Liz 
Crunch, crunch, crunch. If you were a number cruncher before, with AI you’re now breaking down numbers to subatomic levels. If anything, you’re craving more data to smash together to see what you can learn. More, more, more. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
In an industry still heavily dependent on pageviews and programmatic CPMs, that churn is baked into the model. Publishers chase the spike, monetize the impression, and start again. But as third-party cookies continue their long goodbye and advertisers push harder for addressable, consent-based audiences, that cycle is becoming harder to justify.
The 2026 World Cup is a useful pressure point because the spike in audience, spend, and operational risk arrives at once – and publishers that prepare early can turn demand into revenue, rather than watch value leak through a stack built for quieter days. We’re right in the thick of it now. How can publishers make the most of this moment?
Publishers have spent years watching other companies extract value from their work while asking them to prove they created it, own it, and deserve to be paid for it. Is C2PA the answer?
Our industry feels full of contradictions right now. We need to preserve what made us valuable without preserving every part of how we’ve always operated.
This year’s Navigator London agenda was built with publishers firmly in mind, including inspiring keynotes. But true to form, some of the sharpest insights came to light away from the stage, in the many breakout sessions, over lunch, and likely in the local pub afterwards.
Read an AI summary of the Argentina–Cape Verde World Cup game and you’ll find that nearly everything that made it remarkable has been stripped away.
Even at a strong event, the human brain is not exactly built for perfect attention. People show up carrying work stress, travel stress, social stress, and the constant mental hum of what is happening somewhere else. A text comes in. An email is waiting. A meeting back at the office keeps creeping into the mind.
Dr. G closed Navigator NYC with a different kind of session. After a day of conversations about AI, data, audience, brand safety, revenue pressure, collaboration, and change, she brought the room back to a simple question: what are you actually taking with you?
When Rich Murphy and Lindsay Horrigan sat down at Navigator NYC, the conversation landed on one of the biggest shifts publishers are working through right now: audience is no longer something publishers can treat as an automatic byproduct of making good content.