Grow Audience Engagement & Ad Revenue with AI | Media Keynote, Dreamforce 2026

One year ago, a childhood dream of mine finally came true. I was in Milan watching AC Milan, an iconic soccer club, play live for the first time. My good friend Massimo, who works for the club, He picked me up from my hotel on a scooter. And you can picture that, like, it's a beautiful late summer afternoon in Milan, some questionable driving, a helmet that had clearly seen better days. And we were kind of making our way through the Milan traffic, and I was holding on to my seat in the back. And my knees actually were way too close to the cars surrounding us. But then suddenly there it was, San Siro. It is one of those— if you grew up learning soccer, this is one of those places when you see it, it almost doesn't feel real. We still had a couple of hours until the game began. And so Massimo and I explored the area of AC Milan around the stadium. We went to the museum, we went to the shop, obviously, we went to the hospitality area, and then of course to the match itself. And it was just a fantastic, a fantastic afternoon. And we also somehow ended up sitting just a few seats away from a gentleman called Zlatan Ibrahimović, who you might know, one of the, I guess, best soccer players ever in the world. And when we left the stadium, I was like super happy, as you can imagine. I looked at Massimo and I said, hey, Massimo, I will never forget this day. And he looked at me and smiled and said, Daniel, AC Milan won't forget you either. I was like, I don't know what you mean. It doesn't make sense. And until he showed me this. So he showed me all of the signals that AC Milan had captured over the course of the day without me even noticing it. my ticket scan, the purchases in the shop, the hospitality survey we did, and the follow-ups. So that was just one fan, one afternoon, and dozens of signals, as you can tell here. All of these signals are an opportunity for ASML Anne to get to know me better. And how we connect these signals and how media and entertainment and sports companies can translate those signals into relationship and revenue. That is what brings us here today, and welcome to the media keynote. So I want to thank you. Thank you for coming here. We started with the Benioff keynote day 1. We're doing the media keynote on day 1. So apparently whoever set up the agenda decided we do the opposite of save the best for last this year. And also, thank you to everyone watching us on Salesforce+ across the globe. Really appreciate it. So AC Milan did this with one fan on one afternoon. But this is not a sports story here. This is not a sports keynote either. If you are a publisher, you know what the people read. If you're a streaming service, you know what people watch. If you are a concert promoter, you know what music people like. And if you're a game publisher, You know what people play. It's different business models. It's different signals. But it is the same opportunity for everyone, understanding who's on the other side of your content. That's the whole point.

