Do marketing leaders ever really get a winter break? You’re supposed to be relaxing, but your brain won’t cooperate. You’re thinking about Q1 budgets while waiting for your flight. Mentally drafting your board presentation while the family watches a holiday movie. Lying awake in the wee hours of the morning running through 2026 talent considerations.
We’ve curated this reading list specifically for the realities of the holidays, matching key resources to those moments when you might have a few minutes to yourself. Whether you’re feeling inspired or just need a break from that one relative (you know the one…), these reads can help you start the new year informed and energized.
And if you only get through a couple of paragraphs before you’re called away to a snowball fight? We’ll call that a win.
Ah, the joys of holiday travel. You’ve been gifted a couple of extra hours in everyone’s favorite place: A crowded airport. Instead of spending it all on retail therapy at the duty-free shop, why not invest a few of those minutes in building up your industry smarts? This article provides an in-depth look at how the CMO role is transforming, how CMOs can set themselves up for success, and why brands that embrace these changes are best positioned to unlock their full potential.
The house is finally quiet, everyone’s asleep, and you’re wide awake staring at the ceiling. When work anxiety strikes in the middle of the night, it helps to know that many of your biggest challenges share a common denominator (address it, and you can alleviate multiple problems at once!). This article connects major challenges around proving ROI, AI adoption, talent efficiency and retention, and more back to data problems, and outlines practical steps marketing leaders can take to address them at their source.
Your aunt has had a bit too much eggnog, and she’s finally revealed the secret to everyone’s favorite holiday cookies: Real, high-quality vanilla extract. It has you thinking about other things that require quality inputs to generate quality outputs—AI, for instance. This article explores how marketing teams can get around barriers to AI adoption and drive ROI by improving their data readiness. While holiday cookies can still taste decent with artificial vanilla, AI tools simply can’t function without clean, unified, high-quality data.
Everyone has an opinion about AI, and when the topic comes up at the holiday party, you know that you’ll be expected to offer an authoritative take. This report provides the exclusive, data-based insights you need to sound like an expert, even if holiday brain fog has temporarily eclipsed your expertise. More importantly, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how your peers are approaching AI adoption, the efficiency gains they’re seeing, the risks they’re most concerned about, and more.
You’re driving home from the holiday party, and that AI conversation is still rattling around in your mind. Have you done enough to optimize your team for an increasingly AI-driven future? This report provides exclusive data and actionable recommendations for navigating the AI revolution from a talent perspective in 2026. It’ll transform those anxious questions into ideas to fuel your tech and talent strategies next year.
Sometimes, sitting alone at the local pizza place waiting for your order provides the greatest holiday gift of all: A few precious minutes alone. This brief read offers expert guidance around one of marketing’s biggest debates—how to strike the right balance between performance and brand investments—with a particular focus on achieving that balance amidst economic uncertainty. You’ll arrive home not only with dinner, but with fresh insights for leading your business through volatility.
With the stress of Q4 2025 still fresh in your mind, you may be resolving to do things a bit differently in 2026—if only for the sake of your future self’s blood pressure. It’s a good call, as earning executive buy-in during budget season is considerably easier when you’ve been nurturing cross-departmental alignment and goodwill throughout the year. This article, written by Basis CMO Katie McAdams, outlines how marketing leaders can find more success securing C-suite backing by working to build trust with executives year-round. Her recommendations work in any economic climate, but are especially valuable when budgets are tight.
Well, there you have it: You just made smart use of the odd pockets of solitude that winter break provides. Made it through everything? Great. Only got through half of one article? Still counts. Either way, you’re heading into 2026 sharper and more informed than you were before.
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Looking for one more resource to round out your winter break reading? Check out Rewinding to Fast Forward: The 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report for an in-depth look at four key forces shaping the year ahead for brands.
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.
Between holiday travel, endless leftovers, and the annual rite of forgetting what day it is, the end of the year can be a bit of a blur. Yet it can also offer a rare pocket of breathing room, allowing agency leaders to step back from the daily rush and think about the bigger shifts shaping the future of the advertising industry. With AI accelerating, data fragmenting, and client expectations rising, leaders are heading into 2026 with more complexity to manage—but more opportunity to capture as well.
