Published on: June 30, 2026

Dave Helmreich has spent twenty years watching the ad industry get incredibly good at the “how” of buying ads while completely forgetting the “what.” He’s a veteran who has seen the business from every angle; now, as CEO of TripleLift, he’s calling out a major disconnect. Dave is a straight-talker who believes we’ve hit a wall with pure targeting. He isn’t interested in tech for tech’s sake. Instead, he’s focused on how we can use new tools to bring back the creative spark that makes people actually pay attention. In this exclusive conversation, it’s a real look at why the “math” of advertising is no longer enough and why 2026 is the year the actual ad finally matters again. 

Moving from the buy side at Innovid to leading the sell side at TripleLift, what unique advantage did that cross-aisle perspective give you about where programmatic creative was genuinely falling short? 

My move from the buy side to the sell side provided a clearer view of a disconnect that’s existed in programmatic for years. 

“The industry became incredibly sophisticated at targeting and optimization, but creative itself stayed largely static.” 

At Innovid, I experienced firsthand how brands were trying to personalize experiences and measure outcomes across screens. However, the creative assets entering the ecosystem were simply repurposed TV spots with minimal adaptation for context, environment or audience behavior. 

Bringing that perspective to TripleLift has been extremely valuable because it highlights how much untapped performance still sits on the supply side. Premium publishers and CTV environments can deliver extraordinary engagement, but only if the creative is designed for how consumers actually experience those formats. A 30-second linear ad dropped into a streaming environment without contextual relevance or interactive capability is a missed opportunity.

What’s obvious now is that media and creative can no longer live in silos. The advertisers winning today treat creative as a dynamic lever informed by real-time signals, rather than a fixed asset delivered at the very end of the process. 

With the World Cup ongoing and brands pouring budget into tentpole broadcast moments, what are the smartest advertisers doing differently to capture fan attention without overpaying for the obvious spots? 

Advertisers who want to win recognize that value won’t come from competing for the most expensive in-game placements. Most major brands will chase those moments, which drives costs up and creates a cluttered environment for consumers. Strategic marketers are expanding their thinking beyond the match itself and building campaigns around the broader fan journey. That means activating before, between, and after games through premium CTV, mobile and commerce media environments where attention is often less saturated but still highly engaged. Fans spend weeks following storylines, highlights, predictions and social conversation leading into the tournament. Advertisers that connect with those behaviors early can build familiarity before peak CPMs arrive. 

Creative strategy is the spark here; the brands standing out develop modular creative that adapts to audience segments or matches momentum rather than relying on a single hero asset. They’re also leaning into contextual alignment by pairing messaging with culturally relevant content and moments that feel authentic to fans instead of being interruptive. Ultimately, major tentpole events reward advertisers that prioritize relevance and agility, not just reach. 

“The companies that treat the World Cup as an always-on cultural moment rather than a two-hour media buy will likely see the strongest long-term returns” 

Your own research shows 49% of CTV ads are still built around 15 and 30-second linear TV spots — why has creative on the fastest-growing ad channel been the last thing to evolve?

“The reality is that CTV grew so quickly that much of the industry prioritized scale and inventory access before rethinking the creative experience itself.” 

For years, advertisers approached connected TV as a simple extension of linear television: take an existing 15- or 30-second spot, distribute it programmatically and focus optimization efforts on audience targeting or delivery efficiency. That approach helped accelerate adoption but it also carried over legacy creative assumptions into a fundamentally different environment. Streaming audiences behave differently from traditional TV viewers. They expect personalization, interactivity and relevance across devices but many brands still treat CTV creative as static broadcast inventory. 

CTV offers far richer signals than linear ever could, including contextual data, engagement insights, commerce intent and cross-device behavior. However, most creative workflows were never designed to respond dynamically to those inputs. Much of the delay is operational. Creative, media and measurement teams have historically worked in silos with separate technologies and KPIs which leads to fragmentation, making innovation harder. What’s changing now is that brands recognize creative quality directly impacts performance; as that realization grows, CTV is finally evolving beyond repurposed advertising. 

