Navigator NYC Agenda

From the chaos of identity to the reality of measurement, we’re not here to talk in circles—we’re here to get somewhere. Whether it’s market dynamics, practical innovation, or the stuff nobody wants to say out loud, it’s on the table. Want to know more about the event, how to request an invite, or get involved as a sponsor? Head to the main Navigator NYC page. As for the agenda, it’s solid (until it isn’t). You won’t find a list of every coffee break or snack table, but rest assured—there’s time built in to pause, connect, and network.

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Session Time	Session Title	Session Description
8:00 am	Breakfast & Registration	Someone said breakfast is the most important meal of the day. They’re probably sleeping in. Not you though! Get here and get ready for a big day!
9:00 am	Welcome & Opening Remarks	Kicking off Navigator, but yes, it’s also the big jacket reveal. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
9:10 am	Keynote Session: The Hidden Power of Latent Data	Achieve your mission, grow revenue, gain efficiency with data you already have. Justin Evans makes a bold and practical case: the most powerful asset in your business is hiding in plain sight. Whether you’re a publisher fighting margin pressure, an ad tech operator optimizing yield, or a data leader navigating privacy and identity, you’re sitting on untapped value. Justin calls it latent data — the customer knowledge, transactions, device signals, and operational records your company already generates every day. Through gripping real-world stories — including the journey of an entrepreneur to cure the loneliness he believes caused his father’s death, using a ‘loneliness score’ — Justin shows how asking the right business question unlocks extraordinary outcomes, how to identify your organization’s unique ‘data kingdom,’ how to spot the six types of latent data inside it, and how AI can act as a powerful reader and synthesizer to convert raw information into growth, efficiency, and mission-driven impact. Justin Evans, CEO, TheDataStory Group
9:50 am	Keynote Session: Purpose and Patterns Today: Get What You Need and Do What You Want	The world is rife with distractions and competing priorities. As you buckle up for a day of intentional learning, we’re joined by Beeler.Tech favorite Dr. G (Deborah Gilboa, MD) to focus on the strategies that will help you get the most out of our time together – learning, networking, and growing. How can you possibly laugh this much, feel this good, and still absorb the difference-makers Navigator has to offer? We’ve got you covered! Dr. Deborah Gilboa, MD, Resilience & Change Navigation Expert, Deborah Gilboa, MD, LLC
10:15am	Transition Break	It’s time to head to your first breakout session of the day!
10:30 am Breakout Sessions
	Let’s Talk About ads.text	Most publishers set their ads.txt once and forget it. That’s a mistake. This session covers what ads.txt actually controls, what happens when it goes wrong, and what publishers should be auditing right now. Two operators share what they’ve had to fix and why. Steve Irenski, VP, Ad Operations, Programmatic Strategy & Revenue, Trusted Media Brands Marguerite Hanna, Vendor Operations, Manager, AdOps, The Washington Post
	Inside the Buy Side: How AI is Reshaping How Brands Buy Media	The way brands plan, buy, and measure media is changing faster than most publishers realize. AI is rewriting campaign workflows, shifting where decisions get made, and changing what buyers actually need from their publisher partners. This session brings buy-side voices into the Navigator room to talk honestly about what’s happening inside their organizations – what’s being automated, what still requires human judgment, and what they wish publishers understand about how the landscape is shifting. For publishers: a rare look at what’s actually driving buyer behavior right now. For buyers: a chance to shape the conversaiton with the partners who need to hear it. Tim Hurd, Vice President Media, Goodway Group Kristy Schafer, Director of Sales, Optable
	Keynote Continued: The Hidden Power of Latent Data	Justin Evans just gave you the framework. Now bring your questions. In this smaller-room follow-up to his keynote, Justin goes deeper on the latent data concept — working through the six types of latent data, how to identify your organization’s data kingdom, and how to start asking the business questions that unlock real value. This is where the morning’s big ideas get pressure-tested against your actual situation. Justin Evans, CEO, TheDataStory Group
	Has Trusted Server Arrived?	The IAB Tech Lab’s Trusted Server moves monetization logic out of the browser and into the CDN edge layer — bringing auction orchestration, identity coordination, compliance enforcement, and bot/agent detection closer to the publisher’s infrastructure. For publishers still running everything client-side, this session is an honest look at where the initiative stands: what’s working in production, what the integration requirements actually look like, and whether this is ready for your stack right now or still a 12-month roadmap item. Jason Evans, Trusted Server Architect, IAB Tech Lab Rowena Lam, Sr. Director, Privacy & Data, IAB Tech Lab
	No-Code Superpowers: AI Tools Any AdOps Team Can Use This Week	You don’t need an engineering ticket or a six-week implementation to start getting value from AI in your ad ops workflow. This session covers the tools that are actually working right now — MCP servers, browser automation, AI analytics, Power Query, opportunity surfacing — and shows you how to use them without a technical background. Walk out with something you can try Monday morning. James Strang, Ad Tech Consultant, JS.Consulting
11:15am	Networking Break	Grab a coffee and a snack, chat with new friends, and then make your way to your next session.
