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Much like the arrival of digital advertising several decades ago, agentic advertising has gone from emerging concept to leadership priority remarkably fast.
Two-thirds of ad buyers say agentic AI ad buying and execution is an increased focus this year, and 84% name media planning and buying recommendations as a current or likely use case, according to IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study. For many, the first instinct is to ask which AI tool to buy. But what actually determines success is whether an agency’s data infrastructure can support an agent that plans, decides, and executes on its own.
Agentic advertising is advertising run by an AI system that executes multiple steps toward a goal with less human intervention at each step. In agentic advertising workflows, a person sets the goal and reviews the output rather than approving every action, while AI typically moves between the intermediate steps on its own. Taking a media brief from strategy through planning, activation, optimization, and reporting is one example, but the same pattern applies wherever an agent carries a multi-step task to completion. It sits a step beyond rule-based automation and a step short of fully autonomous advertising, and it’s a tier agencies are already putting to work or actively exploring.
Agentic advertising can be powerful, effective, and efficient…but it can also be unforgiving. When an AI system shifts budgets, adjusts targeting, and executes media buys with less human review at each step, the quality of the data underneath it decides almost everything. An agent pointed at fragmented, stale, or un-auditable data won’t recognize anything is wrong, and it will still act, executing the errors at machine speed—faster than anyone can review and correct them.
An agency’s readiness for agentic advertising, then, is a question of data infrastructure. This guide walks through the four dimensions that determine whether agentic workflows will deliver for an agency: data centralization, workflow integration, system-of-record integrity, and governance and auditability.
Though automation, agentic, and autonomous often get used interchangeably and there is some overlap, they do not mean precisely the same thing. Understanding each is an important first step to determining whether an agency is ready for agentic advertising.
Advertising automation uses AI and software to plan, activate, optimize, and reconcile campaign tasks with reduced manual intervention. It spans four maturity tiers:
Knowing where a platform actually sits on that spectrum—and what role(s) it plays in the process—is the first filter for any serious evaluation. To learn more about how to choose a platform, check out AI and Advertising Automation in 2026.
Agentic advertising is a form of advertising automation (and a tier below fully autonomous advertising) where an AI agent executes multiple steps toward a goal with less human intervention at each step. Compass, Basis’ AI for omnichannel media planning and activation, is a good example of agentic advertising. It turns briefs into complete, insight-driven media strategies, allocating spend across channels and audiences spanning both the open web and walled gardens. And every recommendation from Compass is accompanied by the reasoning behind it, so a media planner can review the logic, refine the plan, and activate on their own terms.
Autonomous advertising builds on agentic advertising and takes it a step further, with multiple agents orchestrating together simultaneously, each handling part of the workflow and coordinating without a human directing the handoffs. Few organizations run true autonomous advertising yet, but it is where the industry is heading. Getting there depends on a unified operating system that connects planning, activation, and reporting across channels, a foundation many agencies don’t yet have in place.
| Advertising Automation | Agentic Advertising | Autonomous Advertising | |
| How it works | A spectrum, from if-then rules to independent optimization | One agent, multiple steps, less intervention at each step | Multiple agents orchestrating simultaneously |
| Human role | Sets the rules or parameters | Sets the goal, reviews the output | Sets the objective and guardrails; oversees and reviews |
| Maturity | Widespread | In use now, but limited adoption | Emerging |
A strong, unified data foundation becomes more important the higher a platform sits on the automation spectrum. A single agentic system is only as sound as the data it acts on. Coordinate several agents autonomously, and any weakness in that shared foundation compounds across all of them at once. Readiness for agentic advertising, and eventually autonomous advertising, is an infrastructure question before it is an AI question.
Much of the industry debate over agentic tools fixates on the underlying models (ex. proprietary methodologies versus generic LLMs) and on which is best suited to the task at hand.
Yet even the right model for the job is governed primarily by the system and the data it acts on. A generic large language model working from clean, unified, owned performance data will likely make better media decisions than a proprietary or task-specific one working from fragmented, siloed inputs. That is why data quality, rather than simply AI adoption, is a primary predictor of whether AI advertising delivers differentiated results for an agency.
Give an agentic system only a partial view of performance and it will optimize against it with full confidence, moving spend toward what looks efficient in isolation, losing sight of how channels perform together—and with no human reviewing each step to catch it. The problem compounds because the infrastructure most agencies run wasn’t built for autonomous decision-making.
Basis’ 2026 Advertising Agency Report found that 36.8% of full-service and media agencies now manage 10 or more adtech tools, more than double the share two years ago, with inefficient processes (44.1%) and siloed, disconnected systems (40.4%) ranking as their top operational challenges. An AI agent inherits that fragmentation. As such, readiness for agentic advertising means ensuring a strong data foundation first.
An agency’s readiness for agentic advertising comes down to four dimensions of data infrastructure. Each one determines whether an agent can act on a complete, trustworthy, accountable picture, or a broken one. These four dimensions also align with how to evaluate any platform’s automation: workflow coverage, integration depth, maturity-tier honesty, and human-in-the-loop control.
| Dimension | Not Ready | Partially Ready | Ready |
| Data Centralization | Data lives in separate channel tools and spreadsheets | Some sources integrated; gaps remain across channels | All channels and historical performance unified in one view |
| Workflow Integration | Planning, buying, and reporting happen in disconnected systems | Some stages connected; manual handoffs persist | An agent can act across the full workflow in one unified platform |
| System-of-Record Integrity | No single source of truth; duplicated, conflicting records | One source of truth exists but isn’t consistently maintained | Clean, owned, continuously maintained record agents can trust |
| Governance & Auditability | No way to trace what an automated system did or why | Some logging; not decision-level or client-ready | Every automated decision is logged, explainable, and auditable |
What it is: All of an agency’s campaign data, across every channel and reaching back through historical performance, accessible in one place.
Why agentic workflows fail without it: An agent optimizes against the data it can see. When display, CTV, search, and social live in separate tools, the agent makes confident decisions on a fragment, shifting budget toward what looks efficient in one silo while missing how channels perform together. The gap between what the agent sees and what is actually happening becomes the gap between its decisions and good ones.
How to assess: Could an agent see every channel and historical results without a person assembling the data first?
What ready looks like: A unified data foundation where cross-channel and historical performance are already consolidated, so an agent acts on the whole picture rather than a slice of it.
What it is: Planning, activation, optimization, reporting, and billing connected in one continuous workflow, rather than stitched together across separate systems via human intervention or manual work.
Why agentic workflows fail without it: An agent can recommend a budget shift, but if a person still has to re-key that shift into a separate buying tool, the speed advantage evaporates and errors enter at every handoff. A Forrester Total Economic Impact study of the Basis platform found that consolidating those workflows reduced manual steps by 40% and media operations time by 43%, the exact overhead that keeps agents from acting end to end.