This winter break reading list highlights many of the themes defining the next chapter of agency work: operational clarity, AI readiness, unified data, and stronger strategic partnerships. For your convenience, we've grouped the reads by the moments that tend to emerge during winter break—planned or otherwise. When you find a few minutes to yourself, this list is ready for you. And if you need a reason to hide in the guest room for twenty minutes, you’re welcome.
You’ve heard, “So what exactly is it you do again?” one too many times and need a few minutes to yourself. Instead of scrolling mindlessly, why not escape into the world of strategy, leadership, and the future of agency work?
Agencies are being asked to do more with less while navigating shifting client demands, agentic AI, and an increasingly complex media environment. Here, gain expert perspectives on the pressures driving change and the strategic choices leaders must make in response. Topics include how to balance profitability with investment in talent, how to integrate AI without losing the human touch, and how to sharpen strategic focus instead of trying to do everything for everyone. Consider it your guide to what will separate future-ready agencies from the rest.
With budgets tightening and client expectations rising, agencies are navigating an increasingly challenging landscape. This piece outlines how tech-driven efficiency can help stabilize teams, strengthen client relationships, and protect margins amidst economic pressure. It also highlights why integrated systems and automation are becoming essential for agency resilience and provides practical guidance on using technology to maintain performance and drive long-term growth.
If the departures board has betrayed you, dive into the pieces that show how consolidation and smarter systems can restore a sense of order—at least to your data.
With more tools, more channels, and more platforms, advertisers are struggling to achieve a holistic view of performance. This presents a major barrier to agency teams, especially in the context of the rising pressure to prove impact. This article breaks down how disconnected data and tech sprawl fuel operational inefficiencies and limit teams’ ability to adapt quickly. It also explores how consolidating data into one source of truth strengthens reporting, improves optimization, and unlocks the full value of AI-driven tools. For leaders navigating complexity, it offers a clear case for why consolidation is both a strategic and operational imperative.
From media fragmentation to revenue pressure to stalled AI initiatives, many of marketing leaders’ toughest challenges share a common source: poor data foundations. This article unpacks how inconsistent, siloed, or overwhelming amounts of data complicate decision-making, weaken storytelling, strain teams, and limit the impact of new technology. It also outlines practical steps leaders can take to consolidate insights, strengthen visibility, and unlock more strategic value across operations.
Perfect for a quiet morning with coffee or a rare uninterrupted afternoon, these pieces zoom out to help you see the industry with a fresh perspective.
This year’s Advertising Agency Report captures a sector in transition, with teams grappling with increasingly fragmented workflows, tougher client demands, and heightened brand safety risks. The report uses data to outline the most urgent challenges agencies are facing, as well as the strategic investments leaders plan to make next—especially around AI and operational efficiency. If you’re short on time, catch the executive summary here.
Brand-agency relationships are shifting fast, and the gap between how agencies think they’re performing and how brands grade their performance is significant. This piece breaks down why that gap exists, how tech and media complexity are reshaping expectations, and what agency leaders can do to strengthen client trust and demonstrate their value.
For easing from vacation mode into the new year, these pieces provide a gentle reentry into operational discipline, efficiency, and the systems that help teams thrive.
Pitching remains essential for agency growth, yet it’s become increasingly complex and costly. With clients demanding faster turnarounds and more operational transparency, agencies must show not only strong ideas but the systems that enable them. This piece breaks down how tech maturity, unified data, and AI readiness can ease the burden on teams while strengthening pitch performance. It offers a clear view into how agencies can modernize their approach to win business in a more competitive market.
From privacy shifts to brand safety concerns to a sprawling tech ecosystem, agencies are feeling the weight of growing complexity. This article argues that improving efficiency is the key to cutting through complexity and helping agencies work faster, drive better performance, and strengthen client relationships. It breaks down the risks created by disconnected systems, manual processes, and underutilized AI, and highlights how streamlined systems and automation can simplify operations and strengthen client relationships.
As the year winds down, consider this reading list your invitation to recharge, recalibrate, and head into 2026 with a clearer view of what matters. And if diving into any of these articles gives you an excuse to procrastinate packing your suitcase? Even better.
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Looking for more insights to inform your 2026 planning? Rewinding to Fast Forward: The 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report provides perspective on four key topics that will influence how advertisers work next year. Get your copy now and uncover the trends and opportunities that will shape 2026 for advertisers.