And it doesn't really matter where you see yourself in the wide spectrum of media, right? It is really about figuring out, taking all those signals that we as consumers and all of you as consumers as well that we give to media companies, and make sense of them. We commissioned a report with Omdia a couple of weeks ago, and this is all about how ready are you to understand your audience. And we heard, we found out that less than half of the media companies are actually saying about themselves, hey, yeah, I'm in the position with the data infrastructure I have, I'm in the position to capture all those signals. and make sense of them. So I'm going to pause here real quick. If you want the report, it's great. You can scan the QR code and read the full report. It's very, very insightful. So why is it so hard to get that full picture, right? We got all the signals, but to get that full picture is really hard. And I think in media, depending on what part of the media industry you work in, We all know that the data sits, we hear this all the time, in silos. But what it basically means is the audience data sits here, maybe in a CDP, the subscription data sits somewhere else, probably very close, hopefully, to the billing data. The advertising sales data sits somewhere else, the ad ops workflows sit somewhere else, and it's really hard to bring all of them together. And that prevents us from creating automated workflows. The handovers are kind of tricky, and it just adds more complexity. And whenever we're trying to add another business model, so imagine you're an ad sales business and you want to introduce a subscription business or vice versa, it always adds complexity. And in the worst case, it adds another tech stack. So those are not new problems. I know that. I know that. The speed at which they cost you, that is definitely, definitely new. What do the leading media companies actually do? Well, 2 things. One, deep audience relationships. Take all the signals out there, bring them together so they make sense and so that you can actually act on it and understand who's that person on the other side of the content. The second one, monetize every relationship. Whether your business model is advertising, subscriptions, licensing, commerce, sponsorships, it doesn't really matter. Just make sure you're monetizing the hell out of the relationships that you earned in the first place. And do all of that with speed. Run operations faster. This is, we saw it this morning, this is where agents and AI come in. And make sure that the workflows are happening as automated as possible and that your teams can focus on the things that really matter. So it all comes down to one question. Can you connect all the signals? Can you capture all the signals? Can you connect them all together? Can you build that audience view that you need? And can you capture every ad dollar? And we believe that to do all of that, you need a connected platform, a platform that allows you to automate your business and to evolve with it. So at the foundation, you've got Data 360. This is the united picture. This is the trusted data. This is the data that your teams and your agents will use in a harmonized, connected, and as I said before, a trusted way. Customer 360 then takes that context and brings it to all the workflows and business applications that your team already run— sales, service, marketing, revenue, industry. On top of that, we've got AgentForwards. Think of that as your digital workforce, the one that's automating the workflows, the one that's taking away the manual work, the one that's coordinating the handovers, and the one that allows your teams to work faster. And of course, again, very prominent in Marc's keynote this morning, AI for us, that's the interface. This is how your teams actually engage with the agents, whether that's in Slack, whether that's in Teams, whether that's in Claude. They're already there. And now we can bring the best of Salesforce and the best of their business to them. I know this is theory, but it works in practice. We can guarantee you because the top 20 media and entertainment companies on the globe work with Salesforce. And I know many of you in the room are part of that. So thank you very much. We don't take that trust for granted, but it also— your trust allows us to have a front row seat when it comes to understanding how fast the industry is changing. And we're now going to go to 2 places where this change becomes real. One is audience engagement with Live Nation, and the other one is advertising sales with Nine and Anzu. So let's do what media does best, take an exciting story and bring it to an audience. And with that, please welcome Senior Vice President of Sales, Nick Griesbach.

Thanks, Daniel. What an exciting day for Salesforce, and thank you all for coming. I couldn't be more excited to be here. I'm going to create a quick picture for you that I think is going to resonate with the vast majority of you. So I'm going to take you all the way back to this last Sunday night. Imagine a show that you've been dying to see for the last 2 years finally has a season coming back. Couldn't be more thrilled. Or maybe Sunday for a lot of people is game day. Football came back a couple of weeks ago. In my house, we are a big Formula 1 family. My 7-year-old and I love McLaren. My 4-year-old, for some reason, has decided to like Williams with my wife. It's a good in-house rivalry. It's great. But maybe you're just scrolling social media and you see that that band that you were obsessed with in high school that you used to belt out on the way to school is having a reunion tour. They're coming back, and they're coming to your town. So what do you do next if you really want to get in on that action, take it to that next level? Maybe you sign up for a streaming service or buy a ticket, or maybe you join a loyalty program. We all do this, right? But when we do, what happens? Maybe I'm Nick Griesbach over here or N.Griesbach. Griesbach over here, or my favorite, Nicholas Griesbach over here, something that only my mother ever calls me. So when I get that email, it doesn't feel super personalized, right?

Yeah.

I think we've all had that happen. So what do we do next, right? Why does that happen? It's because that data is all fractured, right? The system in the backend thinks that I'm a different set of fans, right? Doesn't know that that's all one person. Quick show of hands, how many of you have experienced this, right?

Yeah.

It's pretty common, but it's something that we need to solve. It's annoying, but it's also— it's annoying for us as fans. It's extra annoying for the business users that are working through this every single day. So great example of it. Last week, I am talking to a customer that said, hey, Nick, when our guests are on site with us, our job is to create bespoke, really exciting, custom, unforgettable experiences for them, right? Real, real surprise and delight stuff. But I just can't do it. I don't have a system in place that can reliably take all that data and put it in one zone. It's a problem we're all dealing with and something that we just need to solve. It's common, yes, but something we need to solve today if we're ever going to take it to that next level, right? So, that is why I couldn't be more excited to be at Salesforce than I am right now. Enter Maximize Audience Engagement. We have now found a way to completely eliminate that gap. So, it takes all of that data, all that scattershot data that's all over that we talked about earlier, brings it into one 360 view of the customer that anybody in your organization can take action on, right? whether that's your IT organization or your service center, anybody can view the data and create real lasting impact. However, if I were you, I'd be saying, that all sounds great, Nick, but I'm gonna need to see it to believe it. So with that, I would like to welcome to the stage Azalea and Michael to take us through a little bit of how are we bringing Maximize audience engagement to life in a much bigger and more impactful way. So welcome, Azalea.

