Chief marketing officers are planning to spend more in 2026 — dentsu’s latest global outlook reports 86 percent expect their budgets to increase over the next twelve months — but the more important story is where the money is going, because the structure of the media plan is being rebuilt underneath the totals.
Start with the totals. Global advertising is forecast to grow between roughly 5 and 9 percent depending on the forecaster, passing $1 trillion for the first time. The growth is not evenly spread: retail media, connected TV and social video are expanding at double-digit rates while search growth moderates — dentsu pegs search at 3.4 percent in 2026 as AI answers, retail search and social search compete with the traditional query. WARC’s Future of Media research calculates that almost 80 percent of all spend now flows into just three buckets — retail media, paid search and social — leaving a fifth of the market for everything else in media combined.
WARC’s diagnosis goes deeper than channel shares. Its researchers argue the established model of media planning — static annual plans, rigid personas, stable channel definitions — is breaking apart under structural and technological change, and that a “systems planning” model is emerging in its place: continuous, AI-assisted allocation across a landscape where discovery happens in search, social feeds, retail shelves and AI assistants interchangeably. A second WARC theme is that AI search creates a secondary audience for marketing — machines that summarize, recommend and increasingly transact — which means brands must be legible to algorithms as well as attractive to people. The third is the rise of creator and user-generated content as a brand-building system most marketers are still underprepared to run.
The budget mechanics follow from that. When algorithms are significantly involved in buying decisions — already true for a majority of spend and heading toward three-quarters by 2028 in dentsu’s estimate — the scarce resources stop being media inventory and become clean first-party data, distinctive creative and measurement a finance team will believe. That is why CMOs raising budgets are disproportionately funding retail media data partnerships, CTV and video production, and creator programs: those are the inputs the algorithmic system rewards.
For agencies and in-house teams alike, the 2026 budget conversation has changed its unit. The question is no longer how last year’s line items should inflate. It is whether the plan is architected for a market where three platform categories take four-fifths of the money, where machines are a real audience, and where the plan itself is becoming a system that reallocates continuously rather than a document signed in October. Budgets are rising. Plans built on last year’s structure will not automatically deserve the increase.
Related reading: HubSpot and Salesforce Are Selling the Same Thing: A CRM That Updates Itself · Creator Marketing Is a $44 Billion Line Item Now, and Performance Pay Runs Half of It · Selling Ads Is Now Growing Faster Than Selling Goods at America's Biggest Retailers
