The Leadership Lag: Streaming, Retail Media, and Gaming Built New Revenue Models Faster Than They Reviewed the Leadership

Consumers changed how they watch, play, and buy. Many companies handed the response to the same executives who ran the business before it changed. 

We place commercial leaders in technology, media, and gaming. Over the past few years many companies in those sectors have changed how they earn their revenue. A broadcaster now sells access to viewers it can name, rather than a slot against an estimated rating. A game publisher earns from the same player for years, rather than from a single purchase. A retailer sells advertising priced on what its shoppers have bought, rather than shelf space. In each case, the customer stopped being a crowd and became a person. Knowing who that person is has value to whoever wants to reach them, which is why so much of this ends up being sold as advertising. We draw on the advertising agencies more than their size warrants, and for one reason. They met this change a decade before the others and their published numbers record what the delay cost, which makes them the leading indicator for the rest. 

The leadership question is whether the executive who ran the old model is the right person to run the new one. Many boards do not ask it, because nothing prompts them to. Leadership gets reviewed after a resignation or a bad quarter, and a company that has just funded a successful move has neither. We call the delay between changing the model and reviewing the leadership the leadership lag. 

The first half of this paper sets out what changed in television, gaming, and retail media, who a media owner now sells to, and what automation has done to the commercial role. The second half turns to the leadership question. It covers which parts of an incumbent’s experience still apply, what to test for in anyone brought in from outside, and ends with a five-question audit a board can run this quarter. The findings below summarize the argument. 

Executive Summary

• The change is to the business model, not only the channel. Television sold time slots against a panel-measured rating and now sells access to viewers it can identify individually, with streaming taking 48.6% of US watch-time. Gaming sold a title once and now earns from the same players for years, through in-game purchases, live content, and subscriptions, with subscription spending up 11% year on year. Retailers turned their checkout data into an advertising business. In each case the responsibilities of the commercial leadership changed with it. 
• Companies see the change and fund it quickly. Retailers built a US advertising business worth about $69.3 billion in 2026 from almost nothing in a decade, and broadcasters rebuilt their inventory around addressable audiences. Funding the change is rarely the bottleneck. 
• Fewer companies revisit who should run it. Funding decisions come back to the board every year. Leadership is usually reviewed only when someone resigns or a quarter goes badly. A team can therefore stay in place through a change in the business it was never appointed to run. Where the resulting capability gap has been measured, it is wide. Asked about their own teams in our Q1 2026 survey, 62% of 214 executives said leadership held no vision for AI beyond tactical use, which is one of several capabilities the new model requires. 
• One industry is far enough along to show where this ends. Advertising agencies watched clients take media buying in-house and watched planning move into automated systems, which left them selling something their clients could increasingly do themselves. Their share of US ad spending fell from more than 44% in 2019 to 29.6% by early 2024, and the largest groups have since rebuilt themselves around data and automation. The correction came after the revenue had gone rather than before. 
• Whether the executive who ran the previous model should run the new one is a question about skills, and it takes the same form in television, gaming, retail media, and advertising. Boards often treat it as a judgement about the person, which makes it uncomfortable to raise and easy to defer. Written down as a list of what the new model requires and who has done each of those things before, the same question becomes ordinary board work. 

In Television and Gaming, the Customer Stopped Being a Crowd

Start with television, because it is the clearest case and the one with the longest paper trail. Streaming reached 48.6% of total US television watch-time in May 2026, according to Nielsen’s monthly Gauge. Cable held 20.4% and broadcast 19.2%, so streaming now out-rates both traditional categories combined. Streaming has set new highs repeatedly through the year, so this reads as more than a seasonal movement. 

The consumer change is easy to state, and the commercial change underneath it is the part that catches companies out. Linear television sold advertisers an audience measured by panel and traded against a guaranteed rating. Streaming sells them one you can identify, address, and measure, although that measurement is still fragmented across platforms. For the broadcasters and platforms doing the selling, that has moved the negotiation from reach and price to identity graphs, clean rooms, and attribution models defended in front of a client’s analytics team. Often the buyer has changed too, from the media planner to whoever owns the customer data. That is a different sale, won on different ground. 

