles for people to watch videos and, naturally, ads while en route.

And it’s not like this “put ads everywhere” strategy doesn’t perform. During the same panel, Uber’s head of agency partnerships Ashan Khan claimed that JourneyTV has driven a 20% lift in brand favorability for advertisers and that 35% more brands advertised on JourneyTV in the second half of 2024 than in the first half.

But if the ad industry is going to insist on turning every screen and any idle moment into an ad opportunity, it really needs to consider the actual ads it will be inserting there. Because the quality vs. quantity of ads is imbalanced.

In what ended up being the mic drop moment of the panel, Havas Media Network chief strategy officer Sarah Ivey said the following:

“I don’t think anyone would look at the advertising industry right now and say, ‘Wow, those are great experiences.’ Advertising experiences generally across the board are not that great…. We cannot spend any more time with ads than we currently do. So from the advertiser’s perspective, the emphasis on the quality of the experience is becoming more important,” said Havas Media Network chief strategy officer Sarah Ivey.

And then Ivey said this at the end of the discussion, a moment that elicited some claps from the crowd:

“Advertising experiences generally suck, and we don’t want our clients’ advertising experiences to suck [claps from the crowd]. It seems like such table stakes, but it isn’t.”

CES Briefing: Ad industry peeks at the ‘agentic’ era & confronts low-quality ad experiences

This edition of the CES Briefing looks at how the agentic era of AI looms over CES, plus a session recap on the issue of everything becoming an ad network.