11:45 am Breakout Sessions
	Building a Better Bid Request	As buyers seek stronger signals to value impressions, gaps in ORTB and publisher data have led DSPs to rely on third-party inputs — often without publisher control. This session shows publishers how to use tools like Prebid to manage and enhance signal quality, protect pricing, and stay competitive in the evolving programmatic landscape. Not theory — a live demo of how to actually do it, with immediate revenue impact. Mike Racic, President, Prebid.org Keith Candiotti, Founder & CEO, Optimera Jake Sullivan, Senior Manager, Inventory & Ad Quality, Yahoo
	The Attention Premium	Arena Group had the readers, but they needed a better way to convert that attention into revenue. This session delves into how they achieved significantly higher revenue per session and overall site net CPM by making strategic choices regarding creative and technological aspects. It also provides an overview of the implementation process and the insights gained from analyzing the numbers, highlighting the untapped potential for publisher revenue. The key takeaway is that the optimal format, aligned with the reader’s journey, holds greater value than what most publishers currently capture. Stephanie Mazzamaro, SVP, Programmatic, Addressability & Ops,The Arena Group Mike Padula, Senior Director, Publisher Partnerships, Kargo
	Connect.Forward: Establishing Meaningful Connections to Grow Your Career (and Help Others Grow in Theirs)	Leadership. Mentorship. Friendship. All of the “ships.” Now, more than ever, forming industry connections is crucial for professional development, accelerating career growth, improving skillsets and boosting confidence. Connecting with others in the industry (either one-on-one or in small groups) facilitates knowledge transfer, expands your professional network and helps navigate workplace and marketplace challenges. Join us as we set the framework for this ongoing community initiative. Raef Godwin, Program Director, Beeler.Tech Melissa Chapman, Chief Operations Officer, Beeler.Tech
	The Market We Deserve	Every high-functioning marketplace at scale — stock markets, payment card networks, systems processing billions of transactions a day — operates with transparent rules and clear terms of participation for all parties. Programmatic advertising does not. The result is a market where publishers see atomized bid responses stripped of campaign context, where ad ops practices run beneath the awareness of the sales leaders nominally in charge, and where the incentives inside buy-side and sell-side organizations are misaligned even with their own goals. Ben Hovaness, Chief Media Officer at OMD Worldwide and co-founder of the IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Governance Council, isn’t here to litigate past sins. He’s here to talk about what a grown-up version of this market actually looks like — what buyers need to share with sellers, what sellers need to stop doing, and why the only path forward is multilateral consensus rather than company-by-company reform. A publisher co-chair of the Governance Council joins to put the sell-side reality on the table. Ben Hovaness, Chief Media Officer, OMD Worldwide Scott Both, Vice President of Programmatic Monetization & Operations, Hearst Magazines
	How Buyers Define Quality	Not every quality signal carries the same weight. Some are measurable and agreed upon. Some are contested. Some are still being invented. Dave Byrne and Neal Thurman walk through how buyers actually think about inventory quality as they approach a buy, from the concrete (viewability, ad experience) to the murky (MFA, brand safety) to the emergent (AI-generated content). Neal Thurman, CEO, Brand Safety Institute Dave Byrne, Digital Safety Consultant, TrustRaise
	Vibe Code: Build a Real AdOps Tool in 45 Minutes	This isn’t a demo. You’re building something. James Strang walks a room of non-developers through a semi-live build of an actual ad ops tool — prompting, iterating, debugging in real time — so you can see exactly what the process looks like when it’s working and when it isn’t. Prompts, a GitHub repo, and a link to the live app go out after the session so you can keep building. James Strang, Ad Tech Consultant, JS.Consulting
12:30 pm	It’s Lunch Time!	After a full morning of collaborating and learning, let’s eat! Join us for tacos (for a little Cinco De Mayo flavor) and conversation before we dig into the rest of our day together.
1:30 pm	Keynote Session: What We Decided to Keep, What We Let Go Of	When Katie Drummond took over as WIRED’s Global Editorial Director in 2023, the easier path was obvious — cut, consolidate, optimize for what the algorithms rewarded. She didn’t take it. Instead, WIRED made a series of deliberate editorial and operational choices: what to cover, how to cover it, what not to automate, where to invest when everyone else was pulling back. The result was a publication that broke major news, restored profitability, and earned recognition as one of the few bright spots in a brutal two-year stretch for media. Let’s learn from Katie the tradeoffs, the bets, and the logic behind the decisions that turned out to matter. Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director, Wired
2:10pm	Transition Break	It’s time for a big afternoon of learning, so head to your next breakout session.
