We were in Paris and what the world's biggest tech event confirmed about where advertising is headed
Perion Marketing
25th Jun 2026
Paris had a lot to say this year. VivaTech 2026 brought together tens of thousands of investors and tech and brand leaders over four days at Porte de Versailles, and the conversations on stage had a single, unavoidable thread: AI is no longer something companies plan to use. It’s something they’re being held accountable for using well.
For those of us working at the intersection of advertising, data, and out-of-home media, the signal was clear. The execution gap is the problem. Not the technology.
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McKinsey opened with a number that stopped the room. 80% of large companies now invest in AI, but only 6% see any profit impact, up only slightly from 4% a year earlier. Their verdict: it’s an execution problem.
That diagnosis applies directly to media. The industry has spent years adding AI to its vocabulary. Fewer companies have rewired the way decisions are actually made. Outmax was built to close exactly that gap. As Perion’s AI execution agent, it sits at the execution layer, allocating spend, managing pacing, and optimizing delivery in real time across channels, including YouTube, Meta, TikTok, CTV, display, and video. It doesn’t optimize toward a budget. It optimizes toward a business outcome. The bottleneck in advertising has never been data. It’s been the speed and intelligence of the decisions made against it.
One of the sharpest observations came from the Center for Humane Technology: technology has stopped competing for our attention and started competing for our affections.
This is a challenge that DOOH is uniquely positioned to answer. A screen in a city isn’t asking for a login or a scroll. It shows up in the physical world when someone is already moving through their day. When the creative is right and the context is intelligent, it doesn’t feel like an interruption. It feels like relevance. The brands winning in out-of-home are the ones treating the medium as a canvas for storytelling, not a channel for delivery.
A recurring theme was what happens when companies depend on infrastructure they don’t control. The abrupt restriction of a leading closed AI model, reportedly along nationality lines, sent a clear message: closed-model concentration is now an active business risk.
The advertising industry has been here before. Walled gardens, black-box auctions, opaque attribution, the playbook of dependency is familiar. The VivaTech conversation around AI sovereignty mirrors what marketers have been navigating for years in digital media.
Outmax is built on a different principle. It layers a custom, brand-specific AI algorithm onto each campaign, fully transparent, adaptable to your KPIs, and designed to fit your data, not the other way around. As Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf put it, the rational hedge against dependency is treating the underlying technology as something you understand and control. That’s what full transparency in execution actually means.
Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen made a point that’s worth sitting with. He acknowledged AI slop is real, but argued the content that will stand out is the kind that combines creative originality with genuine emotional engagement.
That’s a useful frame for thinking about AI in advertising execution. The goal isn’t automation for its own sake. It’s smarter decisions that free up human attention for the work that actually requires it. Outmax delivers up to 40% efficiency gains by detecting data patterns and untapped audiences in real time, doubling down on what’s working and reducing waste. The efficiency isn’t a shortcut. It’s what makes better creative decisions possible.
VivaTech 2026 confirmed something Perion has been building toward: the future of advertising is real-time, outcome-driven, and built on transparency. The brands and agencies that will lead aren’t the ones with the most screens or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones making the best decisions, faster, with the clearest view of what’s working.
Outmax is how Perion delivers that across every channel.
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