January 28, 2026
The media landscape is evolving at machine speed, reshaping how brands navigate across increasingly complex digital environments. As engagement grows more fluid and responsive, brands are grappling to connect performance signals to real business impact. Many are left interpreting fragmented signals, not just whether the campaign worked, but also to understand why. However, when strategic insights miss the mark, the impact goes beyond wasted spending, leaving behind brand-unsuitable impressions that quietly amplify reputational risk long after activity ends.
Why Brand Protection Must Evolve Beyond Static Controls?
For years, brand protection has mainly been retrospective, relying on static controls and post-campaign analysis to identify risk only after media dollars have already been spent.
Today, media investments are depleted by unsuitable placements, misaligned context, and fraudulent activity, undermining campaign ROI. Advertisers need flexible, interoperable solutions that go beyond static tools that protect the brand while continuously optimising performance during live campaigns.
According to the Integral Ad Science Report (IAS), 61% of media experts say they’re genuinely excited about advancements in Generative AI. But there’s a flip side: more than half (53%) cite adjacency to AI-generated content among their top challenges. The precision-engineered and AI-enhanced technologies close this gap by making optimisation decisions explainable, surfacing the reasoning behind recommendations, and maintaining granular control over optimisation execution.
AI Agent: Your Advertising Compass for Navigating Media Landscape
With performance growing more sophisticated and harder to interpret, brands need an AI agent that applies intelligent media intelligence to guide omnichannel strategies toward meaningful outcomes.
By ingesting and synthesising multidimensional signals around context, viewability, attention dynamics, and fraud vectors in near real-time, enabling informed optimisation across channels and platforms, and ensuring each impression contributes to business success. These tools prevent waste before it happens, reorient campaigns toward the highest-quality, most performant media, and maximise omnichannel investments.
These tools mark a fundamental shift in enterprise marketing, giving brands transparent visibility into the rationale behind recommendations, early signals of
performance degradation, emerging risk vectors, and capital inefficiencies.
As platforms and new formats evolve, marketers will need intelligence to restore trustworthy signals and actively shape how brands appear in generative environments.
The Tangible Impact of Agents in Reducing Waste
IAS’s early production testing demonstrates how AI agents reduce operational inefficiency. Configuration timelines have been compressed by over 50%, replacing more than 40 manual interactions with just six. With real-time visibility into performance degradation, risk escalation, and capital inefficiency, teams no longer need to dedicate resources to low-value monitoring. It can instead be redirected to drive strategic optimisation and governance.
The future of AI in marketing lies in augmentation, not automation alone. In an environment shaped by automation, speed, and reach, the rise of low-quality, misleading, or risky AI-generated content has increased risks related to quality, brand suitability, and governance. Continuous, in-flight optimisation transforms campaigns from static investments into adaptive growth engines, helping advertisers to gain a sustained competitive advantage and maximise the value of every dollar spent.
POV:
Q.What is the one AI in Marketing capability brands must build in 2026 to drive real business impact, and why?
A. While AI has accelerated the pace of media optimisation, real impact lies in the ability to interpret outcomes, with confidence and control. It moves the industry beyond black-box optimisation, where risk is often identified only after a campaign has run.
That’s where IAS is investing precisely. With close to 15 years of proprietary global data and real-time analysis across mobile, web, and CTV, IAS provides a complete, independent view of media quality. It helps marketers to identify emerging risk, understand what’s driving growth, and surface opportunities as they develop.
The future of AI lies in smart media intelligence that augments human expertise with complete transparency. In an environment shaped by AI-generated risky and misleading content, marketers must make every impression work smarter, harder, and faster to achieve their marketing goals.
- Saurabh Khattar
Country Manager, India, Integral Ad Science