Features like Spotify’s “Wrapped” or Netflix’s “Your Next Watch” resonate because they surface data-based insights into our actual behavior. Similarly, the articles that were most popular among our audience in 2025 reveal the challenges and opportunities that most captured marketers’ time, curiosity, and attention over the past year.
In analyzing the posts that drew the most traffic in 2025, four key themes appeared: AI’s transformative influence on the search landscape, evolving and oft-conflicting regulatory pressures, leadership roles expanding and evolving, and media formats continuing to fragment. Below, we unpack what these four themes tell us about the current state of marketing—and where the industry is headed in 2026.
When Gartner predicted in early 2024 that 25% of traditional search engine volume would shift to AI chatbots and agents by 2026, it crystallized what many marketers were already sensing: A fundamental shift was underway. The rise of zero-click search is radically changing where and how consumers engage with information—and, by extension, where advertising needs to show up.
The popularity of our search-related content reveals where marketers are seeking guidance most urgently: Navigating the fragmentation of the search landscape, understanding how to adapt to AI Overviews, and building the operational flexibility needed to adjust as platforms and query formats continue to evolve.
This piece explores what the shift to natural-language queries and AI-powered agents means for advertisers, highlighting fragmentation in the search space, brand safety and misinformation risks, and organic traffic declines. Plus, it provides guidance on upskilling teams, testing with AI-driven tools, and building the operational flexibility needed for a rapidly evolving search landscape.
Early research has found the appearance of AIOs to be correlated with lower organic and paid click-through rates. Here, learn why certain verticals and query types trigger AIOs more often, how the format changes user behavior, and what marketers can do to adapt.
Alongside these AI-driven changes, regulatory shifts are pulling marketing leaders in competing directions. The popularity of our regulation-focused content in 2025 reveals how much uncertainty exists around what’s actually changing and what it means for advertisers.
On one hand, the Trump Administration has taken a deregulatory approach, signing an executive order requiring that for every new rule, regulation, or guidance, 10 existing ones must be repealed. At the same time, the number of states that have comprehensive consumer privacy laws enacted or in effect continues to climb, and consumer concern about data privacy remains high. As teams plan for 2026, they must understand existing regulations and build strategies flexible enough to absorb diverging and ever-evolving compliance requirements without constant overhauls.
The return of the Trump Administration introduced a new regulatory posture for digital advertising, with many anticipating reduced federal oversight and heightened economic uncertainty. This post explores the political, economic, and cultural pressures evolving under the new administration, giving teams context for how future planning may need to adjust.
Despite the Trump Administration’s focus on deregulation, regulatory activity across states and global markets continues to accelerate. New privacy laws, stricter enforcement under the CPRA, rising false advertising scrutiny, and movement on AI regulation are reshaping the compliance landscape. This post provides a clear overview of the regulatory trends influencing data use, targeting precision, and campaign operations.
These external technological and regulatory pressures—alongside other forces like economic volatility—are transforming expectations for leadership.
For brands, the CMO role has expanded. Today’s leaders are tasked with not only building their brand but also bringing product and sales strategies together to build alignment and ensure cross-functional success. Meanwhile, agency leaders are also navigating complexity, caught between client demands for efficiency gains and the need to maintain profitability—and inaction on new capabilities only makes them vulnerable to competitors who move faster.
In 2026, competitive advantage will come from understanding these pressures and adapting to them quickly. Leaders who can integrate AI meaningfully, evolve how their teams work, and prove business impact faster than peers will separate themselves from competitors still debating whether to act.
Agencies are navigating a perfect storm of pressures: economic volatility, shrinking client budgets, rapid innovations in AI, and a media landscape that is growing increasingly fragmented. Here, industry veterans share where agencies are feeling the most strain, how expectations from brands are shifting, and what leaders can do to evolve their talent, technology, and operating models.
The CMO role has expanded far beyond more traditional brand building expertise. Today’s leaders are expected to blend strategic vision, technical fluency, financial logic, and cross-functional influence—all while navigating growing misalignment across the C-suite. This deep dive unpacks the pressures reshaping the CMO role, the growing expectations for business impact, and the leadership traits that will matter most in the years ahead.
