Katz Digital President Scott Porretti sees the year ahead as unique for digital media, especially with the backdrop of major sports events — such as February’s Winter Olympics and soccer’s World Cup in the U.S., Canada and Mexico — along with the midterm elections.

“You’re going to see technology and all of its evolutions come into play for how we’ve seen media consumption evolve, but also [for] these unbelievably large cultural events that are going to take shape this year,” Porretti says during an interview at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. “There are few things today that we consume live, as a community, whether it’s local or global or national. Advertisers want to take part in those kinds of cultural events, and we’re going to try to find ways to enable them to do that.”

Faced with this challenge in 2026, Porretti says Katz Digital’s brand is “as strong and growing as ever. We are serving ads from marketers on every platform known to man, from CTV to audio to mobile devices — everything.”

As to how digital media can help political advertisers, Porretti sees many ways of making that happen in this key election year. “Our goal is to help these campaigns, marketers and advertisers reach consumers. They've seen a lot of disruption to their business model and how they reach people. They’ve had traditional ways of doing that, that have been fairly easy to evolve over time, and that’s changing. So, they’re looking for companies like ours that have worked with them for years to help guide them on the best way they can reach those customers, voters, or people they can influence.”

Geographical targeting will be crucial for candidates in every state, Porretti says. “Digital enables them to [target] a county, a zip code, a congressional district, and [by using] new things for them, like podcasting. In the last presidential election, there was so much talk around podcasting and [its] impact. Those are great audiences to reach, and we’re helping them do that across different states. And [there’s] the fragmentation on the video side, with CTV and so many different places to consume video content.”

How can digital media move the needle for political advertisers in such a fragmented environment? “Everybody’s looking for that small group, [and] different elections are for different things,” Porretti says, “so you're going to see on the primary side, people really trying to get out their core voters and reaching those audiences. But when it comes to more general elections that are issue-based, those persuadables are hard to reach. How do we find these people? How do we attack them across [all] devices they’re engaging with, to hit them once, hit them twice? Does the message matter for the content that they’re advertising in? We advocate it does, so changing the messaging and the creative to fit the environment that it’s in makes it more impactful.”

The year’s major events aside, digital media advertising would still be headed for a big year, Porretti says. “[It’s] that intersection of an unbelievable amount of diverse content that’s out there and [the] technology that enables you to reach those people and engage with them. Audio is just an intimate medium that you consume in a special environment, whether you’re relaxing, getting hyped up for something or trying to learn something new. Whatever these things you’re trying to do, those are great environments for marketers to reach people in and capture them with their message.”

What’s Porretti’s take on AI and how it fits into digital strategies? “In our business, we’re looking at AI to help us kind of take away some of the more painful tasks, enable us to run a better and more efficient business, and optimize against the audiences we have, but we still believe in the human being, engaging with customers, hearing about needs, and responding in some way. That’s not going away for a long time. There are ways to use AI content to be more efficient, but I think there’s still real value in humans creating content.”