Webinar Recap: From Reach to Relevance: Reinventing Ad Services

A GlobalLogic and AWS webinar on AdTech innovation

The advertising industry is in the middle of a seismic shift — read Everest Group’s report about the key changes shaping AdTech. The days of planning around a handful of TV networks and banner ads are long gone. Today, ads follow audiences everywhere, from connected TVs and TikTok feeds to retail screens. This landscape demands not just wider reach but deeper relevance.

That transformation took center stage in the recent webinar, “From Reach to Relevance: Reinventing Ad Services,” hosted by GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group Company, in partnership with AWS. Scott Davis, CTO of Media and Entertainment at GlobalLogic, was joined by Stephanie Layser, Global Head of Publisher Ad Tech Solutions at AWS, and Anthony Molina, Associate Director of Business Intelligence and Ad Sales at Wolters Kluwer for a dynamic discussion on how media organizations and advertisers can turn technological complexity into clarity and new forms of monetization.

Disruption from Every Direction

Davis opened the session by unpacking the disruptive forces sweeping through the media ecosystem — viewed through three lenses: supply, demand, and the technology that connects them.

On the supply side, ad inventory is more fragmented than ever. The audience, once captive in front of linear television, now lives across FAST channels, streaming platforms, podcasts, and social clips. The challenge is uniting this fragmented inventory into something buyers can understand and value.

Margin pressure intensifies the problem. Rights costs continue to climb while advertisers push CPMs lower, searching for more efficient return on investment. At the same time, the old scaffolding of identity is collapsing. As cookies go away, first-party data has become the new lifeline.

Finally, transparency and trust have become defining factors. Advertisers demand visibility into supply paths, fraud metrics, and real-time reporting. Publishers able to demonstrate brand safety and authenticity will have a competitive advantage in a world where trust is currency.

The New Rules of Demand

On the demand side, advertisers are equally transformed. They are no longer buying impressions; they’re buying outcomes. Success is measured in conversions, sales lift, and engagement that can be verified.

Modern brands also expect unified omnichannel experiences. Campaigns now span connected TV, digital out-of-home, and retail media networks — all expected to perform like one cohesive ecosystem. And increasingly, advertisers are filtering spend through lenses of responsibility — sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and responsible AI.

Technology: The Connective Tissue

The connective layer of technology — the true “engine room” of modern media — sits at the core. It’s where supply meets demand through cloud-native infrastructure built for speed, oversight, and interoperability.

Davis described his vision of the future as “a new world of addressability, one rooted not in opaque signals, but in a consent-oriented relationship where we’re stewarding information appropriately.”

The cloud is foundational to this shift. Only cloud-native, metadata-rich systems can deliver the velocity, governance, and compliance required to earn consumer trust and meet increasingly complex regulatory expectations.

AI reinforces the connective layer. It is “a force multiplier across the advertising workflow,” said Davis. Its presence is now embedded end-to-end — from personalization and targeting to fraud detection and trust, yield optimization, creative production, and measurement and attribution.

Davis summarized the emerging model: by running consent and governance as a control plane, leveraging providers like AWS for execution, and embedding AI as the optimization engine, GlobalLogic and AWS are shaping a playbook where supply and demand both win, data privacy in media is respected, and millisecond outcomes become standard.

AdTech Insights

After Davis’s opening, the webinar shifted to an engaging panel session with Davis, Layser, and Molina fielding key topics. They explored how rapidly shifting consumer behavior, cloud adoption, and AI are reshaping the advertising ecosystem — and why data now sits at the center of every advancement.

Panelists agreed the customer is driving change, fragmenting attention across platforms, and raising expectations for relevance and transparency. Molina noted that digital media is shifting “from quantity to quality,” with the emphasis now on “reaching users in their moment of intent.” This shift brings both opportunity and complexity.

A major theme was compliance and trust. “Turning compliance into a competitive advantage” builds credibility with consumers, who are “more willing, if they feel protected and it adds value,” said Davis. Layser added that demonstrating the “value exchange” of data is now essential, with AWS Clean Rooms offering a secure way for advertisers, media companies, and retail media networks to connect insights without exposing sensitive information.

They hit on the cloud and the modernization of legacy ad systems. Real-time bidding workflows, once rigid and hardware-bound, are becoming nimbler with services like the AWS RTB Fabric. Davis captured the transformation succinctly: “When we modernize, we decompose the old monoliths… and now we can restructure quickly without disrupting existing operations or revenue flows.” In the end, “You don’t forklift the ad stack, you phase shift it.”

The panel also explored data foundations, calling them the backbone of both personalization and AI. Layser underscored that “the quality, accessibility, and democratization of your data assets” determine how effectively companies can deploy AI.

Looking ahead, panelists pointed to emerging ad models, especially FAST channels and evolving linear TV behaviors. “FAST isn’t going to replace linear,” Davis said, “but it’s teaching it to learn.” Contextual AI surfaced as a major opportunity area, with new capabilities poised to align real-time content moments — like touchdowns — with instant ad activation.

The conversation closed with a look at agentic AI and how platforms like AWS AgentCore are making multi-agent workflows practical — provided the data foundation is strong.

In the end, the panelists were unanimous: the future of AdTech innovation will belong to those who get their data right, embrace composability, and see AI not as automation, but as amplification.

Final Moments

During the brief Q&A, attendees pressed the panel on defining boundaries when it comes to agentic AI, the broader responsibilities of ethical AI, especially with the growing threat of deepfakes, and the practical hurdles of creating clean, uniform data across systems. The webinar made one thing clear: the industry is being rewired from every angle — and the gap between reach and relevance is closing, powered by AI, the cloud, and transparent collaboration.

Learn more about this shift in AdTech. Download the new Everest Group report, featuring a foreword from GlobalLogic and AWS.