• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I was a virtual attendee of the 2026 Association of National Advertisers Financial Management Conference, held earlier this week. There were many presentations, speakers and panels that had me scribbling notes furiously. There were some really insightful and well-thought-out ideas. It was absolutely worth my time.

But there were also so many moments when I thought: “I can’t believe I have been in this industry for as long as I have, and some of these topics don’t seem to have moved forward at all.” And it wasn’t because both marketing and marketing procurement teams are still proclaiming that earlier involvement of both in the scoping and contracting phase is beneficial (it is!).

If you attended the ANA Financial Management Conference in 2016, "transparency anxiety” seemed to be the main sentiment among attendees. We were in the shadow of the ANA/K2 Intelligence report, and the big alignment goal between marketing, marketing procurement and agencies was essentially a trust-rebuilding exercise. Ten years later, the stakes are even higher.

We used to worry about whether our agency was taking a 10% kickback on programmatic (they were, sometimes more). Now, we’re dealing with principal media deals where agencies literally own the inventory they’re selling back to advertisers.

In 2016, we were worried about hidden markups. In 2026, 90% of marketers are uncertain if principal media recommendations from their agency -- if disclosed at all -- are truly in their best interest, per ANA findings. The practice is “known” to marketers, but not all marketers have put up guardrails to protect themselves from their budgets being bundled by agencies to create agency principal media dark pools. In over a decade of "transparency initiatives," trust is actually trending lower.

We’ve also traded the 2016 headache of "how do I audit my agency?" for the 2026 nightmare of "how do I negotiate an agency contract that includes agentic AI agents, tokens and principal media?"

In 2016, statement of work (SOW) alignment often meant procurement trying to shoehorn marketing’s creative dreams into a labor-based fee model. Back then, 68% of marketers used fee-based compensation. Procurement was the "PO factory," focused on auditing hours and reducing agency fees, often at the expense of healthy relationships.

In 2026, AI is making labor-based SOWs outdated. Alignment now requires marketing and procurement to speak a new dialect of data and finance. We’re no longer just buying "time"; we’re buying "outputs" and "autonomous agents." High-performing 2026 teams have moved from "time saved" as a metric and are now aligning around "income statement impact.”

In 2016, "using data to manage agency relationships" meant a static dashboard of quarterly spends and delivery. In 2026, AI-powered source-to-pay platforms provide shared visibility into real-time supplier health and contract compliance.

Is this progress?

I’d argue that it's certainly not enough. We’re still trying to figure out how to pay agencies for “value” instead of “hours,” even as AI makes "hours" a meaningless metric. It seems that for now, the most value comes from "hybrid intelligence": using AI to do the heavy lifting of data analysis and volume work, but keeping a human to make the final brand-right call. At the same time, if your marketing procurement team doesn't understand the cost difference between an input and an output token, they’re going to get fleeced.

And that lack of trust? That’s still the same old song. But at least now we have the AI tools to help us manage and analyze it. Right?