How to assess: Once an agent makes a decision, can it act on that decision across workflows without a human moving it between systems?
What ready looks like: A connected workflow where an agent’s decision flows through planning, buying, reporting, and billing without manual re-entry.
What it is: A single, clean, continuously maintained source of truth for what happened in every campaign, owned by the agency rather than scattered across vendor exports.
Why agentic workflows fail without it: An agent treats its system of record as reality. If that record holds duplicated, stale, or conflicting numbers, the agent doesn’t hesitate over the discrepancy the way a person might. Weak data quality is already the constraint most teams name, with 45% of marketers saying they expect data quality or accessibility to pose significant challenges to their AI efforts over the next one to two years. Owning that record, rather than renting fragments of it from each channel, is what makes it trustworthy enough to hand to an agent.
How to assess: When two systems disagree on a number today, does the agency have one record that serves as the source of truth?
What ready looks like: One owned, deduplicated, continuously updated record that both the agency’s team and an agent can act on without reconciling exports first.
What it is: The ability to trace what an agentic advertising tool did, why it did it, and to intervene, for every decision it makes.
Why agentic workflows fail without it: Agencies must stay accountable to their clients, and any decision an agent cannot explain can turn into a decision the agency cannot defend. As human oversight moves out of each individual step, the ability to reconstruct what happened afterward becomes the safeguard. This is where agentic AI has to be built for transparency rather than treated as a black box. Compass, for example, pairs every recommendation with the reasoning behind it, so a team can see what drove each allocation, adjust it, and activate with confidence. Auditability is also what makes governance real across brand safety and privacy obligations, where an agency has to show both the outcome and the decision path that led there.
How to assess: If a client asked why an agent moved their budget last week, could the agency show them the reasoning and the trail behind it?
What ready looks like: Every automated decision is logged, explainable in plain terms, and open to human override, so autonomy never comes at the cost of accountability.
Agencies adopting agentic workflows need a complete, trustworthy, accountable foundation for their agents to act on. That is what the Basis platform is built to be, the operating system for autonomous advertising, with AI like Compass woven directly inside it.
Basis consolidates the full advertising workflow, unifying planning, activation, optimization, reporting, and reconciliation across programmatic, search, social, and CTV in one platform, rather than a stack of single-purpose point tools. That consolidation is what turns the four readiness dimensions from aspirations into defaults. Data centralization comes from unifying every channel and campaign into one dataset. Workflow integration comes from connecting planning through reporting so decisions flow without re-keying. System-of-record integrity comes from owning that dataset rather than reconciling vendor exports. Governance comes from the controls Basis applies to how that data is accessed, used, and tracked across workflows. And because it runs inside that same governance, Compass brings transparency to the decisions themselves, pairing every recommendation with the reasoning behind it.
The four dimensions are what separate agencies that can act on agentic workflows now from those that need to build readiness for them. Basis is built so they come as defaults rather than a project an agency has to assemble on its own.
What is agentic advertising?
Agentic advertising is advertising run by an AI system that executes multiple steps toward a goal with less human intervention at each step. A person sets the goal and reviews the output rather than approving every action, while the system moves between the intermediate steps on its own. Taking a media brief from strategy through planning, activation, and optimization is one example, though the same pattern applies wherever an agent carries a multi-step task to completion. It sits between rule-based automation, which follows if-then rules a person defines, and autonomous advertising, where multiple agents coordinate simultaneously. Agencies are using agentic advertising today, including through Compass, Basis’ agentic AI for omnichannel media planning and activation.
What is autonomous advertising?
Autonomous advertising is advertising run by multiple AI agents that orchestrate together simultaneously, each handling part of the workflow and coordinating without a person directing the handoffs. It sits one tier beyond agentic advertising, where a single agent executes multiple steps toward a goal on its own. Few organizations run true autonomous advertising today, but it is the direction the advertising industry is heading.
Which advertising platforms have launched agentic tools?
Basis offers agentic capabilities today through Compass, its AI for omnichannel media planning and activation, and SmartBid, its AI for real-time campaign optimization. Several adtech and point-solution vendors have launched narrower agentic features as well, though most operate within a single channel or workflow stage rather than across the full campaign lifecycle.
Which AI advertising tools are built on proprietary methodologies versus generic LLMs?
Compass is trained on Basis’ proprietary IMPACT campaign framework, a planning methodology tested across thousands of media campaigns, rather than reasoning from general-purpose training data alone. A model grounded in proprietary, campaign-tested data and unified performance history has an edge—but that edge only holds when the data underneath it is clean and unified, which makes the advantage an infrastructure question more than a model question.
Which advertising platforms reduce manual campaign operations?
Platforms that consolidate the campaign workflow reduce manual operations most. A Forrester Total Economic Impact study of the Basis platform found consolidation reduced manual steps by 40% and media operations time by 43%. SmartBid further cuts manual work by handling bid and budget adjustments automatically against live performance signals, freeing teams to focus on strategy.
How can an agency tell if it is ready for agentic advertising?
An agency can assess readiness across four infrastructure dimensions: data centralization, workflow integration, system-of-record integrity, and governance and auditability. If its data is unified, its workflow is connected end to end, its system of record is clean and owned, and every automated decision is auditable, agentic workflows can deliver. Gaps in any dimension are what to resolve first.
Key Takeaways:
One might expect that the more time consumers spend with a certain channel, the more money advertisers would want to invest in it. In reality, however, the two rarely match.
Some channels, like CTV, command far more consumer time than their share of ad dollars suggest. Others, like social media, attract spend that far outpaces the time consumers give them.
These gaps are, in part, a result of the pressure to prove how every dollar spent contributes to business outcomes. This pressure can lead teams to overinvest in channels with advanced performance offerings, thereby undermining the long-term demand and brand equity built by upper-funnel marketing. Understanding these dynamics is key to crafting effective media plans in 2026, especially as economic anxiety makes consumers more discerning with their spending.
Divergences between the percent of daily time spent by US consumers and the percent of total US media ad spend show up across many (if not most) advertising channels.
The divide is particularly pronounced on subscription OTT, where ad spend accounts for 12.5 percentage points less than consumer time spent, and social media, where ad spend accounts for 15.2 percentage points more than consumer time spent.
Adding to the disconnect, social engagement is growing by only a few minutes annually, but ad spend will grow by over 20% in 2026. This phenomenon is largely driven by Meta platforms: US adults spend 3.9% of their daily time with digital media on Facebook and 3.4% on Instagram, but those channels receive 11.9% and 12.8% of total US digital ad spending, respectively.
There are a variety of reasons behind the gaps between consumer time spent and ad spend. CTV inventory, for example, is expensive to buy, and producing broadcast-quality video adds another layer of cost, keeping the channel out of reach for many advertisers despite its heavy viewership. Social platforms sit at the other end of the spectrum, with comparatively low CPMs and low barriers to entry that make them approachable for smaller-budget teams. On the other hand, audio and radio draw significant daily time but tend to be consumed more passively, which may be part of why they attract less spend despite the hours consumers listen.
