Only 57% of advertisers are confident their organization has the right media mix, according to Kantar’s 2026 Media Reactions report.
Today’s advertising landscape has put more data in marketers’ hands than ever before, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier for marketers to determine the most effective media mix.
Fifty-seven percent of advertisers are confident their organization has the right media mix, down from 64% a year prior, according to Kantar’s 2026 Media Reactions report. Further, 51% of advertisers feel they are getting actionable intelligence to support their marketing goals.
Only half of advertisers this year are confident that they have the right balance between brand building and performance marketing. Comparatively, 60% of advertisers felt confident in that balance in 2025. Despite the uncertainty around their media strategies, marketers are still placing fresh bets on areas including artificial intelligence and creators.
“I don’t think marketers have lost their faith in media,” said Jeff Greenspoon, CEO of Americas at Kantar. “I think it’s that the media ecosystem is fragmenting, changing and probably outgrowing the way decisions have been made for the last 25 years.”
Kantar’s annual Media Reactions report is based on surveys of 806 senior marketers globally and 23,452 consumers in 33 markets. The surveys were fielded from May 25 to July 21 and July 3 to Sept. 10, respectively.
Growing brand affinity
Many advertisers struggle to understand how to build long-term brand affinity without sacrificing short-term sales, but multichannel marketing offers the opportunity to achieve both, Greenspoon explained. Between 2020 and 2025, 43% of campaign performance was attributed to channels working together, up from 18% pre-2014, per Kantar.
Still, cross-channel measurement remains a challenge, with various platforms and measurement tools making it harder to clearly determine what works and what doesn’t.
“Media, creative, brand, performance, and commerce all have different dashboards. They have different partners, and those partners are incentivized differently,” Greenspoon said. “[They] are measuring the instruments and not the orchestra.”
Advertisers need to ensure their media partners provide evidence of why and how their inventory will help the brand reach the agreed-upon business outcomes, while also providing data that can be easily combined and analyzed, Greenspoon said.
The next big thing
Many advertisers are actively experimenting with new strategies and platforms. Greenspoon pointed to the impact AI is having on brands: Nearly two-thirds of marketers anticipate generative AI will play a major role in brand recommendations and 75% plan to increase their investment in AI assistants next year. However, consumers remain skeptical, with only 23% trusting AI’s recommendations.
“If you look at the number of people that are using it across the journey, that is continuing to increase,” Greenspoon said. “The more it gets used, the more consumers get comfortable with it, and the more they begin to trust it.”
Brands are also refining their creator strategies with a focus on smaller creators. Marketers next year plan to boost their spending on micro- and nano-creators by 66% and 61%, respectively, compared with increases of 42% and 48% for mega- and macro-creators, per Kantar.
“The creator with the largest audience is not going to be the creator who makes your brand the most meaningful,” Greenspoon said. “The shift we’re seeing is from borrowing fame through some of the bigger influencers to trying to earn relevance amongst a smaller audience, but in a way that will actually move the needle for either brand-building or sales.”
Despite an increasingly fragmented media landscape, none of these diverse channels work in isolation — from creators to AI to retail media, each channel can reinforce the other. Once marketers can align their goals and measurement tools to reflect that, they will likely be more confident in their media mix.
“We have to look at portfolio-level measurement, where we look at what each channel does independently, and then determine the value that is created across channels and how that value changes and compounds over time,” Greenspoon said.
Filed Under:Agencies,Data/Analytics,Ad Tech
