Advertising Week 2026: Don’t Call It a Comeback, the Human Experience Lives

Last week, I attended the 23rd edition of Advertising Week New York. Creators came in full force, and organizers expected roughly 2,500, up from about 1,000 in 2025. Dhar Mann is the event's first Chief Creator Officer with a goal of reaching $100 million in creator-brand deals over the next 12 months as a result of the event. Hope he gets it!

It was also the place to be seen this year. Venus Williams talked LA28 with Carson Daly on opening day; John Legend, Issa Rae, and Trevor Noah all took the stage; and reality TV favorites, including Dorinda Medley (RHONY OG lover for life over here), Harry Jowsey, and Jason Tartick, were part of the week.

And for the first time in a long while, the sky wasn't falling. The conversation reminded me of the events I attended in 2018: why influencer engagement matters, why strong content with the audience in mind matters, why podcasting matters, and why brand awareness is still queen. It was shocking. What's different in 2026 is the reason each of those fundamentals matters, and most of that reason (now) is AI.

TL;DR for Comms Pros

• Advertising Week is now where the creator economy does business. Creators were treated as partners and media companies, and day two opened with breaking news on stage: Get Engaged is now part of SAMY globally.
• Speakers got specific about where AI belongs. Use it for speed and volume, and keep people on the ideas, the judgment, and anything that touches how someone feels.
• Trust was the business case in session after session, from Anthropic's no-ads Super Bowl stance to Usercentrics' research on who consumers will share their data with.
• Discovery has moved into AI answers. G2 shared that 51% of software buyers start their search in an LLM, which makes brand awareness and earned media more important.
• Healthcare communicators got a lesson in language from patients themselves. "Journey," "let," and "funnel" came up as words to retire. My favorite quote from the event noted that chronic disease is and will never be a journey, but an odyssey.
• The celebrity lineup made it a place to be seen, but the sessions that stuck with me were the ones where a practitioner got specific and a little vulnerable.

Key Trends and Themes

The loudest message: when and where to use AI

My hot take: the push against over-reliance on AI was deafening. Maybe that's me hearing an echo of our own AI charter, which is built on an AI-powered, human-led principle. Still, this was the first event in a while where speakers got specific about when and where AI belongs, and where human judgment and creativity have to stay in charge.

The most striking take came from Julie O'Neil of Dell Technologies, whose team must use AI in almost everything they do. Her advice was that not everything needs AI, and that sometimes you should ask AI, "Do I need you?" On the challenger brand panel, Boatsetter's marketing lead put it more bluntly: "Don't ask AI for the good ideas; ask your humans for that."

Metricool’s survey of marketing and social media managers notes thatabout half said AI's main job is saving time, while only 4% said it helps them create better-performing posts. So, essentially, we’re all making more content, and it isn't improving outcomes. In our own agency training this summer, we put it this way: AI is the floor, and we are the ceiling. The fun part of that title is that it's intentionally a riff on such a common AI statement. 🤣😉

It felt like 2018…and I liked it!

Get Engaged's co-founders started their creator agency in 2016, when partnering with creators was, in Ben Hiott's words, a "nice to have" for most brands. Today he calls it "a key component to most marketing strategy." SAMY co-founder Marta Nicolás added the part brands still struggle with: one-shot campaigns don't build a story or trust, and brands rarely have the patience for long-term partnerships.

Alix Earle joined them on The Founders Conversation: Global Growth and Influence, and what struck me most was how much she believed in herself. Management companies turned her down early on because she didn't have enough followers, and she kept posting anyway. She knew what she wanted from her content and kept going. Her read on her audience is right on the nose, which is something you could see in full display on her reality TV show when she finally posted her response to the Alex/Alix drama (#IYKYK): "everyone now assumes everything's an ad. So…you might as well make it enjoyable." She told the room she'd rather work with a handful of brands over a year than a hundred. Something to keep in mind when your brand is all about authenticity, like hers.

Brand awareness was also a big part of the conversations. On the challenger brand panel, one speaker shared a framework called the “Care Index”: Do consumers know you, like you, or love you? Brands often stall at "like" because people don't understand where the brand fits in their lives, and one brand raised its score with premium content and persona-targeted messaging on podcasts and custom newsletters. Boatsetter's marketing lead was honest about how long it takes to shift a brand’s position, which was refreshing. They said a brand should pay back like performance marketing, in about 12 to 18 months, and I couldn’t agree more.

