| 8:00 am | Breakfast | 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 remarks | Kicking off Navigator but yes, it’s also the big jacket reveal. |
| 9:10 am | Keynote Session:
Building Publisher Brands | Imagine being a publisher without a website and you’ll start to understand how Sharon Mussalli (CEO, NowThis) and her team at NowThis are rethinking the traditional publisher business model. Building a recognizable brand with unique content, engaging with their audience and focusing only on what they do best may be the recipe everyone else should follow. |
10:05 am
Breakout
Sessions | | |
| The Power of Product | It’s time to tear down the walls between departments. Let’s discuss how product and operations can align to create a more profitable organization. With Ariscielle Novicio, CTO & SVP of Product & Digital Strategy, New York Post. |
| Ad Tech Spring Cleaning: Actions to Refresh & Maximize Yield in a Tough Market | Hidden inefficiencies can quietly drain revenue. In this session, we’ll discuss actionable strategies to optimize ad stack by revisiting overlooked initiatives and prioritizing quality. With Jeremy Gan, EVP Advertising, MailOnline. |
| Redefining Media Buying: Agentic Advertising | Join us for an in-depth discussion with Scope3 about their recent product launches, including their AI-powered Brand Standards tool and the expansion into sustainable AI practices. Did they just change the game? |
| Compliance Is a Balancing Act | Not being compliant is a risk you don’t want to make. Overcompliance is nearly as bad, robbing you of revenue you’ll never see by limiting your business opportunities. Strike the right balance and you’ll be prepared for whatever comes next. With Daniel Rosenzweig, Founder & Principal Attorney, DBR Tech Law and Feras Ahmed, Assistant General Counsel, Privacy, Dotdash Meredith. |
| Mapping Context in CTV | What happens when open web comprehension meets the connected TV experience? |
11:15 am
Breakout Sessions | | |
| Putting Your Data To Work | If your data only powers your ad targeting, you are not realizing your potential return. You are sitting on more revenue opportunities than you think. Let’s reframe the data strategy conversation to build in more profitable revenue streams and prepare for an AI-powered future. With Janice Liu, CEO of The Mantis Group. |
| The Big Identity Reset: Why Publishers Must Collaborate to Win | Disclaimer: This is not another boring session on ID. Come and join us if you believe publishers deserve to be leaders — not followers — in the next era of digital advertising.
The publishing industry stands at a pivotal moment. As platforms tighten their grip and third-party solutions rush to fill the void, we risk losing not just value — but our influence and our relevance. Yet together, we have the power to change the course. Join Ozone and News Corp for a rallying call to rebuild identity the right way: publisher-centric, strategic, and built to last. It’s time to reclaim control and shape a future where publishers lead with strength and purpose. |
| Dealing with the Deluge of Deal IDs | Nothing is growing faster than the proliferation of deal IDs. That should be a good thing. Unfortunately, it’s not. Let’s discuss how to dig out of this mess. With Will Doherty, SVP Inventory Development, The Trade Desk. |
| TBA: Direct Sold Innovation | Hang tight: we’re confirming details for this much needed discussion. #protectdirect |
| True Stories of Clean Rooms in Action | In a digital ecosystem moving beyond third-party cookies, The Globe and Mail, VIA Rail, Touché! (OMG), and Optable partnered on an innovative and creative approach to data collaboration—using clean room technology to unlock the full potential of first-party data. This session will walk through two impactful case studies that demonstrate how clean rooms can be used not only for secure audience targeting but also for privacy-safe measurement and attribution:
Targeting Use Case: Through a unique ABC testing framework, The Globe and Mail matched VIA Rail’s customer segments to its readership, created high-performing lookalike audiences, and delivered 3.4X greater reach with 2.5X lower cost per reach.
Measurement Use Case: Leveraging clean room-enabled attribution, the team linked ad exposure to a 20% increase in VIA Rail ticket sales—without relying on third-party cookies. |
| Solving for Pharma (and for Advertisers in General) | Pharma advertisers operate in a uniquely constrained environment—but those challenges inspire creative buying strategies. Hear from Hibo and Allie as they discuss what pharma needs beyond programmatic and how publishers can play a stronger role in unlocking high-value outcomes. With Hibo Ali Griffin, Group Director, CAM, IPG Mediabrands and Allie Lichtenberg, Founder & CEO, AD LUCEM. |
| NOON | Lunch time! | Sit with People You Don’t Know, Expand Your Network. |
| 1:10 pm | Keynote Session:
The Art of Choosing | In The Art of Choosing, Columbia Business School professor DR. SHEENA IYENGAR draws from her award-winning, discipline-spanning research to explore the “3 Cs” of choosing: Choice Overload, Culture, and Creativity. Iyengar delves into the intricacies of how we make choices and how those choices shape our lives. This talk covers a range of decisions, from the trivial to the profound, offering surprising insights into our decision-making processes and how we can improve them.
