Last week, marketers, agency executives, media buyers, publishers, and tech innovators descended upon New York City for Advertising Week. While iOS 27 dominated many of the conversations, there were a few other themes that were top of mind for attendees. Here are the key takeaways from ID5’s team members who were on the ground.
Publishers and agencies are under growing pressure to prove the outcomes they deliver to brands. However, demonstrating value is still proving to be a challenge for many. Why is this still an obstacle in 2026? Carly Allcorn, ID5’s Senior Director of Publisher Development, says the root problem is that ID resolution remains a constant struggle for publishers and ad tech platforms. Attendees gave two reasons for this. Some pointed to fragmentation across platforms and channels. Others pointed to signal loss and to the difficulty of knowing which signals can “persist & exist” across environments, as Carly put it. If you can’t reliably recognize the same audience across environments, you can’t connect a campaign to its outcome.
On the topic of identity resolution, “it is clear that brands and agencies will need to be data-savvy enough to utilize a few solutions together to paint the full picture,” says Lisa Abousaleh, SVP of Partnerships at ID5. Identity resolution technology can help tackle challenges like signal loss and fragmentation to create better omnichannel marketing outcomes.
Publicis’s acquisition of LiveRamp was also a talking point. Several brand and agency attendees we spoke with said they’re reviewing their identity layer and looking at neutral alternatives while the deal moves toward completion. At this moment, identity companies like ID5 represent an essential translation layer to ensure that ad spend makes its way to quality inventory, and that brands and agencies can see greater outcomes from their campaigns.
Apple’s iOS 27 update came out not long before Advertising Week, so it was too late to add to the agenda, but it was top of mind for attendees. Everyone was talking about Apple’s unpublished WebKit blocklist, which stops Safari and other iOS browsers from connecting to certain ad tech domains. There were more questions than there were answers last week. You can read what ID5 CEO Mathieu Roche had to say about this in ID5’s blog on what the iOS 27 changes mean moving forward.
As AI takes over workflows, processes, and the wider adtech industry, many attendees at Advertising Week wondered when agentic buying would go mainstream. Last year, agentic buying was a big topic at the event, but this year there wasn’t much progress made compared to 2025. According to ID5’s VP of Product, agentic buying campaigns are “mostly small tests with limited budgets”. She predicts this will change in 2027 as the conversation around agentic buying expands and matures and will have real proof points to evaluate effectiveness. So if 2026 was the year of standards and exploration, 2027 is the year we find out how they actually work.
M&A has been hot in 2026, especially in CTV. Paramount closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery midway through Advertising Week, creating Skydance, and attendees were keen to talk about the impact. The general consensus was that streaming consolidation is real. But what does this mean for advertising? With fragmentation still representing one of the major challenges in CTV, this streaming consolidation could be a solution to some of that. Additionally, when paired with identity resolution technology, this provides a great opportunity for brands and agencies that are investing in CTV advertising.