5 AI takeaways for publishers from the spring’s biggest U.S. media conferences
The AI debate has moved on. And it’s important to understand what it means for your revenue.
If you weren’t at Mega Conference in Austin or Niche Media Conference in Orlando this spring, here’s what the industry is talking about. Six months into 2026, the gap between publishers using AI strategically and those still waiting to figure it out is widening fast. I was on the floor for both events and came back with a clear view of where the real opportunity lives, and it’s not where most people are looking.
The AI conversation has moved off the editorial page and onto the revenue line
For two years, AI in publishing meant one thing – a fight. Content theft, job losses, licensing disputes. That debate hasn’t gone away, at Mega Conference, the conversation around AI content licensing was as heated as ever, and publishers are right to push back on their work being used without attribution or compensation.
But at both events, the most energised conversations and sessions that had people leaning forward, were the ones asking-Â how is AI influencing your revenue line?
That framing shift is significant. Publishers moving fastest aren’t waiting for copyright battles to resolve. They are using AI on the sales and production side, generating campaign mockups, building speculative creative, producing multi-format ad assets, fast enough to actually close deals.
When a sales rep can walk into a client conversation with a print ad, a digital banner, and a 30-second video concept ready to show, the dynamic changes completely. The advertiser stops asking what can you do for me? and starts saying yes.
The bottleneck killing your ad revenue isn’t what you think
The same story came up repeatedly at Niche Media Conference. A local advertiser is interested. The sales rep is ready. They promise a mockup. The request lands with a designer already managing deadlines, revisions, and layout. Days pass. The advertiser cools. The deal stalls or dies.
This is not a talent problem. It is a capacity problem, and it is bleeding revenue quietly, every single week.
In smaller operations, one person is often handling sales, design requests, and production simultaneously. Ryan Dohrn, who led the sales training track at Niche, put it plainly – speed is now a competitive advantage. The publishers winning local ad business are the ones who can say yes fast, produce a concept on the spot, iterate in real time, launch within 24 hours.Â
That used to require a large in-house team. That is no longer the case, if you have the right infrastructure in place.
AI tools alone are not enough, and smart publishers know it
Here is the part of the AI conversation that barely makes it into the articles, but came up constantly in the hallways at both events. An AI tool on its own does not solve all problems. There must be a human in the loop.
Many publishers we spoke to at these trade events had tried standalone AI ad tools. The tools worked, until they didn’t. A deadline hit, a format broke, a campaign needed a creative intervention that the tool simply couldn’t deliver. And there was no one to call.
The question that kept coming up was not should we use AI? It was what happens when the AI isn’t enough?
This is where the conversation got interesting for us. At Mediaferry, we have built around exactly this reality. Our platform combines AI-powered ad production, brand profiling, multi-format creative generation, instant campaign variants, with access to a talent pool of over 500 professional designers and copywriters available on demand. When a deadline is critical and a campaign needs a designer to provide inputs or changes, that backup is there.
It is not a small distinction. Most AI tools cannot offer this, because they simply do not have the human resource to back up the tool. For lean teams running up against tight production windows, it is often the difference between a deal closing and a deal dying.
Local ad revenue is the biggest untapped opportunity, and friction is the only barrier
One of the most compelling themes at the America’s Newspapers Mega-Conference in Austin was deceptively simple, most publishers have local advertisers who are already spending on digital, just not with them.
The barrier is not budget. It is friction. Local SMBs want to advertise locally. They want the community reach and trusted audience that regional publishers offer. What they do not want is to wait a week for a proof, go through three rounds of revisions, and feel like they are doing the publisher a favour.
The publishers consistently winning local business right now are not necessarily the biggest or the best resourced. They are the fastest. They can produce a campaign concept on the spot, show it across multiple formats, and launch within the same day if needed.
That speed, and the operational infrastructure behind it, is increasingly the core sales pitch.
Quality still wins. But efficiency is what funds it.
At Niche, Dr. Jeffrey Magee’s keynote made a point that landed hard across a room full of publishers – quality content and thoughtful design remain the foundation of publisher trust. Thirty-four years of running a successful niche publication will give you that clarity.
But here is the tension every publisher in that room knows: you cannot invest in quality if operational costs are crushing your margin. Every hour a designer spends resizing the same ad for three formats is an hour not spent on something that builds your brand.
The publishers getting this balance right are not choosing between quality and efficiency. They are using automation to clear the repetitive work, the resizing, the reformatting, the spec ad production — so their best creative people can do their best work.
David Arkin’s session on AI policy and workflows at Niche was one of the most practical of the week, walking through how media companies are building real internal systems around AI: proposal automation, editorial production tools, and sales workflow integration that actually function inside a real newsroom. The message was consistent: stop treating AI as something that is happening to you. Start building it into the way your teams work.
Across both events, the operational picture was consistent: fragmented systems, lean teams, and a production process built for a different era. Publishers who are pulling ahead have found a smarter way to work, automating the repetitive, compressing the production cycle, and giving their sales teams creative firepower to close faster.
If you are curious where your biggest bottleneck is, we offer a free 15-minute workflow scan. no-strings-attached, just a clear view of where time is being lost and what a smarter setup could look like.
