Marketers Plan Biggest Ad Boosts In Digital, Social, CTV - AI, Influencer, Retail Lag

by Joe Mandese , 6 hours ago

For all the hype surrounding ad-supported AI, influencer marketing, and retail media coming into this year, marketers are most bullish on increasing their spending on good old digital display and video advertising and social media platforms, according to the just-released sixth semiannual edition of a survey of thousands of marketing pros by agency and media-processing tech platform Mediaocean.

Detailed data on their plans to increase, decrease or maintain their ad spending can be viewed by medium in the table below, but the one above shows the net change -- the delta among those marketers planning to increase of decrease their spending in each medium in the months ahead.

Overall, their sentiment seems net positive for the media industry at large, but three media -- local and national TV and print -- all are in negative territory and one (audio/radio) is essentially flat.

The survey was fielded in November, well before OpenAI unveiled its testing plans for search-like ad formats on its popular ChatGPT LLM last week, so marketer sentiment may already be changing. But based on the Mediaocean data, ad-supported AI ranks fourth in terms of net increase ad-spending plans, followed by the heavily hyped paid influencer market.

Search ranks sixth in terms of net increase in marketer demand, while retail ranks seventh.

The report -- the sixth in an ongoing series of semiannual surveys published by Mediaocean -- can be read in its entirety here, and much of it digs into research about marketer sentiment and plans for operationalizing elements of AI in their organizations and media and advertising practices, which will be covered in more depth in MediaPost's "Media3.0" column later today.

ad spending, advertising, artificial intelligence, audio, connected tv, data, display, influencer marketing, marketing, media buying, media measurement, radio, research, retail, search, technology, television

2 comments about "Marketers Plan Biggest Ad Boosts In Digital, Social, CTV - AI, Influencer, Retail Lag".

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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 21, 2026 at 1:03 p.m.
Joe, as you know, most national branding advertisers consider CTV and linear TV as "TV", so in reality, "their "TV" spending plans call for more ad dollars in "TV". They don't care all that much about exactly how the consumer accesses the content, so long as they can attain the total reach they need, target consumers when possible, place their ads in compatible and quality programs, get their ads seen and control their CPMs. This kind of research is too digital-centric in my humble opinion. "TV" remains the dominant medium of choice for national branding campaigns.
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Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., January 21, 2026 at 1:47 p.m.

@Ed Papazian: Great point. I didn't analyze how and why money was shifting from one line item to another, just reported on what the planned shifts are. I mean, AI spending could be coming at the expense of search, etc.