Last year, our experts made some bold calls about what 2025 would bring to the digital, marketing and creative world. The rise of zero-click searches. Hyperpersonalization. AI transforming how creative work gets done. The growth of multishoring.
As we head into 2026, it’s time to look back at how those predictions played out and what they indicate as we begin a new year. Some trends accelerated faster than we expected. Others revealed challenges that are reshaping how teams work. And new insights emerged that are worth paying attention to.
Here’s what we predicted and what we’re watching as 2026 unfolds.
Mary Baum, Director, Digital Marketing | Digital and SEO
How it started:
Zero-click searches and AI overviews will continue to change the way we search. Users no longer have to leave Google to find an answer they are looking for, which is greatly changing the metrics we focus on and those that we report on. Embracing zero-click content strategies will become more important than ever.
How it’s going:
The intersection of social search optimization and the complexity of multi-channel attribution intensified in 2025, driven by the rise of zero-click searches and AI Overviews. The widespread introduction and further optimization of tools like Google’s AI Overviews significantly reduced click-through rates, validating the shift toward a zero-click reality where users find answers directly on the Search Engine Results page. Consequently, the challenge of proving marketing ROI on efforts across numerous touchpoints (including social search destinations like TikTok and Reddit) became more acute, moving the industry focus away from simple last-click traffic toward more sophisticated metrics like brand visibility, AI citations, and funnel-stage engagement to effectively credit and optimize content across a fragmented customer journey.
Steve Bevilacqua, Principal Technology Consultant | AI/Martech
How it started:
Hyper-personalization will become the new buzzword. AI-automated marketing campaigns will improve along with real-time A/B testing and adjustment. People will start to realize we have a storage issue with thousands of assets being generated per minute to meet the needs of hyper-personalization and campaigns being tweaked every few minutes based on user response. CDP platforms will become big news in 2025 with companies scrambling to improve or implement them.
How it’s going:
Hyper-personalization shifted from a concept to a dominant strategic buzzword in 2025. This fueled the other major trends: the widespread adoption of AI-automated campaigns capable of real-time adjustment, and the predicted scramble as companies rushed to implement and optimize CDP platforms to manage the new data demands.
The most prescient warning, however, was the asset issue. We are now grappling with the predicted storage and management crisis. This is no longer theoretical; it’s evidenced by the slew of recent announcements for mega AI data centers. These facilities are being built in part to cope with the massive asset sprawl from personalized, high-velocity campaigns. The significant reported environmental impacts of these centers, from power grid strain to water consumption, only underscore the scale of the challenge I forecasted.
Josh Cancel, Creative Director | Creative Art Direction
How it started:
Generative AI tools will continue to become more common to the design process, serving as a collaborative partner that enhances creativity rather than replaces it. Creative teams will increase their use of AI to handle repetitive tasks like resizing, color correction, and generating variations, freeing up time to focus on strategic and conceptual aspects of design. The emergence and adoption of generative AI for video and motion graphics will be prevalent in 2025. Runway has been the major player in motion and video generation for a while but competition is on the horizon with Adobe expecting to release their Firefly Video Model by the end of 2024. The tools will become more intuitive, offering user-friendly UIs which will speed adaptation and ease friction.
How it’s going:
The collaborative partnership with AI in my prediction arrived faster and more powerfully than expected. What was fascinating was how consolidated the landscape became, i.e., Adobe and others brought entire ecosystems of AI models together, giving designers access to multiple specialized tools from a single workspace. We’re now using conversational interfaces to describe complex edits, and AI is tackling the technical grunt work, compositing, harmonizing, and generating endless variations, which used to consume hours of a designer’s day.
However, while having dozens of specialized AI models gives designers unprecedented creative flexibility, the challenge has shifted from learning individual tools to understanding which model works best for which creative need, whether that’s photorealistic rendering, specific aesthetic styles or maintaining brand consistency across variations. The good news? Designers are no longer jumping between platforms to access these capabilities. The challenge? Knowing how to orchestrate this growing toolkit effectively is becoming as important as traditional design skills. Moreover, as always, taste, judgment and point of view will matter more than ever because the tools are available to everyone.
Tim Gearhart, Vice President, Talent Delivery | Hiring Trends
How it started:
It’s hard not to immediately go to AI when talking about 2025 hiring trends within the marketing space. Candidates who want to grab a potential employer’s attention will need to showcase more than just using the basics, like ChatGPT or Gemini. They’ll need to be conversant in relevant AI tools, real-world usage examples, emerging AI trends, and show how all of this is used to specifically impact the entire customer experience. Additionally, marketers who can demonstrate a well-informed understanding of ethical AI usage and governance, its limitations, and how to leverage it to enhance -- rather than replace -- human capabilities, will stand out in a competitive market.
