Jessica Saunders, VP global partner success and operations at Eyeota, joins us to discuss DOOH, CTV, and the continuity challenge for marketing in the AI era...

AI search is compressing the traditional "click economy". What key indicators are you seeing that confirm this behavioural shift, and how quickly do you expect it to reshape budget allocations across digital channels?

We’re seeing two clear signals. First, user behaviour is changing quickly. Daily AI search usage more than doubled in a matter of months, and marketers understand that traditional search usage will continue to decline as conversational AI becomes the default interface. Second, even before AI is fully embedded, search clickthrough rates are softening, suggesting fewer steps between query and answer.

This doesn’t mean demand disappears. It relocates. As search becomes less about journeys and more about instant responses, budgets are flowing toward environments built for discovery and sustained attention, particularly CTV and digital out-of-home.

This reallocation is already happening, and we expect it to continue steadily over the next 12 to 24 months. Marketers rarely pivot overnight, but the direction is clear: fewer clicks, more audience-led planning across premium, addressable channels.

With search losing its dominance as the primary intent signal, how should marketers rethink audience intelligence and targeting? What types of data are proving most valuable in this emerging attention-driven ecosystem?

As search intent weakens as a primary signal, audience intelligence must expand beyond declared intent to known behaviours and persistent identity.

Marketers should think less in terms of isolated signals and more in terms of connected profiles. The most valuable data in this environment is high-quality, privacy-compliant audience data that reflects real-world interests, consumption patterns, purchase behaviours, and contextual engagement across channels.

This shift also elevates the importance of recency, provenance, and transparency. As optimisation becomes more automated, poor-quality inputs create amplified inefficiencies. Reliable third-party audience data, enriched with identity resolution, helps brands recognise individuals consistently across streaming, mobile, and emerging surfaces, even when there is no obvious click to anchor the journey.

In short, audience intelligence must become continuous and portable, not reactive and channel-specific.

CTV and DOOH are both absorbing budgets once tied to search. How are these channels changing the way marketers plan and measure campaigns, particularly when deterministic attribution is no longer the gold standard?

CTV and DOOH shift planning from capturing explicit intent to shaping outcomes through exposure and relevance. These environments are discovery-driven and often non-clickable, which forces marketers to move beyond last-touch thinking.

Planning becomes more audience-centric and cross-channel by design. Rather than optimising toward a single deterministic action, brands are combining household-level and device-level insights with modelled and incrementality-based measurement frameworks.

Measurement is evolving accordingly. Marketers are placing greater emphasis on lift, reach quality, frequency management, and cross-channel consistency. Deterministic attribution still has a role, but it is no longer the sole arbiter of performance.

As more budgets flow into streaming and digital out-of-home, the competitive edge lies in aligning premium inventory with trusted audience data and modern measurement models that reflect how people actually consume media today.

Continuity seems to be the biggest challenge as budgets migrate from intent-led environments to discovery-driven ones. How can brands maintain consistent audience recognition and activation across channels like streaming, mobile, and out-of-home?

Continuity depends on identity and data architecture, not channel mechanics.

Search-centric strategies relied on platform-contained signals. In a discovery-led ecosystem, brands must recognise audiences across fragmented surfaces where no single platform provides the full picture.

This requires a persistent identity foundation that connects signals across streaming, mobile, and digital out-of-home while respecting privacy requirements. It also demands consistent audience definitions that can be activated across partners without being rebuilt each time the channel mix shifts.

When identity resolution, enrichment, and activation are coordinated, audience recognition becomes portable. That portability enables consistent frequency management, message sequencing, and performance optimisation across environments.

Without that foundation, discovery channels feel disconnected. With it, they become extensions of a unified audience strategy rather than isolated line items on a media plan.

In practical terms, what does this marketing reset look like for data partnerships, and how can marketers build a shared data infrastructure that evolves with the channel mix?

In practical terms, the reset moves data from a campaign input to shared infrastructure.

Marketers should prioritise partners that provide transparent sourcing methodology, validated matching logic, and interoperability across platforms. As channel mixes evolve, the underlying audience definitions should not have to. A shared data spine that supports enrichment, identity resolution, and privacy-forward activation across CTV, mobile, and DOOH becomes essential.

This is the reality that Eyeota has been anticipating for years. Our focus is on helping brands and agencies translate high-quality third-party data into portable audiences that can be activated consistently across partners. By grounding audience strategies in trusted, privacy-compliant data, marketers can follow attention wherever it shifts without rebuilding their approach from scratch.

The future mix will be disrupted and then disrupted again. The right data infrastructure will not.