Thank you so much, Matt.

Thank you.

Happy Dreamforce, everyone. Also, another round of applause for our demo driver, Michael.

I can't hear you, sorry.

All right, so you heard, right? Maximizing audience engagement is critical. Today, we're gonna take a look at what that can look like from personalized two-way marketing engagement to always-on seamless service. Michael, we ready to roll? All right, so let's get started. Marcus is an avid concertgoer. Historically, he's received static information and general updates leading up to an event, but now with Salesforce, it's no longer a static do-not-reply email. It's dynamic. So a day before the show, right, Marcus receives a Know Before You Go email, But this time it's powered by Agentforce. He can ask questions, interact, and get real-time personalized answers right in his inbox. And Marcus can go back anytime with more questions, so it feels like a real conversation. He realizes he was charged twice for parking. Salesforce makes what is usually a tedious experience seamless. So Marcus's email triggers a case to our service rep Priya, and Agentforce knows how to do that, right? It can answer his questions, but it's intelligent enough to know that more complex cases need a human touch. In her service console, Priya has all of the context she needs with a conversation summary that's generated for her. Raise your hand if you know how infuriating it is to have to repeat yourself multiple times throughout the service journey. Priya has AI-recommended replies ready to go as well. So in one click, she can respond to Marcus and remove that charge. She also sees Agentforce-recommended next actions. These actions are based on Marcus's unified profile. In one click, she can improve his experience and send him a VIP parking upgrade. Now, there's more. Because we have all of this rich engagement history on Marcus, the day after the show, he gets a personalized what's next email. That is the beauty of this flywheel. The greater the personalization to the fan or to our customers, the greater the engagement, which means we have a stronger understanding to then continue to further personalize as we build that customer relationship. So what you've seen is just a preview of what maximizing audience engagement looks like. You saw intelligent email interactions, seamless handoffs with grounded context and personalized engagement. So first you build the customer relationship, but then you monetize that relationship. I would like to introduce Chinmayi Bhattacharjee, GM of Media Cloud, to tell us more about that. Thank you.

Thank you, Azalea. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. So ad sales. Well, scaling monetization is the outcome that every media company is chasing, and advertising sales is where it's realized. We've been saying this every year though, but this year, The size of the prize is the difference. WPP Media forecasts that global advertising revenue is going to increase 8.9% this year to a whopping $1.3 trillion. And a large part of it is driven by AI. You have AI-native companies jumping into the media business. And you have media publishers turning to AI to improve targeting and operations. So this trillion-dollar opportunity and this growth has AI written over it as we step into the future. But growth on paper and revenue in hand are 2 completely different things. This trillion-dollar opportunity actually has to go through fragmented, highly complex, margin-thin paths to close. And these paths are where things get really hard. That is exactly where our Accelerate Advertising Sales capability comes into the picture. It addresses this gap by actually clearing up the friction within systems and manual processes so your sales teams can capture revenue faster. At the forefront is Media Cloud. Media Cloud is the industry-specific product that we built so that you don't have to spend your precious resources maintaining a roadmap on Salesforce. We are announcing 2 exciting innovations today. One is the publisher agent, and 2, RFP management. RFP management or brief management is the tip of the spear when it comes to advertising sales. And the publisher agent leverages this capability and transacts the deal end-to-end in an agentic fashion with your team in the loop every step. step of the way. This is not just an incremental feature that we've released. It's groundbreaking functionality. Welcome to agentic advertising. Agentic advertising is when a brand's buy-side agent talks to the publisher's sell-side agent, the publisher agent, and negotiates agent-to-agent with your team in the loop. There are very few technology providers that can actually say they're on both sides of the pond. Salesforce is there on both the buy side and the sell side, connecting direct ad sales agent-to-agent. To bring this To life, please help me welcome distinguished solution engineer Shitij Shivani to the stage.

