Seven trends that will impact media and marcoms in 2026

In 2025, the global advertising industry is expected to finish the year at $1.19trn (£890m), according to Warc’s latest Global Ad Forecast. Big tech platforms continue to dominate with around 70% of incremental global growth going to companies including Alphabet, Meta and Amazon.

By 2026, total advertising investment is forecast to climb to $1.3trn (£970m), representing 9.1% year-on-year growth. A further 7.9% lift in 2027 would push global ad spend to $1.4trn (£1.04m), effectively doubling the industry’s size since the pandemic. That figure equates to roughly $150 spent on advertising for every person alive today.

With spend growing, Marketing Week has identified seven marcom trends that will shape 2026, to help marketers make smarter decisions and plan effectively.

1. Consolidation reshapes agencies and media owners

The effects of widespread consolidation in 2025 will become more apparent next year. James Shoreland, CEO of VCCP Media, describes this period as one of “positive consolidation”, driven as much by changes in consumer behaviour as by corporate activity.

“Consumers like to use their media time in a much more selective way,” he says. “There’s that consolidation of time and focus that we start to see and younger audiences are zeroing in on fewer, bigger, better media moments.”

YouTube is one of the beneficiaries, with YouGov reporting that 28% of UK social media users now watch more YouTube than they did a year ago. Long-form, television-style content continues to grow on the platform, such as M&S’s ‘Love That’ series.

The largest agency-side consolidation is Omnicom’s $13.5bn (£10.3bn) acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG), which creates the world’s biggest advertising holding company, with combined revenues exceeding $25bn (£18.7bn). The integration process, and its impact on clients and agency structures, will become clearer in 2026.

Consolidation is also accelerating among media owners. ITV has confirmed talks to sell its broadcast business to Sky for £1.6bn, a move that would significantly alter the UK’s broadcasting landscape. In the US, Netflix had agreed to buy Warner Bros Discovery for $72bn (£53.8bn), before Paramount launched a hostile bid worth $108.4bn (£81bn).

Both deals face competition concerns in the US and Europe, meaning the regulatory responses expected in 2026 will carry significant weight for the future of TV and streaming.

2. AI continues to reshape search

AI search moved into the mainstream this year and its expansion will only continue in 2026. As users shift to chatbots like ChatGPT for quick, conversational answers, the coming year will test how brands respond.

The idea of “generative engine optimisation”, or GEO, gained traction this year, with Marketing Week columnist Andrew Holland describing it as how generative AI systems “perceive, interpret and present your brand”, so that you show up as a trusted, preferred answer when people ask questions relevant to your business.

“It’s essentially about creating and structuring content to be easily digestible by the LLMs to influence AI summaries to feature your brand,” he wrote.

A recent report from Ofcom also reported signs of change in search behaviour with 30% of searches now showing AI overviews. According to the findings, ChatGPT recorded 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period in 2024.

Search advertising remains a major driver of digital spend. WPP Media forecasts the category will reach $244.9bn (£183bn) in 2025, up 10.2% year-on-year, representing 21.4% of global ad revenue.

Growth is expected to hold at similar levels in 2026 before slowing toward 2030. These figures, however, only cover traditional search engines such as Google, Bing, Baidu, Naver and Seznam, and exclude search-driven ad revenue on platforms like Amazon and TikTok.

By including other search platforms (such as Yelp), social platforms (such as Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok) and commerce sites (such as Amazon), the “expanded search” market could reach about $400bn in 2026. Pureplay search would account for roughly 61% of that, including emerging ad revenue from AI Overviews and other generative search formats.

Search behaviour continues to fragment across commerce platforms, social networks and AI assistants. The shift may narrow again as AI search from major platforms, such as Google’s AI mode, matures. Still, this “zero-click” future means brands must reassess how they appear, and whether they appear at all, in an AI-driven search environment.

3. AI accelerates creative production

This year, AI has well and truly become the norm and this is only set to continue into 2026, particularly for generating TV ads.

Both ITV and Channel 4 have launched services to help SMEs create AI-generated ads. The services allows brands to generate TV ad creative within minutes, or with human input, based on their existing online footprint.

Matt Campion, founder and creative director of Spirit Studios, which was the first to use Channel 4’s AI-generated ad service, expects adoption to accelerate.

“We’re going to see an absolute explosion of it being used in production as the money continues to drop out of legacy media,” he explains.

“We’re going to see both the buyers and the producers start to use these tools because there’s no alternative. We’re on a journey for it to become part of the normal way of working.”

Younger audiences are zeroing in on fewer, bigger, better media moments.

James Shoreland, VCCP Media

Even large brands have entered the game. For a second year, Coca-Cola produced an AI version of its 1995 ‘Holidays Are Coming’ festive ad. Pratik Thakar, the company’s global vice-president and head of generative AI, calls the work “a transformational leap”.

Consumers don’t seem to mind. A study by System1 and Jellyfish found AI-generated ads recorded an average star rating of 3.4, compared with 2.3 across System1’s wider database of more than 120,000 ads.

Platforms are moving quickly too. Meta plans to enable advertisers to build and target entire campaigns using AI by the end of 2026, while Disney’s $1bn investment in OpenAI is set to allow the creation of short, user-prompted videos featuring characters from across Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.

