January is over, and so is the season of media, marketing, and technology predictions - a perfect time to reflect and challenge opinions, beliefs, and thinly disguised sales pitches.
Trend 1: Operational AI to Transformational AI
If 2025 was the year of operational AI (increased efficiency and reduced costs), then 2026 is the year of Transformational AI. Whilst Operational AI, in the main, benefits the organisation, Transformational AI ultimately benefits the customer.
With an increasingly complex and fragmented media ecosystem, there are some big emerging trends:
- Audiences are no longer usefully defined by demographics
- Audiences are no longer usefully defined by the media they consume
- Brands are no longer usefully defined by competitors
- Products and services are experiences, not just transactions
From a marketing perspective, the immediate opportunity for marketers to do more with 1PD (first-party data), their marketing technology stack, media partnerships, and operational stakeholders in their own business sits within the realm of transformational AI. The enabler for much of this will become increasingly clear through the lens of Agentic AI.
From a May 2025 survey by Chief Martech, we can see that 75% of marketing organisations aren’t using AI agents.
What is Agentic AI for marketers?
For starters, an ‘agent’ needs to be embedded in a system, with access to tools, platforms, and historical data. It’s recommended that there are clear ‘guardrails’ in place to guide the values and principles of an agent.
If you or your organisation are comfortable with the above and have a marketing technology stack and source of truth that are composable (see Trend 5), then here are some examples of how an AI Agent can assist transformational marketing in 2026:
- Market & competitor research
- Autonomous campaign (paid advertising) management & optimisation (many social and programmatic platforms offer a ‘co-pilot’
- Content creation at scale
- Lead qualification
- Reporting
- Partner discovery
However, there’s no need to be limited by what exists; the real opportunity is to create something bespoke.
As publishers and search look to limit LLM influence, it’s important to understand that your current tools, platforms, and marketing technology stack should always be open to review, but every marketing operation should have or at least not leave unclaimed a host of SEO tools, platform ad management systems, GA4, Google Search Console, social handles, and analytics.
Trend 2: Creativity expected from everyone
The last few years have seen an incredible rise in AI creative tools. Creative platforms for as little as £20 a month now provide individuals with enough content and editing options to mass-produce. Whilst there’s a lot of talk about ‘AI slop’ across the internet (especially on social media, where approximately 75% of social media posts are AI-generated), there is a chance that even the AI slop will generate enough engagement to play the algorithm, but it’s unlikely to drive real-life marketing outcomes.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of expectation that media planners and managers will now be able to own the creative process. I genuinely believe that simply having the tools is not enough for high-impact work. However, as John Hegarty says, anyone can be creative given the right culture.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/backlash-builds-against-ai-slop-8291162/
Trend 3: Effectiveness over creativity
Enabling creativity and creative output in your marketing organisation through culture and tools is, as highlighted above, on the rise. However, there’s a really good chance that inexperienced creatives will focus on beautification and style without factoring in a measurement framework to assess the actual effectiveness of the creative content in advertising.
Understanding and tailoring all aspects of creative to a defined target audience at the right time in their journey = and with the medium where the creative content will appear in mind - are skills built up over time and require collaboration with a media and marketing plan. Anyone tries to be creative without doing this first will not make effective content.
Trend 4: An effective strategy is dependent on effective measurement
Trend 3 highlights a need for a measurement framework in the creative production process. A measurement framework for all marketing is critical, now more than ever.
A measurement framework starts with clarity on the source of truth. For many digital marketers, this will likely be GA4 or, more likely, a combination of GA4 and lead data. More advanced frameworks will incorporate CRM (segmented customer data) and forms of brand sentiment or NPS (Net Promoter Score) sources, if relevant.
Whatever your organisation's marketing maturity, having something in place is better than nothing. There’s a lot that GA4 can provide one with, and it can be customised to suit your business - lead generation or ecommerce.
At I-COM, we focus on connected & tangible recommendations that will drive growth for brands in all sectors - PAE is our planning framework.
Trend 5: Composability in Martech (Marketing Technology)
This one is actually from 2025. As much as having a source of truth is important, it's even better to have a combination of sources of truth. The complications rising from an increasingly fragmented media market ensure that, rather than being able to rely on one central marketing technology or source, competitive advantage will be gained by how your marketing technology complements your strategy: composability.
The number of martech providers continues to grow, up 28% last year to 14,106 providers, according to Scott Brinker. The continued growth is down to AI, new, smaller entrants, and a move away from the belief that a smaller martech stack was the goal for many CMOs (less cost & complexity).
There is a competitive advantage in having a border tech stack that enables integration, as there is no ‘one’ Martech provider that does it all. Composability is the key for a martech stack, and whilst the decision-making process will now be harder and longer (it will need to involve the CMO, Enterprise IT Leads, Finance, and Customer Experience teams).
Trend 6: Incrementality over big shifts - always in beta
A catchy phrase that sounds as if I'm based in Palo Alto. This trend is really a cultural one and an antidote for marketers or organisations who are expected to be the experts in what is clearly the most disruptive time in marketing since the rise of programmatic and mobile.
Every marketing or investment decision can only be judged by those with context. Comparing yourselves to benchmarks and competitors is less useful than having a strategy that plans for disruption. Sounds easy, right?
It’s tempting, especially when using synonyms like ‘transformational’ to only think and plan big. As with a lot of change and change management, it’s often a combination of smaller changes supported by culture. Marketers in mature sectors need to share responsibility for the approach to experimentation, product development, and change.
If you’re in a fast-growing business, then an experimentation culture will be a critical factor in innovation and growth. According to the World Economic Forum, companies with strong innovation cultures do better than competitors that don’t foster innovation.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/01/business-innovation-performance-2022-covid/?utm
Trend 7: Social Media - A Dividing Line in 2025?
Another trend from 2025 - we are starting to see brands and organisations be more conscious of the influence of social and the rise of ‘AI slop’ on some of these platforms. Will the lack of trust push investment towards regulated main media channels, and will some brands come off social media platforms? Maybe this year?
In summary
It’s always good to be consistent in one’s predictions; however, 2025 was a significant year of change and development. Whilst a large number of people were coming to terms with a definition for AI in their business, there were also some who weren’t buying into the opportunity. The sentiment in and for 2026 feels very different, and it’s clear that marketing, like other professions, is going through a significant period of change and marketers need to adopt a growth mindset as their number one priority.
For those who are interested in looking back on our 2025 predictions: 7 Marketing Trends for 2025
If you’d like to find out more about I-COM’s PAE Strategy Framework and how it can support marketing and business growth, then please contact alex.blaikley@i-com.net
