AI is transforming how consumers discover brands, shifting what was once a linear path into a fluid, AI-assisted journey that blends curiosity, relevance, and immediacy.
That shift is rewriting the rules of engagement. A brand can be visible everywhere, but without true preference, that presence is meaningless. Consumers are choosing what earns their time and trust.
To win in this new environment, media buyers must pair creativity with data-driven intelligence to deliver personalized experiences that consumers choose to invite into their attention.
This evolution set the stage for a recent series of IPG Mediabrands client events hosted at our Toronto office, where leaders from Index Exchange and IPG explored the future of AI in advertising and how it’s reshaping media from the inside out—from ad tech infrastructure to the creativity that makes brand moments meaningful.
Building the intelligent foundation
AI’s transformation of programmatic begins in the infrastructure powering every ad experience. Once seen as the invisible infrastructure behind every impression, SSPs like Index are now powering smarter, more intentional decisions on the sell side.
We process more than two petabytes of data each day at Index—a scale that helps train AI models to detect quality, optimize pricing, and improve contextual relevance. When embedded directly into the exchange, these models continuously learn, predict, and improve performance.
“AI moves us from reactive to predictive programmatic—from responding to opportunity to anticipating it.”
Lori Goode, CMO
Index Exchange
That foresight and contextual understanding help agencies like IPG design campaigns that adapt as quickly as consumers do. Instead of optimizing after the fact, AI allows marketers to align creative, audience, and environment in the moment on a per-impression basis, ensuring each message lands where it matters most.
Mike McNeeley, SVP of product at Index, shared an example: A holiday recipe page that mentions white zinfandel within the cooking instructions could easily be blocked by legacy brand safety filters, even if it’s about preparing a family-oriented festive dish. With contextual understanding, AI can recognize it as harmless content and classify it accurately, opening access to a quality audience that would otherwise be missed.
Powering creativity with hyper-personalization
AI is also reimagining creative expression. In his conversation with Christy MacLeod, chief data and solutions officer at Kinesso, Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index, explored how agentic and generative AI are reshaping the creative process and giving brands new ways to express ideas and tailor messages.
“Generative AI is expanding what’s possible for brands creatively. It lets us test, learn, and adapt at a speed that matches culture—while keeping human creativity at the center.”
Andrew Casale, President and CEO
Index Exchange
By learning from billions of interactions, AI can help identify what stories resonate most deeply, then adapt content to match tone, timing, and context for each ad opportunity. For IPG, that means dynamic creative optimization isn’t just a post-campaign exercise; it’s a living process that evolves as audiences do, enabling hyper-personalized storytelling at scale.
“AI gives us the ability to understand what works and why at a scale we’ve never had before. It’s helping us close the loop between creativity, data, and performance.”
Christy MacLeod, Chief Data and Solutions Officer
Kinesso
Bridging the signal gap
One of the most significant advancements emerging today is the ability to unify buy- and sell-side signals.
Historically, media owners and buyers held separate pieces of the consumer journey, with limited ways to unite those insights. AI is now closing that gap. Sell-side intelligence reveals what consumers engage with in real time, while buy-side data brings audience intent, creative strategy, and performance goals. When these signals work together, marketers gain a far richer sense of why an impression is valuable, not just who it might reach.
“There are all these signals on the buy side and all these signals on the supply side—imagine a world where they could talk to each other. That added intelligence completely changes how marketers can bid and plan.”
Mike McNeeley, SVP of Product
Index Exchange
This shift is strengthening the relationship between agencies and SSPs as they collaborate more closely to test how sell-side signals can shape planning, inform bidding strategies, and unlock new pathways for personalization.
Ultimately, planning becomes more adaptive, bidding becomes more precise, and creative choices become more aligned with real behavior to drive stronger outcomes.
AI in advertising: from innovation to intention
These shifts are creating new pathways for how brands connect and create, reshaping how Index and partners like IPG help marketers deliver more meaningful advertising experiences.
Across sessions, the message was clear: The next era of marketing belongs to brands that combine intelligence, creativity, and relevance to deliver performance at scale.
At Index, we aren’t leveraging AI in advertising as just a tool for efficiency, but a way for marketers to bring more intention, clarity, and context to every impression.
Hear more from the changemakers shaping programmatic’s future in our Innovators Unscripted series.
