That’s not so Sean.
What can we say? Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we don’t. Luckily, we have no skin in the game!
SOURCES
https://www.kantar.com/Campaigns/Marketing-Trends
https://www.deloittedigital.com/nl/en/insights/perspective/marketing-trends-2026.html
https://www.coursera.org/articles/marketing-trends
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/future-of-marketing
https://www.ama.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Executive_Summary-AMA-2026-Future_Trends_in_Marketing.pdf
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-shutting-down-browser
https://www.vogue.com/article/you-cannot-trust-a-machine-the-ai-consumer-perception-survey
https://www.pangram.com/blog/ai-in-your-feed?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
We’re celebrating 150 episodes of The Marketing Gateway today, and I thought it’d be fun to look at some of the marketing predictions that I and other people made for 2026 and to see where things have wound up.
So let’s start with me. In Episode 41 in the last week of 2025, we discussed whether or not AI would prove to be the end of influencers in 2026 as AI creations like the face actress Tilly Norwood could be poised to create digital influencers to replace real ones. But as of this month, at least, we’re not quite there. Human influencers are still going strong as a channel for getting the word out there, but there’s no denying that many are now using AI tools to come up with content ideas, write scripts and create images.
In Episode 42, I talked about Treatonomics, that idea that when the economy goes down, people tend to indulge in buying treats for themselves. It’s still unclear if this is happening yet or not, but as food and fuel costs have risen, tariffs have added expense to packaged goods and electronics have gotten out of control in terms of component costs, I’d expect to see this one happening a lot more in the fourth quarter as people prep for the holidays.
In Episode 43, I talked about how consumers were turning off the audio in ads and the result was that many digital and broadcast ads are showing words and pictures under the assumption that people aren’t listening. This trend has continued, but there’s been a swing back to talking about where audio actually works, like podcasts, music services, retail media networks and in-app background audio that gives perks to users who listen without disrupting the experience.
Speaking of retail media networks, I talked about them in Episode 44 and how they’re poised to become the next big advertising platform. Some examples of these are Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing and its data insights platform 84.51°, Target Roundel, Instacart Ads and Lowe’s Media Network. These still seem poised to be the wave of the future for many marketers, but from what I can tell, we’re not quite there yet, with a lot of digital advertising strategies still mostly focusing on social media and search.
And then there’s AI, which I discussed in our final episode of 2025, episode 45 – 105 episodes ago! And while The Marketing Gateway is still 100% authored by human hands, AI has continued to be a controversial topic, with some people going all in on it and even utilizing agents to act as trained assistants and other people, myself included, hanging back while we wait to see if this tech is going to deliver on all its promises. Given that the tech is suddenly getting more expensive and some of the major players like OpenAI and Anthropic are about to get caught up in a bubble burst that’s like to happen this year, it’s anyone’s guess where we’ll wind up on AI by the end of the year.
So, let’s give me maybe 2 and a half points out of five so far for the year, and maybe 3 out of 5 by the time we’re recording episode 200 about 17 weeks from now sometime in November. I think I did pretty well considering the data on hand.
But what about some of the other predictions that people far smarter than me were willing to make in the end of 2025? We’re going to look at some today, including a few that really missed the mark.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
I want to start by saying that no one can predict the future, and while it’s fun and even cathartic to watch predictions for the future fail, it’s also illustrative of the fact that we look at the future by projecting our own biases forward. People in the 1950s and 60s saw a rapid adoption of convenient home appliances and automobiles and presumed that the future was going to have even better versions of those things, but in the form of autonomous servant robots and flying cars. Obviously, we’re nowhere near that future today.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s and 90s, the future looked like it was going to continue the fashion and music culture of that decade and we all expected the people of the future were going to be cool and fun and have all this holographic technology and futuro-rock music. Obviously, things didn’t shake out quite that way, and I doubt anyone from the 80s and early 90s thought we’d be still be listening to early 80s music on the radio nearly half a decade later.
On the other hand, there have been plenty of marketers over time who have predicted the future pretty much spot on. Ecommerce was one of those things early internet adopters saw coming from a mile away; nobody knew who would ultimately own it, but the idea of an everything store like Amazon was being posited in the 1990s when we still had dial-up internet. Likewise, the idea of using personalized, targeted ads has been something marketers were chasing for decades in the 20th century; today’s digital advertising follows a lot of those patterns.