While leadership grapples with new mandates, the media landscape continues to splinter. The continued growth of short-form video and streaming TV in 2025 wasn’t a surprise, but the scale of their impact became impossible to ignore. As of this year, 40% of sports fans only watch sports on streaming services. And people (especially younger audiences) are spending an increasing amount of time watching short-form video—and making purchases as a result.
Understanding how media consumption continues to change is key for deciding where advertising dollars go, how creative gets developed, and what “engagement” actually means when formats and platforms are constantly fragmenting.
Short-form video has become a default media habit, reshaping how people discover products, engage with creators, and make purchase decisions. TikTok and TikTok-esque features across platforms have normalized fast, highly personalized content that blurs the line between entertainment and advertising. Here, learn how this shift is changing creative expectations, funnel dynamics, and brand safety needs, as well as what it takes to use short-form video as a meaningful driver of attention.
Live sports are evolving from cable mainstays to a fragmented, streaming-first world, with leagues striking exclusive deals across platforms and rights fees soaring. This post breaks down how shifting inventory packages, rising sports betting engagement, and second-screen behavior are reshaping the value of live sports advertising.
As viewers continue to migrate to streaming and advertisers look for flexibility, programmatic CTV is becoming a critical way to reach audiences on the big screen. This piece breaks down why upfront commitments are losing ground to dynamic, data-driven buying and how AI is improving contextual targeting, reporting, and brand safety controls.
The themes that drove engagement this year won't be resolved neatly in 2026. If anything, they'll deepen. Teams will need ongoing strategies for adapting to AI-driven search changes, managing evolving regulatory requirements, proving business impact as CMO and agency leader responsibilities expand, and reaching audiences across increasingly fragmented media channels. The common thread across all four themes? Success will require strategies built for continuous adaptation, not one-time fixes.
For a more comprehensive look at what’s ahead—including expert perspectives and strategic guidance on navigating these shifts—download our full 2026 Trends Report: Rewinding to Fast Forward.
Agency leaders who feel confident in their client relationships face an uncomfortable reality: There's a good chance their clients feel differently. While 40% of agencies rate their brand partnerships as excellent, only 13% of brands feel the same.
As brand-agency relationships evolve alongside rapid technological innovation and an increasingly complex media environment, it’s critical for agency leaders to understand the reasons for this gap—and the pressures shaping their clients’ expectations. Recent waves of holding company consolidations have only amplified this uncertainty, prompting brands to question how these structural shifts will impact their partnerships and service delivery. This is especially true amidst economic uncertainty, with most CMOs struggling to balance stagnant marketing budgets with intense pressure to drive measurable business impact.
To succeed in this environment, agency leaders must first develop a deep understanding of where their clients are pushing them to evolve and then differentiate their businesses in those areas. At the same time, they must maintain focus on two fundamentals: driving effectiveness and telling compelling, transparent stories about how that effectiveness is achieved.
Among the factors reshaping brand-agency relationships, three demand particular focus:
Each of these forces is changing what brands expect from their agency partners and how agencies must operate to meet those expectations. AI is changing the economics of agency work and prompting conversations around pricing and value. Media fragmentation is redefining agencies' role, increasingly shifting them from comprehensive partners to specialized experts. And rising client expectations are raising the stakes for agencies across the board. Understanding how each force is driving change—and how to respond—is essential for agencies looking to adapt and thrive.
Tech innovations, especially AI, are empowering brands and agencies with substantial efficiencies. The opportunity is particularly impactful for agencies, as they can apply efficiency gains across multiple clients (likely one reason why agencies have adopted AI more extensively than brands).
As AI and other technologies change how agency marketers work, brands are pushing agencies to evolve their pricing models. “Brands understand that the output of adopting these new technologies is efficiency at scale,” says Dan Wilson, Group VP of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis. “They want to know how agencies plan to share those efficiency gains with them.”
At the same time, Wilson notes that most brands and agencies haven’t reached the point where AI investments have met expectations. Barriers to adoption are also a problem, with 70% of both agencies and brands yet to fully scale the technology across media planning, activation, and analysis due to adoption challenges. This puts agencies in the difficult position of needing to evolve their pricing models to reflect AI efficiency gains that aren’t yet fully realized.
Media complexity is a major challenge for agencies and brands, and most feel their organizations’ solutions to fragmentation are only moderately effective.
