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 publishing 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 your covered! Dr. Deborah Gilboa MD
10:25 am Breakout Sessions
	Let’s Talk Ads.Txt: The Little Text File That Could	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 and Programmatic Strategy & Revenue, Trusted Media Brands
	Wiring Up Your Seller Agent (Don’t Tell Me There Isn’t Work to Be Done)	Everyone’s talking about agentic advertising. Not everyone has actually tried to build for it on the sell side. This session skips the theory and goes straight to the work — what it actually took to wire up a seller agent, what the blockers were, what surprised them, and what they’d do differently. A publisher-led case study for the people who will have to do this themselves.
	Editorial Meet Ops, Ops Meet Editorial: Finding Common Metrics	These two teams are supposed to be building the same thing — a healthy, sustainable publication. But they’re often measuring completely different things. Editorial is chasing engagement, time on page, loyalty. Ops is chasing CPMs, fill rate, and yield. When those metrics conflict, so do the decisions. This session puts both sides in the room to find the overlap — what does a shared measurement framework actually look like, and who has to give ground to get there?
	The Hidden Power of Latent Data: Keynote Continued	These two teams are supposed to be building the same thing — a healthy, sustainable publication. But they’re often measuring completely different things. Editorial is chasing engagement, time on page, loyalty. Ops is chasing CPMs, fill rate, and yield. When those metrics conflict, so do the decisions. This session puts both sides in the room to find the overlap — what does a shared measurement framework actually look like, and who has to give ground to get there? 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 Labs
	Vibe Coding for Ad Ops: Where Do You Even Start?	Vibe coding for ad ops isn’t the same as vibe coding for a developer — your problems are different, your tools are different, and your tolerance for things breaking in production is very different. This session is the on-ramp: what vibe coding actually is, where it fits in an ad ops workflow, what kinds of problems it’s already solving, and how to take your first real shot at it without breaking anything important. No coding background required. Curiosity required.
11:40 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
	The SEO You Knew Is Gone: Navigating the AEO/GEO Shift	Search traffic built publisher businesses. AI-driven answer engines are dismantling them. Publishers expect a 40%+ decline in search traffic over the next three years — Chartbeat data already shows 33% down globally. The question for ad ops isn’t abstract: fewer visits means fewer impressions to serve. This session covers what the shift from SEO to AEO and GEO actually looks like in the data, which agencies are already repurposing their SEO capabilities around it, and what publishers need to start building for now. Dr. Cecilia Dones
	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.
	The Enforcement Moment: What CBA’s New Standards Mean for Your Ad Stack	New Coalition for Better Ads standards were announced in January 2026 and go live around May 15 — right after this event. Chrome is signaling it may move toward actual enforcement, not just certification. That makes this operationally urgent for publishers who haven’t yet audited their ad stacks against the new standards. Neal Thurman presents what’s changed and what publishers need to do before the standards go live. Dave Byrne puts the buyer requirement on the table: what buyers are actually demanding from publishers before they’ll spend. Compliance and commercial reality in the same room. Neal Thurman, Director, Coalition of Better Ads
12:25 pm	Lunch time!	Sit with People You Don’t Know, Expand Your Network.
1:25 pm	Keynote Session: TBD	It’s still in the works, but trust us, it will blow you away!
2:15 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.
	The Market We Deserve: How Programmatic Actually Gets Fixed	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 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
	Gen Z Ops: What We Know, What We Need, and What You’re Getting Wrong	You hired them. Now learn from them. This session flips the usual dynamic — instead of veterans explaining how things work to the next generation, Gen Z ad ops practitioners lead the conversation. What do they actually want to learn? What do they wish their managers understood about how they work, what motivates them, and what makes them leave? And what does a generation that grew up with AI as a native tool see that the rest of the room is missing? Part open ask, part honest brief — the most useful 45 minutes any manager in this room will spend all year.
	Curation Has Gone Into Witness Protection (and that’s not a good thing)	Curation was everywhere — every SSP had a curation story, every conference had a curation panel, every sales deck had a curation slide. Then it went quiet. But here’s the thing: curation didn’t stop. The deals are still being built, the data is still being layered, the margins are still being taken. It just stopped being talked about. This session asks the uncomfortable question — is the silence a sign that curation has matured into something real, or is it a sign that the industry has moved on without solving the fundamental problems? Who’s actually doing curation well, who’s using the quiet to obscure what’s really happening, and what do publishers need to know about what’s being done with their inventory when nobody’s watching?
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.
	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.
	The Money Is There: Let’s Go Get It!	$32 Billion on the Table: Why Buyers Can’t Spend It With You. 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, VP Measurement Center & Center of Excellence Operations, IAB
	A Potentially Unbrand-Safe Conversation about Brand Safety	Mark Howard, Time Inc., has emerged as a leading voice in the publisher community on brand safety when it isn’t done well. His team’s approach is not to shy away from the conversation, but to help lead it so that brands, publishers, and audiences all benefit from amazing advertising-supported content. 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, Vice President, Ad Technology & Operations, Warner Bros. Discovery
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
5:30 pm	Evening Reception	Your last chance to meet that one person who will help catapult your career!