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26 for 2026

This is my first predictions post ever. Please know that all of these predictions are unencumbered by the thought process. We might find that I'm just talking out of my butt. It wouldn't be the first time, and it certainly won't be the last.

1. AI Backlash: There's going to be an AI backlash, and I don't mean that people are going to be using less AI. In fact, they will be using more. But lazy AI-created content is going to be more worthless than it already is.

2. Talent: If you are an agency owner, it is going to be harder than ever to hold on to your talent because tools make it so much easier for a solo provider or a very small team to offer incredible services. So your talent will not stick around if you add friction to their lives. BEWARE.

3. AI Advances: AI will continue its incredible march and become more indistinguishable from reality. I think that will be limited to images, video, and sound. For some reason, AI cannot throw off the shackles of its fairly shitty writing. So I think that there will be incredible advances in quality, autonomy, and functionality inside of AI, but writing, for some reason, will continue to lag and be the hallmark of unoriginality.

4. Static Content Sites Will Zombify: We've already seen it happen, but sites that thrive on traffic because of good quality content that lasts for a long time are going to become zombies because any structured content like recipes or directions or how-to or many of the things that drove SEO visibility in the past have already been eaten up and are now spit out in LLM output. So if you own one of those sites, that's bad. The only thing that matters to search engines and LLMs will be content that they have not seen before. So anything that is static or "classic" is going to have a steeper decline in 2026.

5. That Will Have An Impact On The Ad Market: The change in these sorts of sites and the fact that they will drive less and less traffic over time will have an impact on the ad market. Very specifically, programmatic and remarketing advertising will either get way more effective or way less effective. It could get more effective because all of the junk impressions that power so much of the programmatic market will disappear because those sites don't generate traffic anymore. And that should mean that there is better signal on those remarketing and programmatic ad units on higher traffic sites, which would mean that advertising is more effective. Or there will be so much competition for those ad slots. That prices will become untenable and the signal will become diluted because there are so many marketers competing for a spot in the rotation.

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6. Premium Is Back, Baby: There will be a resurgence in premium inventory because traffic will start to consolidate amongst fewer sites. Since traffic will be flat or dropping, more and more publishers will opt for premium placement options rather than just relying on programmatic ad networks. That will be the only sure way to know that your ads are going to the traffic that you want to be visible for. And in almost every case, premium placement pays better than programmatic.

7. Premium Represents An Agency Opportunity: There will be a short- and medium-term opportunity for agencies who are willing to become premium spot brokers. There is also an opportunity for agencies that have specific facilities in creating effective premium placements, advertising that honors both the advertiser and the publisher's creative vision. I don't know how big that opportunity will be, however I am quite sure that there is one. Premium placement brokerage and premium aplacement creative will make some agencies a giant metric ton of money.

8. Agencies Will Move Towards Publication & Curation: In a throwback to the olden days of advertising, we will see some agencies developing owned properties that are suitable for premium placement advertising. They will, of course, sell that as a benefit to their clients. But there will be one or two agencies that create publications that are powerful enough to attract a non-client advertising audience.

9. There Will Be An End to End AI-Generated Campaign That Will Crush: In 2026, we will in fact see an advertising campaign that will be made from end to end by AI. In fact, we may even see the product itself created, designed by AI, but the human involvement will be limited to the prompt: "Make a campaign for [insert name of product]," and AI will do the rest of it without human intervention, and people will buy.

10. Procurement Bots Will Rise: I predict in 2026 that an agency will go through a sales process with human beings. The agency and the human beings will agree to work together. The financial negotiation & terms of the contract will be negotiated with a procurement bot on the marketer’s side, and the agency will accept the terms set by the client. This is not good news for agencies. But shortly, I suspect in 2027 or 2028, there will be seller bots on the other end that negotiate back and forth with the procurement bot, and we will end up with more fair pricing over time. But there will be real PROCUREMENT PAIN.

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11. All Agencies Will Be Outcome Focused: If you haven't been heading in this direction already, 2026 will be really hard for you. But all agencies will become outcome-focused. Process deliverables, ideas, etc. those things will not be valued unless they are shown to influence and create outcomes.

