Speakers at Annual OTT.X Breakfast Focus on Streaming’s Growing Ad Business
Pieter de Zwart, director, advertising engineering, for Amazon Ads, was among the speakers at the annual OTT.X Breakfast Jan. 6 at the Stirling Club in Las Vegas. (Media Play News staff photo)
January 6, 2026
LAS VEGAS — With a nod to the rise in ad-supported streaming, this year’s OTT.X breakfast presentation on the opening day of CES 2026 focused on the burgeoning advertising market.
The overarching message from speakers at the Jan. 6 event at the Stirling Club, just across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center, is that the industry needs to get better at pairing the right ads with the right viewers at the right times — and avoid mishaps like showing the same ad repeatedly, over and over again.
Pieter de Zwart, director, advertising engineering, for Amazon Ads, joked that when he was watching a baseball game last year, he saw the same ad from the same trucking company a total of 14 times.
In de Zwart’s presentation, “The Future of Streaming TV Advertising: AI, Authenticity, and Audience Connection,” the executive noted that as fragmentation across streaming intensifies, scale and relevance are being rebuilt around smarter tools and intelligence. He talked about how AI-driven insights and dynamic creative are transforming streaming advertising reach, measurement, and audience connection.
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“Over the last year, we have deployed a lot of solutions,” he said — including Brand+ and Performance+, two powerful tools within the AI-powered Amazon DSP marketing suite. Brand+ is focused on building brand awareness and fostering engagement, while Performance+ is aimed at driving conversions. These solutions leverage machine learning and AI to simplify campaign optimization, helping advertisers reach the right customers and achieve better outcomes.
The DSP suite also includes Creative Agent, an AI tool that acts as a creative partner and strategist, using conversational guidance and Amazon’s data signals to generate advertising content, and Live Events Optimizer, a new data-powered, turnkey programmatic offering that enables advertisers to capture audiences during the most valuable live moments while optimizing for performance.
“I strongly believe that if we focus on the fundamentals of digital advertising, and we all lean in a little bit together, we can create a rising tide, which will float each of our individual boats. We need to create more liquidity in the digital advertising marketplace,” he said. “It starts with activating more advertisers, exposing more inventory, and exchanging better signals before and after the impression. And the last thing is running price-based, dense options.
“If we do this, I actually believe that everything is going to get better for everyone.”
On another panel discussion called “Contextualized Advertising: Unlocking Smarter Monetization Through AI and Data,” the focus was on how cloud, automation, and AI are converging to create flexible, intelligent, and deeply personalized media ecosystems. In contextualized advertising, ads are shown based on the content and context of what someone is viewing right now, rather than on their personal data or past behavior.
Paul Claussen, director of strategic partnerships and business development at Comcast Technology Solutions, talked up his company’s VideoAI, a comprehensive framework of intelligent technologies that deliver greater advertising efficiency and streamlined operations. VideoAI scans every component of content — words, pictures, sounds — and provides actionable metadata for applications including segmentation, contextual advertising, and quick preparation of live events.
This helps with monetization, Claussen said, by answering “basic questions such as where should ads go in the content and, once you know where the ads should go, what are the best ads to put there to optimize the value of the spots.”
“It’s all about delivering the best ads to the right person at the right time, and maximizing the value of the opportunity,” added Spencer Kuhn, platform sales leader at FreeWheel, a Comcast company that provides comprehensive media buying platforms for publishers, advertisers, and ad buyers.
Other panels and presentations at the OTT.X breakfast included “Second-Screen Engagement Dynamics in CTV Advertising,” which explored how second-screen engagement introduces measurable action into CTV, enabling outcome-based value layers that complement CPM; “Future Media Platform: AI-Driven, Cloud-Native, and Personalized,” about how next-generation infrastructure is redefining workflows, content delivery, and audience engagement across the global media landscape; and “The New Economics of Global Content Distribution: Windowing, Rights, and Platform Optimization in 2026.”
Parks Associates also presented its latest annual State of Streaming report.
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