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.
A busy season
Mortimer foresees besting overall attendance figures from 2025, when over 20,000 marketers convened at the Penn District space, a repurposed shopping mall at the heart of Herald Square where Advertising Week has been hosted since 2023.
Advertising Week shoring up its position as a space to make business happen comes as its longstanding slot on the fall calendar grows more crowded. This is also the first Advertising Week since its owner Emerald was acquired by Apollo Global Management in July and merged with the B2B editorial and events company Questex to create a new corporate entity called Forge.
Lions, the organization behind Cannes Lions, is bringing the newly-merged VidCon x Lions Creators showcase to its Insight to Impact Festival in Denver the same week. Lions acquired the popular creator fan convention, usually hosted in Anaheim, two years ago and plans to eventually run the show out of Nashville, along with integrating more VidCon programming into Cannes Lions. Also the same week as Advertising Week is the brand-new Jupiter Festival, an event centered on media, entertainment and sports that has attracted sponsors including Google’s YouTube and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a major trade body.
Marketers see these various gatherings as appealing to different crowds — VidCon is more about video creator content and community than brand marketing, specifically — but the risk for oversaturation is on the horizon.
“In a couple years, if we keep adding all these conferences that everyone's trying to piggyback off of and make a new name for themselves, I think it's going to get to be too much,” said Tommy Johnson, senior director of partnerships at Open Influence.
That said, Johnson has been encouraged that shows like Advertising Week, which has been put on for over 20 years, are adapting to changing marketing needs. U.S. ad spending on the creator economy broadly is forecast to rise nearly 19% to $44 billion in 2026, according to the IAB, which now considers the tactic a core media channel versus an add-on.
“It's just a good indicator for us that the creator marketing industry is really not going anywhere,” Johnson said.
Advertising Week wields a geographic advantage and relatively broad programming slate, even as it doubles down on specific topics like creators and CMO confabs. A closed-door CMO experience limited to just a few dozen executives is returning this year, for instance.
The merger with Questex has also opened the door to more healthcare and wellness-related content, as well as the ability to tap into new sister brands like StreamTV Show. Mortimer ultimately sees the emergence of more events as a sign that Advertising Week is betting its chips in the right places.
“It's great to have events that are dedicated to different segments — there are so many out there. What we want to be is that place where they all come together,” said Mortimer.
Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Marketing Dive’s publisher Informa TechTarget, is also invested in Lions. Informa has no influence over Marketing Dive’s coverage.