12. Agency Leadership Takes Center Stage: There's going to be a collapse in middle management in agencies because many of the things that middle managers do (training, course correcting, supporting) will effectively handled at a significantly lower cost by AI. There is no longer any need to write an SOP. AI can do that on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the particular desired outcomes and the particular people working on the task. Your new mission as an agency leader is to keep the attention of those employees and staff members that are now somewhat managed by AI and better connect them to your mission.

13. Small Agencies Win More Often: Note that I said small, not early-stage. Small agencies will begin to win more often simply because they will invest more in flexible processes, more flexible tooling, and have a lower cost structure than large holding companies. So I suspect that we will see more 15-30 people agencies landing clients that are substantively bigger and more established than they are. This is a rare bit of good news for agencies.

14. Agentic Shopping Upsets The Apple Cart: In the e-commerce space, we saw it a little bit this year with AI-powered or agentic shopping changing the traffic patterns for some e-commerce players. This is going to accelerate greatly. This will diminish the role of e-commerce agencies in terms of feed management, paid search management, because so much of this will be happening on an agentic level. In the short run, the agent will serve the end user before it serves the platform. As a corollary to this, I suspect that we will see web design and development patterns that make it harder for LLMs to capture product data and associated information simply so there is some benefit to the brand to have a human visitor. We have already seen the rise of development techniques that are uniquely focused around LLM data ingestion, things like answer pages, long involved FAQs, text that is structured in a way that doesn't read terribly well but is very digestible. In response to agentic shopping sites will take two approaches:

    1. To try to stop it

    2. To facilitate it

    Both of those will have an impact on user experience.

15. Email Is In For a Rough Patch: Over the last half-decade, platforms like Klaviyo have made email marketing astoundingly effective. That's about to change. There are more and more agents handling email, there are more and more tabs inside of Gmail, so we will see a significant decline in the effectiveness of email as we currently know it. Broad segments with time sensitivity driven promotions are going to have a rough time. I don't know how quickly the super hyper single person personalized email will happen, but between now and then, email is going to be a seriously high friction channel.

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16. SEO Is Dead & AEO Is Alive: This isn't real. SEO and AEO (or whatever we call it) are largely traveling to the same spot. The techniques you use for one will impact the other and vice versa. I do not think that we will see a decline in the competitive nature, the difficulty, or in fact the expertise needed to have an impact on either of these channels. I do think that the believability and the veracity of the results claimed by these channels will come into question in a significant way. And that the amount companies are willing to pay for these services in advance of results will decline rapidly.

17. Efficiency Isn’t Valuable: Efficiency in many respects will cease to have premium value. Media buying agencies who make their bones by efficient acquisition, or content agencies that generate quality content more efficiently than a brand could do it, will start to fade. Workflow automation, all of these things will start to happen automagically.

    We are seeing really the first wave of optimizers as experts start to fade. Making something more efficient will require less and less human interaction. So knowing how to make something efficient will not be helpful. Understanding what things need to be made efficient and what to do with the resulting capacity is helpful, but knowing how to do the stuff will be less valuable. And that is going to happen much more quickly than many people realize.

18. Creativity Is Everything: Even today, as we talk about creative as the new targeting, the ads that we are talking about are not in fact very creative. They are highly iterative, and iteration is very similar to optimization. Iterative ideas will not be effective because there is no barrier to massive iteration. The only barrier that cannot be automated and prompted away is truly creative and challenging thinking. If you are An agency that does not have an investment in truly creative people, meaning creative thinkers. The creative skills that you currently have around production and creation of images will no longer be well valued. Your investments need to be in people who are creative, not people who use tools to be creative.

19. Agency/In House Partnerships Will Be Wildly Important: The current paradigm is that agencies often do work that an in-house team cannot do in a cost-effective manner. The advantage of having better cost efficiencies will start to diminish, so the agency is going to transform. This already is happening, but it will transform from a doer to a partner in exploration. Testing and failing will be the job of the agency. Agencies may, in fact, need to eat that cost over time, much like they eat the cost of creative iteration today, but there needs to be a much tighter bond between agency and in-house teams. Because given a choice, a marketer will choose an in-house team plus AI tools over an agency that works in a silo.

