Top Women in Media & Ad Tech 2026: 184 Honorees and the Ad Tech Businesses Growing Fastest

On November 3, AdExchanger hands out its Top Women in Media & Ad Tech awards at The Lighthouse, Pier 61 in New York. The 2026 class has 184 honorees from about 140 companies, from The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal and The Coca-Cola Company to ad tech platforms that most brand marketers never see.

We read the whole list, all 184 honoree profiles, and the latest financial reports of the public companies on it. The red carpet isn't the story here. The story is which ad tech businesses are growing, and how many of the fast ones are run by women.

The gala and the forum at a glance

It's 2 events on 2 days, run by Access Intelligence, the company that owns AdExchanger and Chief Marketer. The awards gala is an evening of recognition and networking. The forum the next day is a separate paid conference about leadership.

• Awards gala: Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 6:00-9:00 pm ET, The Lighthouse, Pier 61, Chelsea Piers, New York
• Top Women Leadership Forum: Wednesday, November 4, 8:00 am-3:30 pm, same venue, 20 speakers
• Honorees: 184 women in 20 categories, plus 2 Special Recognition Awards chosen by AdExchanger's editors and judges
• Catalyst Award: Lauren Wetzel, Global President, Data and Technology Solutions at WPP
• Industry Impact Award: Kristi Argyilan, Chief Commercial Officer at The Trade Desk
• Contact: Karis Kim, kkim@accessintel.com, for tickets; Vernesa Merdanovic, vmerdanovic@accessintel.com, for sponsorship

We checked prices on the registration page on October 31. The landing page still listed the half-table at $2,975 and the table at $6,200, but registration shows them as sold out.

AdExchanger announced the class on September 17 and described it like this:

Where the 184 honorees work

The list mixes household names with the plumbing of programmatic advertising. Here's who sent the most people, grouped by what the employer does:

• Media and brands: Spectrum Reach (4 honorees), The E.W. Scripps Company and AMC Global Media (2 each), The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal, CBS, Fox, Roku, DIRECTV Advertising, Yahoo, People Inc., the NBA, The Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, HubSpot
• Commerce and retail media: Koddi (4), Pacvue, Kroger Precision Marketing and PebblePost (3 each), The Home Depot, Rokt, PayPal Ads, Uber Advertising, Microsoft AI, AdAdapted, Chicory, Fluent
• Programmatic platforms: The Trade Desk, Magnite, OpenX, TripleLift and AI Digital (3 each), PubMatic (2), Equativ, Nexxen, Viant, Sovrn, Permutive, ID5, Optable, Kevel
• Mobile app advertising: Moloco and BidMachine (2 each), Appodeal, Liftoff, Mintegral, Glance
• Measurement and data: Experian and Attain (2 each), DoubleVerify, Comscore, Circana, Bombora, Claritas
• Agencies: billups (3), Horizon Media and Havas Media Network (2 each), WPP, dentsu X, Incubeta
• Partnerships: impact.com (2), the platform many brands use to run their affiliate and partner programs

By our count, 28 honorees from 22 companies work in TV, streaming and audio, 25 from 16 companies in commerce and retail media, and 8 from 6 companies in mobile app advertising. The grouping is ours: AdExchanger sorts honorees by award category, not by business.

AI first, commerce second: what the categories say

AI Media Innovators is the biggest category this year, and Commerce Media Mavens is second. Here are the categories with 7 honorees or more:

There are more AI innovators on the list than buy-side and sell-side trailblazers combined (15). Keep in mind that companies nominate their own people, so the categories show where the industry wants to be seen, not audited market share.

The AI profiles are less about chatbots and more about who buys the media. PubX, a platform for agent-to-agent ad deals, ran its first 3 live agent-to-agent transactions in North America in 2026, according to the profile of its North America president. Kovva builds AI agents for media buying teams. Bluefish tracks how brands show up in AI answers, the same shift that is eating search clicks for SEO affiliates.

The money: which segments grow fastest

We took every public company on the list and pulled its latest reported results. Q3 2026 reports mostly arrive in November (The Trade Desk reports on November 9), so most figures below are for Q2 2026.

In short: the fastest money on this list is in commerce media, mobile apps and CTV, and the largest platforms are slowing down.

Commerce media grows fastest. Fluent's Commerce Media Solutions revenue grew 90% and now makes up 63% of the company's revenue. Fluent says the unit's annual revenue run rate is above $125 million. This is the business of offers shown to a shopper right after checkout, and it's the closest thing to affiliate marketing on the whole list.

Mobile app ads come second. Liftoff, which went public in June 2026, grew revenue 35%. Mobvista, the parent of Mintegral, grew 23.2% in the first half. PubMatic says its own mobile app revenue grew over 40% and is now about 25% of its total.