2:20 pm Breakout Sessions
	Telling a Better Audience Story	In an environment of inflated metrics and opaque methodologies, the way you handle your audience data says as much as the numbers themselves. This session looks at how transparent sourcing, third-party-validated methods, and clear documentation can transform your audience slides from ‘claims’ into proof points that build confidence with agencies and brands. Lindsay Horrigan, SVP, Consumer Growth Officer, Hearst Rich Murphy, CEO, President, and Managing Director, Alliance for Audited Media
	What Are Agencies Becoming?	Agencies are in the middle of their own transformation — consolidating teams, rebuilding around AI, and rethinking how they buy. Publishers are doing the same thing on their side of the table. The problem is both sides are so busy changing that they keep losing track of each other. This session puts a publisher and an agency voice in the same room to map what’s actually shifting, what it means for how deals get made, and how you stay aligned with partners who look different every time you talk to them. Chandon Jones, SVP US Ad Operations, Kinesso Mike Richter, Co-Founder & CEO, Unplugged Collective
	Gen Z Ops: How the Newest People in the Room Actually Work	The ad ops and revenue ops world keeps talking about the future of the workforce — but rarely actually asks the people entering it what they see. This session does. Gen Z practitioners are already inside publisher and ad tech organizations, and they’re solving problems, building workflows, and using tools in ways that don’t look like anything in the playbook. Zip Nguyen brings that perspective into the room: what it’s like to come up in this industry right now, what’s confusing, what’s obvious that the rest of us have overcomplicated, and what the newest generation of operators is actually good at. Not a trend piece. A real conversation with someone who’s living it. Zip Nguyen, Business Intelligence & Yield Manager, BBC Studios Socheata Sea, Business Intelligence Analyst, BBC Studios Ukë Hasanaj, Data Strategy Summer Intern, McCann New York Thao Nguyen, Incoming Summer Intern, Ogilvy
	Turning Signal Clarity into Marketplace Performance	In this case study, Ziff Davis joins The Trade Desk to unpack what signal clarity means for publishers — and why direct access can meaningfully change marketplace performance. We’ll walk through how Ziff Davis leverages direct relationships through OpenPath to evaluate supply paths, strengthen buyer collaboration, and optimize monetization. Attendees will leave with practical takeaways on how direct connections empower publishers to take greater ownership of their supply and drive more efficient, high-quality programmatic transactions. Mark Obermoller, VP, Programmatic Strategy & Yield, Ziff Davis Andrew Slater, GM, Inventory Development, The Trade Desk
	How System1 Turned a Prebid Bottleneck into Revenue Lift	System 1 had a Prebid upgrade that was actively costing them money and no way to figure out why. Their ops and yield teams couldn’t test fixes without going through engineering. Their analytics, built on GA/GAM alignment, were counting bot traffic and giving them a false read on actual session performance. And every dynamic flooring solution they tried couldn’t beat the manual floors they’d built themselves. Aaron Thai, Director, Display Monetization, at System 1, walks through how they broke out of it. Integrating Assertive Yield’s full stack gave the ops team a no-code environment where they could launch, test, and validate in minutes without touching engineering. AI flooring delivered a 4–5% uplift in session RPM, finally beating the manual floors. First-party analytics replaced the GA/GAM guesswork. Net result: 5% overall revenue lift and an ops team that can move at the speed the market requires. Aaron Thai, Director, Display Monetization, System1 Ryan Abrahams, Executive Vice President of Sales, Assertive Yield
	Keynote Continued: What We Decided to Keep	Katie Drummond just walked you through the big choices — what WIRED kept, what they let go, and the logic that turned those decisions into a rare bright spot in a brutal stretch for media. Now, bring your questions. In this follow-up to her keynote in a smaller room, Katie goes deeper into the trade-offs that don’t fit in a 30-minute fireside chat. What almost got cut and didn’t. What looks obvious now but wasn’t at the time. How she thinks about bets that haven’t paid off yet. Let’s talk about what comes next for all of us. Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director, Wired
3:05pm	Networking Break	We’re almost through the day! Take a moment to connect with your peers, quickly check your emails, and then prepare to end the day strong.
