A new year, a fresh set of predictions to capture new opportunities, navigate shifting environments, and prepare oneself for the year ahead.
The Creativ Company executive team compiled our top 5 predictions and why they matter, so you can become a better informed marketing-technologist.
Trend 1, our massive AI bubble:
Our industry is currently in a major AI bubble, similar to the dotcom bubble of 2001. AI startups raised billions from private markets, during the easy money period in 2021 and 2022 with interest rates at near zero. These start ups have burned through their runway with no significant revenue gains. They now face an oversaturated AI market, little consumer demand, and an expensive money market.
A handful of tech giants, the magnificent 7, now make up 38% of the public stock market - Nvidia, Microsoft/OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Tesla, Palantir. These firms are burning huge amounts of capital investing in AI, have sky high valuations that are hundreds of times their real cash flows and have padded their balance sheets by signing circular deals amongst each other.
AI is the unlock to the next technological revolution, but much of the business community's self-dealing and overinvestments will not lead to the massive payoff Wall Street is betting on. The reason? The investment has created an oversupply to lukewarm demand. It's only a matter of time before we see value destruction tech as reality crashes in.
To our mind, the question isn’t if, it’s when. Bubbles burst when an exogenous shock disrupts a fragile system. It’s anyone's guess what that could be.
But wait, aren't you an AI company? Yes, we consider ourselves a machine intelligent marketing company. We build insights products and marketing solutions with machine automation that power the campaigns we produce; however, we’ve raised no capital from outside investors and remain profitable. These challenges will be critically faced by AI companies that raised massive capital to sell a product against insufficient demand.
Trend 2, AI Marketing Fatigue:
Merriam-Websters word of 2025 was slop. AI has become commodified and genericized beyond recognition. The key question in 2026 will be 'what does your AI do?'.
Many firms have coasted on the buzzword of 2025, but failed to solve a specific business problem through its application. 2026 will be the year we separate the wheat from the chaff. At the same time advertising spend from AI and technology companies continues to increase going into 2026. The dearth of campaigns will quickly cause consumer fatigue, furthering genericizing AI.
Companies addressing real business challenges with this transformative technology will thrive while the ones that leverage AI for the sake of it will fail. 2026 will be the year where things get real. See trend 1 for why.
Trend 3, More consolidation:
Expect even more consolidation in the entertainment, tech and media industry. This has been an ongoing trend that I predicted in 2024 that's come to pass in 2025. Disney merging with Hulu. Netflix acquires Warner Brothers Discovery. Paramount merging with Skydance. Streaming disrupted the media status quo, spinning into valuable standalone companies in the last 10 years. Now they are being reabsorbed and conglomerated as the streaming TV industry matures as the new standard. The same goes for gaming such as Microsoft's buying spree and EA's recent leveraged buyout.
For consumers, expect less platforms, less apps, less originals, and corresponding higher prices as industry consolidation raises media company pricing power. Great for a few mega corps, bad for consumers, and bad for our business ecosystem in which service firms have fewer clients to support and clients have more concentrated leverage.
Trend 4, Community Marketing Rises:
Audience engagement has transformed from a brand-to-consumer monologue into a decentralized, peer-to-peer dialogue that spans platforms, brands and even industries. The new multi-platform, creator driven marketing ecosystem necessitates new solutions to marketing and insights. Many marketers have abandoned the funnel framework and replaced it with a cycle that goes from awareness to consideration to conversation to advocacy.
This shift will require new tools. LLMs and deep learning will analyze organic conversations and respond with personalized generated content within brand online communities. New measurement products will ingest multiple platforms to summarize perception. Campaigns will have to adapt to incentivize community engagement, sharing, and growth.
Trend 5, The Qualitative Become Quantitative
The Shift to Qualitative Impact Measurement! The media and advertising world's fragmentation, coupled with increasing privacy restrictions, has rendered traditional, last-click metrics obsolete for capturing true brand value. We will be the transition from quantifying actions (impressions, clicks) to quantifying influence and authenticity through human-centric signals. We are moving toward models that use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to assign attribution credit not just based on a customer's final action, but on their emotional response across the journey and the cumulative perception of consumers against a brand.
The focus shifts from counting ad views to measuring the resonance of the brand's story. Advanced machine intelligence models can now analyze thousands of pieces of media coverage, social posts, and comments to determine if the intended narrative (e.g., "Sustainability Leader," "Innovation Pioneer") is actually being perceived and believed by the public.
Buckle up adland, it's going to be a wild 2026.