This complexity and fragmentation make it difficult for agencies to provide holistic, data-driven insights around campaign performance and strategy. These problems hinder transparency, which in turn often erodes client relationships—a trend reflected in data showing over half of agency marketers report their client relationships are more strained now than they were two years ago.
Additionally, media complexity is driving brands to split their work across multiple specialized agencies. “As the industry has grown more complex, brands are understanding that, while the single, streamlined agency relationship sounds nice, it often doesn’t result in the effectiveness they’re after,” says Wilson.
This has redefined the role of the modern agency. Success now depends less on being the comprehensive partner who does everything and more on delivering specialized expertise and nimble execution in targeted areas of the marketing mix.
As tech evolutions and media fragmentation push the industry to evolve, brand expectations are growing more sophisticated in kind.
“Brands are just harder graders these days,” says Wilson. “They know what to expect, and when they’re not getting it, they’re quick to make that known and potentially make changes.” Data reflects this impatience, with one 2024 survey finding that 40% of brand respondents reported plans to switch from their primary agency within six months.
These rising expectations signal a shift in what brands want from their agencies. Where agencies once focused primarily on execution, brands now expect them to serve as trusted advisors—providing strategic guidance, offering informed perspectives on emerging technologies and tactics, and helping brands navigate marketing complexity.
With so many forces changing brand-agency relationships, agency leaders need clear priorities to inform the evolution of their businesses. Two fundamentals should guide strategic decision making:
Effectiveness will always be brands' primary concern, but delivering results is only half the battle. Agencies must also articulate how and why their strategies work.
“Storytelling will always be at the crux of what makes a good agency partnership,” says Lisa Olszewski, VP of Brand Development at Basis. “An agency’s ability to communicate how a brand’s investment is moving the needle for their business is fundamental to success.”
These priorities—driving effectiveness and demonstrating it through storytelling—matter across all three forces reshaping partnerships that this article has explored thus far. Agencies that consistently drive effectiveness and demonstrate it through compelling storytelling across these areas will be best positioned to strengthen client relationships and thrive amid industry change.
As the industry races to adopt AI, agencies who approach the technology strategically can make significant efficiency gains for both their clients and their own businesses.
Strategic integration is the foundation of successful tech adoption. Rather than accumulating a variety of disparate point solutions, agencies must prioritize interoperability with their existing tech stacks. This ensures new tools truly enhance team workflows rather than inadvertently complicating them.
Data readiness represents one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption at scale. Because AI effectiveness depends on data quality, agencies that invest in data infrastructure will significantly outperform competitors who don't. Without clean, well-organized data, even the most sophisticated AI tools will underdeliver.
Leaders should also consider rethinking their pricing models to meet client expectations for cost structures that reflect how AI is changing agency work. “A lot of agencies are exploring hybrid pricing models that mix a percent of media with incentive tiers based on innovation or performance,” says Olszewski. “We’re still in the early days of figuring it out, but it’s clear there’s an appetite in the industry for new approaches to pricing.”
Transparency should be another key consideration for agency leaders evaluating their tech stacks. As lack of transparency marks a major frustration for many brands, agencies who can offer it will set their businesses apart. “Brands want to know exactly where their media is running and what's driving results,” says Olszewski. Agencies that leverage transparency-forward solutions—for example, dashboards that offer holistic views of campaign performance across platforms—can deliver on a critical client expectation and build stronger relationships as a result.
As they work to optimize their investments, agencies must also craft compelling narratives about how their tech stack delivers superior results and drives measurable business impact. This means moving beyond general claims of increased efficiency to share concrete proof points—for example, demonstrating how AI-based optimization delivers higher ROAS than manual budget adjustments, or quantifying the hours per week that workflow automation technology saves agency teams.
In today's fragmented media environment, brands need agencies that can move with speed and clarity, quickly pivoting strategies based on performance data and adjusting campaigns in real-time. Yet rising media complexity makes this agility increasingly difficult to achieve, as agency teams navigate disconnected platforms, channels, and tools throughout their daily work.
The need for agility extends beyond campaign execution to the partnership itself. “Brands need agency partners who can think on their feet and adjust the relationship as the brand or the market changes,” says Olszewski.
Technology can play a critical role here. By adopting tools that unify disparate platforms and automate manual processes throughout the campaign life cycle, agency leaders can deliver the agility clients are looking for.