Trust gets earned in public

As someone who spends a lot of time strategizing for brands from startups to the Fortune 500, I'll admit that hearing Anthropic say they still had a brand awareness challenge made me giggle. But before its Super Bowl ad, Anthropic did have an awareness problem as well as a familiarity problem: people are "bucketing all the AI companies together." I used their campaign as a case study in our agency training this summer because they did something we always counsel our brand partners to do. They found a position a rival brand can't copy without contradicting its own business model: a commitment to keep ads out of Claude. They took it a step further by arguing that principle with humor instead of burying it in a corporate announcement. Loved it! And that was the day we stopped using other enterprise AI tools and standardized agency-wide on Claude. Their team also made it clear that research informs their work but doesn't drive the decision. For their follow-up campaign, they used the voices of real people from their focus groups as the advertisingand it’s more impactful than any script would have been.

Usercentrics brought the consumer data behind why trust matters. VP Maureen Prado Roberts shared findings from the company's State of Digital Trust research, which surveyed 11,000 consumers across seven markets. 66% of U.S. consumers have stopped using a company because of how it handled their data, and three in four people find AI personalization intrusive. The point everyone was talking about in her session was the flip side: "People aren't really rejecting AI. They're rejecting being kept in the dark." When a brand tells people plainly how it uses AI and gives them a say, half of them say they'd pay more. She also warned against mistaking a worn-down yes for a real one. When 57% of people say risking their personal data is just part of everyday life, "That's not a yes you've earned, that's resignation."

G2, in a panel alongside Advertising Week, showed where that trust is now being tested. Bombora hosted this B2B panel, and G2's Jenny Risch shared that 51% of software buyers now start their search in an LLM, and 82% have used one to build a shortlist in the last 24 months. As she put it, "you might have lost the deal before you even knew they were in market." For B2B brands, whether you show up in that answer depends on the reputation and earned media you've built long before the buyer types the question.

Words matter, and AI doesn't really get that

The session that impacted me most personally was Words Matter: How to Communicate with Humanity in a Regulated, AI World. Our healthcare and life sciences practice exists because health is the one subject that reaches everybody, and this panel reminded us what that responsibility should look like.

Dr. Susan Dorfman, who was diagnosed with a chronic condition last year, asked marketers to retire "journey." She said journeys are fun and adventurous, and being sick is anything but. Patient and writer Kerry Wong offered a better word she'd picked up from another patient columnist: a diagnostic odyssey. Kerry also asked brands to stop using "let," as in "don't let this condition stop you." Her illness doesn't ask her permission. Marcel Minassian, head of media and innovation at Genentech, described hearing a pharma marketer say patients were "falling out of the funnel." His response was brilliant: life is not funnel-shaped.

When the moderator asked how communicators can bring AI into this kind of writing, the panel pushed back hard. Susan said there are "some topics that AI should just not be the main focus of." Kerry shared her paraphrase of a post by Neil deGrasse Tyson: "AI knows everything but understands nothing," because it lacks human experience. Marcel's team used AI for ideation, but a person always wrote the final words, and he asked the room a fair question about leaning on AI for everything: what do you risk? Kerry's closing ask was to "Stop making patients feel bad about their experience."

Odds and Ends

• The star power was real. Opening day had Venus Williams and LA28 CMO Alex Merchán with Carson Daly, Dhar Mann and radio host Big Boy launching the $100M Creator Challenge, a surprise visit from Nick Cannon, and Andy Grammer performing during a music and brand partnerships panel. Jason Tartick recorded his podcast live, Harry Jowsey joined Snap executives, and even Dorinda Medley was in the house.
• Later in the week, Issa Rae premiered her new TikTok microseries, John Legend shared his "mic test" for any business venture, and Trevor Noah talked about brands blending into content.
• Advertising Week's co-founder Lance Pillersdorf closed the Founders Conversation with a champagne toast on stage to celebrate the SAMY and Get Engaged news. It was barely mid-morning. It's Advertising Week.
• Best runner-up agency name of the week went to Worst Kept Secret's "Agency.final.final," a nod to every creative's file folder. Something we can all relate to!
• Dell's Julie O'Neil has sent her team a Pro Tip Tuesday email every week for nearly five years. This is similar to our agency’s weekly musings email where we share practical tips, news to know, and issues to counsel our clients on. A colleague called this activity compounding interest, and I couldn’t agree more; it’s my favorite activity.
• G2's Jenny Risch gave the room permission to slow down to speed up, and admitted that blocking over her learning time is the fastest way onto her bad side. I'm 100% stealing that.
• One attendee described the last five years as a "perma-crisis." The stages felt optimistic, but that line was a fair reminder of what many people in the room are carrying.
• Adweek's editor-in-chief said, "We do not tolerate any AI-generated content. We're not the Wall Street Journal." So, some media outlets caught some strays, too. 👀

This was the first event in a while where I heard clear answers about when and where to use AI, and an equally clear warning not to lose human judgment and creativity along the way. The human experience never left, so don't call it a comeback.

‍