Gaming changed in the same way, and further. Roughly 205 million Americans play regularly, close to two-thirds of the country, and the average player is 36 with women making up 47% of the audience, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2025 Essential Facts report. The commercial change underneath those numbers is the one that redraws the responsibilities. Most of the money now arrives after the first purchase, through in-game spending and live content, and subscriptions are the fastest-growing part of it. US game subscription spending rose 11% year on year in May 2026 while mobile game spending fell 11%, and Circana links the market’s potential record year partly to the spread of subscription pricing. 

Much of gaming understands both halves of that picture, the players and the economics, and several of the major publishers and platforms have been hiring for subscription economics, live operations, and AI capability for years. Below that tier the picture is uneven, with live-service revenue added to companies still led by people whose careers were built on shipping titles. The brands buying advertising inside games have been slower than any of them. Those brands and their agencies often still work from a picture of a teenage boy in a headset, which reaches neither the 63-year-old playing word games on her phone nor the parent playing alongside a nine-year-old. That matters most to the publishers and platforms whose revenue includes advertising and brand integrations, which on mobile is a large part of it. They are selling to a buyer working from an outdated view of their own audience, and that view sets the price. 

Advertising Budgets Arrive Years After the Audience

A company whose audience has moved still has to wait for the buyers across the table to move their money, and those buyers allocate on assumptions formed under the previous model. The spending data shows how far behind the money runs, and that is what a commercial team sells against. It is a separate problem from the leadership lag, though it hides one, because a company can carry the wrong leader for years before the revenue line makes the case for itself. eMarketer’s latest comparison of ad spending against time spent finds social networks taking 27.7% of US ad spending this year. They account for just 12.5% of the 13 hours and 26 minutes adults give to media each day. Television and subscription streaming take the largest shares of time, without the spending to match. 

Advertising money is catching up with the television audience, slowly. This is the first year in which CTV upfront commitments, at $17.73 billion, exceed primetime linear at $16.98 billion, which is a milestone worth noting mainly because it took this long. Gaming is the furthest from correcting, because despite more than 3.4 billion players and time spent rising another 6% year on year, it still draws under 5% of worldwide media investment. That number needs qualifying, because most of the industry earns its money from players and treats advertising as a secondary line. For the mobile publishers whose games are funded by advertising, it is the main line, and they are competing for a pool that has not grown with their audience. 

The widest of those gaps has a standard explanation, and it starts with where advertising is possible at all. Mobile free-to-play titles carry rewarded video and interstitials. Sports and racing games can sell in-world signage, because real stadiums carry it too. Platforms like Roblox and Fortnite host brand integrations. A premium single-player game carries none of it, so the audience an advertiser can reach is smaller than the player numbers suggest. 

Where advertising is possible, buying it takes more work than buying it on streaming television. A planner buying CTV goes to a handful of sellers who all report the same measures. In gaming there is no single place to buy, and no agreed way to compare what one platform sold you against another. An advertisement built into a game can also take months to produce. All of that is true and slowly getting fixed, but it explains a delay rather than a decade of one. It explains nothing about retail media. There the measurement was never the obstacle, and companies still ended up without anyone senior running the business. 

In Retail Media, the Buyer Is Also a Supplier 

Retailers have sold supplier-funded promotion for a century, through circulars, end-cap placements, and co-op advertising budgets. What changed is the form it takes. A retail media business runs an auction, targets shoppers using the retailer’s own purchase records, extends beyond the retailer’s own site, and reports measurement back to the buyer. That is a media operation rather than a merchandising one, and it carries a margin closer to software than to grocery. Amazon and Walmart built it at scale first, and several large grocers followed. For a retailer standing one up more recently, the question of who runs it often has a default answer, which is whoever ran ecommerce. 

The complication is who the buyers are. Almost all of them are brands the retailer already sells, so the person buying the advertising also negotiates shelf space and promotional terms with the same company. A retail media leader is therefore selling to a supplier, and every conversation carries the trading relationship with it. 

US retail media spend will reach roughly $69.3 billion in 2026, up from about $58.8 billion the year before, which is more than $10 billion of growth in a single year. Sponsored listings on the retailer’s own site are still the largest format. That is where the loop between the advertisement and the sale closes tightly, because both happen in the same place. 

