Three industry veterans discuss the trends every advertiser should understand heading into 2026, including the crisis of programmatic waste, the rise of agentic AI, and the growing importance of consumer trust.
Key Takeaways:
1. Media quality must become a strategic priority: With only 36 cents of every programmatic dollar reaching publishers, it’s critical for advertisers to invest in verification tools and transparent supply paths to deliver real effectiveness.
2. CTV "premium" inventory requires scrutiny and validation: CTV inventory quality often falls short of advertiser expectations, requiring more rigorous evaluation and ongoing monitoring throughout campaigns.
3. Agentic AI adoption demands careful experimentation: As AI evolves from assistive to autonomous, marketers should start with small pilots, invest in their teams’ prompting skills, and prioritize enterprise tools that protect intellectual property.
4. Trust-building requires continuous strategic investment: With trust now as important as price and quality in purchase decisions, brands must leverage customer evangelists, maintain authentic creative, place ads in trusted environments, and use diverse measurement approaches to track results.
From AI breakthroughs to the proliferation of retail media networks to significant industry consolidation through M&A activity, 2025 brought transformative shifts that forced advertisers to rethink their strategies.
To explore how these shifts may impact brands and agencies in 2026, we brought together three industry veterans to share their insights and predictions. Their discussion spanned the challenges of supply chain transparency, the complexities of CTV inventory quality, the practical implications of agentic AI adoption, and the strategies brands are using to build authentic consumer trust—all critical trends that every advertiser should understand heading into 2026.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Programmatic advertising waste has reached crisis levels, with only 36 cents of every dollar reaching consumers while the rest disappears into opaque fees and intermediaries. What does it look like when advertisers treat media quality as a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have?
April Weeks | Chief Investment & Media Officer, Basis: First, it looks like advertisers safeguarding the media quality of their buys by partnering with media quality and brand safety verification vendors like Peer39, DoubleVerify, and IAS. It’s easy for brands to avoid paying for those when they sound like they’re “extras.” But when they’re not included, low value inventory seeps in.
Like most things in life, you get what you pay for. When advertisers don’t take measures to protect their spend, they’re trading efficiency for effectiveness. Personally, I place less value on how efficient a buy was—I care about how effective it was. When you chase the efficiency game with low CPMs, you sacrifice high-quality inventory and the effectiveness needed to drive real outcomes.
Grace Briscoe | EVP of Client Development, Basis: This is one of those areas where advertisers can make the mistake of valuing and measuring the wrong metrics. If you focus on maintaining low CPMs or a low cost per click rather than on the outcomes your media plan is driving, you’re going to end up spending on lower quality, cheaper inventory.
Katie McAdams | Chief Marketing Officer, Basis: Those short-term vanity metrics can look really good from an efficiency standpoint. But in the long term, you’re trading effectiveness for efficiency.
GB: I also think it’s important for advertisers to get really clear about what they consider to be premium inventory. I’ve grown to kind of hate the word “premium”, because if you ask five different advertisers to define it, you’re going to get five different answers. It’s not an objective standardized term. It’s an opinion.
Take, for example, some brands avoiding news content. There’s this knee-jerk reaction to block all news because advertisers don’t want to show up near anything negative. But I would consider journalistic news content to be premium, and when advertisers avoid it, I think it continues a cycle of defunding quality content. And that hurts the whole ecosystem in the long run.
AW: I completely agree. Gaming is another great example of both a channel and content that’s easy to stereotype. There’s this idea that gaming only reaches teenage boys sitting in their basements, but that’s not the case at all. If you look at the research and the audience data, a lot of women and high-income households are engaging with gaming content and platforms regularly. So another essential part of the story here is the importance of taking an informed and data-driven approach to how you’re defining inventory, rather than making assumptions.
KM: I think similar assumptions can lead advertisers down the wrong path when it comes to connecting with diverse audiences. Buyers tend to assume that general audience inventory is going to give them spillover into diverse audiences, but that’s often not the case. They need to tap into the supply networks that truly represent the publishers where those audiences spend time.
AW: That’s right, and it's a critical point at a time when the economic impact of diverse audiences continues to increase. The best way to reach diverse audiences is to take an authentic community approach, tapping into specific inventory sources that curate high-quality content that actually resonates and is specific to those audiences.