Key Takeaways from Dr. Iyengar’s speech:
Find out what effective leaders need to know about choice and how to choose your way to success.
Understand the differences in how people perceive choice, and its effect on what people want and how they act.
Learn the effect that the ability to choose has on job performance. For example, Iyengar cited Google’s policy of allowing employees to work on their own projects for 20 percent of the time. Fifty percent of Google’s new products, including Gmail and Google Voice, have come out of employee projects.
Discover how to give people the kinds of choices that will motivate them.
Recognize how choice is viewed in different cultural contexts. |
2:20 pm
Breakout Sessions | | |
| Taking The High Road in CTV | At the recent CIMM event in New York City this past April it became clear that one of the biggest issues facing the industry today is fraud, the same fraud that has given digital media a less-than-stellar reputation. So what can legitimate CTV and OLV publishers do to identify themselves as the good guys, and what is the buy side doing about ensuring their own systems are diligent about finding and buying only real CTV viewers?
In this session, Andrew Rosenman, Founder & President of Arise Communications Inc. and Rebecca Kabir, VP of Product at Blockboard will guide a discussion to help publishers to understand the technical and operational mechanisms that will help the demand side to identify real people watching premium CTV. |
| TBA: Publisher Curation Controls | A publisher will explain how they are using data to track recent curation trends and take action to maximize opportunities and mitigate risks. |
| Is Trusted Server a New Paradigm for Publishers? | IAB Tech Lab has put forth a proof of concept called Trusted Server. The goal is to move publishers toward a server-to-server world where the browsers no longer dictate their business model. There’s much work to be done – let’s dive into the details. |
| Proving You’re Human May Mean Everything | The tsunami of AI sludge is coming to the open marketplace. How do we keep our heads above it and prove that humans need human-created content? |
| TBA: Bid Enhancement Strategies | Not all publishers a created equal nor can they follow the same programmatic approach. Speakers to be announced. |
| Agencies That Zig Where Holding Companies Zag | Independent agencies are looking to unlock the value of publisher relationships. Let’s forge some new friendships. With Kasha Casy, Chief Media Officer at Known. |
3:30 pm
Breakout Sessions | | |
| Unlocking Higher Quality Actions from Users | Step one: get someone to your website. Step two: make them interact in ways that help you strengthen your relationship with them and your advertisers. With Lindsay Van Kirk, SVP & Group GM, D/Cipher, Dotdash Meredith. |
| Privacy Sandbox in Action | Dotdash Meredith (DDM) proactively tested the Shared Storage and Private Aggregation APIs to enhance their audience understanding and targeting capabilities in a privacy-focused manner, moving beyond reliance on third-party cookies. By storing user visitation data as taxonomies in Shared Storage and using Private Aggregation to analyze co-visitation patterns across their network of over 40 domains, DDM aimed to maintain audience reach and gain insights into user interests. Their testing in 2024, which involved refining propensity models based on the collected data, achieved a 95% signal recovery rate compared to third-party cookies. This success validates the potential of these Privacy Sandbox technologies for future-proofing DDM’s advertising capabilities, particularly for their Direct IO campaigns. While facing initial challenges with privacy budgets and API limitations, DDM collaborated with the Privacy Sandbox team to refine their approach. |
| Curating the Curators | You know you want your inventory curated. So why the long face? Gareth will challenge your thinking about how you’re thinking through the latest publisher obsession. |
| No, Not MFA: Publisher Quality | The Made For Advertising conversation has had the wrong framing since its inception. Our businesses are made for advertising, so how is that a bad thing? It’s time to talk about publisher quality so that companies that do it well are rewarded. |
| Revenue from Merging Ad Tech and MarTech | It’s not all about advertising: growing newsletter sign-ups and magazine subscriptions also bring in revenue. These strategies bring in even more revenue when they are part of one cohesive strategy and solution. |
| Retail Media Network Reality Check | RMNs have quickly inserted themselves into the ecosystem, changing the dynamics between brands, agencies, publishers, and consumers. They’re not done yet. |
| 4:30 pm | Keynote Session:
Driving a Data-Driven Strategy | Jessica Hogue will explain how her role as Chief Data Officer, Consumer Media at Hearst came to be and her goal of aligning three big companies into one holistic data strategy. We’re not talking about data aggregation. We’re talking about the next transformation of publishers to be truly data-driven organizations. |
| 5:00 pm | Day in Review | Let’s wrap this sucker up! The day is done. The impact, however, will continue. |
| End of Day | Drinks & Nibbles | Your last chance to meet that one person who will help catapult your career! |
