This episode was sponsored by Verve. Verve captures over a billion daily search, AI chat and zero-party signals, giving brands and publishers a real-time understanding of intent.
Does the definition of premium change in an agentic world?
Advertisers have spent years chasing “premium” content: prestige publishers, high-quality video and top-tier entertainment. But in an AI-saturated feed, the stuff people can’t stop watching often looks a lot less like HBO and a lot more like drag queens chasing ICE agents down the street in a video that isn’t even real.
On this episode of The Big Story, recorded live at Programmatic AI in Las Vegas this week, the AdExchanger editorial team tries to pin down what “premium” means when AI is shaping both the content and the ad stack underneath.
Senior Editor Alyssa Boyle, for example, confesses to a diet of “YouTube garbage,” from Karen memes to AI-narrated oddities, and she poses an important question: If junk and AI slop are what people engage with, will brands inevitably follow?
Because it’s arguable that quality is in the eye of the beholder. In a world without much monoculture left, it’s only inevitable that what counts as premium will be whatever and wherever people choose to spend their time.
“No one’s watching the same things anymore,” says Associate Editor Victoria McNally. “Something that might have been considered premium 10 years ago might not be anymore, because if you have a specific audience that you’re trying to hit and they’re not watching that thing, then that’s not premium to you.”
And if “premium” is subjective, it only follows that “slop” is, too. “No one’s definition of slop is the same,” says Associate Editor Joanna Gerber – which makes it a lot harder for brands to know what they should avoid and what their audience actually enjoys.
Plus: Senior Editor James Hercher zooms out to the infrastructure layer, unpacking why Publicis acquiring LiveRamp for $2.2 billion is more about owning the “sinews of programmatic” than making some sort of flashy agentic play.