Nothing Is Sacred Anymore, Not Even Mickey Mouse

Last year's CES was all announcements and promises. This year, the ad industry showed up with receipts (although it couldn't help itself and rallied around a buzzword again, this time "agentic AI"—you can safely ignore this as noise).

Major players are now letting AI into their core business, not just bolting it onto the edges. NBCUniversal ran the first-ever AI agent-to-agent media buy across linear and digital—including live sports. Selling ad inventory is their business, and they're now letting machines negotiate it. IAB Tech Lab released an agentic roadmap designed to scale these machine-to-machine transactions across the programmatic ecosystem.

Reddit is playing a similar game with a twist. Their new "Max Campaigns" automate targeting, creative selection, and budget allocation—which sounds like every other black-box product until you realize Reddit is leaning into transparency as a differentiator. "Top Audience Personas" shows advertisers exactly which AI-clustered personas are engaging with their campaigns—new parents, ambitious home cooks, travel junkies—and what those groups are interested in right now. In an industry where automation usually means "trust us," Reddit is betting that showing its work will be the competitive edge.

NBC letting AI sell ads makes intuitive sense—it's a transactional process that can be systematized. Disney is a company whose entire value proposition is premium creative environments. And they're now giving advertisers AI tools to generate the ads that run inside them.

The new video generation tool lets brands submit assets and guidelines, then orchestrates multiple AI models—one for script, one for storyboards, one for audio, one for video—in a single workflow to produce CTV-ready commercials. A separate planning agent takes RFP inputs and generates optimized media plans through a chat interface, replacing a back-and-forth process that, as Disney's Tony Donohoe put it, "can take weeks" and happens "tens of thousands of times a year." Disney Compass ties it together with AI-powered measurement summaries.

If Disney thinks AI creative meets their premium standard, that tells us that AI-generated work doesn't need to be as good as your agency's best campaign. It needs to be good enough, fast enough, and cheap enough for certain use cases. Disney just answered that for CTV ads.

And if you're buying media on Disney, NBC, or Reddit, AI will be part of the workflow. Your brand assets, guidelines, and briefs need to be structured enough for an AI to actually use them—or they'll choke on a 47-page PDF that hasn't been updated since 2019.

But here's the real question worth sitting with: Disney just stopped protecting the creative that runs alongside Mickey Mouse. What are you still treating as too important to let AI touch that maybe... isn't?

— Torsten & Peter

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