Marketers name the overlooked media and consumer shifts that will shape 2026

Senior marketers and agency leaders have picked out the media stories that went largely unreported in 2025 but which they believe will shape how brands operate in 2026.

Their choices range from the industry’s tolerance of digital spend that cannot be audited to the growth of outrage-driven content, YouTube’s rise on television screens and disruption in connected TV.

Measurement, fraud and brand safety

Christopher Francia, director of product development, client performance at Attention Arc, said the most overlooked story was not a new technology but “the industry’s continued acceptance that a large portion of digital media remains essentially unauditable and our collective reluctance to confront it directly.”

Although agencies are being asked to deliver more on smaller budgets, he said, tolerance of budget inefficiency has grown because it is difficult to tackle. “Publicly, we say we’re solving this problem. Privately, we acknowledge how challenging it is,” he said. The technology to improve accountability exists, but the industry lacks strong structural incentives to make it a priority, and he called for more transparency and shared responsibility.

Ian Orekondy, head of media, analytics and innovation at Method, said AI-optimised targeting was tested in 2025 but does not fix persistent in-flight problems. “Even with ‘perfect’ targeting, the operational side of media is still massively underestimated,” he said.

He noted that Cleantap.io, DoubleVerify and Fou Analytics published new data in 2025 on how TV platforms serve ads regardless of how they are bought. Brands have split between those embracing programmatic and those avoiding it in the belief that direct buys remove fraud and viewability problems, and he said both need vigilance. “We’ve seen single optimizations (like catching a viewability issue) end up being worth six figures,” he said.

For AI to improve targeting and ad quality, Orekondy said, agencies need the right third-party signals, a decisioning engine and connections to platform-level APIs. Those that manage it can add significant value and justify premium pricing.

Joshua Lowcock, president of media at Quad, argued that “2025 was the year media responsibility and brand safety died.” AI has normalised fakes, platforms have scaled back oversight and recent merger approvals have added confusion, he said. He also suggested that, with AI models scraping everything, non-human traffic may have overtaken human traffic during the year.

Outrage and trust

Stefan Hajek, head of creative at Designit, said controversies involving American Eagle, Elf and McDonald’s dominated headlines, but the larger story was a media system “seemingly tailor-made to amplify outrage”. He pointed to Oxford’s word of the year, ‘rage bait’, as evidence of how algorithms reward provocation.

Brands chasing virality risk losing trust, he said, and must anticipate how campaigns will land before launch because consumers call out mistakes immediately. “Doubling down after backlash only deepens the damage,” he said, urging marketers to put empathy ahead of engagement hacks. “Going viral isn’t a win if it alienates the very people you seek to connect with.”

Bryan Goodpaster, vice-president of foresight and cultural strategy at Marks, said 2025 was the year marketing reached peak polarity. He cited Spotify, whose ICE recruitment ads angered many users even as it quietly changed its product to give listeners more control and ease algorithmic pressure on them. “There was no campaign. Just more humane UX decisions,” he said. “The real story is that modern brands now behave less like archetypal characters and more like politicians,” he said.

Video, TV and streaming

Max Maharajh, founder of Be A Bear, likened YouTube to the raptor in Jurassic Park that surprises Bob Peck’s character. He said YouTube had been taking over television sets throughout 2025 and is now set to host the Oscars. “Brand-side marketers, you need to be building up your YouTube presence now,” he said.

DJ Agahi, managing director at Sabio, said connected TV, once an afterthought, gained momentum quickly across BVOD, SVOD and AVOD/FAST. With Netflix and Paramount reportedly in a bidding war for Warner Bros Discovery, he said any acquisition would reshape how advertisers plan and buy CTV and could change how audiences consume content more widely.

“Time will tell whether this shift will ultimately be for the better, but one thing is for sure, its impact will be immeasurable,” Agahi said.

Social, creators and influencers

Evan Horowitz, founder of Movers+Shakers, said marketers focused on platforms and formats and missed the larger change: “social is no longer a channel; it’s the operating system for modern marketing.” The most effective brands use social insight to set the brief and treat TV, out-of-home and retail as sequels to what has already worked in the feed. “You don’t test TV spots any more; you test TikToks,” he said.

He said speed, community feedback and cultural proximity are becoming competitive advantages. “Brands still treating social as distribution continue to lose market share. The future belongs to those who let social write the strategy and let everything else turn up the volume.”

Stuart Williams, head of planning at Adam&Eve\TBWA, said influencer marketing is now worth $36bn globally, but definitive peer-reviewed proof of its effectiveness arrived only in October 2025 with the IPA’s first influencer databank. The research showed influencers can work as a performance channel but excel at long-term brand building, delivering a similar ROI to linear TV and significantly more than standard paid social. He said that should prompt brands to rethink their social spend, where brand-authored paid content still far outweighs investment in influencers.

