Next week, Advertising Week New York will be buzzing with brand leaders, agency executives, tech experts, and creators, all offering perspectives from the front lines on how the media playbook is changing and how making personal connections with customers is still possible amidst all the noise.

This fall marketers are bracing for big changes brought on by AI transformation, social media, and the maturing creator landscape. AI discoverability is on everybody’s radar, building on presentations this month at EMARKETER’s Future of Digital summit.

With a packed schedule of over 1,300 speakers, and over 500 sessions, Advertising Week New York will be hitting the ad world from all angles. Here are some key areas we think marketers will be able to build on as Advertising Week gets underway. EMARKETER will also be there, addressing what’s on the horizon for commerce media at our event on The Next Era of Commerce Media, held on October 7.

Capturing the creator economy’s full potential

As creators continue to blossom, advertisers and agencies are reevaluating how to approach this growing ecosystem. The creators are springboarding from single social media and digital video channels to become full-blown multi-channel media companies. Capturing the opportunity means going far beyond a social media strategy. Brands have to reevaluate their entire budgets, because the old dividing lines are changing.

Advertising Week will be shining a light on how the creator space is shifting from one-off sponsorships to enduring brand-building relationships and always-on ecommerce campaigns, driving value across the entire funnel. And many of the creators themselves will be on hand speaking about their vision for authentic engagement in a complex environment.

Throughout the week, marketers will have a rare opportunity to hear from media veterans like Trevor Noah, Don Lemon, and others, about how traditional media channels are transforming to become digital-first, data-driven environments. Their ranks are joined by rising stars like Remi Bader and Jason Tartick, who have built passionate digital audiences, while branching out to host podcasts and develop their own brands.

Increasingly, brands are challenged with where to place their ad dollars. Advertising Week attendees will be able to see for themselves, creators are now a media force of their own, rivaling traditional advertising placements.

AI answers become the new brand discovery signals

At this year's Advertising Week, expect heavy attention on brand AI discoverability. Marketers have spent two decades managing how brands appear in search results. Now the focus shifts to how brands appear in AI answers. As consumers turn to chatbots for recommendations and comparisons, public LLMs are becoming a front door to the brand, and most marketers have little idea what's behind it.

Adoption isn't the problem. Per MediaRadar's Eric Kallemeyn, 87% of the industry already uses AI in ad decisions. The gap is visibility: Few brands know whether they show up in AI-generated answers, how they're described, or which competitors get named instead. Expect brands to lean into amplifying attribution and curating their data for AI visibility across surfaces.

Several forces are pushing this into the spotlight. Generative answers can resolve a query without a click, so brands absent from the response cycle never get the chance to make their case. LLMs also draw on a patchwork of sources including press coverage, reviews, creator content, third-party sites, which means the brand narrative is partly written by others. And most AI use in marketing remains fragmented experimentation, with teams running separate pilots and no shared source of truth.

Deciphering modern social media

As social media continues to splinter and niche communities grow more distinct, marketers have been scrambling to find out where audiences spend time on the internet and how they speak to each other. Today, memes, slang, references, and other forms of communication are growing distinctly individual to online groups. Marketers looking to make connections with their target consumers have to not only find those audiences, but speak to them with authenticity and care.

A few sessions at Advertising Week New York hope to take on these topics and provide clarity to marketers who might feel lost in a sea of subreddits or unfamiliar slang terms. Two sessions on Tuesday, Oct. 6, will explore the where and the what of modern screen time: "Brainrot Culture: What Happens When Culture Stops Making Sense?" and "Social Media Isn’t a Stage. It’s a Group Chat."

Industry experts such Paper president Jason Ve, co-founder and CEO of Reach Agency Gabe Gordon, and Dove US' head of engagement marketing Dana Paolucci will look at the chaotic way internet communities communicate and congregate.

Rebrandings, controversial campaigns, and questionable creative have led to any number of recent examples where audiences push back against brands. While brand safety will always be a swiftly moving target, smart marketers will take stock of how audiences connect in their favorite online places.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.