To gain the fullest value from these investments, agencies must consistently weave them into their client storytelling, demonstrating how their tech stack delivers the agility and insight that sets them apart in an increasingly fragmented landscape. In a multi-agency environment where brands constantly compare partners, clear communication about operational advantages can be the difference between deepening relationships and losing them.
Finally, agencies should drive effectiveness by deepening their role as trusted advisors. Marketing and media complexity has increased to the point where it has created significant opportunities for agencies that can guide clients through constant change.
“Brands want a partner who’s evaluating things with them, not just for them, whether that’s analytics, automation tools, creative strategy, or something else.” notes Olszewski. Clients need their agencies to weigh in on critical questions: Which platforms deserve investment? How should we approach AI adoption? What does an effective data strategy look like?
"One of the things brands have relied on their agency partners for is to help them stay informed," says Wilson. "That's a massive value proposition of working with an agency. They educate the brand, and the brand grows more and more educated over the years as a result."
Crafting compelling stories around strategies and impact is a critical piece of this advisory role, helping brands understand not just what agencies do, but why it matters. This might mean walking a client through the rationale behind a channel mix shift based on emerging consumer behavior, or recommending budget adjustments based on competitive intel. Agencies that excel at this consultative storytelling build client confidence and deepen trust by clarifying the 'why' behind every recommendation.
While each agency's path forward will depend on its unique strengths and client base, successful leaders will anchor their strategies around two constants: driving measurable effectiveness and telling compelling stories about how that effectiveness is achieved. By strategically investing in technology that enhances both capabilities and transparency, prioritizing nimbleness in an increasingly fragmented landscape, and deepening their role as trusted advisors, agencies can strengthen client relationships and differentiate themselves in a competitive market. Those who embrace these shifts will be well-positioned to close the perception gap with brands, retain valuable clients, and thrive amid ongoing industry transformation.
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Looking for more in-depth insights around how brand-agency relationships are evolving? Our research study with AdExchanger, Broken Trust, Blurred Lines: Who Owns the Future of Advertising? reveals insights from brand and agency leaders around the major obstacles facing the industry, areas of conflict and potential growth, and the forces driving digital advertising's evolution.
Most trends reports are nothing more than wishlists and buzzwords, filled with the latest overhyped products and aspirational technologies while self-servingly touting the publisher’s own capabilities as The Next Big Thing That You So Desperately Need™.
And sure, admittedly, those can be kind of fun to read! After all, it’s cool to think about how a new innovation or a secret insight or tactic that was closely held until just this very moment (and that has only now been shared exclusively with you) will unlock unparalleled fortune and success in the year ahead. But in reality, you end up with a lot of empty promises, money pits, and hot takes that fade into foggy memories right around the time the New Year rolls around. For every innovation that claims to be the “next smartphone!” there are dozens of NFTs, metaverses, and blockchains left scattered in the wake, and marketers are stuck holding on for dear life as the industry confronts unprecedented fragmentation, complexity, and C-suite expectations.
Lucky for you, this is a very different kinds of trends report.
Inside, you will find real perspective on four key topics that are poised to shape the year ahead. Each highlights an area where actual innovation is well positioned to address and overcome long-standing challenges and help marketers see meaningful, measurable growth in 2026. No gimmickry. No secret (or not-so-secret) salesmanship. Just real insights.
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The Quality Quandary: Ignorance may seem like bliss, but it comes with a heavy price. In 2026, transparency and accountability will be the true currency of performance.
Streaming TV's Inequity: Premium platforms don’t guarantee premium placements. It’s time for advertisers’ approach to CTV to evolve.
Agents of Chaos: By late 2026, agentic AI will move from pilot projects to production infrastructure. As agentic AI evolves from hype to infrastructure, brands must learn to communicate with both humans and machines.
Brand Immunity: In an age of cultural volatility, social fragmentation, and algorithmic authority, brand loyalty must be earned—and never assumed.
Uncover the trends and opportunities that will shape advertising in the year ahead: Download Rewinding to Fast Forward: The 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report today!
Patchwork privacy fixes and workarounds are failing brands and advertisers. Liz Emery, co-founder of Vyvr, is tackling the adtech industry’s battle with signal loss and compliance challenges.