These factors explain part of the picture, but they don't account for the full size of the gap. The imbalances are also rooted in advertisers’ efforts to demonstrate the impact of every dollar spent. CMOs are increasingly under pressure to deliver measurable business outcomes, which understandably leads marketing teams to invest more in channels whose performance advertising offerings make ROI easy to show.
Meta is a prime example, offering granular targeting, massive scale, and conversion tracking that ties spend directly to outcomes—likely one of the main factors driving advertisers to invest so heavily in Facebook and Instagram. In contrast, CTV has a reputation for being more difficult to measure, which is part of why ad spend drags so heavily behind consumer time spent.
Channels that make ROI easy to prove have real value. At the same time, attribution-based measurement can overstate how much performance marketing actually contributes. These methods tend to over-credit the channels closest to the point of purchase, skewing the picture of how channels work together to drive results. For example, one study found that 30% of paid search clicks are attributable to other advertising channels (mostly video). And the channels with the biggest imbalances between time spent and ad spend are where this dynamic plays out most, with a recent ad effectiveness analysis showing that large brands tend to heavily overspend on social.
These skewed understandings of channel contribution are a problem because overinvesting in performance marketing can backfire. Reports have framed this trend as defining the industry’s “performance era,” finding that these overinvestments can decrease revenue returns by 20% to 50%, while moving from a more performance-focused investment profile to one that balances performance with brand can increase overall revenue returns by a median of 90%.
“You can’t just chase performance,” says Kelly Boyle, SVP of Strategic Business Outcomes at Basis. “If you’re not building future demand, your performance marketing will eventually lose steam.”
Finding the optimal media mix for each brand and campaign depends on marketing teams’ approach to measurement. Attribution-based measurement is often platform-specific, which leaves advertisers without a clear view of how investments across different channels work together. Modern modeling approaches like MMM, regression modeling, and scenario planning, on the other hand, show teams how investments across channels and platforms can optimally work together to drive business outcomes. Platform-specific attribution should remain a core function, but modern modeling is essential to seeing the full picture.
Of course, consumer time spent is just one consideration to factor into a media strategy. “Every brand’s audience and their consumer journey is different,” says Boyle. “It’s not just about showing up in the places where people are spending time. It’s also important to consider, ‘Where is my audience being influenced? Where are they making decisions? Where are they in the right mindset for a certain message?’”
Ultimately, the most successful advertisers use a granular understanding of the brand's customer journey—informed by platform-specific measurement and modern modeling as well as additional consumer signals and market research—to allocate budget where it will actually move the business.
Channels that make ROI easy to demonstrate have earned their place in the media mix. At the same time, it’s important for advertisers to understand how last-click attribution can lead teams to overinvest in them—and that it does so at the expense of the brand-building that sustains performance over time.
In response, leading marketing teams are evolving their measurement approaches to get a clearer picture of how their investments work together and allocating accordingly. Ultimately, the quality of a team's measurement approach is what separates spending that looks good from spending that actually grows the business.
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Want to go deeper on what better measurement looks like in 2026? In Bringing Momentum to Measurement: What Marketers Are Missing in the Pursuit of Effectiveness, Basis experts break down where most teams get stuck and what measurement approaches actually drive effectiveness.
The way people consume media has splintered across platforms. But many of the brand safety signals used to determine where ads should and shouldn't appear haven't kept pace. As a result, advertisers are excluding valuable inventory, missing relevant audiences, and paying for impressions that meet technical safety standards but fail to deliver real performance.
In this webinar, Sara Maskivish, SVP of Market Enablement - Verification at Protected by Mediaocean, joins host Noor Naseer to unpack what modern brand safety and suitability strategies require. They’ll explore how a smarter approach to brand safety and suitability can help advertisers balance scale, relevance, and risk while improving the effectiveness of every media dollar.
What you'll learn:
Innocean needed to scale campaign execution, improve spend efficiency, and maintain performance without increasing operational overhead.
The California-based full-service agency manages media for Wienerschnitzel, a franchise brand with 300+ stores, co-op funded budgets, and frequent promotional cycles, such as "Wiener Wednesdays." The franchise structure centered by equitable budget distribution across all stores, but was challenged by:
To overcome the challenges, Innocean turned to Basis to bring structure, automation, and data-driven decisioning to their media operation. Basis and Innocean focused on eliminating inefficiencies in targeting, planning, and execution while building a foundation that could support continued growth. With Basis, Innocean was able to achieve:
As the Weiner Wednesday promotion campaign gained traction, media investments shifted from launch-level support to reminder-focused messaging, demonstrating the team's ability to sustain business impact more efficiently over time.
Basis provided a data-driven approach that helped Innocean scale franchise media more efficiently while driving measurable in-store impact, with resulting including:
“Basis has been a transformative partner to the Wienerschnitzel business, elevating our media approach through innovative strategy, measurable impact, and exceptional collaboration.”
– Leo Hernandez | Media Director, Innocean
Key Takeaways:
The economy is weighing on consumers.
Amidst an uncertain job market, persistent inflation, and ongoing geopolitical tensions, consumer sentiment has taken a hit. In the second quarter of 2026, the share of US consumers feeling optimistic about the economy fell to its lowest point in two years.
Despite the hardship, market conditions have not translated to a recession economy—at least as of yet—as consumer spending is forecast to dip only about 1% in the second half of the year. The US ad market also remains strong, with ad spend projected to grow by 9.5% in 2026 (and those gains aren't just a byproduct of political, Olympics, and World Cup spending).
All together, today’s market looks more like a value economy: Consumers are spending more cautiously and taking the time to hunt for the best deals. For advertisers, understanding how to adjust campaign strategies in response is key to success.
While consumer financial wellbeing remains resilient, economic concerns are impacting discretionary purchases, with a larger share of consumers planning to spend less on nonessential items and experiences over the next few months than last quarter.
That caution runs deepest among lower-income households. However, higher- and middle-income consumers reported the steepest declines in optimism in Q2, with many reconsidering their "nice-to-haves." Given that groceries cost about a third more than they did in 2019, with housing and family health insurance up by even greater proportions, the rising cost of “must-haves” is putting pressure on the budget consumers otherwise reserve for wants.
That shift is already showing up in consumer spending, with retail sales slipping in July for the first time in nine months.
Increased caution around discretionary spending will likely play out in a few different ways. Some consumers will postpone purchases, weighing whether their old phone or car can last another six months. Others will make trade-offs rather than cut spending, hunting for the best value they can find across categories like travel, retail, and clothing. And some will forego certain purchases entirely, deciding a nonessential isn't worth the money right now.
The common thread is that consumers are scrutinizing discretionary purchases and looking harder for reasons to justify their spending—which means it's on advertisers to supply that justification.