3:35 pm Breakout Sessions
	AdTech AdTalk Live	Join Gareth Glaser and Adam Heimlich, the duo behind AdTech AdTalk, for a live, no-scripts, no-spin conversation about what’s really happening in adtech. Expect sharp takes, skeptical questions, and honest disagreement as they tackle the industry’s latest buzzwords, hype cycles, and hard truths in real time. Fast, funny, and occasionally spicy back-and-forth where nothing is off limits and audience questions are absolutely fair game. Gareth Glaser, CEO/Co-founder, Gamera Inc. Adam Heimlich, Founder/CEO, Chalice AI
	What the Bots Can’t Buy: The Enduring Fundamentals of Direct Sales	Automation has changed how media gets bought and sold — but it hasn’t changed what actually closes deals. This session makes the case that human relationships aren’t a legacy sales tactic — they’re the highest-leverage thing in your revenue operation. We’ll look at what the best direct sellers do differently, why presence and trust convert when everything else is commoditized, and how to build the kind of buyer relationships that don’t disappear when the next RFP hits. Mort Greenberg, Founder, digitalCORE, Inc.
	The Money Is There: Let’s Go Get It!	Buyers surveyed by the IAB said measurement gaps are actively preventing them from shifting spend to underrepresented channels — CTV, audio, podcasting, digital out of home. The money exists. The intent exists. What’s missing is the measurement infrastructure to justify the buy. Angelina Eng breaks down what’s blocking the spend and what publishers can do about it. Angelina Eng, Vice President, Measurement Center, IAB Wendy Emerson, Senior Vice President, Marketing Science, Butler/Till
	A Potentially Unbrand-Safe Conversation about Brand Safety	Brand safety done wrong doesn’t protect anyone — it just defunds good journalism and frustrates publishers who are doing everything right. Mark Howard has emerged as a leading voice in the publisher community on exactly this problem. His approach isn’t to avoid the conversation but to lead it, bringing brands, publishers, and audiences into alignment around what advertising-supported content can and should look like when it’s done well. This session takes the gloves off on the real costs of blunt brand safety tools — and makes the affirmative case for what thoughtful, intentional brand safety actually produces for everyone at the table. Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer, TIME Monica Wood, VP, AdOps, TIME
	Convergence Has Not Converged	CTV and linear have been “converging” for fifteen years. The infrastructure exists. The intent is there on both sides. And yet buyers and sellers still can’t find each other at scale in a way that actually works. This session stops pretending otherwise. A CTV publisher operations leader and a buy-side partner sit down to be honest about why convergence keeps stalling – the structural mismatches, the misaligned incentives, the assumptions each side brings to the table that the other side never agreed to. No talking points. No roadmaps. Just two operators who have lived this problem long enough to stop sugarcoating it – and who think the only way forward is to finally say out loud what everyone in the room already knows. Huda Kazi, VP, Ad Tech & Operations, Warner Bros. Discovery Andrew Rosenman, President & Founder, Arise Media Group
	What Would You Do With Your Time Back?	Publisher dependency and overlap with managed service or technology partners — navigating what to keep, what to reclaim, and how to make the relationship work when your partner has some of your work covered. A publisher-led case study on the real operational and strategic tradeoffs of outsourcing vs. owning. Jeff Li, Head of Business Development, Programmatic, Digital Revenue Partnerships, Fortune John Ilacqua, Executive Vice President (EVP) of Growth and Publisher Development, Freestar
4:20pm	Transition Break	The day is almost done, folks. Time to head to our final sessions of the day, where we’ll bring everything together.
4:30 pm	The Navigator Awards: Recognizing the Brands and Agencies That Show Up for Journalism	Good journalism is expensive. It’s also increasingly easy to avoid. Broad brand safety settings do the avoiding automatically, without anyone making a real decision. The Navigator Awards exist to make visible the brands and agencies that chose differently. Publisher-nominated and conversation-driven, these awards recognize buyers who made an intentional decision to show up in trusted news environments, support difficult coverage, and act like partners instead of just buyers. Rob Beeler presents the inaugural Navigator Awards, celebrating the industry leaders who understand that when journalism loses funding, everyone loses something real. Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech
5:00 pm	Purpose and Patterns Tomorrow: Take What You Need and Give What You Want	The day is done. The hard conversations have been had. Now the real question: what do you actually do with all of it? Dr. Deborah Gilboa, MD returns to close the loop — helping you identify what’s worth taking home, how to share it with the colleagues and bosses who weren’t here, and how to keep the relationships you built today alive when you’re back at your desk Monday morning. Not theory. Practical, and human. Dr. Deborah Gilboa, MD, Resilience & Change Navigation Expert, Deborah Gilboa, MD, LLC
5:30 pm	Evening Reception	After a long day of collaborative discussion and debate, we’re going to come together one last time. Make connections, share ideas, and exchange knowledge. (Thank you to our partners at Admiral, Clipcentric, and Perion for sponsoring this get together.)
7:30 pm	Of Course, There’s an After Party	Psst! For those of you still left in town, we’ll be getting together at Wogie’s (44 Trinity Pl) for drinks, laughs, and a few final hours of memory-making.