She joins host Noor Naseer to share critical lessons from the privacy trenches, practical advice for avoiding legal risks, and her vision for building data infrastructure that’s ready for whatever comes next—from AI to new privacy laws and beyond.
Marketing teams face significant pressure to prove the ROI for every dollar spent, particularly amidst today’s economic volatility. Performance tactics often drive immediate results, but brand recall is what makes those tactics more efficient over time, and memory is what builds that recall.
Every ad impression either strengthens existing connections or disappears among competing messages. Brands that stay present in consumers’ minds are able to account for memory much more easily by aligning creative, media, and measurement around a common goal: helping audiences remember them when it’s time to buy.
That alignment turns campaigns from short-lived bursts of visibility into systems that build familiarity and trust over time. Each creative cue, channel, and pacing decision enforces (or reinforces) what audiences know, and these consistent exposures create lasting awareness and growing preference. Memory, more than momentary visibility, is what ultimately drives long-term brand impact.
Today, that long-term focus is especially critical. Economic uncertainty—along with other factors including last-click attribution and enhanced optimization—has led many teams to overinvest in short-term performance tactics. Yet research shows that taking a balanced approach to short- and long-term marketing can lift overall revenue returns by a median of 90%. Long-term brand activity builds memory, which sustains performance even when short-term demand fluctuates.
Building brand memory is an intentional process. It requires long-term coordination across creative, media, and measurement so every campaign contributes to familiarity and trust that ultimately strengthens what consumers remember.
That process starts with how people form memories in the first place. Audiences notice something, pay attention to it, hold it briefly in their short-term memory and—if they determine it’s meaningful or easy to process—remember it long-term. Four factors shape whether a brand makes it through these stages: attention, attraction, emotion, and cognitive load. When these elements work together, the message becomes easier to retrieve later.
At its core, memory building happens through consistency. Once brands capture audience attention, they then help people recognize, rehearse, and remember the brand across time and context. Yet many teams invest heavily in breakthrough moments without simultaneously planning for how to capitalize on that initial awareness. Consumers who notice a brand may not be ready to purchase immediately, and without building upon that initial awareness, memory fades before purchase intent emerges—and the investment fails to deliver its full value.
Of course, memory doesn’t develop through frequency alone. Running the same creative over and over can lead to fatigue rather than recall. To become a part of long-term memory (and consumers’ consideration sets) brands must craft experiences that are coherent, structured sequences where each touchpoint reinforces what audiences already know through varied formats that connect back to the original message. Encoding, a critical component of memory building, relies on pattern recognition. Distinctive assets, such as visuals, sounds, language, and tone, can act as anchors, allowing each exposure to connect to the last.
When teams plan creative and media together, that exposure becomes cumulative rather than fragmented. This turns brand building from a series of distinct campaigns into a continuous, compounding process that strengthens recognition over time. And the results are measurable: Over a five-year period, advertising from the most consistent brands is projected to grow market share more than twice as effectively as the least consistent brands, even when media investment is the same. Without this foundation, even high-performing campaigns require constant spending to maintain results.
A strong media strategy ensures creative ideas translate into lasting brand presence. This begins with understanding a brand’s creative brief, target audiences, and sales cycle. Timing matters, too: Brands need to trigger attention before it’s too late, ensuring memory is established well ahead of peak purchase windows.
Each channel contributes to that goal in a distinct way:
The effectiveness of a media strategy depends on how these channels work together over time. Strong memory is built through sequencing, or planning for how one exposure carries forward to the next. A brand might start with a large-scale YouTube awareness push designed to introduce a story and distinctive visual cues, then follow with lighter programmatic and audio placements that echo the same message. Each layer builds on the last, keeping the brand familiar without inducing fatigue. This type of consistency pushes towards advertising that is always present but never overwhelming—the type that builds long-term memory.
This balance between reach and restraint requires deliberate pacing. Oversaturation can lead to cognitive overload, but inconsistency weakens memory. The most effective campaigns sustain attention through a steady cadence of touchpoints that collectively build recognition and trust.
For instance, a campaign designed to drive awareness ahead of a key retail period might lead with engaging video and display formats, then pivot to conversion-driven placements closer to the point of sale. Proactive planning ensures every impression across every channel reinforces a single, coherent message that compounds over time.