The loop loosens as the channel widens. Retailers now use the same purchase data to target shoppers on connected TV, social, and the open web, and that off-site spending is growing at about twice the rate of on-site. It buys reach that the storefront cannot, with a weaker line back to the purchase. Knowing when that trade is worth making is part of the role. 

The channel also concentrates fast, which changes the kind of leader it needs. Amazon and Walmart will take around 89% of the incremental dollars in 2026, roughly $9.4 billion of the $10.5 billion in new retail media spending, even as more retailers launch networks of their own. That concentration sets the standard everyone else is judged against. A retailer outside the top two has to prove a media return to a buyer who can spend the same money with Amazon, while protecting a trading relationship with that same buyer. The executive running it needs to be credible with brands as a media seller, with merchants as a colleague, and with the board as a P&L owner. Few people have held all three at once. 

So, the revenue is there, the on-site measurement works, and the growth is not in doubt. Where companies get caught is in the reporting line. Retail media usually starts under ecommerce, because the inventory sits on the website, or under merchandising, because the money arrives through supplier negotiations. Both are reasonable ways to start a small line. Neither works at nine figures, when the position spans a media product, a data asset, and a trading relationship at once. Most companies passed the point where that arrangement still made sense several years ago. 

Brands Now Buy Direct, and That Changes the Sale

Something else changed while the audience was moving, and it changed who a media owner sells to. Third-party identifiers stopped doing the work they once did, so a company’s own record of its customers became the scarce input everything else depends on. That shifted value away from the people who used to sit in between. 

The clearest proof is what the largest sellers of advertising services did with their own businesses. Omnicom completed its acquisition of Interpublic in November 2025. It then announced more than 4,000 job cuts and folded DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe into other networks. Three months later WPP set out a plan called Elevate28, organizing around four divisions and its AI platform, with £500 million of gross annualized savings targeted by 2028. Cindy Rose put it plainly to journalists, saying WPP was no longer a holding company. 

Those restructures matter to anyone selling media, because the buyer on the other side of the table has changed. The big six holding companies’ share of US ad spending fell from more than 44% in 2019 to 29.6% by the first quarter of 2024. By that year, spending direct from brands had overtaken the holding company share entirely. A media owner that built its sales organization around agency relationships is increasingly selling to the advertiser itself, a customer with its own data team and its own view on measurement. 

What those companies kept is as telling as what they cut. The creative networks, some of them a century old, were treated as duplicative cost. The data assets were treated as the thing worth keeping. Acxiom, Epsilon, Merkle, and InfoSum all survived the cuts that retired famous agency names. WPP now describes the InfoSum technology it bought as the foundation of the intelligence layer connecting its whole company. Selling to a buyer who has built that capability is a different conversation from selling to one who has not. 

Automation Runs the Trade, and the Errors Land on the Seller

Automation already runs most of the transaction. Bidding, targeting, pricing, and optimization happen inside systems on both sides of the trade. Yield, packaging, and the question of where a brand actually appears are decisions a machine now makes thousands of times a second. 

That turns the commercial role from negotiating a deal into governing a system that negotiates continuously, and the executives holding those positions say they are not ready for it. In Stanton Chase’s survey of 214 C-suite executives and board members across more than 45 countries, 77% said their organizations had not moved AI beyond experimentation and 65% could not show a measurable financial return. Asked about their own executive teams, 62% said leadership lacked any vision for AI beyond tactical implementation. 

In advertising the consequences land on the seller. An automated system will eventually place a brand beside content it should not appear next to, misprice inventory against a competitor, or optimize toward a metric the client never asked for. Across organizations using AI, 51% have already had at least one negative consequence, with inaccuracy the most common. When it happens on a campaign, the client does not call the vendor who built the system. They call whoever sold them the inventory. 

Somebody has to be answerable for that, and in most companies nobody has been named. It is the clearest case in this paper of a position whose responsibilities changed while the question of who should hold it went unasked. 

Is the Incumbent Still Right for the New Model?

Often the answer is yes. None of what has changed makes the incumbent the wrong person, and leading a business through it is the kind of assignment that develops a strong executive. The error is treating yes as the default rather than as a conclusion. An executive who ran the legacy business, paid at the point of sale, is now being asked to run one paid across the life of a customer. What carries over is client relationships, commercial judgment, and credibility inside the company. What does not carry over is what the new model runs on, including retention economics, identity data, and the discipline of holding a customer relationship open long after the campaign has ended. 