Thank you, Chinmay. First, can we please show some love to Karina, who's going to be running this live for us? No pressure, Karina. We all heard what agentic advertising is. Now let us show you what it looks like. This buyer likes to work in Claude. You all have already heard about AI Force and our headless toolkit. This is that for media. The interface is wherever humans like to work. The platform provides the intelligence. The buyer attaches the brief, one line, and they're able to hand over that brief to the publisher. No portals, no forms. This is powered and enabled by the Publisher Agent. And that brief just landed in Slack. That's where the sellers work. The seller calls on the Publisher Agent to help ingest that brief and understand those key requirements. Then a quick check. What inventory do we have to support this campaign? And now comes the really hard part, building that media plan and the ad proposal. The publisher agent pulls live avails, audiences, rate cards, targeting, and pricing grounded in the publisher's data. And there it is. That proposal is now ready for review. For anyone who's ever had to build a multichannel ad proposal, Or if you've seen someone build it, that used to be days of work, if not weeks. And nothing gets sent until the seller approves and reviews that. And that's it. Now back to our buyer in Claude, that proposal is already waiting for them. The buyer agent weighs the mix against the goals and drafts a counter. Now something really powerful happens. The buyer and the brand, they are able to call on the publisher agent to send that counter, and the publisher agent reprices. Well, there seems to be only one thing left to do, and that is to accept. And there it is. A booked order, a real opportunity that was converted and closed and won. 2 agents just negotiated, humans on both sides approved. But a question that we do get asked often is, how do I really track all of this work that all of these agents are doing for me? Well, right back in Slack where your sellers work, every deal that the agents orchestrated, is right there for them to see. And the one that we just worked on, that's there as well. Every step and those 2 parts where the humans actually approved. This is what agentic advertising looks like. So just to recap, we had trusted data right in Media Cloud, which is the platform that is powering that intelligence. And real records that you can see right there for your opportunity, the opportunity, the media plan, the proposal, everything attached. And that is agentic advertising sales built on Media Cloud. So once again, trusted data and context, agents doing the heavy lifting, and humans in complete control of the relationship. Now let's welcome back Chinmayi on stage.

I hope you were excited about what you saw. I am. And we also have 2 other folks who are excited about this— Nine Entertainment in Australia and Dentsu. They've both been part of this proof of concept. And Nine has been putting their—

I'm excited.

Ad proposal workflow to the test, and they've actually seen up to 90% faster time going from brief to signed IO and capturing those ad sales revenue. Pretty exciting. So on the— that's the sell side, right? Publisher agent. On the buy side, as I mentioned, we have Dentsu, one of the largest media agencies in the globe, and they have been testing this out. where the buy-side agent converts a campaign brief, takes it all the way to a signed insertion order as well. And to tell you more about this, I'm thrilled to welcome Emily Anthony, Chief Customer Solutions Officer.

Please.

Thank you for joining us. Yes.

Yeah, glad to be here.

So a media agency and a publisher used to sit across the table for weeks to close a deal. Now on the Dentsu side, that negotiation is being run by a buyer agent talking directly to a publisher's sell-side agent. What did it take for you to trust that handoff and what convinced you it was ready?

Yeah, well firstly, we have a longstanding partnership with Salesforce, so that certainly helps as a starting point. But what you just saw, right, this process between buyer and seller, for anybody that's issued a media campaign RFP, and I know there's a couple of you in the audience, that's a process that really has been fundamentally the same for literally decades. At this point. So at iProspect, those are the areas that we look for, legacy areas where there's a lot of manual coordination, maybe disproportionate to strategic advantage. And this process checked both of those boxes.

Your buyer agent is working the deal alongside the publisher's sell-side agent. Tell me, where does your team still choose to step in? And where has it genuinely freed up time you used to spend back and forth?

