It's the most wondering time of
the year. No, not the holiday season, but the time when ad industry leaders issue year-end and/or look-ahead assessments, and following on my ANA "marketing word of the year" column yesterday, I
figured I'd apply some of its logic to Havas Media Network's just-released "2026 Predictions Forecast."
You can read the 21-page report for yourself -- but I did a little quant analysis to put its
substance into context, beginning by indexing how many times it cites the two ANA words of the year. I also utilized some AI tools -- primarily Google's NotebookLM -- to distill HMN's tome down to its
essence via an audio overview you can listen to below, but also vis a vis its mind-mapping graphic delineation.
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In terms of my keyword indexing, I was a little surprised to see the report
cites "agentic" only once. On the plus side, it referenced "authenticity" eight times, and if you add the word "authentic," it is used 23 times.
I indexed the other keywords below, because
they are things on my mind when I think about big media agencies, especially HMN, including the word "meaningful," which has been at the heart of its culture -- as well as part of its proprietary
methodology -- for a long-time now. It still ranks (16 citations), and thankfully, ahead of one of another term -- "ecosystem" -- I keep seeing big media agencies using to describe their product, not
"media."
Another positive for HMN, is that "media" still ranks No. 1 in Mandese's mind map, followed by "content" and "culture.
The bad news for the primary constituents of this
publication is that "planning" and "buying" are also-rans (though still ahead of "agentic).
Next up, I asked NotebookLM to render the report as a mind map to see
how its major themes plot. You can access the fully expanded mind map here, but the graphic below
is expanded to represent what HMN thinks are the big "wildcards" for 2026. Interesting!
Finally, I asked NotebookLM to boil the entire report down into a
short audio overview for those with a TLDR mindset. You can listen to that by clicking below.
