Data and AI Summit 2025: Your Guide to the Media and Advertising Industry Experience

By Noah Levine, Global Head of Media and Advertising GTM, Databricks

You don’t need a futurist to tell you Data and AI is radically changing the media and advertising industry. You can see it in your revenue, budgets, timelines, and workflows.

It’s in the way advertising campaigns are planned, optimized and budget is allocated. It’s in the creative itself. It’s in the data infrastructure humming beneath the world’s biggest platforms, streamers, publishers, ad tech, data, measurement. Whether you’re a platform,a streamer, a publisher, an agency, ad tech, data provider, or measurement provider chances are you’re somewhere between experimentation and full-on transformation.

This is why I’m genuinely excited for Data + AI Summit 2025, happening June 9–12 in San Francisco. Because this year, the conversations feel different. We’ve moved beyond the hype cycle. Now it’s about how organizations actually operationalize AI, including machine learning, at scale, to integrate prediction and GenAI into your products and offerings to best navigate this moment of opportunity and change.

What We’re Talking About in 2025

The stakes are real. Fragmented audiences, identity challenges, increased competition, and the sheer pace of content creation are forcing companies to rethink how they operate. The most ambitious ones are asking:

What if we could predict audience interest and intent to holistically connect content and advertising at scale?

And the ones getting there fastest are doing three things really well:

1. Capturing and unifying their data across silos
    
2. Applying AI directly to decision points— to predict actions and outcomes, to influence investment in creative and media, yielding superior monetization and audience experiences
    
3. Doing it all with an eye toward privacy, interoperability, flexibility, scalability and control

At Databricks, we’re seeing media and advertising customers move from isolated innovation pockets to coordinated AI-native operating models. That shift is the real story. It’s what you’ll hear directly from the brands, engineers, and executives building that future at Summit.

A Preview of the Media & Advertising Experience

We’ve built out an exceptional agenda for the Media & Advertising industry track—grounded in what real teams are doing right now with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

Check out the full track

Here’s a taste of what’s in store:

Industry Forum (Tuesday, June 10 @ 4PM PT) 

Hear directly from industry leaders from Integral Ad Science, Publicis Groupe, NBCUniversal, IPG Acxiom, and Fox Entertainment who are tackling the most pressing issues in our industry:

• How does Data + AI enable organizations to transform and compete more effectively
   
• Understand the opportunities Databricks creates for innovation and scale
   
• Learn about where the industry is today and where it’s going next

You’ll leave with a clearer picture of how top Media & Advertising enterprises are doing more with less—without losing their edge. Session ›

Sessions Worth Prioritizing

If you’re looking for proof that AI is already driving measurable impact in media and advertising, these are the sessions I’d make time for. Each one highlights how real organizations are applying data and AI to solve industry-specific problems—at scale, and in production.

How Ad Tech Runs on Databricks

Modern ad tech platforms are evolving fast, and many of them are doing it on Databricks. This session explores how leading players including Magnite, LG Ads, MiQ, and Publicis Influential are driving transformational change for the market and delivering real-time insights and outcomes for their customers. It’s a great look into the use cases and the outcomes they drive behind high-volume, always-on systems powering the global ad ecosystem. Session ›

How Adobe Leverages Agentic AI to Power their Data Supply Chains

This session takes you inside the emerging world of agentic systems, where AI agents are managing and optimizing media data pipelines without human intervention. From content ingestion to campaign execution, learn how teams are automating operational decisions to reduce friction and accelerate delivery. Session ›

West Media: Inside Their AI Factory

Seven West Media is rethinking how AI gets deployed across a large-scale media organization. In this session, you’ll hear how they built a centralized “AI factory” to support everything from newsroom intelligence to advertising yield optimization—making AI more repeatable, scalable, and cost-effective across teams.  Session ›

Disney’s Medallion Journey

Get a firsthand look at how Disney is implementing a medallion architecture to bring consistency, governance, and scalability to their data foundation. The session covers how this model supports trusted analytics and AI use cases across business units, from content planning to consumer engagement. Session ›

Privacy-Compliant TV Insights

Audience measurement is evolving… learn how Comcast FreeWheel is supporting innovation in this session.. Learn how media companies are using clean room technologies and Delta Sharing to analyze TV viewership data while maintaining privacy and compliance. It’s a real-world example of how to build insight pipelines that meet both business and regulatory demands. Session ›

AI Powering Epsilon's Identity Strategy: Unified Marketing Platform on Databricks

Hear how Epsilon Data Management migrated Epsilon’s unique, AI-powered marketing identity solution from multi-petabyte on-prem Hadoop and data warehouse systems to a unified Databricks Lakehouse platform. This transition enabled Epsilon to further scale its Decision Sciences solution and enable new cloud-based AI research capabilities on time and within budget, without being bottlenecked by the resource constraints of on-prem systems. Session ›

Inscape Smart TV Data: Unlocking Consumption and Competitive Intelligence

Unlock strategic advantages with VIZIO's Inscape linear TV and streaming viewership data, now readily accessible in the Databricks marketplace. This comprehensive, real-time dataset enables flexible integrations and secure sharing, ideal for measuring incremental streaming reach and performing ROI analyses with 1st/3rd party data. Join the session to discover how to leverage Inscape data, including competitive share-of-voice analysis, for actionable insights. Session ›

How the Texas Rangers Use a Unified Data Platform to Drive World Class Baseball Analytics

Don't miss this session where we demonstrate how the Texas Rangers baseball team is staying one step ahead of the competition by going back to the basics. After implementing a modern data strategy with Databricks and winnng the 2023 World Series the rest of the league quickly followed suit. Now more than ever, data and AI are a central pillar of every baseball team's strategy driving profound insights into player performance and game dynamics. Session ›

Using Clean Rooms for Privacy-Centric Data Collaboration

Databricks Clean Rooms make privacy-safe collaboration possible for data, analytics, and AI — across clouds and platforms. Built on Delta Sharing, Clean Rooms enable organizations to securely share and analyze data together in a governed, isolated environment — without ever exposing raw data. Session ›

Visit Us on the Expo Floor

We’ll be demoing real Media & Advertising use cases in the Industry Lounge including AI powered: media planning, Ad Sales Analytics & Dashboards, Audience Activation, Advertising Creative Generation, Geospatial Traffic Analysis, and more. Swing by, meet the team, and see how the solutions come together in practice.

If You’re Coming to Learn, Lead, or Get Unstuck—This Is the Week

If you’re already deep into AI ops, this is a chance to compare notes and push the envelope. If you’re earlier in the journey, it’s the best place to find out what works and what doesn’t, without the buzzwords.

Hope to see you in SF. Bring your questions. Bring your skeptics. Bring your curiosity.

Explore the full agenda and register now!