Economy-related shifts in consumer sentiment and behavior should inform brands' messaging more than their media strategies. For most categories, the audience and media mix don't need to change when consumers grow cautious. By adjusting messaging, however, brands can give discerning consumers the justification they need to make a purchase.
Considering this, value-based messaging is key. As consumers evaluate cheaper alternatives, brands should make the case for their premium—for example, by showing how their product outperforms or outlasts competitors’. And as consumers consider postponing purchases, brands should give them clear reasons to buy now, such as a limited-time offer.
As consumers have grown more cautious, many brands have done the same. I’ve seen some begin gravitating more towards performance marketing, seeking measurable returns that make investments more easily defensible.
Leaning harder into performance makes sense when budgets are under scrutiny and marketers need to demonstrate ROI. But pulling back on brand marketing for too long tends to backfire. When brands don’t continuously generate demand at the top of the funnel, they eventually run out of prospects to convert lower down. History bears this out: Brands that pull back on spending during economic downturns tend to fare worse, while brands that keep investing tend to come out ahead. Even outside of a downturn, one study found that shifting from a performance-focused strategy to a more balanced mix of performance and brand delivered a median revenue ROI increase of 90%.
The risks that come with cutting brand investment are particularly acute for premium brands. A brand that stops making the case for its premium leaves consumers to make purchase decisions based on cost alone—a risky position when value is top of mind. Sustained brand investment is what keeps consumers perceiving a certain brand as worth the premium, even with cheaper alternatives available.
Inflation, geopolitical unrest, and job market uncertainty are changing how consumers spend in 2026. The brands that navigate this period most successfully will be those that meet a more cautious consumer with value-focused messaging and factor in the risks of pulling back on brand marketing for too long.
As economic and geopolitical conditions continue to shift, the brands that keep a pulse on what’s top of mind for consumers will be best positioned to earn their dollars.
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A launch, a relaunch, and a new‑market entry all task media teams with a challenge that is simultaneously complex and high-stakes: Create demand where little or none exists and build the momentum needed to drive growth.
Paid media is a strong driver of scale and visibility in these moments. It is also a discipline that is often asked to compensate for decisions made elsewhere. When positioning is muddy, creative doesn’t land, or the path to purchase has gaps, media is usually the first place teams look for a fix.
That said, “paid media alone isn’t going to be able to launch a brand by itself and just have stellar results,” says Laura Burks, Business Outcomes Partner at Basis. “There’s a lot of coordination required to successfully launch a brand before you even start to talk to the market.”
Positioning, creative, product availability, and the customer journey from start to finish all shape what paid media can accomplish. Perhaps equally important is how closely paid, owned, and earned teams are working toward the same moment.
For the leaders overseeing these launches, more of this is controllable than a compressed timeline suggests, even when the brand strategy arrives (seemingly) fully baked. Researching the category independently, naming the barriers media has to clear, pushing for a single brief across teams, and agreeing on what success looks like before anything goes live all shape how well paid media performs. And doing that work early gives campaigns a far better chance of building durable demand instead of an early peak that drops off quickly.
Key Takeaways:
The strongest launch strategies begin at the category level before narrowing in on brand specifics. Before a plan takes shape, teams need a clear read on what drives purchase in the category, what buyers already expect from any entrant, and where competitors have left room.
By doing this kind of research, teams can test whether what a brand believes makes it unique actually resonates with consumers in that category and matches the kind of messages they respond to.
“It’s easy to fall in love with a brand you’ve created and the aspects you feel make it unique,” says Burks. “But if it doesn’t answer or solve a consumer need, it’s likely going to fall flat when you take it to market.”
Category context also clarifies what a launch is being asked to do, which often varies more than the word “launch” suggests. A challenger brand entering an established category, for instance, needs awareness and credibility. But an established brand adding a line extension or moving into a new market, on the other hand, needs to build relevance and get new buyers to try the product for the first time. Those are decidedly different jobs to be done, and they should lead to different channel mixes, different pacing, and different definitions of early success. For media teams, settling what the launch is actually solving for before debating channels is key, as that answer drives every choice that follows.
How much influence a media team has over these decisions depends heavily on when it enters the conversation. Earlier involvement means more room to shape positioning and messaging. Often, though, the strategy arrives fully formed.
Even then, Burks says, doing the category work is important. Teams should conduct research to understand what’s happening in the category, identify specific consumer expectations, and then use those findings to frame the jobs paid media needs to accomplish. From there, teams can pinpoint the specific barriers standing between the brand and its audience, revisiting them throughout the campaign to determine whether media is actually clearing them.
Coordination across marketing disciplines usually falls apart at the brief, long before it shows up as a problem on the flow chart.
Burks has seen paid media briefed separately from the PR agency, and separately again from the teams building the website and running owned communications. “It creates a disconnect in terms of what everyone’s hearing, the ability for folks across different disciplines to ask questions, and for the whole room to hear the answer,” she says. One brief, delivered to everyone at once, removes that gap.
Sequencing is the other half of the equation. A launch that lands as a single, unmissable moment requires each discipline to peak together, which means starting at different times.
“Peaking together obviously doesn’t mean starting all at the same time,” says Burks. Owned and earned typically begin earlier to build the story and establish credibility. Paid arrives to amplify it, and the peak usually lands when paid turns on.
Building toward that peak takes one connected timeline across PR, creators, owned media, and paid, with each discipline’s lead time and role mapped against it. Research on launch performance shows that successful launches often front‑load investment and activate across three or more channels to drive early awareness. Getting CTV, online video, audio, digital out‑of‑home (DOOH), display, paid social, and paid search to converge on a single date is easier when activation across those channels runs from one view rather than several.
Early traction tends to come from heavy and experienced category buyers, including the fans most likely to extend a launch beyond paid media. But sustaining that growth requires expanding quickly to medium and light buyers, which is what builds broad mental availability and keeps penetration from peaking early and then sliding.
A better‑for‑you snack brand, for example, might open with placements aimed at dedicated health and wellness shoppers who try new products first and talk about them, then widen into mainstream grocery audiences once trial holds.
Finding stage‑one audiences without first‑party data means analyzing behavior in the category: search activity, purchase patterns among competitors, the communities forming around the category, and the creators those communities trust.
“A lot of momentum now bubbles up from communities, which is a real shift from the more top-down way that new products used to reach markets,” Burks says.
Contextual environments are useful here too, since they let teams reach people through the content the category already gathers around. For relaunches and line extensions, existing first‑party data comes first.
New brands often weight spend heavily toward performance, for practical reasons. Revenue has to materialize before broader investment gets approved.
The limitation shows up later, when the pool of in‑market buyers thins out.
“Performance and brand are really intended to do different jobs,” Burks says. “Not everyone’s in market for what you’re offering at a given time.”