Joe Churchill, founder of Fan Club, said brands still treat social as a way to reach young people, even though the fastest-growing demographic on YouTube is the over-55s. “Social isn’t ‘youth media’ any more; it’s mainstream, multi-generational and central to how people consume content,” he said.

In his view, too many strategies overlook the fact that social and digital content platforms reach every age group most effectively, not just Gen Z or millennials, and that underestimating this means missing people where they already are.

Angharad Salazar Llewellyn, editorial director at Dept, said the creator industry has transformed creative production, with clients now expecting talent in social content as standard, whether creators or A-list names, in-house creators or UGC creators. That has created the role of ‘in-house content creator’ on both agency and client sides, and even the government was hiring one.

She also pointed to Instagram’s US test of broadcasting on Amazon Fire TV devices, which puts creators’ reels on the big screen, and that creator Angry Ginge’s win on I’m A Celebrity showed a shift in what counts as celebrity, “going from ‘streamer to mainstream’ in just a few years”.

Tom Wild, head of strategy at Fuse, said athletes became publishers in their own right in 2025, controlling distribution, narrative and audience trust through podcasts, long-form video, newsletters and their own social channels. He cited Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham. For brands, “alignment matters more than amplification,” he said, and the opportunity lies in shared authorship rather than borrowed reach.

“The risk of ignoring it is clear: marketing that feels imposed rather than lived,” he said.

Tom Stanton, head of planning at Anything is Possible, pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s comments to Stratechery in May describing a future in which brands hand Meta their bank details and Meta delivers results. “It’s a bleak future and should serve as a wake-up call,” he said, arguing that connected channel strategies outperform single-platform plans as media fragments.

Agencies and the media mix

Pete Wallace, general manager for EMEA and JAPAC at GumGum, said that while headlines focused on the Omnicom merger, a bigger shift was happening inside agencies. Almost every holding company has revamped its go-to-market strategy around data, technology and people backed by owned assets, changing pitching, skills and relationships with publishers and technology partners. Some relationships became combative, he said, but scrutiny of each partner’s value has increased, and the best data and technology will rise to the top.

Jared Belsky, chief executive of Acadia, said the biggest consolidation under way was marketers combining retail media, DTC media and national or integrated media. “75% of our RFPs over the last six months have called for this unique combination,” he said, adding that CMOs are frustrated at having the money artificially siloed and most agencies are not built to deliver all three at scale.

Chris Keenan, head of agency development for EMEA and APAC at StackAdapt, said physical store sales have received too little attention. After more than two decades of e-commerce growth, stores still account for more than 80% of sales. He said marketers should focus on linking digital signals to in-store behaviour, even without perfect one-to-one addressability, and pointed to DOOH and direct mail as examples of privacy-first omnichannel strategies powered by first-party data.

Cat Botibol, business development director at Secret Cinema, said optimising for impressions has trained people to forget advertising instantly. “What is the value of reaching 100 million individuals with instantly forgettable advertising?” she said. Secret Cinema’s research found 73% of people reported stronger brand affinity after a bespoke experience, and she said global experiential spend reached £96bn in 2024, above pre-pandemic levels.

She argued that while 2025 was dominated by stories about AI, budget efficiency and digital ROI, little thought went into the effect of relentless optimisation on people, whereas those attending well-made brand experiences engage for hours rather than seconds.

Culture and audiences

Ed Hayes, chief strategy officer at Bloom, highlighted Kodak’s return in October to selling printable consumer camera film as a possible sign of an analogue counter-revolution. He also cited Birkenstocks’ rapid growth, the appeal of neo-soul artists such as Olivia Dean and digital detoxing among Gen Z, and said a global readjustment would push higher-value categories towards “permanence, slowness and humanity”.

“Kodak famously drowned in the early 2010s digital media wave,” Hayes said. “But people’s appetite for analog refuses to die. For a growing cohort, the most precious moments and memories deserve pictures made from more than pixels and bytes.”

David Gaspar, partner and head of innovation at Gather, said women’s sport is still discussed in isolation rather than as part of brands’ wider sports strategy, and that marketers focus on only one or two leagues even as new ones keep opening up. He expects the conversation to change, though it did not in 2025.

“Sports are a cultural moment; they provide the opportunity to connect with consumers that few other industries can. Women’s sports are no different,” he said.

Susan Lee Colby, founder of Grace Creative, called 2025 “the year of aging”. Marketers focus on Gen Z and Gen Alpha, she said, while overlooking the over-50s, who hold 70% of disposable income and $86tn in wealth, equal to the world’s third-largest economy. This group spends up to five times more on categories including luxury, travel, wellness and tech, yet typically receives only 5-10% of marketing budgets. She added that the oldest millennials will reach 50 in little more than five years.

“When brands understand how to authentically market to this cohort’s desire to age in, not out, conversion, loyalty and revenue jumps,” she said, arguing that most brands still associate age with decline despite advances in longevity and health span.