The harder question is what a board does once it can see which responsibilities have changed. The companies that sell technology into all three sectors met the change first, because their whole product is the thing that changed. Two days in July 2026 showed how their owners answered it. 

On 6 July, reports emerged that Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital had bid to take Criteo private at a premium above 50%. Criteo builds the technology behind many retailers’ media networks, so the bidders were buying a position in the same shift, and they were said to view its AI capabilities as the opportunity. The next day Integral Ad Science, which verifies where advertisements appear and whether anyone saw them, appointed Lidiane Jones as chief executive, effective immediately, citing her expertise across product, technology, and AI as the reason. Jones came from enterprise and consumer software rather than advertising technology, having led Bumble and Slack, with earlier roles at Sonos and more than a decade at Microsoft. Her predecessor of more than seven years stayed on as a special adviser to the board. 

Both moves are worth reading carefully, because in each an owner acted on the same judgement, that the next phase would be decided by AI capability rather than category tenure. Vista and Quinti priced that capability into what they were willing to pay for the asset. The IAS board went further and changed the leadership to match it, without waiting for a vacancy. A chief executive with seven successful years was not failing, and the review happened anyway. 

Sony reached a similar conclusion in gaming, appointing Hideaki Nishino as sole chief executive of Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2025. Nishino had run the platform, products, and services side of PlayStation, and the head of its studios now reports to him. Sony placed the platform and services business above the content business, which is a plain statement of where it thinks the value now sits. Paramount reached it in television. In October 2025 the company created a chief revenue officer role and filled it with Jay Askinasi, who ran advertising at Roku and before that led Publicis Media Exchange in the US, with a remit to unify advertising across CBS, the cable networks, Paramount+, and Pluto TV. The president of Paramount Advertising kept his role and now reports into that seat. The match of leadership to model is precise, and it arrived with a change of ownership rather than with the change in the model, which had happened years earlier. 

What Does the New Commercial Leadership Profile Look Like?

The appointments above point to a specification, and it has an order. Recurring-revenue economics comes first, meaning retention, lifetime value, and the monetization of a customer measured over years rather than a campaign measured over weeks. It is the skill this change created, and the one least likely to transfer from a career spent selling reach. Data literacy comes second, covering identity, measurement, and the practical limits of automated systems. Channel fluency comes third, meaning credibility across streaming, retail media, and gaming, and the ability to build one plan spanning all three rather than defending a single channel. Creative credibility comes fourth, in the specific sense of knowing how to protect the human judgment no model can originate. Accountability for AI governance runs through all four, and it is the requirement position specifications most often leave out. 

Reading that order as a demotion of creative would be an expensive mistake, because the sequence describes dependency rather than worth. It also points to the part of an incumbent’s experience that does transfer. Identity graphs, retail media networks, and optimization engines are becoming available to every competitor on similar terms, so they will stop differentiating anybody. Judgment about what is worth making does not become a commodity. That is why the executive whose background is in judgment about what is worth making, whether that is a campaign, a title, or a format, is often the right person to lead the new model once they have learned the recurring-revenue economics, and why the reverse is harder. 

The difficulty is that this profile does not match the career paths television, gaming, retail media, and advertising spent decades building. The issue is not which discipline someone came from, but that almost everyone came up in businesses where revenue arrived at the point of sale and data kept score rather than set direction. Executives who can hold all four capabilities in that order are rarer than the volume of open positions suggests. They also tend to sit outside the relationships most search processes rely on. Look inside the platforms, the game studios, the retail media networks, enterprise software, and the portfolio companies of investors who have been through this before. 

That is why insular hiring tends to produce the same shortlist. A search run through the relationships of the previous era surfaces the leaders of the previous era. They interview extremely well, and most have never owned a nine-figure budget against a closed-loop sales number. Assessing candidates from outside that pool is harder, because it takes operating knowledge of these environments to tell who has run the work from who has read the same reports you have. 

Does Your Company Have a Leadership Lag?

Before any of that becomes a hiring decision, a company has to establish whether it has the gap at all. The practical starting point is therefore not a reorganization. It is an honest inventory, and it takes five questions. They are written for the companies this paper covers, meaning broadcasters and streaming platforms, retailers running media businesses, and gaming publishers. 