As AI floods the programmatic supply chain with synthetic content, how does a brand protect the quality and trust of the environments its ads appear in? 

As generative AI scales content production across the open internet, protecting brand trust becomes less about blocking everything unfamiliar and more about strengthening transparency, accountability and quality signals throughout the supply chain. Brands can’t rely on outdated assumptions about what constitutes “premium” inventory when synthetic content is becoming increasingly sophisticated and harder to identify. 

Advertisers navigating this best focus on direct relationships with trusted publishers, curated marketplaces and partners that prioritize supply-path

transparency. They want greater visibility into where impressions originate, how inventory is packaged and what standards exist around content verification. This is especially important in programmatic environments where automation can otherwise obscure quality issues. 

AI-generated content itself isn’t inherently negative as many publishers and creators will use these tools responsibly. The challenge is distinguishing credible environments from low-quality content farms designed purely to arbitrage attention. This is also where human oversight remains critical. AI can help identify anomalies, fraudulent behavior, and contextual risk faster than manual systems, but brands still need trusted partners applying editorial judgment and supply curation. 

“Protecting trust in an AI-driven ecosystem requires a combination of technology, transparency, and intentional publisher relationships rather than purely automated safeguards.” 

With the launch of TL Spark, you’re making the case that agentic AI should coordinate creative, supply and measurement together rather than optimize them in isolation — why does that distinction matter? 

The distinction matters because most advertising technology has historically optimized each function independently. Creative platforms focus on asset performance, supply-side systems optimize delivery efficiency, and measurement tools evaluate outcomes after campaigns run. The problem is that consumers don’t experience advertising in disconnected layers; they experience a single impression in a specific context at a specific moment. 

With TL Spark, the goal is to bring those signals together so that decisions about creative, media quality, and performance happen in coordination rather than in isolation. Agentic AI creates an opportunity to move beyond static workflows where teams manually connect insights after the fact. Instead, systems can continuously adapt creative messaging based on contextual supply signals and measured outcomes in near real time. That coordination becomes increasingly important as media fragmentation accelerates. Advertisers today manage CTV, retail media,

commerce environments, mobile video, and premium web inventory simultaneously, optimizing one variable without understanding its relationship to the others often produces diminishing returns. 

“The brands that will outperform are those using AI to create alignment across the entire advertising experience, not simply automating isolated tasks.” 

Ultimately, agentic AI isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about making media, creative, and measurement work as a unified decisioning system rather than separate operational functions. 

If creative has been undervalued in programmatic for fifteen years, what finally makes 2026 the year that changes, and what happens to the platforms that don’t adapt? 

For most of programmatic advertising’s history, the industry has focused heavily on audience precision, automation, and scale as those were the easiest outcomes to quantify quickly. Creative was often treated as subjective, important for branding, but secondary to targeting and bidding efficiency. What’s changed now is that the ecosystem has finally reached a point where optimization alone can’t deliver the same incremental gains it once did. As signal loss increases, privacy standards evolve and inventory becomes more fragmented, advertisers are recognizing that creative quality and contextual relevance are now major differentiators for performance. AI is accelerating that shift because it dramatically lowers the barriers to producing, testing, and adapting creative dynamically across environments. 

At TripleLift, we see 2026 as an inflection point where creative intelligence becomes foundational rather than optional. Brands now expect campaigns to adapt fluidly across CTV, commerce media and the open web while maintaining consistency and measurable outcomes. The platforms that fail to evolve risk becoming commoditised infrastructure focused only on low-cost delivery. In contrast, the companies that integrate creative, context, and performance together will become more strategically valuable because they’ll help advertisers drive attention and outcomes simultaneously.

“The future of programmatic doesn’t belong to platforms that simply automate media buying; it belongs to those who make advertising more relevant, adaptive, and engaging for consumers”.