Research shows that taking an integrated brand and performance approach raises revenue returns by a median of 90%, and Burks recommends managing that balance deliberately: suppressing recent converters, re-engaging them when they’re ready to buy again, and continuing to build demand among future buyers.
New brands often lack performance history to measure against, which makes benchmarks a matter of triangulation. Burks recommends building them from category norms, channel‑level performance standards, and historical results across comparable verticals—for instance, through strategic partnerships that include access to such data. This gives teams a defensible reference point when none of their own exists yet.
That said, those benchmarks should be treated as a starting position rather than a fixed target. When the ultimate KPI won’t move, try “baby-stepping” backward through the customer journey, identifying gaps, and setting interim goals.
By way of example, consider a regional beverage brand entering three new metros with a trial-driving conversion goal. Two weeks in, coupon downloads are lagging badly. Rather than abandoning the plan, the team could look at where people are dropping off in the journey. If few visitors are reaching the offer page at all, the near-term goal could shift towards driving qualified traffic there and measuring time spent on product education pages, while moving budget toward the channels and site placements driving the most engaged visits. Once that step performs, conversions can become the next milestone.
Burks frames this work as a learning agenda rather than open-ended experimentation. Before launch, teams should establish what they want to learn, how they’ll evaluate performance, and what actions different outcomes will trigger.
“The point isn’t to have all the answers upfront,” she says. “It’s about being deliberate about what you want to learn and how you’ll respond. Learning should shape how the plan evolves, rather than reacting on the fly once you’re in market.”
Acting on those signals requires seeing them in flight. Research that explores “leader” companies (i.e., those with successful launches) finds that such brands are nearly three times more likely to ensure they have real-time access to data, underscoring how critical such capabilities are. Ideally, such data lives in real-time dashboards that consolidate all channels to a single, unified view, making it easier to determine which channels are driving the most impact during launch.
Five conditions that help make for a more successful launch should be set before media goes live: a clear read on the category, one comprehensive brief across every discipline, a sequenced timeline, an audience model that expands, and benchmarks the team agrees on in advance.
From there, advertisers should keep a watchful eye on performance and adjust accordingly. “It’s definitely not a set it and forget it kind of thing,” says Burks. “There’s a lot of testing and learning happening along the way.”
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Interested in how consumers are actually discovering and evaluating brands right now? What the Customer Journey Really Looks Like in 2026 breaks down what a fragmented, AI‑shaped path to purchase means for advertisers.
YouTube is one of the most powerful digital advertising channels for political campaigns in 2026, reaching 76% of registered US voters every week. It recorded 13.8% of total US TV watch-time in May 2026, the largest share of television among all TV distributors for a third consecutive month, and TV screens have surpassed mobile and desktop as the primary way Americans watch it.
It also runs on rules that differ sharply from other digital channels. YouTube blocks voter-file and third-party audience targeting, so campaigns reach voters through placements, topics, keywords, limited demographics (age and gender), and geography down to the congressional district. Premium inventory can sell out. Costs climb 20 to 50% during peak periods. Verification takes time campaigns rarely have.
Those constraints are one reason YouTube rarely stands alone. Most political campaigns run CTV, streaming audio, programmatic display, social, and search alongside it, and every platform added to that stack is another interface to learn, another set of reports to reconcile, and another place where pacing can drift unnoticed. Basis, an AI-powered omnichannel advertising platform used by many political and advocacy campaigns, connects planning, buying, reporting, and billing across those channels in one unified workflow.
This guide covers what political advertisers need to buy YouTube well in 2026: inventory types, ad formats, campaign structures, targeting rules, verification requirements, and cost planning.
Key Takeaways:
YouTube is the largest and most scalable video advertising platform available to US political campaigns in 2026. It reaches more than 76% of registered US voters weekly, spans every demographic group, and now leads living-room viewing—making it a genuine broadcast alternative with digital targeting and measurement built in.
YouTube Political Advertising at a Glance:
When examining the landscape of social video platforms accepting political advertising in 2026, YouTube stands virtually alone at scale. While platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video have opted out of political ads, YouTube continues to offer unparalleled reach across every demographic group.
The numbers tell a compelling story. The 2026 cycle is projected to reach $11.6 billion in total political ad spending—the most expensive election cycle on record—with connected TV (CTV) taking a growing share. YouTube leads within the CTV landscape: It recorded 13.8% of total US TV watch-time in May 2026, the largest share of television among all TV distributors for a third consecutive month. The platform's reach extends beyond traditional metrics. A single video from a top creator like Mr. Beast can generate viewership equivalent to an NBA Finals game or Monday Night Football broadcast.
Perhaps most significantly, TV screens have surpassed mobile and desktop as the primary consumption device for YouTube content in the United States. This shift transforms YouTube from a digital-only platform into a genuine broadcast alternative with superior targeting capabilities.
YouTube offers three core inventory types—Standard Auction, YouTube Select, and YouTube TV—each mapped to a different campaign objective and reservation requirement.
Standard auction inventory is YouTube's core, real-time-bid advertising supply available across all channels and content—the most flexible and scalable option for political campaigns.
YouTube Select is a curated set of premium lineups from top creators, sports, entertainment, and family content. It is best used when campaigns want brand-safe placement alongside YouTube's highest-quality inventory. YouTube Select provides access to premium content from top creators and brands. The platform organizes this inventory into curated lineups including top artists, popular creators, sports content, entertainment, and families. For political advertisers, the broadcast lineup is particularly valuable as it provides access to YouTube TV inventory.
This premium placement requires advance reservations, especially during high-demand periods. Working with a Google Premier Partner can unlock discounted rates not available through standard channels.
YouTube TV lets political advertisers run video as traditional commercials inside live TV and DVR environments, extending broadcast strategy with greater efficiency and preliminary audience targeting. During peak political season, particularly September through November when live sports dominate viewership, this inventory becomes especially competitive.
YouTube Inventory Types at a Glance:
| Inventory Type | Access Method | Reservation Required | Best Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Auction | Real-time bidding | No, never sells out | Flexible, scalable reach for any campaign, including quick-turn needs |
| YouTube Select | Reservation | Yes | Premium, brand-safe placement alongside top creators and content |
| YouTube TV | Auction or reservation | Required for guaranteed placement, especially during peak periods | Extending broadcast strategy into live TV and DVR environments |
Political campaigns can choose from seven YouTube ad formats, from skippable in-stream ads built for efficient reach to CTV pause ads built for the living room. Each is optimized for different strategic goals:
Skippable in-stream ads play before or during video content and can be skipped after five seconds, making them ideal for efficient, broad-reach awareness campaigns where you pay only for views that aren't skipped. The strategic advantage is clear: If a viewer skips your ad, you pay nothing. Those first five to 10 seconds before the skip option appears represent free impressions. This format is a strong fit for awareness campaigns where broad reach matters more than guaranteed completion.