• Who owns your newest revenue line end to end? Ownership here means a single executive carrying a revenue number for the whole line rather than a share of it. Where the responsibility is distributed across functions, the budget tends to grow faster than the accountability around it. 
• Who has been accountable for a customer relationship measured over years? This is different from having managed a campaign or a product launch. It means having carried retention or lifetime value as a personal objective, and having had to defend those numbers when they moved in the wrong direction. 
• Which executive can turn your own data into revenue? Most companies in these sectors now hold detailed records of their customers. Far fewer employ someone who has built a commercial product on top of that data and sold it. The two capabilities are frequently assumed to be the same, and they are not. 
• When an automated system makes a decision you would not have made, who answers for it? The question asks for a name, because the answer is usually a function. If responsibility rests with a committee, or with the supplier of the system, the company has bought the technology without assigning the accountability that goes with it.
• When did you last review whether the leadership team matches the business you now run? This is a different exercise from assessing performance against plan. It asks whether the roles as currently defined still describe the company, and for most boards it is a review that has never formally taken place. 

A weak answer to any of these is not in itself a reason to replace anyone. It is a reason to run the review properly, and to start it before the numbers force the issue, because a leadership change takes months to work through. 

Running it properly means writing down what the role now has to deliver. Do that before moving anyone. The exercise forces a decision about who is accountable for what, which is easier to settle on paper than after people have moved. It also shows whether the person in the seat can do the position as it now stands. Where they cannot, the search that follows is harder than it looks. 

What Acting Early Is Worth

The evidence is already in. Viewers moved to streaming, retailers built advertising businesses out of their own data, and gaming moved most of its revenue past the first purchase. All of it is measured and public, so nothing here depends on a forecast. The advertising holding companies have already shown what a late correction looks like, arriving as a restructure after the money had gone. The only part still open is who runs these businesses now. 

Broadcasters, retailers, and gaming publishers that settle that question early get two things. They reach the small group of people who have run a recurring-revenue business or built a product out of customer data, while that group is still reachable and before the price of it rises. And they make the change as a decision rather than a reaction, which is a different conversation to have with a board and with a workforce. 

Consumers have already changed how they watch, play, and buy. Most companies have already built the revenue line that follows from it. Reviewing the leadership at the same time is the step most often skipped, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of the work pays off. 

Stanton Chase works with companies part way through that move, from revenue that arrives at the point of sale to revenue that arrives over years, and from selling inventory to selling what their own data makes possible. Sometimes that means executive search. More often it starts earlier, with executive assessment and development of the team already in place, or a succession plan for the seats that will turn over. Where the question belongs with the directors, it becomes board services, and where a hire does follow, executive onboarding is what stops it becoming next year’s version of the same problem. 

About the Authors

Greg Selker is a Managing Director, Regional Sector Leader for Technology in North America, and Global Subsector Leader for Software and Growth Equity, based in the Stanton Chase Baltimore office. He has conducted retained executive searches in technology for more than 30 years, appointing chief executives and their direct reports at CXO level across enterprise software, SaaS, data analytics, martech and adtech, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure. His clients range from venture-backed startups to private equity owned and global multinational companies, at both board and executive level. 

Sam Selker is a Director and Stanton Chase’s Global Subsector Leader for Gaming, based in Cleveland and serving clients through the Baltimore office. He joined the firm in 2022 from financial services, moved into the North America Technology Practice in 2024, and took the global gaming remit in 2026 alongside a role in the semiconductor practice. His deepest experience is in mobile gaming, with particular concentration in public real money gaming platforms. His searches run from vice president to C-suite across gaming, B2B SaaS, adtech, data analytics, and factory automation. He has been a gamer since the NES and still plays across PC, console, and mobile, which is why he watched free-to-play monetization evolve as a player rather than as a line on a spreadsheet. 

Bill Firing is a Partner in the Stanton Chase Denver office, focused on high-growth companies in technology, professional services, and medtech. He brings more than a decade in retained executive search and over 20 years in senior leadership at global marketing and technology services firms, including as a Senior Partner at Ogilvy and as Chief Strategy Officer of a private equity backed martech company. His searches span chief executive, go-to-market, finance, product, technology, and people leadership, which is the vantage point the argument in this paper comes from.