‘Tis the season for performance, and it’s starting earlier than ever. The advertisers who win the holidays aren’t waiting for the rush. They move first, spend with conviction, and treat every dollar like it has to earn its place.

B2B buyers move across companies and job titles faster than most marketing stacks can track them. Account-based strategies help marketers zero in on the right companies, but without a complete picture of the people inside each buying group, critical signals get missed.

Creator spend is scaling fast—61% of marketers plan to increase investment in creator content in 2026, according to Kantar. But the intelligence guiding those decisions hasn’t kept pace. Creator partnerships are bought like media, yet they’re rarely measured like media. Kantar found that platform engagement data (likes and comments) only aligned with real brand-building potential in one out of every three pieces of creator content.

Performance marketing creative moves fast—new channels, new formats, new deadlines—but speed hasn’t solved the bigger problem. Every handoff between strategy, creative, and production loses a little more context, and creative ends up performing in isolation instead of building on what came before.

Your CTV platform is grading its own homework. And it’s giving itself straight A’s. In one audit, in-platform attribution reported results 4X higher than what a holdout group showed on the same campaign. Add in a fee stack that can eat 40-60% of programmatic CTV spend before a single ad airs, and IP-to-email targeting that’s accurate just 16% of the time, and the picture gets ugly fast.

Every marketing team has amassed a capable stack and plenty of data, yet few can turn either into the real-time customer journeys leadership expects. The instinct when something breaks is to bolt on one more tool, and the result is a system too tangled to move fast—chaos standing in for capability.

If you’re a creator, you already know the feeling: brands still treat you like a distribution channel, not a business partner. You’re building products, launching companies, curating real communities—and half the industry is still briefing you like it’s 2016.

What if you could spot a customer about to walk away? For most brands, churn doesn’t happen all at once. It builds slowly, through repetitive, irrelevant, or poorly timed interactions that quietly erode trust until a customer disengages for good.

We’re now past the midpoint of 2026—enough time for some AI predictions to have landed as expected, others to have surprised everyone, and a few still playing out.

Brands are building bigger partner, creator, and affiliate networks than ever, betting on them to fuel growth. But loyalty is easy to lose. Recent Tipalti research found that 81% of organizations consider their external networks vital to business success, yet 26% lost partners in the past year due to a surprising source of friction. Friction they never saw coming.

Point-of-care advertising has quietly become one of the most underutilized opportunities in programmatic media. And it’s no longer just for pharma.

Most marketers optimize the wrong thing. Sales lift tells you a campaign worked, but it doesn’t tell you if you won the customer. There’s a real difference between a buyer and a loyal customer, and most measurement frameworks can’t tell the two apart.

YouTube has never represented a bigger opportunity for agencies. It’s also never been more complicated to execute. It now spans TV, social, and performance, with a thriving creator economy at its center. Agencies need more than a media plan. They need a strategy built for the ecosystem YouTube’s become.

As advertising enters a more complex, AI-driven era, campaigns are increasingly fragmented across channels, making effectiveness harder to achieve and even harder to scale. Success now depends on creative, media, and measurement working together as a coordinated system. The most effective campaigns don’t just show up everywhere, they build impact through connection.

Some audiences are too small, too fragmented, or too hard to identify through conventional means. For most marketers, that’s a dead end. For healthcare marketers—it’s a daily challenge.

Cannes Lions is going to be hotter than ever this year. Yes, temperature-wise (do you have your handheld rechargeable fan ready?), and more importantly, from a deal-making, news-breaking, connection-creating perspective. But what actually matters and what’s just noise? What should you watch for? Who are the people to follow?