So let’s start with Kantar, which issued a Marketing Trends report for 2026. In their first recommendation, they suggested that consumers were going to be excited about using AI assistants for shopping, based on a statistic that 24% of AI users were already doing so. Kantar also believed that OpenAI’s AI-powered browser was going to be a big hit.
Just last week, though, OpenAI announced it’s shutting down the Atlas browser 9 months after launch and the whole idea of agentic shopping has turned out to be a real dud as well. Beyond the cybersecurity concerns, which turned out to be a big problem, the technology was slow, inefficient and really bad at finding the right items or shopping for deals.
Likewise, Kantar’s second recommendation that internet users would come to rely on AI assistants for product recommendations has proven not to be true, and the hype around GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, has sort of fizzled for now.
To offer an example, Vogue released some research in April of this year suggesting that only about a quarter of their respondents would use AI for product research for beauty products, while other use cases showed even lower numbers. 54% said they would never consider using AI for this purpose. Many of the people who refused to use AI talked about concerns regarding loss of creativity, privacy and security, ethical concerns or simply the fact that they don’t want to lose the feeling of human connection to their product recommendations.
We’ll stop picking on Kantar and move to Deloitte, who made the bold statement in their Digital Marketing Trends for 2026 report that “Marketing as we now know it is over. AI rewrites creativity. Trust becomes currency. Channels collapse. Pressure intensifies. What worked yesterday won’t survive tomorrow.”
And, I mean, yeah? The world’s always changing and you have to be aware that nothing lasts forever. But many of the consumer trends we’ve seen in 2026 have been due to worsening economic conditions causing things to become more expensive, not consumers rapidly changing in how they do things. The Deloitte report discusses AI as a panacea for marketing if it can be used correctly, but the reality is that AI has been more useful for automating repetitive tasks and speeding up content production than it has been for moving the needle on consumer behavior.
One line in the report is that AI will become the operating system for marketing, with the report explaining it’s because it can react to the market so much faster, and at a grander scale, that traditional systems.
Obviously, that isn’t the case at this point in time. Agentic AI is still a neat tool that doesn’t work very well and which is primarily being used for coding. AI agents are also far more capable of serving individual, customized roles, like being a personal assistant, than making strategic decisions about the marketplace.
I have yet to see any study talk about how AI marketing is directly responsible for changing how consumers are doing things, and I doubt I will beyond very contrived, manipulative circumstances because AI is just a tool that’s useful for optimizing what human beings were already doing.
At the same time, it’s also a tool that can be catastrophic when it’s given too much leeway to behave on its own and which consumers tend to hate interacting with when they want to speak to an actual human.
What I have seen, by contrast, is marketers on online forums like Reddit complaining that AI is being forced on them by leadership that doesn’t understand how it ought to be used and that they often have to justify their own roles because their human knowledge and experience aren’t trusted as much as a general AI platform is. And that’s a problem, because AI is not ever going to get smarter or better or learn from experience the way a human being might. If we’re looking forward, as the Deloitte report suggests we should, we need to acknowledge that LLMs are trained on data that look backwards.
So, let’s put that one aside and move on to a Coursera report ostensibly based on a more academic understanding of what 2026 will bring, though it’s really just an advertisement for various Coursera services pretending to be an article.
Even so, it’s actually interesting to read because instead of being hyperbolic and taking big swings, it feels like a report that was written for previous years and just updated for the present, maybe actually authored by AI instead of a real person. And that wouldn’t be surprising, because it offers general statements like “Artificial Intelligence is boosting effectiveness and efficiency” and “Personalization is enhancing the user experience.”
A lot of this report is very bland and very obvious, with few citations to research.
But the prediction I think is most worth discussing is #5 of the 9 presented – “Quality editorial content persists.” The report says, and I quote:
“Marketers will continue to invest in editorial content, like blog posts and podcasts, to generate engagement, support conversions, and promote thought leadership. According to the 2025 HubSpot report, 91 percent of marketers surveyed plan to increase or maintain their investment in podcasts and audio content in 2025”
End quote.