20. Attribution Tools Will Be Challenged: I haven't been a big fan of attribution tools ever, but with more decisions being invested into AI-driven thinking, attribution tools will become a smaller part of a marketer's stack. It's not due to any technical limitations that they have, but rather the attribution knowledge will be used well before it becomes a report from which marketers derive insight.

21. Cold Stuff Will Continue to Suck Harder: I used to love cold outreach. I still harbor fantasies that it will come back someday. But cold outreach in the form of email, LinkedIn messaging, or anything else will continue to diminish in effectiveness, and there is not sufficient scale on the planet earth to make it more effective.

    AI has allowed scale and faux personalization to be ubiquitous. There is a more aggressive crackdown coming from ESPs, email recipients, and society in general. Unless whatever you have is so uniquely relevant to me and it answers the thing that I was just thinking about, it will be discarded. More volume won't help; more specificity will.

    I can imagine that by the end of 2026, the best cold outreach specialists will be the people who are able to cull your list of targets from 10,000 down to ten and generate six positive responses.

22. Newsletters & Content Will Continue to Suck Less: It has been said for a long time that content is king or queen or whatever, some sort of royalty. That will continue to be true. High-quality, relevant content will outperform certainly cold email and cold outreach. However, the bar for quality will rise because, as we talked about earlier in this list, AI has made making content easy, but it has not learned yet how to make good content. So there will be a focus on people who create wonderful content because of the way that they think, and the way that they process information, and the way that they are able to share that information, regardless of your industry or your position. Content creation is now a permanent part of your job responsibility.

23. Social Proof Will Begin to Evolve: First, we had case studies, and then that Transformed into social proof with endorsements, testimonials, and things that mix both the quantitative and the qualitative. But I think that social proof, over a long period of time, will turn into some sort of AI-powered endorsement/veracity check/prediction engine about the effectiveness of a particular kind of service or approach against your particular circumstances. We will see the 1st steps in that direction in 2026.

24. Events Will Matter More (or Less): There's no doubt that the pandemic and the rise of higher quality remote communication through Zoom, etc. impacted the efficacy of in-person events. There is a change that is happening. In-person events matter more right now, I think. I am not sure however that that is a long-term trend. Events work well now because there is an emphasis on real human connection. That being said, the way that events work now, where it is largely artificial presentations and structured meetings I think we'll give way to something that is more collaborative. I don't know how quickly that is going to happen. But events are going to change dramatically because there is no longer any real imbalance of information. Whatever process or technique an expert is talking about, you can go ask Claude or ChatGPT to reverse engineer that right now. The purpose of the event will not be lecture-driven teaching but perhaps more experiential experimentation in a collaborative setting. I don't know, but events are going to change, and they will either matter more or they will not evolve quickly enough and be shown to be not actually useful.

25. The Tastemakers Re-emerge: This is likely to be a slow-moving train, but we will be seeing the rise of tastemakers. A tastemaker is different than an influencer because an influencer is inherently a commercial entity. They are engaged in influencing because it drives commercial gain for them. There will be a movement towards people who curate because it is their nature - they may be academics, or artists in different media, but their curation will not be driven by a desire for fame, but rather as a sign of otherness. They will curate because they have particularly strong feelings about something (Warhol & Lichtenstein were tastemakers. Thomas Kinkade & Peter Max more similar to influencers. Hopefully that isn’t too esoteric an example.) Brands will chase tastemakers because they convey status & assign quality to a brand, whereas an “influencer” is a commodity based largely on their visibility. The tastemaker’s value is based on identity, attitude and other things that can't be easily copied.

26. There Are More Bullshit Projections Than Valuable Prognostications on This List: We won’t know for a long time, but please pay particular attention to 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12…they are likely to have the biggest impact on your business in 2026.

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