Non-skippable in-stream ads guarantee full message delivery by preventing viewers from skipping, and are best used when a campaign's message must be seen in its entirety. When your message requires full delivery, non-skippable ads ensure viewers watch the entire spot. This category includes bumper ads (six seconds) and longer formats up to 60 seconds or more. While YouTube recommends standard lengths of six, 15, 30, and 60 seconds, the platform accommodates custom lengths like 38 or 48-second spots without requiring editing.
Video sequencing serves a series of ads in a set order to build a narrative over multiple exposures, and it is well suited to candidate introduction campaigns that develop a story over time. If a viewer engages with the first ad, they'll see the second, then the third. If they skip, the system can route them to alternative content based on regular targeting parameters.
In-feed ads appear in search results, on the YouTube homepage, and among recommended videos, delivering highly qualified views because voters must actively choose to click and watch. Users must actively click to watch, creating a triple qualification: they see the ad, choose to click, and then watch the content. While this can command premium pricing, it delivers highly qualified views from genuinely interested voters.
YouTube Shorts is YouTube's fast-growing vertical short-form video inventory, best used to reach mobile-first voters with vertical creative already running on other platforms. As YouTube's answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels, Shorts represents rapidly growing inventory. While horizontal video ads can run in Shorts, vertical creative performs significantly better and delivers a superior user experience. Campaigns already running vertical content on other platforms can easily extend that investment to YouTube Shorts.
YouTube audio ads reach listeners consuming podcast and music content across YouTube and YouTube Music, and offer a solution for campaigns without video assets. YouTube and YouTube Music have become major podcast players. Audio ads allow campaigns to reach listeners consuming podcast content, including popular shows from NPR and other major publishers.
CTV pause ads are image-based ads that appear when a viewer pauses YouTube content on a television screen, offering an added living room touchpoint sold on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis. This newer format displays ads when users pause YouTube content on television screens. After a 10-second pause, the ad appears and remains visible until the viewer resumes playback.
YouTube advertising operates through two primary campaign structures, each optimized for different objectives.
Designed for persuasion, video reach campaigns excel at delivering candidate biography content and contrast ads highlighting differences with opponents. These campaigns are purchased on a dynamic CPM basis, with campaign managers optimizing bids to balance efficiency with quality audience exposure.
Video views campaigns are built for consideration, since you pay only when a voter completes the video. They are often the strongest fit for get-out-the-vote (GOTV) initiatives. The key difference lies in the buying model: Advertisers only pay when viewers complete the entire video (up to 30 seconds). For a three-minute video, cost is incurred at the 30-second mark. This approach maximizes impressions while ensuring payment only for engaged viewing.
Recommended ad lengths vary by campaign type:
| Campaign Type | Recommended Lengths | Best Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Video Reach | 15s, 30s, 60s | Persuasion, candidate bios, contrast ads |
| Video Views | 15s, 30s | Consideration, GOTV, issue education |
YouTube's targeting options differ significantly from other programmatic platforms, with specific restrictions political advertisers must understand. YouTube does not support voter-file or third-party audience targeting, so political campaigns must rely on contextual signals like placements, topics, and keywords, plus limited demographics (age and gender) and geography down to the congressional district.
Demographics are limited to age and gender. Third-party audience segments and first-party data onboarding (including voter files commonly used in Connected TV campaigns) are not available on YouTube.
Geographic targeting supports zip codes, cities, metropolitan areas, states, and countries. Importantly for down-ballot races, congressional district targeting remains available.
The majority of YouTube targeting relies on contextual signals:
For example, a Second Amendment-focused candidate might target channels discussing firearms and hunting. An environmentally-focused campaign, meanwhile, could target content about green energy and electric vehicles. Keyword targeting works similarly to search advertising, reaching voters actively seeking information on specific topics.
YouTube does not allow targeting based on:
These restrictions reflect Google's approach to maintaining trust and transparency in political advertising while complying with federal and state regulations.
Every political advertiser must complete Google's verification process before running ads, and all political ads appear publicly in Google's Ads Transparency Center.
Google defines election ads broadly. Any content promoting current or potential candidates, political parties at any level, or ballot measures, initiatives, and propositions falls under political advertising restrictions.
Before running political ads, accounts must complete Google's verification process. This requires a few pieces of information, including:
Working with a Google Premier Partner streamlines this process. These partners represent the top 3% of Google Partners, providing direct access to human support rather than automated bot reviews. This becomes critical for quick-turn campaign needs and troubleshooting disapproved ads.
All political ads appear in Google's Ads Transparency Center at adstransparency.google.com. This public database allows anyone to search for competitors, view their creative, see when ads ran, and access approximate spending levels. Smart campaigns use this resource for competitive intelligence and budget planning.
Political advertising costs on YouTube rose 20-50% during peak periods in 2024, driven by high demand and the crowded advertising environment. These premiums intensified during early Q4 when political spending overlapped with traditional brand advertising for the holiday season. Political advertisers should plan for these increases and reserve YouTube Select and YouTube TV inventory early because it can sell out.
YouTube Select and YouTube TV inventory require advance planning. In previous cycles, YouTube TV inventory has completely sold out regardless of budget, leaving late-moving campaigns without access. Securing premium placements well in advance of go-live dates is essential.
Standard YouTube auction inventory never sells out due to the platform's massive scale. While costs may fluctuate based on demand, campaigns can always access this inventory even for quick-turn needs.
Account verification should happen as early as possible, ideally before campaign launch. While expedited processing is sometimes available, building buffer time prevents delays when launching time-sensitive messaging or responding to campaign developments.
While less common in political advertising, two campaign types deserve mention for specific use cases:
These campaigns drive consideration across YouTube, Google Discover, and Gmail. They require conversion tracking implementation but can effectively build interest in candidates or initiatives when measurable website actions matter.
Performance Max, or "PMax," runs across all Google inventory, optimizing toward specific conversion goals like newsletter signups or volunteer registrations. This approach works when driving trackable actions matters more than broad awareness.
Both formats require website tracking tags and work best when clear conversion events can be defined and measured.
Success on YouTube requires understanding both the platform's capabilities and its constraints. Here are some tips for achieving success when advertising on YouTube this election season:
Complete account verification immediately. Reserve premium inventory for critical flight dates, especially during September through November when live sports and peak political activity converge.
Don't rely on a single ad type. Combine skippable ads for efficient reach with non-skippable formats for guaranteed message delivery. Layer in-feed ads to capture active searchers and shorts to reach mobile-first voters.
The same 30-second spot that works on broadcast may underperform on YouTube if it doesn't capture attention in the first five seconds. Test multiple creative approaches and let performance data guide budget allocation.
Without access to voter file targeting, contextual signals become crucial. Invest time identifying channels, topics, and keywords that align with your target voter's content consumption habits.
Use the Ads Transparency Center to track opponent spending and messaging. This intelligence informs budget decisions and creative strategy.