4. Measuring effectiveness and tackling waste

Marketers continue to face pressure to demonstrate the commercial impact of their work. However, Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness survey, run with Kantar and Google, shows only 39.2% of marketers currently measure whether their work is delivering business outcomes.

Less than half (48.6%) of marketers measure campaign views and leads generated (44.5%), while under a third (31.8%) describe customer retention rates as a key metric. Concerningly, less than half (49.5%) of B2C marketers say they focus on gauging whether their work is delivering business outcomes.

These gaps are emerging at a time when global ad spend is expected to grow 9% this year and is increasingly invested in big tech platforms.

In response, broadcasters are attempting to strengthen their measurement capabilities to entice advertisers back to the platform. Channel 4, Sky, and ITV joined forces to launch Lantern, a collaborative TV measurement panel.

The tool aims to demonstrate TV’s impact on short-term performance metrics such as search queries, web traffic, social media engagement and conversion as TV’s impact on short-term behaviours is “not often given credit”, according to Sky Media’s director of client and marketing, Karin Seymour.

Meanwhile, ISBA’s Origin – a cross-media audience measurement platform that allows marketers to measure deduplicated reach and frequency of ad campaigns across different media channels and different ad formats – completed its beta trials and has moved into its new Expanded Availability (EA) phase.

Further efforts to unify measurement across linear TV, connected TV, video-on-demand and social environments are expected to gather pace next year.

5. Commerce media beyond retail accelerates

Retail media has been on a meteoric rise in recent years, enabling retailers to move into the advertising business. By tapping into retailers’ first-party data, brands are able to target customers across websites, apps and off-site channels.

Now, as businesses catch on to the significant opportunity set out by retailers, non-retail companies are developing their own media networks to capture a share of growing ad budgets.

Enter commerce media networks (CMNs). Extending beyond retail, CMNs span industries from financial services to healthcare and travel. Commerce media is set to account for 15.6% of global ad revenue in 2025, up 11.6% to reach $178.2bn (£133.5bn) and overtaking total TV ad revenue for the first time, according to WPP Media’s latest This Year, Next Year report.

Brands are now demanding stronger creativity and more rigorous measurement from retail and commerce media networks. Marketers want proof not only of short-term ROI but also long-term brand impact, including shifts in consideration, recall, affinity and customer lifetime value.

6. Multi-platform experiences will gain traction

Despite the growth of digital channels, investment in real-world experiences is increasing, as well as a blending of online and offline experiences. The latest IPA Bellwether report shows a net balance of 10.9% of companies increasing events budgets, reflecting a shift towards face-to-face engagement and experiential activity.

“You’re going to see a lot more cross-collaboration across media owners to bring an entire experience to life,” notes Shoreland, explaining this could be brands joining in on certain sporting events.

Sport is set to play a major role in next year’s spending plans. WPP Media forecasts UK TV advertising will grow 3.4% in 2026 to £4.8bn, driven in part by the FIFA World Cup and the Women’s T20 World Cup.

Meanwhile, brands including McDonald’s, Mastercard and Coca-Cola continue to restructure their budgets to prioritise experiential activity and integrated campaigns.

Mastercard’s outgoing CMO Raja Rajamannar has argued that marketers should have “reinvented” their approach earlier and said the company has already redirected spend away from traditional advertising and towards experiential marketing, or what he terms “immersive experiences that money cannot buy”, exclusive to Mastercard.

7. The changing shape of video

This year, for the first time, the IPA TouchPoints dataset shows British adults aged 15 and over now spend more time on their mobile phones than watching TV.

The way people watch TV has been changing for some time. Ofcom’s annual report on the nation’s media habits reveals 20% of Gen Alpha (aged four to 15) head straight to the YouTube app as soon as they turn the TV on. Meanwhile, over-55s are now watching twice the amount of YouTube content on their TVs than they were last year.

Whether YouTube counts as “TV” remains contested. Unlike public-service broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4, or subscription platforms like Netflix, YouTube does not operate under the same regulatory framework. The debate raises a broader question: is TV defined by an ad format, a media owner, or simply the biggest screen in the home?

In response to shifting behaviours, the Advertising Association and Warc have expanded the definition of total TV to include broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD), ad-supported subscription VOD (such as Disney+, Netflix and Prime Video), advertising-based VOD (AVOD) and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST). YouTube remains outside this definition.

Meanwhile, the consolidation of media owners will have a big impact next year. Havas Media COO Simon Bevan says the shift toward connected TV (CTV) and streaming “is continuing at pace.”

As linear TV viewing declines, audiences are migrating to CTV platforms, and advertising investment is following.

Since 2015, linear TV ad spend has dropped by an average of 33.1% year-on-year, according to figures from Warc. In contrast, total online video – including BVOD, SVOD, social media and open web video – has grown 1,759.4% over the same period, demonstrating that digital investment is increasingly significant, even for traditional broadcasters.

As part of The Year Ahead, Marketing Week will be identifying the key opportunities and challenges that will shape marketers’ roles in 2026. As well as flagging what we think marketers should be spending time and money on next year, it is also a commitment from us to focus on these topics.