At Advertising Week New York 2026, the Roku team joined industry leaders to explore what's next for CTV. Taken together, these conversations show just how quickly CTV is changing — thanks to better data, smarter creative, and more accessible tools — and how it’s moving the needle for advertisers of all sizes.
Below we round up key learnings from those sessions.
TV ads take a page from social's playbook
Could the next generation of TV ads look more like Instagram? In an Adweek House panel alongside executives from LG, Best Buy, and BrightLine, Roku's Miles Fisher, VP of Global Ad Platform Partnerships & Business Development, explained why the answer might be yes.
“The general consensus isn’t that consumers don't like ads. It's actually that consumers don't like bad ads,” Fisher said. “On Instagram, the ads and the content look identical.”
Fisher says a more unified and native ad experience is possible in TV, but only if agencies rethink how they work. Too often, channel-level planning overlooks the interplay between how a shopper searches, evaluates and compares. Fisher encouraged brands to bring media, commerce, and creative teams together earlier in the process to think holistically, rather than simply repurposing a linear TV ad into CTV.
“Brands are more set up for success than they think. The question is, are the agencies they hire willing to break their mold and do it for them?” Fisher said.
Your next CTV ad might already be in your social feed
Think your best-performing social creative belongs only in the feed? Think bigger.
Roku's Julie McBride, Head of Ad Research, and Ted A'Zary, SVP of Insights & Strategy at Publicis Media Exchange, shared new research showing what happens when social-first creative makes the jump to CTV.
The study tested social creative across different viewing environments. For a static ad, the share of people who felt the product was “for someone like me” jumped from 19% on social to 36% on the Roku Home Screen. For a video ad, that figure climbed from 20% on social to 46% on CTV. There was another interesting twist. Viewers were more likely to describe an ad as “annoying” on social vs. CTV. Same creative, different screen, different reaction.
Given the research, A'Zary's advice was simple: “Take that social asset and put it on a home screen. Do a test. See what happens.”
Smarter media buying starts with better audience insights
What happens when streaming intelligence meets AI-powered media planning?
Roku's Sal Candela, VP of Global Agency Partnerships, sat down with Jeremy Flynn, EVP and Head of Product at Horizon, to discuss how a new partnership is helping advertisers make more informed decisions, faster.
By bringing Roku's TV data directly into HorizonOS's Blu platform, advertisers can fill gaps in their audience understanding, sharpen targeting, and streamline campaign planning. “Everyone has data, but there are only a few companies that have truly unique and incremental data. And Roku has that,” said Flynn.
Flynn highlighted how AI is shrinking audience-building workflows from weeks to minutes.
AI can't replace great brand storytelling
AI may be speeding up the creative process, but it can’t replace the human instincts behind great marketing.
In a conversation with Roku's Anne Hallock, Wayfair's Amanda Evans, VP of Brand, Insights & Partnerships, explored how the home retailer uses AI to iterate faster and streamline time-consuming tasks, freeing marketers to focus on the people behind the purchases.
“The more technology enters the creative process,” said Evans, “the more important the human element becomes.”
That’s not all! Learnings on FAST, sports and more
The knowledge just kept coming this week. Here’s a rundown of other themes that surfaced at Advertising Week New York.
- FAST follow: At the Beet.TV Leadership Summit at Omnicom Media, Roku's Sarah Harms, VP of Advertising Revenue Solutions, and Jon Merkin, Director of Platform Insights & Analytics, made the case that premium content is being redefined—if it has someone’s attention, it’s premium to them.
- Sports fandom doesn't end with the final whistle. At Adweek House Advertising HQ, Roku's Jake Piasecki joined Ashley Arena, Chief Investment Officer at PHD, to discuss why fandom spans the whole shopper journey. Fans value authenticity, so you don’t need official sponsor status to own a fan moment. “It's the whole package: the it’s the merch, it's the analysts, it's the podcasts,” Arena said.
- It’s all about the data. Roku's Miles Fisher joined leaders from Magnite, dentsu, and CVS Media Exchange to explore CTV’s expanding role in purchase decisions. By integrating commerce data, CTV can help connect ad exposure to sales outcomes, so it works as more than a branding channel. Watch the full session here.
- Signal boost. Roku's Dylan Moorhead joined executives from Wurl, Kantar, Peer39, and StreamTV to explore how interoperable signals maximize outcomes for partners, and the importance of testing and control, so strategies are proven rather than assumed. Watch the full session here.
Big picture: CTV's next chapter takes shape
Advertising Week 2026 showed just how much the streaming ad playbook is evolving.
For marketers, the opportunity is to put these ideas into practice. Work with Roku to test new formats, make better use of the creative you already have, and get your brand noticed by the shoppers and viewers who matter most.