Speaking of “premium,” that label has largely lost its meaning across CTV, as advertisers paying for inventory on major streaming platforms often end up with ads running on long-tail apps and user-generated content. Considering that “premium” no longer guarantees quality in CTV, how are leading advertisers adapting their CTV strategies?
GB: Again, I think it’s important to note that premium is in the eye of the beholder. When it comes to streaming TV, does inventory qualify as “premium” because of its production value? Because it’s sold by a major streaming service? Or is it about the ad load of how many ads are shown within that content?
I do think we’re seeing brands demand more transparency—particularly in the CTV space— because there are a lot of players in the marketplace operating as black boxes and offering opaque bundles. Often when you start to unpack those bundles, you realize that the “CTV inventory” you purchased actually had a lot of mobile video or other online video mixed in.
There are ways to tell when inventory isn’t premium, though. If the CPM seems too good to be true, then it probably is—you’re not getting ESPN for a sub-$30 CPM. So it’s important for advertisers to evaluate those kinds of signals critically.
KM: It’s also critical for advertisers to check in on their campaigns midstream. That’s when you can validate if your ads are really landing where you placed them and make changes if needed.
GB: Right. Some of that also has to do with how clean the supply path is and maximizing how much of your spend is going as directly as possible to publishers with as few middlemen as possible. The more you tap into aggregators and resellers, the less transparency you have, and the quality starts to go downhill as well.
AW: That ties into the dialogue around the value of curation. With curation, you’re adding another middleman to the supply chain. Curation partners are supposed to filter, bundle, and curate high-quality inventory that delivers access to valuable audiences in premium environments. But is that worth the additional cut they take? These are the questions advertisers have to ask themselves: what’s the value, and is it worth the additional cost and supply chain complexity? The best way to know is to test and learn—understand the potential lift in performance vs. the cost trade-offs by implementing curation.
I would also note that the inclusion of ACR (or automatic content recognition) data, and overlaying ACR data from a reporting standpoint, provides an additional level of granularity around placements, which can help validate you’re getting the quality you want.
GB: ACR also gives you a lot more visibility—for example, frequency of ads per household and the incremental reach. If you’re buying, say, linear TV as well as CTV, then ACR allows you to see how much of the audience is unique versus overlap and duplication. You might see that certain viewers were exposed to an ad on NBC news on linear TV, but also got impressions from Tubi on CTV. Then you can start to optimize on that information— perhaps reallocating budget because it might be a much more effective CPM to reach those viewers on Tubi than it is on primetime linear TV.
AW: And ACR can also help by showing when you’re burning impressions against the same audience.
There are some other important considerations when it comes to targeting and addressability as well. We know there’s often a high, high degree of inaccuracy with IP-based targeting. Considering that, using first-party data and deterministic data layered into buys is a good strategy to increase the integrity of your TV targeting.
Deterministic data—which could be something like user verified login data—is the most precise data advertisers can use for targeting. Probabilistic data, on the other hand, is modeled data inferred from deterministic data, which means that it’s less accurate. It's really important for advertisers to understand these different types of data, because many platforms claim that they can offer addressability, but the accuracy of that addressability varies significantly based on the kind of data powering it.
Agentic AI is poised to fundamentally transform marketing operations, evolving AI from assistive technology into autonomous systems capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks independently. What lessons from the rise of generative AI and the industry’s approach to adopting those AI tools can help marketers more effectively adopt agentic AI?
AW: One thing I would say is that many of the use cases for both gen AI and agentic AI are undefined. Because of that, it’s important for marketers to be open and curious about exploring different possible use cases.
Additionally, my belief is that AI—whether it be generative or agentic—is becoming an overused and almost abused term. You have to ask questions, because there are a lot of companies claiming to have AI solutions where, when you pull back the layers, the tools are actually very clunky, not well developed, and may not be true AI tools.
KM: That all rings very true with my team’s experience as well. As advertisers start testing agentic AI, I’d recommend starting with very small pilots. It takes time to build confidence and trust that an agentic AI tool is going to be able to, for example, capably represent your brand or market it in the same way that you’d expect an employee to. That trust is only going to come with time and testing and learning. That's why it's best to start with a small, controlled test where you're comfortable with some margin of error.
