Sarah Maina
If 2025 has taught marketers anything, it’s that telling the difference between hype and real transformation is becoming a survival skill. At the start of the year, the industry buzzed with talk of “Autonomous Everything”, a phrase that promised sweeping reinvention but delivered very little beyond conference headlines. As the months played out, marketers found themselves steering the same ship with the same tools, only under far greater pressure to prove impact.
That frustration has set the tone for 2026. Going into the year, marketers will stop chasing slogans and start following the numbers again. The data is clearer than ever and the lessons of 2025 are the compass for what comes next. If brands can read those signals with discipline, they’ll find that the shifts already underway are less about novelty and more about precision, timing and the fundamentals of how people behave.
Seasonality Is No Longer a Vertical Problem
For years, seasonality was seen as something contained neatly within verticals. E-commerce owned November. Travel had its summer peak. Gaming had its surge. But the data emerging over the past year shows a more intertwined reality. Seasonal behaviour doesn’t stay inside its lane anymore. When shoppers pour into e-commerce apps during major sale periods, gaming, subscription and entertainment platforms feel the dip almost instantly. When the shopping frenzy dies down, attention quietly swings back and those neglected categories surge.
Marketers aren’t planning for isolated moments anymore, but for a shared, shifting calendar of consumer attention. If one vertical heats up, another cools. This ripple effect will define 2026. The real challenge isn’t spotting the next seasonal wave but choreographing the timing between overlapping ones. A brand running a high-stakes gaming UA campaign during November’s retail shocks will face inflated CPMs, distracted users and slower conversion velocity, not because their creative is poor, but because attention has been pulled elsewhere. Understanding these cross-vertical feedback loops will determine who gets ahead next year.
And once brands get the timing right, they quickly run into the next unavoidable question: what happens when the very nature of creativity changes?
Creativity Becomes Technical, and Technology Becomes Creative
The old wall between creative thinkers and technical teams has crumbled. Marketers today are working in a world where generative tools let them test ideas, iterate rapidly and validate performance before a single campaign goes live. Creativity has become a technical discipline, built on data and experimentation. Likewise, technology, once purely the domain of engineers, now shapes storytelling, emotion and brand identity.
Consumer behaviour is amplifying this shift. People discover, compare and decide at breakneck speed, especially through short-form video and creator-led content. A teenager scrolling TikTok can spot an over-templated ad within seconds; a parent watching YouTube Shorts expects real utility, not fluff. Relevance has become a kind of respect. When content feels generic, attention evaporates.
This is why dynamic, modular and personalised creatives are becoming the default. They feel alive, responsive and human because they adapt to the context in which users experience them. Brands no longer create one message, they create ecosystems of variations that learn and evolve. And increasingly, while AI is threaded through every part of that process, the advantage it gives is not as straightforward as it once was.
AI Is Becoming a Commodity, and Data Is Becoming the Moat
By now, any company can stand up an “agent”. The barriers to running an LLM or deploying a generative workflow have dropped dramatically. The real differentiation lies elsewhere. The agents that will actually move the needle in 2026 will be those built on deep domain expertise and trained on large, clean, high-quality proprietary datasets.
The AI layer itself is commoditising, but domain-specific data is not. After a decade of collecting anything and everything, the companies that thrive will be the ones that can govern, structure and activate their data clearly. Metadata, lineage and discoverability become strategic assets. Clean data turns AI from a clever assistant into a reliable decision-maker. Without it, AI is just a very confident intern making very confident mistakes.
Of course, with AI becoming more embedded in everyday journeys, it is already reshaping how people behave, particularly in how they discover and choose brands.
LLMs Will Rewrite Discovery, Auctions and the Very Definition of Search
At the C-suite level, a fascinating debate has already begun: should brands wall off their experiences or integrate deeply with LLMs such as ChatGPT? That single choice could redefine how users find information, where they make decisions and how much traffic ever makes it back to a brand’s own properties.
If LLM-driven journeys scale as expected, classic auction-based search models may weaken significantly. Instead, discovery will depend on LLM ranking algorithms, which weigh context, preference and historical behaviour rather than bids alone. Vendors will inevitably emerge to help brands understand and optimise how they appear inside these models.
As discovery shifts, so will measurement. The top of the funnel will increasingly start within AI systems and brands will need to connect that visibility to performance, retention and revenue in a way that is trustworthy, privacy-safe and measurable.
This evolution brings us to the final reality of 2026: the way we measure impact must change just as dramatically as the way we earn it.
Why Measurement Will Become the New Growth Infrastructure
The category once known as the “MMP” has outgrown its box. Marketers can no longer afford tools that only measure mobile or focus narrowly on last touch. In 2026, measurement platforms will become shared infrastructure across the whole growth stack spanning paid and owned media, apps and web, connected TV and emerging channels.
Retailers, publishers and ad-tech partners are already breaking down their silos, building shared environments where discovery, engagement and purchase all connect. Customers experience their journey as one continuous flow, and measurement must finally catch up. The future of MarTech won’t be about adding more dashboards, but rather about creating one layer of truth that every team can build on.
In a year full of noise, the marketers who stand out will be the ones who see what really matters. They’ll understand how attention shifts across verticals, they’ll shape creativity that keeps pace with people, and they’ll use AI that’s powered by real, trustworthy data. Most importantly, they’ll measure impact wherever it happens. That’s the MarTech reality taking shape for 2026.
