By Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon  •  January 29, 2026  •

Ivy Liu

Conversations with 10 ad execs over the last month made that shift hard to miss. Ad spending plans are once again wrapped in cautious optimism but the foundation of those efforts has shifted. They’re less driven by faith in a steady economy, more faith in their own ability to navigate one that isn’t. 

“I’m anticipating you’re going to see a slight uptick in general media spend this year but that’s U.S.-based not global,” said Tom Swierczewski, vice president of media investment at Goodway Group.

The shape of that growth follows a path marketers have been craving for years, just with tighter controls and fewer assumptions baked in. Lighter upfront exposure, more flexible programmatic and CTV deals, and sharper expectations that platforms tie spend to outcomes they can actually verify. 

Across the Atlantic, the mood isn’t brighter. It’s just more matter of fact. Companies, especially in the long tail, don’t have the option to go dark so they’re building marketing systems meant to absorb impact. The surprise is where that money is going. It’s not just another rush into performance. For many of them, that well is already tapped. Instead, there’s a renewed focus on brand advertising.

The logic is simple and a little old school: stay visible now, keep demand warm and they’re better positioned to outrun companies when the economy finds its footing again. 

“There seems to be a mind shift — at least across the advertisers we see in our platform — where they’ve realized they don’t get the same outcomes for their performance investments anymore,” said Tomas Forsbäck, CEO of ad tech buying platform Readspeak. “They’re shifting budgets further up the funnel to the mid and upper layers toward brand awareness. The idea being that it will circle back to drive conversion at the bottom.”

That appetite for flexibility isn’t new but it is compounding. Buyers have been inching away from rigid commitments for years. The end of last year simply showed that trajectory holding under pressure, according to the ad buyers interviewed for this article. In fact, several of them said late year ad spending leaned further into deal structures that allowed for in-flight optimization rather than fixed guarantees. 

Yahoo, for instance, saw more CTV dollars move from programmatic guaranteed deals into private marketplaces, a signal that advertisers wanted continued access to premium inventory but with more room to optimize, pause or redirect as conditions changed. 

“What happened in Q4 is an indicator of what could happen in 2026,” said Adam Roodman, gm of Yahoo DSP. “It shows a flexibility on the streamer side to work with the buyer.”

Not that they really have a choice. As ad dollars behave more like actively managed portfolios than fixed annual allocations, media owners are competing for money that can be redirected at the push of a button. Buyers now expect cheaper rates, interoperable data and proof that impressions drive measurable business outcomes not just delivery against a plan. In that environment, inventory that is hard to measure, slow to transact or locked into rigid commercial structures is simply easier to bypass. 

To stay in the mix, publishers and platforms have to show up with cleaner signals, looser commercial structures and tighter links between exposure and results. That’s the cost of entry in a market where money moves faster and the tolerance for friction keeps shrinking. 

Look at the second tier platforms. TikTok and Snap, have been offering a larger volume of incentives. Even the likes of Pinterest and Reddit are starting to hand out credits, albeit more selectively. When flexibility becomes the expectation, the platforms without ironclad demand don’t just compete on performance. They compete on terms. 

One ad exec, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that they’ve asked the platforms outright whether these moves are in aid of taking wallet share or expanding budgets.

“Most of them say they know it’s about taking share from Meta and/or fighting over the long-tail of spend to get a few more percentage points in wallet share and increase spend,” they said, adding that the focus has become more vertical, given the varying appetite for media mix. “The reality is outside of Meta and Google a lot of these channels still only see a few hundred dollars of ad spend per day. They want to push this to five or six figures per day of ad spend.”

And hovering over all of them are the finance chiefs. They’re the ones setting the tone. Their expectation is straightforward: ad dollars flow toward channels that can demonstrate impact on sales and profitability, not just lift in brand metrics. In this environment, marketing isn’t just storytelling, it’s capital allocation with a scoreboard attached.

“Marketing within some companies is increasingly being seen as a CFO function rather than a CMO one,” said Marie-Claire Puffett, industry development and insights director at IAB Europe. “The more that happens and CFOs get their hands on ad investments, the more they’re going to want to truly understand how that money is spent. They’ll be more of a focus on marketing driving outcomes.”

That outlook could shift. It’s still early after all. But for now, the direction of travel is clear. This is the path most ad dollars look set to follow in 2026 — forward but with a hand on the wheel and eyes on the exits.

“What we’re seeing heading into 2026 is cautious optimism, but it’s a different flavor than past cycles,” said Paul Boruta, CEO of ad tech platform Slingwave. “It’s not optimism rooted in stability or certainty. It’s optimism rooted in adaptability. Brands have spent the last few years getting comfortable with uncertainty, learning to plan in shorter cycles, test faster, move budgets more fluidly, and stop waiting for the perfect signal before making a call.”

The top line numbers reflect that tension. U.S. ad spend is projected to grow 9.5% in 2026, with double digit gains expected in social media (14.6%), CTV (13.8%) and commerce media (12.1%), according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. In Europe, the posture looks similar. More than two thirds of roughly 170 marketers surveyed by IAB Europe said they expect to increase spend over the next year. The money is still moving. It’s just moving more carefully than before.