Marketers, creators, and brands descended on midtown Manhattan this week for Advertising Week New York (AWNY), and the conversations kept circling back to three themes: fandom, trust, and street activations.

Brands came to make news: TikTok announced new tools to expand the reach of TikTok Shop, Meta launched an upgrade for its Ads Manager business assistant, and Olyzon rolled out an agentic orchestration platform. But beyond the reveals, trends emerged from session topics, panel discussions, word-of-mouth, and private conversations. They revealed the growing importance of fandom's audiences, looking for trust, and IRL activations.

Here are a few of our takeaways from this year's AWNY.

Fandom for all

Marketers have zeroed in on fandom as a passionate, loyal segment that many types of brands can reach, and the agenda alone proved it. We counted at least 29 AWNY sessions that revolved around fandom, spanning sports, music, video games, and more.

"[Fandom is] a topic that we research and investigate very deeply overall and across a lot of different categories," said Fotoulla Damaskos, executive vice president of brand strategy and innovation at National Research Group, during a panel. "When people see their identity reflected back at them, when they feel connected to a community, when they feel like they have a sense of belonging, their fandom gets deeper, it gets stronger, and it becomes something that they want to share with others and talk about with others."

In recent years, athletes have taken more control of their own influencer presence and turned their fans into an engaged audience for brands. Brands increasingly see creators' fans as a similar channel, especially after the box office success of movies like "Obsession" and "Backrooms."

Trust was top of mind

As marketers lean on AI for content creation, ad strategy, and measurement, the conversations at AWNY 2026 moved past whether the technology is fast or efficient to whether anyone should act on what it produces. Speed and efficiency are now the de facto standard.

“Media plans that once took six weeks can arrive in minutes,” said Izzie Rivers, founder and CEO of AI media planning and buying platform R-ai, during a panel. That accelerated rate of production intensifies brand risk should AI errors or hallucinations emerge in final drafts.

That puts a premium on trustworthy data and on the people who stand behind it. AI recommendations are only as sound as the sources and assumptions underneath them, and a black box that can't explain its reasoning leaves marketers unable to defend a decision to their own leadership.

The fix is more humans in the loop, not fewer. That means practitioners who encode their judgment into platforms, publishers who supply context no model can guess, and editors whose verification standards can be turned into measurable signals. Brands stressed the need for experienced stewards to guide automation while keeping brand voice and values present.

"Trust builds at every point on this [AI adoption] journey, and with trust, there's confidence... when you see outcomes repeated consistently, that's when advocacy happens across the organization," said Gabie Boko, CMO of data infrastructure provider NetApp.

The industry is aligning around transparency, accountability, and human oversight as the baseline for responsible AI. Voluntary frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework give brands a common vocabulary for governing AI systems, while publisher-led efforts like World Media Group's trust framework translate editorial credibility into criteria a buying platform can measure.

The takeaway: AI will keep getting faster, so speed won't separate the platforms and partners brands choose. Trust will. Marketers should ask where their data comes from, who built the systems, how recommendations are explained, and where a person reviews the output before it goes live.

Outside activations

The stages at Advertising Week New York delivered an endless flow of strategies and news, but the activations on the street showed marketers another way to connect with customers.

Seedtag put this principle into practice with a head-turning display for attendees entering and exiting on 33rd St. in Manhattan. A truck rigged with a see-through trailer housed a family of humanoid robots with a simple, direct message to advertisers: “Your audience is human. Don’t treat them like robots.”

The display didn't explain what Seedtag sells, but its message hit home for marketers experiencing automation across the entire ad supply chain.

As conference goers wandered from the AWNY campus for afternoon and evening events, they could see just what a canvas the city is for activations of all kinds. Mere steps from the AWNY hub, on Sixth Ave., Taco Bell’s Midtown Cantina hosted a restaurant takeover in collaboration with Duolingo. The promise of free Duo-themed plushies and limited-edition taco sauce attracted a long line of customers wrapping around the block.

The takeaway: Streetside activations and store takeovers can work for B2B and consumer audiences alike. They work even better when two overlapping customer bases build momentum off each other in an unexpected collaboration.

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