Measurement ties such a strategy together. Brand lift studies and brand health tracking make it possible to show how such efforts contribute to both recall and sales outcomes, and metrics like brand awareness, advertising awareness, and favorability reveal whether campaigns are strengthening memory or simply generating impressions. Such metrics not only validate the impact of memory-building activity but also guide optimization, showing where attention translates most effectively into action.
Ultimately, the brands that balance these elements—consistency, emotional resonance, and strategic pacing—are the ones that stay with consumers long after exposure. Brands that prioritize memory transform consistent storytelling into lasting competitive strength.
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Part of building memory is capturing audience attention. But today, that attention is at a premium. Explore Winning the Battle for Audience Attention for insights into how advertisers can earn and sustain focus in an increasingly saturated digital environment.
Welcome to our new series, “The Breakdown.” Each post breaks down a complex marketing concept and explores its applications—helping you make smarter decisions that drive meaningful results.
How often do you say “grab a Kleenex” instead of “grab a tissue?” Or ask, “Do you have a Band-Aid?” rather than say “I need an adhesive bandage?” What about, “Where’s the Tupperware?” versus “Where are your plastic food containers?”
These are all examples of mental availability—the ease with which a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, whether or not someone is actively shopping—at work. It’s what keeps brands top of mind when it matters most.
Brands can’t be chosen if they aren’t known, but awareness alone isn’t enough. Yahoo remains a well-known name in search, but when consumers need to look something up, they instinctively “Google it.” The critical difference between awareness and mental availability lies in being remembered in the moment of need. Awareness means consumers recognize a brand when they see it, but mental availability means the brand automatically comes to mind in buying or usage situations.
Mental availability builds over time. Brands with more distinctive creative assets and consistent presence have stronger salience. They come to mind easily and often across many category entry points—aka those moments when buyers enter the market, like when someone first thinks “I need running shoes” or “I’m out of paper towels.” Advertising helps drive this mental availability, going beyond brand awareness and keeping a product present in the mind when audiences are making or considering a purchase. Every impression, sound, and symbol compounds to make a brand easier to recall later.
Research shows that advertising awareness directly correlates to mental availability, which in turn results in tangible business outcomes. Specifically, there’s a measurable correlation between mental availability and market share: As brands become more mentally available, market share tends to follow. Familiarity breeds preference, and that preference translates to purchase behavior. The more a brand’s advertising is noticed and remembered—especially across different category entry points—the more space that brand holds in memory and the greater likelihood of being chosen when a purchase decision arises.
A strong example of mental availability at work is Heinz’s “Draw Ketchup” campaign. Instead of claiming to be the standard for ketchup, the brand proved it by asking audiences to draw ketchup. Nearly everyone drew some iteration of a Heinz bottle, and the brand launched a global campaign featuring the activation video as well as the drawings. That deep-rooted mental availability translated directly into business impact: The campaign drove double-digit increases in purchase intent and boosted market share despite price increases and rising competition.
Heinz’s success stemmed from leveraging the mental availability the brand had already built through decades of consistent marketing. The drawings demonstrated that Heinz not only had high brand awareness, but that it had, in fact, become the default mental representation of ketchup itself. When consumers thought “ketchup,” they pictured Heinz. The campaign simply made that unconscious association conscious and celebrated it, reinforcing existing memory structures and demonstrating how by focusing on mental availability, brands can become inseparable from the product itself.
Mental availability is built through consistency. It requires deliberate, sustained investment and effort to connect brands with the moments that matter to buyers.
Advertisers can strengthen mental availability through steady market presence rather than intermittent campaigns, reinforcing distinctive creative assets like colors, packaging, slogans, or sounds, and tracking recognition and recall as signals of future demand.
Brands should also consider multiple buying situations—both the obvious product need, as well as the contexts surrounding it. By seeking to understand where customers are when they need a product, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the emotions at play, teams can craft campaigns that connect brands to diverse category entry points.
In the end, growth comes from owning the moment when consumers think of your category. Advertising drives mental availability by ensuring brands are present in those critical moments.
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Long-term investments in brand awareness are critical for building mental availability. Yet amidst prolonged economic uncertainty, many budgets continue to lean heavily toward short-term performance. In Balancing Performance with Brand in Uncertain Times, we break down key considerations for marketing leaders as they strategize around their media investments.
