The venue is familiar, but Advertising Week New York continues to evolve its programming to draw in CMOs and cater to rising interest in topics like agentic artificial intelligence and creator marketing.
The annual industry gathering, which kicks off Monday at the Penn District in midtown Manhattan and runs through Oct. 8, traditionally catered to ad agencies on their Madison Avenue home turf. In recent years, it has pivoted to courting more brand-side marketers to help produce business outcomes for attendees.
“We’ve tried really hard to make that change and appeal more to marketers because, ultimately, they’re the budget holders,” said Ruth Mortimer, Advertising Week’s global president. “We think that a show that aligns itself with the budget holders is always going to be something that every other audience segment needs to be at.”
An emphasis on marketing decision-makers has created ripple effects upon which Advertising Week is trying to better capitalize. Content creators, who also had a bigger showing at Cannes Lions in June, are pouring into the New York conference in search of sponsorships and educational content.
“When we think about Advertising Week as a whole, going deeper is really our theme at the moment. Probably the sector we’ve gone deepest into this year is the creator sector,” said Mortimer.
About 1,000 creators attended Advertising Week as delegates last year, and that figure is expected to more than double in 2026, according to Mortimer. The event has broadened its creator-oriented discussion tracks and this year is introducing a challenge to generate $100 million in creator-brand deals across its four days.
The idea was developed with entrepreneur Dhar Mann, who serves as the show’s chief creator officer and will give an opening keynote address. Mann last year came up with a concept with Old Navy at Advertising Week that ended up becoming a real campaign, a model the event is now attempting to replicate at scale.
“We have marketers where we know how much budget they have, how much budget they want to spend on creators, and we’re actively matchmaking them so that they can do deals together,” said Mortimer.
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