Build budgets assuming 20-50% cost increases during peak periods. This prevents mid-campaign budget shortfalls when competition intensifies.
YouTube's political advertising requirements, verification processes, and optimization strategies differ significantly from other platforms. Partner with teams holding Google Premier Partner status and specific political advertising experience.
YouTube represents the most scalable, targetable video advertising platform available to political campaigns in 2026. While restrictions on audience targeting require different strategic approaches than other digital channels, the platform's reach across every demographic group and its dominance in both mobile and living room viewing make it indispensable.
Success requires understanding the full toolkit: From skippable in-stream ads delivering efficient reach, to YouTube TV placements extending broadcast strategies, to contextual targeting replacing voter file approaches, to verification processes enabling compliant campaigns.
The campaigns that master these elements early, secure premium inventory in advance, and optimize creative for YouTube's unique environment will gain significant advantages in the crowded 2026 election cycle.
Whether you're managing a congressional campaign, a down-ballot race or a national initiative, Basis has the expertise and technology to help you win in 2026.
Basis provides political advertisers a unified, omnichannel platform to execute precise, targeted media strategies across YouTube, CTV, streaming audio, programmatic, and beyond. And our team of experienced political advertising specialists understands the verification requirements, timing pressures, and platform nuances that can make or break a campaign.
Explore Basis’s political advertising capabilities at basis.com/political-advertising-2026.
Can you target voter files on YouTube?
No. YouTube does not support first-party voter-file onboarding or third-party audience segments. Political campaigns reach voters through contextual signals instead (placements, topics, and keywords), plus limited demographics (age and gender) and geography down to the congressional district.
Which video platforms accept political ads in 2026?
YouTube remains the primary video platform accepting political advertising at scale in 2026. Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ (among others) have opted out of political ads, leaving YouTube as a dominant choice for political video reach.
How long does Google political ad verification take?
Verification timing varies, and expedited processing is sometimes available. Because timelines aren't guaranteed, campaigns should complete verification as early as possible, ideally well before launch, to avoid delays on time-sensitive messaging.
Do you pay for skipped YouTube ads?
It depends on the format. With skippable in-stream ads, if a viewer skips after five seconds, you pay nothing. Those first five to 10 seconds function as free impressions, which is why skippable formats are efficient for awareness campaigns. Video views campaigns work differently: You pay only when a viewer completes the video (up to 30 seconds), so a skip before completion costs nothing there too. The exception is any format bought on a CPM basis—like non-skippable ads or CTV pause ads—where you pay for the impression regardless of skips.
What information do you need to verify a political advertising account with Google?
Google requires a Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) or Federal Election Commission (FEC) number, the candidate or organization name, representative contact information, and an email address with organizational details.
Does YouTube political ad inventory sell out?
Premium inventory can. YouTube Select and YouTube TV require advance reservations, and in past cycles YouTube TV inventory sold out regardless of budget. Standard auction inventory does not sell out due to the platform's scale, so it remains accessible even for quick-turn needs.
Key Takeaways:
Traditionally, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role has spanned brand identity and voice, go-to-market strategy, paid media, and sales enablement, along with the campaign and market data that guides future planning.
Today, however, the role is undergoing profound transformation. Once a critical pillar of organizational strategy focused on driving brand growth, the CMO’s scope of work has expanded considerably. Now, CMOs must navigate a steady stream of digital and technological innovation alongside evolving market conditions and a less than predictable consumer. This shift requires CMOs to transform into multifaceted leaders with responsibilities that go far beyond a legacy marketing role.
Today’s CMO is extending their skill set beyond more traditional brand-building expertise. They’re evolving into a cross-functional leader who’s able to unite their knack for strategic thinking with sound business logic to challenge the status quo and drive their brand forward. Brands that recognize and embrace the CMO in this evolving role are best positioned to unlock their full potential.
Historically, CMOs were brand stewards. They developed brand identity and voice, crafted go-to-market strategies, managed paid media efforts, and supported sales enablement while digging into campaign and market data to guide future strategies.
While these fundamentals remain central, the responsibilities of today's CMOs have expanded—indeed, modern CMOs have one of the most complex roles in an organization. Beyond providing strategic guidance within marketing, they're increasingly expected to work across functions like sales, IT, operations, finance, and human resources to drive enterprise growth. And they must bridge the gap between consumer-facing activities and internal business priorities to deliver results.
A CMO’s ability to manage these expanded responsibilities can differ by industry. For example, CMOs in the B2B space may find themselves uniquely well-suited for this shift, given the demand to unify their strategic backgrounds with their legacy focus on producing business outcomes. Basis CMO Katie McAdams notes, “B2B marketing has shifted from being viewed primarily as a sales enablement and lead generating function to becoming part of the design, implementation, and oversight of the company’s overarching strategy. The role and expectation of marketing today is to bring the product and sales strategies together to build alignment and ensure the implementation of a seamless go-to-market plan.”
An essential part of meeting these expectations for strategic excellence is effective communication with stakeholders. To communicate strategies and their outcomes effectively, CMOs must zero in on the most impactful stories they can tell and support them with meaningful data.
“The amount of data we can access across all our campaigns can be overwhelming, and it takes time to understand what to focus on," says McAdams. "Picking a few critical KPIs to prioritize and speak to regularly is key. Otherwise, you’ll end up overwhelming your team and other internal stakeholders with so many data points that they’ll just check out.” Establishing a shared source of truth—through common success metrics or a curated dashboard that the broader organization relies on—keeps everyone aligned on what success looks like.
Ultimately, today's CMO has evolved from a functional marketing expert into a strategic, multidisciplinary leader balancing a dual mandate: leveraging marketing expertise while taking on broader business leadership responsibilities that are integral to the organization’s success.
But as expectations rise, alignment across the C-suite hasn’t kept pace, limiting marketing’s influence at the highest levels.
The CMO’s evolution into a multifaceted business leader should, in theory, strengthen their position at the executive table. Yet paradoxically, even as organizations demand these broader capabilities from their CMOs, a troubling disconnect has emerged within executive teams. By one measure, the gap between CEOs and CMOs has widened by 20% in recent years, creating misalignment that directly impacts growth potential.
This disconnect shows up in multiple ways across organizations. For instance, 64% of CEOs say they feel comfortable with modern marketing, yet only 31% of CMOs think their CEOs actually are. Even more concerning, just half of CMOs participate in strategic planning sessions with their CEOs—despite evidence that companies involving marketing executives in such planning see 1.4 times higher revenue. Compounding this issue, many leaders believe marketing is underfunded even as investment as a share of sales has declined, creating a mismatch between growth expectations and the resources required to achieve them.