Yeah, so you mentioned some of the stats, and you saw the demo from the team with Nine and Claude and Slack. So that process for our team and with Nine historically took about 7 to 10 business days. We're now doing that in a matter of hours. So when you scale that across the holding company with the number of RFPs that we're sending, that's a massive agility leap. And the other thing that I would say around that process and the agility is we're not removing the piece that's really most valuable, which is the human element. Our media agency buyers, their relationships, their expertise, their creativity. We're removing the operational burden so that they can do 2 things really. One is that they can spend more time focused on the contents of the proposal, right? The quality of the plan. How does what a publisher offers fit within the broader context of a multi-partner plan that's coming together? And what are the elements that really are going to add the most unique value? So I mean, I guess to summarize that, right, we're going from managing a process to really thinking about how can we improve outcomes for our clients.

Amazing. So now let's say that it becomes default, right? This is how you're going to run your business. What does that unlock for Dentsu? And also, what are your expectations, speaking for the buy side, what are your expectations from the sell side?

Yeah, so I mentioned how it's really raising the bar for the type of work that our buyers can do, right? Time spent really in that strategic planning not the process management. But that extends to the way that we're working with publishers as well, right? That's more time spent in conversation around things like innovation, right? Is there a new product that a publisher is bringing to market that we then have more space to talk about and understand? Or maybe there's a new opportunity that's opened up around editorial adjacency. That's really where those relationships deepen. I think the other piece is we're managing a lot of fragmentation. That's a real challenge for buyers and brands. And now with this element at play, it helps out. If you look at the B2B space, huge from a lead gen standpoint. We've talked about retail media, massive explosion in that vertical. And now we have a means to help get to the proposal details faster and really get to higher quality. And I think you're going to see investment dollars follow that.

And we've heard in this industry a lot of announcements from others about buy-side agents, sell-side agents, agentic this, agentic that. What makes Salesforce different?

Yeah, well, maybe a little bit of context first. So I mentioned the days to hours. That's on top of about 20% agent operational efficiency that we're able to gain with Dentsu Connect. That's our agency AI-powered operating system. So you're right, there's a lot of agentic discussion and work happening. But where we're going with that next is not just to make legacy workflows faster, more efficient. We are really thinking about how can we reimagine work and relationships in an AI-native way. And that's where I think Salesforce is really unique. It was mentioned earlier, right? When both the buyer and seller are operating from a connected data foundation, so with Data360, the things that we're able to do together are capability that's brand new. So think about matching audiences as you're pulling a proposal together at that point in time. The personalization that you heard from the Live Nation example, scaling that into monetization. new closed-loop measurement. Those are things that we haven't been able to do before, certainly at speed or at scale. So we're sort of changing the fabric, the way that this ecosystem between buyers, sellers, technology partners, and brands works. It's pretty exciting.

Yeah.

Thank you so much. I am super excited for what's to come because we've just scratched the surface. But thank you for your time and being here.

Happy to be here.

So you heard Emily. It's not just about automating existing processes. It's about reimagining what you can possibly do with this. And you saw the art of the possible. That's reimagining how traditional ad sales capabilities work today and the workflows. And that's what you can leverage in order to drive all aspects of the demos that you saw today. So to recap, to bring it to life after you leave the keynote today, right? One, deepen that engagement with your fan and your consumer. Bring all of the data points together that you know about them into a unified profile and have that follow them everywhere. So that one super agent can actually service them across 120 different venues. Second, agentic advertising. Buy-side agents interacting with sell-side agents within the same trusted platform and making decisions, but your team is in the loop from the initial ask to final close. And finally, faster operations. Put your agents on those manual processes, actually unleash them headlessly across every system so that you can actually move at the pace that your audience expects and not being bogged down by how your systems work. But all of this will not be possible without trust. It is this trusted platform that you know of where the buy side is on the same platform, the sell side is on the same platform, looking at trusted data and with trusted guardrails transacting end-to-end. Media and entertainment is an industry that is built upon human connection and emotion. Everything that you saw today is here to protect exactly that bond. What can you do during your time here at Dreamforce? Of course, definitely check out the Media Cloud roadmap session that's happening on Thursday. You can go to the campground if you haven't yet and see up close the agentic advertising demo, as well as check out Live Nation's agentic activation city. And then Of course, there's your account executive. You can absolutely reach out to them, reach out to us if anything you saw today was interesting. And one final thought, thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. And one more moment, if you don't mind taking a short survey, that will help out how we bring things to you next year as well. Thank you so much and have a fabulous rest of your Dreamforce.

Thank you.