Kantar’s 2026 outlook puts it simply:
“If the model doesn’t know you, it won’t choose you.”
Search, recommendations, product discovery, even “What’s the best X for me?” queries are a staple of the 'decisions' being delegated to AI systems, therefore your brand needs to show up in those invisible pathways.
How often your brand appears in AI-summaries, recommendation engines, assistant responses, and predictive category signals.
Why start-ups care: It’s a shortcut to credibility when no one knows you yet.
Why challengers care: You can outmanoeuvre slow incumbents simply by being more visible in the signals AI reads.
Why established brands care: AI can “forget” you if your recent activity lags.
You don’t need big spend here, you need consistent, structured signals.
A few things that cost little but matter a lot:
This is less about volume and more about precision.
Smartly.io found that 41% of marketers still need 3–4 weeks to launch a digital campaign.
In 2026, that’s too slow.
Why start-ups care: Speed is survival. If you launch slowly, you learn slowly.
Why challengers care: Your ability to react faster than the market is your point of difference.
Why established brands care: Slow internal processes crush media efficiency.
Don’t buy more channels, simply reduce the friction inside the ones you have.
You’re not just buying speed, you’re buying agility.
Everyone knows CAC/CPA.
What matters in 2026 is the quality of the customers you acquire, not the quantity.
Analytic Partners and Prophet call this the Brand Equity Multiplier; strong brands make your performance spend cheaper and more effective.
Why start-ups care: Burning cash (and time) on low-value signups kills runway.
Why challengers care: You need to win profitable customers in categories where incumbents dominate loyalty.
Why established brands care: Your next year’s revenue depends on the quality of the customers this year.
The 2025 CMI B2B report found that 65% of successful teams attribute results to content relevance and segmentation, which simply means, getting the journey right!
Why start-ups care: A leaky funnel means wasted spend you can’t afford.
Why challengers care: Unexpected drop-offs destroy the efficiency edge you worked hard for.
Why established brands care: Complexity clouds what’s really working.
You don’t need more media; you need sequenced media and a mechanism to measure.
Fixing the journey is one of the few marketing tasks that saves money and improves revenue.
WARC summarises this perfectly:
“Brand equity acts as a multiplier on performance advertising.”
Why this matters to all three org types:
Why start-ups care: A strong brand reduces your cost to acquire.
Why challengers care: Brand salience helps you punch above your spend.
Why established brands care: Brand equity is often your biggest dormant asset.
You don’t need expensive TV bursts. Try “micro-brand-building”:
These deliver emotional impact with tiny budgets, and boost performance downstream.
A small shift can unlock big results:
Reallocate 15-20% of performance budget to brand-plus-performance channels
Pre-build creative templates to reduce production costs next year
Buy media in consistent small bursts instead of one big sprint
Run micro-tests instead of full experiments
Prioritise channels that already work rather than chasing the new shiny thing
Have measurement systems in place.
Good media strategy doesn’t require more budget, just more intention.
These five KPIs matter because they’re future-proof, not just “trend-proof.”
They help you:
If you track these five, you’ll enter 2026 with clarity, not clutter, and your media strategy will finally work the way it was meant to, as a business lever, not a line item.