Now, obviously, I love a good podcast, so I totally agree with that last part! But let’s talk about written content. Some recent figures released by Pangram, an AI detection platform, suggests that the internet is now at a point where over 40% of the total content available is authored by AI, whether it’s editorial content, social media posts or Amazon reviews.
One of the worst offenders in social media? LinkedIn, where 41% of longform content that’s over 250 words is likely AI-authored, and 30% of the shortform content under that threshold is as well. And if you’ve been on LinkedIn, you can totally tell, and LinkedIn was even encouraging it for awhile. But it brings us that much closer to the concept of the “dead internet”, which is where so much of the content on the internet is produced by artificial sources like bots or generators that it’s pretty much useless for any actual information.
This doesn’t mean that editorial content is a complete waste of time, but I can tell you, from having authored quite a bit of it, that you have to view it as part of a broader engagement strategy in which it’s one form of the content you’re sharing. The content you write for a newsletter should also be repurposed for a video podcast and short-form video and public presentations and an ebook and citations from other pieces. Content is an ecosystem that relies on trust and engagement to keep audiences engaged.
Thought leadership is one of the trickiest areas right now because so much of it comes from people who are selling AI solutions and so many useful white papers, new ideas and impactful conversations get drowned out by AI. It’s hard to find public forums on the internet where thought leadership can be shared and developed, and a lot of what’s presented as new and novel really isn’t because where we’re headed down the road isn’t clear to many people in such unstable times.
So, let’s close out with the American Marketing Association’s report, which takes the boldest swings of any I’ve seen by postulating four different futures ahead. The AMA builds its bold projections on five ideas:
That AI agents are going to change the world
That consumer discovery will come from scrolling, not searching
That marketers will become freelancers and fractional executives or portfolio careerists who share the wealth among multiple companies rather than part of focused teams under one CMO
That innovation will come from a focus on sustainability
And that brands are going to need to find ways to build meaningful trust in a world fragmented by identify-based digital communities, misinformation and manipulation.
That third prediction, by the way, is absolutely terrifying, to think that marketers are destined to become gig workers instead of valuable collaborators within a business.
But let’s look at the four projected futures. Remember, this is from the AMA, based on a survey of 30 highly expert marketing professionals!
One is that we’ll have an infinite marketplace where AI agents hyper-personalize everything and not only coach us through our lives, but also serve as fractional marketers recommending the products we should buy.
Wow. That sounds really dystopian, like Black Mirror sort of stuff.
The second is that due to a global crisis and austerity measures, marketers have to work from home to utilize their skills to help communities learn how to adapt to resource constraints and find solidarity through shared sacrifice.
Now we’re getting downright Orwellian.
The third is that the attention economy crashes and the world is divided between, and I’m not making this up, “protected” attention zones and unregulated Free Zones. Marketers have to work as cognitive brokers to navigate the landscape of attention regulation.
Yikes! I don’t even really know what to say to that.
The last future is what I think the AMA envisions as being the most plausible and favorable one, which is where AI agents take over transactional marketing and humans sit atop that layer as creative designers who come up with the emotional side of the content and then let the AI bots implement them.
This still seems pretty unrealistic, but it also fits our current trajectory of humans create, and machines help us optimize. We’ve been there for awhile, actually, and given the power and flexibility of AI tools, I can see those layers forming naturally. What’s positive about this vision of the future is that marketing itself still serves a valuable role as something that’s creative and insightful and which establishes authenticity.
But what’s terrifying about it? The distance between the marketer and the end user. And so let me close by saying, no matter what research you read and what sector you’re in, what consumers or buyers want is remarkably consistent.
They want service. They want value. They want to be treated well and taken care of and to feel like the relationship they have with you is not transactional, but meaningful. Purposeful. Geared at building something that will last and make them happy to be a customer for the long term.
Not something that will just get them to spend some money and then move on to the next thing.
So if you really want to position yourself for the future as a marketer, I’d keep that perspective in mind. Because unlike most of these other predictions, those ideas I just articulated are what tend to hold up over time.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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