The floor at the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas was dominated by broadcast hardware: smaller transmitters, better cameras, more efficient production equipment. But the conversations during the show kept circling back to a different set of problems. 

Broadcasters, publishers, and technology companies are all trying to figure out the same thing: how do you package your data, build addressable audiences, and monetize them at scale?

Retail media companies were working through these exact questions three to five years ago. The broadcast world is on the same path now, and the implications for audio are significant.

Broadcast Is Discovering Curation 

Nearly every company we spoke with at NAB believes they’re sitting on valuable first-party data and they’re probably right. Contest platforms have submission data. Broadcasters have listener signals. Publishers have engagement data. The awareness is there. 

Where it gets challenging is the next step. Most of these companies are still figuring out how to package that data into something the market can actually buy. There’s no established format yet, no proven model, and in many cases no clear buyer. Everyone is working on a data product at the same time, and the marketplace to transact on those products is still forming.

This mirrors the early days of curation in digital advertising. The first instinct was to package data and sell it directly. Then the market matured, and the model flipped. The most successful companies stopped selling data and started selling media powered by that data.

Broadcast is at the beginning of that same arc. The companies that move past the packaging phase and figure out how to operationalize their data into addressable, sellable media will be the ones that pull ahead.

The Convergence Problem: Data Needs Fulfillment, Fulfillment Needs Data

There was a structural divide that came up across conversations at NAB.

On one side, companies with rich audience data and no scaled way to activate it. On the other, fulfillment infrastructure with reach and inventory, but limited audience intelligence to make that inventory addressable. Neither side can solve the problem alone. The data people need fulfillment partners. The fulfillment people need data and audiences.

This is the exact gap that created the programmatic ecosystem in digital. Exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, and data platforms all emerged to connect these two sides. Broadcast and audio are approaching a similar inflection point.

For audio specifically, this matters because key pieces of the ad tech infrastructure are now in place. Addressable audio, identity resolution, and programmatic delivery have matured significantly in certain environments. What’s still forming is the business layer: the partnerships, data integrations, and go-to-market strategies that turn that progress into scaled revenue.

Audio’s Biggest Gap Was Never Just the Technology

Here’s a telling detail from the show floor: several years ago, radio station groups started sending their sales reps out to sell local CTV inventory. It worked. They had the relationships, the local expertise, the advertiser trust.

That same push never happened for digital audio.

Part of the reason was real. Historically, audio did have a real technology gap. Identity was inconsistent, measurement was largely modeled, and signal quality varied widely across environments. That made it difficult to position audio as a true performance channel.

But that gap is now closing. In environments with deterministic identity, audio delivers precise targeting, reliable measurement, and proven performance. That infrastructure exists today, but it’s not uniform. Much of the ecosystem still runs on probabilistic identity and fragmented signals, which means performance-grade audio exists, but isn’t yet the default surface buyers transact on.

What lagged behind more consistently was distribution. Buyers were never trained to think about audio as a performance channel, and sellers were never equipped to position it that way. Local teams gravitated toward video because it was easier to explain and easier to close.

The result is a market where the product is finally catching up, but the go-to-market motion hasn’t. The companies that correct that and sell audio with the same conviction they brought to CTV will tap into a revenue stream that remains largely uncontested.

Everyone Wants to Be a Media Company

Sports leagues, teams, and content organizations showed up at NAB in force this year. The common thread was production. Hardware for shooting broadcast-quality content on a phone. AI tools for video, voice, and music. The barrier to producing professional content has effectively collapsed.

A decade ago, retailers didn’t run media networks. Now nearly all of them do. The same pattern is playing out across sports, entertainment, and broadcast. Organizations that used to buy media are building their own production and distribution capabilities.

More publishers means more inventory, more first-party data, and more demand for monetization infrastructure. It also means more fragmentation. Not all of that new supply will be immediately usable. Signal quality, identity, and monetization capabilities will vary widely across these new entrants. As supply fragments, the bottleneck shifts from content creation to aggregation, curation, and making that inventory addressable at scale.

AI Is Expanding Supply. It Won’t Solve Monetization.

The biggest software presence at NAB was AI, almost entirely concentrated in production workflows. Video editing, voice synthesis, music generation, automated content creation. AI is making content cheaper and faster to produce, and the production side of broadcast is being reshaped quickly.

That’s significant, but the implication extends beyond production. As AI accelerates the volume of content entering the market, the pressure shifts to the ad infrastructure layer. More content needs to be monetized, and the systems to do that need to keep pace with the supply being created.

What This Means for Audio

NAB confirmed something we’ve been watching closely: broadcast is on a trajectory that digital advertising already traveled. The curation evolution, the data-to-media shift, the convergence of data and fulfillment. These are familiar patterns.What makes this moment interesting is that the infrastructure for addressable, measurable, identity-informed audio advertising is no longer theoretical. It exists in meaningful ways today, even if it’s not yet uniform across the ecosystem. Broadcast is arriving at the realization that this is what they need.

We’ve been building that identity infrastructure for audio and it’s now positioned to meet them there. The convergence is happening, and the companies ready to connect data, audiences, and scaled delivery have a real window to shape what comes next.