How it’s going:
The fundamentals proved accurate: The bar for AI competency rose beyond basic prompt engineering. But what’s been interesting to observe through the year is the convergence of AI literacy with what we’re calling “durable skills” as an emerging differentiator.
In 2025, employers screened for practical AI application (governance knowledge, tool expertise, customer impact, etc.), but they’re increasingly privileging candidates who pair these capabilities with communication, critical thinking, and cross-functional collaboration. The logic is simple. Technical skills can be trained in weeks; adaptive, human-centered competencies take years to build.
Looking ahead, the question won’t be whether AI fluency matters but which layer of AI competency becomes the new baseline for a role. We’re likely to see differentiation shift toward strategic AI orchestration, i.e., candidates who can evaluate which tools solve which problems, design AI-augmented workflows and articulate ROI in business terms. What’s stayed the same is that the advantage will belong to those who treat AI as a capability multiplier within a foundation of irreplaceable human skills.
Cari Shanks, Content Manager | Content Development
How it started:
Authentic brand storytelling that’s interactive, relational and personalized will lead the way in 2025. Content developed and delivered with customer preferences in mind will have a competitive edge. Incentivize brand-loyal audiences with access to premium content that tells your story, provides a passport to exclusive opportunities, and makes space for engagement and community.
How it’s going:
Authentic, interactive content is still king. What’s key is what kind of content. Easily consumable, short-form content that captivates continued to grow in popularity in 2025. Look for more of the same in 2026 with polls, podcasts, games, animated reels, and video (video everywhere!) Social media platforms will continue to default to reels-first content. Videos that feature real people offering real-world insight pave the way for companies to present themselves as the problem solvers, innovators and experts that their audiences turn to again and again.
Message still matters. Let your content become more than glitter cannon attention-getters. Is clever content important? Yes. But so is content that’s useful and relational. Capitalize on those precious few seconds you have to capture and keep your audience’s attention by making the first step in the customer journey a memorable one for all the right reasons.
Maria Sommer, Director, Talent Solutions | Talent Services and Global Delivery Center
How it started:
More companies will be looking at offshoring as a way to scale their resources in 2025. As the need for content grows, companies will utilize cost effective offshore resources for their lower tier creative work. This could include everything from clipping images to editing video to resizing images for the ever growing list of sizes and channels needed for digital ads. While companies place an increased value on their in-house teams, they will want their internal team focused on higher level strategic work, while the offshore teams will handle all of the template-based, iterative lower tier work.
How it’s going:
Last year’s prediction was that most companies would be looking at offshoring as a way to scale their resources. Now with the proliferation of Generative AI in 2026, we must rapidly pivot our staffing models away from repetitive execution (whether onshore or offshore) and toward AI governance and orchestration. For in-house teams, the focus moves entirely to high-value roles. We will see a surge in demand for AI Content Orchestrators who define brand strategy for machines, Responsible AI Officers who audit content for bias and ethics, and Data Storytellers who translate AI-generated performance insights into executive decisions. The greatest staffing risk will be the rapid obsolescence of roles centered on manual production tasks, making AI fluency the single most critical, and highly compensated, skill across the entire digital, creative, and marketing workforce.
Nickole Brown, Senior Consultant | Marketing Operations
How it started:
Efforts to advance foundational operational rigor and increase maturity will be required to support rapid change. Think: AI, data and martech. Critical areas like planning that have been ignored for far too long will no longer be nice-to-haves but must-haves. To remove silos, support collaboration and maximize effectiveness and efficiency, we will see a trend towards merging Marketing and Creative Ops into one streamlined workflow and reporting structure.
How it’s going:
In 2025, I predicted the necessary merger of Marketing and Creative Ops to support AI, data, and martech. As we head into 2026, reality has supercharged this trend. Operational rigor is no longer a ‘nice-to-have,’ and functional and system silos are toxic to the clean data AI demands.
I believe the most impactful roles across the entire marketing organization in 2026 will be the Creative and Marketing Ops leaders who step up as strategic Data Storytellers, AI Architects, and Systems Integrators. They are the ones architecting the new AI-powered ecosystems and automated data flows.
When Ops leaders become subject matter experts on their data, they don’t just get a seat at the table, they build the table.
The future is bright. Ready to plan for the year ahead? Let’s talk!