GB: I’d also recommend that advertisers keep in mind that generative AI and agentic AI are both tools that are still very much people-powered, and the outputs are only as good as the inputs. I think of these AI tools as interfaces between human thinking and computational superpower.
KM: Yes—to build upon what Grace is saying, humans should be questioning all the responses they receive from AI tools. You need to continually question and test the narrative they’re creating for you. And, to Grace’s point about AI tools being people-powered, that drives home the importance of having skilled prompters. It’s really important to invest in those skills among your team.
Personally, I’ve also seen a lot of progression and improvement in enterprise AI tools like Copilot. I think we’re going to see those enterprise tools grow to be more on par with the other major tools, and we may see companies mandating that their employees only use those pre-approved enterprise tools as they seek to protect their IP.
AW: Agreed. The way these enterprise tools can store and process so much of a company’s data and information really unlocks a lot of use cases that people may have previously been hesitant about, because they were concerned with data privacy and security.
GB: That brings to mind some of the concerns I've heard from several brands and marketers: If we're all using the same generative or agentic AI tools for creative purposes, are all our ads going to look the same? How do you ensure that your brand's identity and integrity and data stay yours and don't get diluted or distributed? Enterprise tools offer solutions for some of those concerns, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
New studies show that trust has emerged as equally important to price and quality in consumer purchase decisions. At the same time, in an era marked by cultural volatility, social fragmentation, and widespread consumer distrust, earning trust represents a significant challenge for many brands. How are brands incorporating trust into their marketing strategies and assessing the success of their efforts?
AW: One thought I have is around the role of influencers within marketing. Research shows that recommendations from family, friends, and trusted influencers can have a greater influence in terms of building trust for the brand than traditional advertising. That impact varies among categories, but for many brands, a strategy around building trust may look like reevaluating how they leverage brand ambassadors and influencer marketing.
KM: I agree. To extend that into the world of B2B, brands really need to invest in things like customer marketing and look at their customer evangelists as their best marketing tool. Ultimately, people are going to have more trust in a brand if they are hearing good things from someone who’s actually a customer. That’s always going to feel more authentic than what a brand says about themselves. The goal is to build a system where word of mouth is consistently generating leads.
Another critical piece of trust-building is authenticity when it comes to your ads and your creative. Going back to AI, brands need to use generative AI in a way where they’re still creating things that look and feel authentic to their brand.
And then, lastly, this also connects back to our conversation around media quality. When consumers see ads in trusted environments, in context of trusted content, that’s going to further brand trust. On the flip side, seeing the same ad run on an MFA site creates a poor user experience, which impacts how people perceive and feel about the brand.
AW: Yes, 100%. When it comes to measuring trust in a certain brand, social listening comes to mind as one good way for advertisers to get a baseline of consumer sentiment around a brand. Brand studies are another solid option.
GB: There’s no silver bullet that’s going to give you a full picture, so advertisers need to leverage a variety of different approaches to get an accurate read on consumer sentiment—a combination of social listening, customer reviews, customer surveys, brand lift studies, maybe a brand index study, et cetera. Using only one of those lenses to assess consumer trust will likely give advertisers a skewed view, so it’s important to embrace a healthy mix of approaches.
KM: It's really about identifying all the touchpoints where customers interact with or talk about your brand, then figuring out how to collect and analyze that information holistically.
AW: I would also add there’s a benefit in widening the aperture and looking not just at your own brand, but what’s happening in your sector more broadly. For example, if there’s a particularly high level of consumer distrust in your sector, what opportunities does that open for your brand to rethink their positioning to gain trust?
GB: One last recommendation: To build brand trust, brand marketing needs to be continuous. As soon as you disinvest in that, your customer base will erode over time.
KM: This all goes back to the effectiveness vs. efficiency play that we were talking about at the beginning.
GB: Full circle.
AW: Full circle!
It's critical for leaders at agencies and brands to nurture a thorough understanding of how these four trends are likely to develop over the next year. Check out Rewinding to Fast Forward: The 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report for more insights advertisers can use to gain a competitive edge in 2026.