CTV keeps growing, but not for everyone. Magnite's CTV contribution ex-TAC grew 36%, while its other sell-side business grew 2%. Nexxen's CTV revenue grew 33% and is now 40% of its programmatic revenue. Viant says CTV advertiser spend on its platform grew nearly 50%. PubMatic's CTV grew only 13%.

The biggest platforms are slowing down or being bought. The Trade Desk grew 3% in Q2 2026, after 19% in Q2 2025, and expects at least $650 million in Q3. On August 6, Nielsen agreed to buy DoubleVerify for $13.60 per share in cash. On June 15, Fox agreed to buy Roku, so 2 honoree employers on this list are about to become one.

Women-led companies on the list, and the growth they report

36 of the 184 honorees hold a CEO, founder, president or COO title, some of them for a region or a division, and 17 founded or co-founded their company. Most of them don't run public companies, so the only growth figures are the ones in their honoree profiles.

Niki Bansal runs the kind of company many ad networks are built on. TeqBlaze sells white-label ad tech: a network or a publisher gets its own exchange, SSP or DSP under its own brand. The company says its roots go back to 2014 and that it became independent in 2024. According to her profile, Bansal started as a technical project manager, spun the team out of a larger group and is a 32-year-old CEO.

Niki Bansal

CEO

TeqBlaze. AdExchanger Top Women in Media & Ad Tech 2026: honoree in AI Media Innovators (awards gala, New York, November 3, 2026).

Katherine Tuluzova sits where AI search meets publisher revenue. She has been CEO of Sigma Software since June 2025, and she chairs Prebid's LLM & Pub Monetization task force. Its stated job is to help publishers create new revenue streams or keep existing ones as AI search changes traffic. If you run content sites, that is your problem too.

Katherine Tuluzova

CEO

Sigma Software. AdExchanger Top Women in Media & Ad Tech 2026: honoree in AI Media Innovators (awards gala, New York, November 3, 2026).

Tanja Mimica is on her second ad tech startup. Her first, Martin, was bought by PubMatic, which announced the deal on September 14, 2022. Now she is co-founder and COO of Kovva, which builds AI agents for media buying teams.

More founders and CEOs to watch: Rosie O'Meara, CEO of the location-based ad platform GroundTruth since April 2024; Kamya Elawadhi, co-founder and president of the healthcare ad platform Doceree; Lotta Lautsuo, co-founder of Givsly; and Vanessa Otero, founder of Ad Fontes Media, which rates news for bias and reliability and sells that data to advertisers. Lauren Wetzel, the Catalyst Award winner, was CEO of the data collaboration company InfoSum when WPP bought it in April 2025.

Some of the strongest numbers come from operators, not founders. These are also self-reported in the profiles:

• Optable: ARR grew 77% since October 2025, according to the profile of VP of Sales Crystal Jacques.
• Attain: revenue grew more than 100% year over year, according to the profile of Jackie Carroll.
• BidMachine: Berta Moreno's team looks after DSP clients with about $500 million in annualized gross ad spend, and her own book of business grew revenue 40% year over year.
• PatientPoint: a new audience product is on track to grow its programmatic business more than 4 times year over year, according to Kate Calabrese's profile.
• Chicory: revenue grew 9 times while Meghan Howard ran sales, before she became CRO.

What it means for affiliates and media buyers

Commerce media is the neighbour to watch. Offers after checkout (Rokt, Fluent), retailer ad networks (Kroger, The Home Depot), PayPal and Uber selling ads on their own data: it's all performance advertising sold on purchase data. If you work e-commerce offers, these are the teams buying and selling that traffic.

Fluent, Inc.

Offers shown to shoppers right after checkout on partner sites.

Visit site Read the review

In-app is where growth is, and you already buy there. Moloco, Liftoff, Mintegral and BidMachine all sell app install and in-app traffic. Their growth means more competition for that inventory, but also more formats and more budgets on these platforms.

Moloco

Performance advertising platform that bids in real time on in-app and connected-TV inventory outside the large closed platforms, with a second product for retail media.

Visit site Read the review

The affiliate world has its own seat at the table. impact.com, a partnership platform where brands run affiliate and partner programs, has 2 honorees: Chief Customer Officer Jessica Breslav and CMO Cristy Garcia. According to Garcia's profile, marketing grew its share of new business from 25% to 50%, and the company's iPX event series brings in over $1 million a year.

Is a $595 gala ticket worth it for an affiliate? It's an awards dinner, not a trade show: no booths, no offers, no traffic sources pitching. It pays off if you sell to commerce media, CTV or in-app teams and want 3 hours in a room with their leaders. The $1,199 forum is about leadership and careers, not about traffic.