The divide extends beyond individual relationships. Executive teams have grown by 50% over the past five years, fragmenting customer ownership across multiple C-suite roles. Companies with a single, integrated customer-centric executive achieve 2.3 times the growth of those with overlapping responsibilities, yet many continue adding chiefs of digital, revenue, and customer experience alongside CMOs—blurring accountability and diluting marketing’s voice at the strategic table. This fragmentation stems from a critical gap in organizational infrastructure: Without common success metrics that all executives track and trust, each C-suite member defaults to their own measures and timelines for judging impact, making true alignment nearly impossible.
This fragmentation has left CMOs increasingly vulnerable. Despite the promise that an evolved CMO presents, the same conditions that have made today’s CMO a dynamic leader with a diverse toolkit have also put the role at risk.
Uncertainty surrounding the necessity of a CMO in today’s business climate has become evident as lines between the responsibilities of a CMO and those of other C-suite executives like the CFO and CTO have blurred. At the same time, profitability and cost-cutting demands have put the role under heightened scrutiny in several major companies. Only 36% of Fortune 500 companies now use the chief marketing officer title, down from 49% in 2025, as marketing responsibilities increasingly consolidate under broader roles like chief growth officer and chief commercial officer. As a result of this trend, CMOs today must continually prove the value of their teams and their role within the organization. That scrutiny often shows up in budgets, where reduced investment can make it harder to demonstrate impact, further reinforcing questions about marketing’s seat at the table.
While the outlook may seem grim, businesses' need for marketing leadership hasn't disappeared, it's just recalibrating to meet the evolving challenges of the landscape. Organizations still depend on CMOs for the marketing expertise that drives success, and that expertise is in short supply: Just 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have a marketing background, and senior marketing leaders now sit on the executive team or report to the CEO at just 52% of Fortune 500 companies, down from 58% in 2025. Without that expertise at the leadership table, businesses risk losing the strategic marketing perspective their competitiveness depends on.
The increasing complexity of the marketing ecosystem has placed a premium on technology. To maximize ROI, CMOs are increasingly investing in martech and adtech tools, with as many as 80% of organizations planning to increase martech spend over the next five years. However, these investments often fall short of their potential—not because they’re ineffective, but because the people using these platforms haven’t been adequately trained. In fact, companies actively use just 49% of their martech stack.
This underutilization underscores the importance of aligning technology with talent. CMOs should not only ensure their teams are equipped with the right tools, but also that there’s a plan in place to develop the skills to use them effectively. Upskilling and ongoing training are critical to closing the gap between tech investment and outcomes.
Adding to this complexity, the rise of AI is reshaping marketing team structures. As AI capabilities advance, some marketing roles are being replaced with the technology, making it crucial for CMOs to assess when to invest in talent development versus AI tools. This challenge of determining which capabilities remain uniquely human and which can be effectively automated makes strategic talent investment a critical priority for marketing leaders.
CMO spending priorities reflect this recognition. Even as AI adoption accelerates, labor's share of marketing budgets rose to 24.5% in 2026, up from 21.9% the year before. This reflects a growing understanding that people—not just technology—are key to unlocking the full potential of marketing innovations.
Finding the optimal balance between technology and talent is essential. CMOs who succeed in this area will drive both innovation and efficiency, ensuring their organizations stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Bridging the C-suite gap also requires CMOs to think beyond marketing metrics and tie their strategies directly to business outcomes. The pressure to deliver measurable business results is at an all-time high, with brands often prioritizing short-term revenue growth over long-term brand-building strategies. Caught in the middle are CMOs, whose legacies lie in carefully crafted long-term brand strategies but are now primarily tasked with producing revenue gains. The pandemic accelerated this trend, with the percentage of CMOs reporting that marketing is primarily responsible for revenue growth jumping almost 9% from February of 2020 to March of 2023. Alongside this, 84% of CMOs now name ROI as their primary metric for budget allocation, a sign of mounting pressure to favor short-term conversion over long-term brand growth. This creates a tension between achieving short-term wins and safeguarding the brand's future equity,
To navigate this challenge, CMOs must collaborate closely with CEOs, CFOs, and other senior leaders to align marketing strategies with broader business objectives. Agreeing on a small set of shared metrics—including revenue or margin growth—makes the business connection explicit and strengthens trust across the leadership team. By advocating for the critical needs filled by marketing and demonstrating the impact of marketing on both short-term revenue and long-term growth, CMOs can secure the resources and support needed to strike this delicate balance.
Rather than retreating under pressure, many CMOs are embracing a challenger mindset to redefine both their role and the industry around them.
Modern CMOs have a unique opportunity to challenge outdated practices and redefine industry norms. As change agents, they can ask bold questions, rethink legacy strategies, and drive transformative initiatives that set their organizations apart. This approach requires CMOs to push boundaries, disrupt the status quo, and champion innovation—all while maintaining alignment with organizational goals.
“Basis has embraced large-scale brand initiatives as part of its repositioning strategy,” says McAdams. “The success we’ve seen showcases how a challenger mindset can lead to significant market differentiation.”
To succeed as challengers, CMOs need strong support from key stakeholders within their organizations. Disruption often involves risk, and having the necessary backing is essential to ensuring these efforts lead to meaningful progress. McAdams says that her partnerships with Basis’ President, CEO, and CFO are critical: “Aligning the full leadership team with our go-to-market plan—and the investments required to make the big splashes we’ve envisioned—has allowed us to move faster and capitalize on opportunities as they present themselves.”
Ultimately, CMOs today can benefit from acting as disruptors. But to do so effectively, they'll need to cultivate the internal relationships necessary to ensure that their disruptive strategies can succeed.
Marketing has always been a tool for differentiation, but the modern CMO will elevate it into a strategic force that drives measurable business outcomes. By embracing expanded roles as cross-functional leaders, CMOs are uniquely positioned to unify internal priorities, align with organizational objectives, and deliver value in an ever-changing landscape.
Success for today’s CMO hinges on their ability to balance innovation with talent development, short-term gains with long-term growth, and tradition with transformation. As the business landscape continues to evolve, CMOs will remain the lynchpin connecting brand, customer, and company strategy—driving the future of both marketing and organizational success.
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The CMO’s evolution from marketing expert to strategic business leader brings opportunity alongside mounting pressure. As economic uncertainty tightens budgets, today’s CMOs must balance their expanded responsibilities while proving marketing’s impact on the bottom line. Our article, 3 Ways CMOs Can Cultivate C-Suite Buy-In Amidst Economic Uncertainty, explores how leaders can navigate this balance.
The relationship between brands and agencies is being rewritten. On this episode of AdTech Unfiltered, host Noor Naseer sits down with W. Joe DeMiero, Chief Client and Business Officer at Havas, to share what he's learned about the brand-agency relationship from working on both sides.
Drawing on his experience as a two-time agency CEO as well as a former CMO, Joe shares why today's marketing leaders are increasingly accountable for business outcomes, how AI and technology should support (but not dictate) strategy, and why the future belongs to agencies that prioritize trust, collaboration, and adaptability over the traditional model.