Marketers Face 40-Point Gap Between Business Optimism and Budget Reality
WARC survey shows 59% expect better business in 2026 but only 19% see budget increases—short-termism and AI anxiety dominate planning
59% of brand marketers expect business to improve in 2026. Only 19% expect higher budgets.
That 40 percentage point gap tells you everything about 2026. WARC’s Voice of the Marketer report surveyed over 1,000 marketers worldwide between September and October 2025. The data shows CFOs aren’t matching marketer optimism with investment.
Four trends dominate: budget cuts driving short-term thinking, US trade policy uncertainty, doubled AI anxiety, and digital’s near-total lock on ad spend.
Short-Termism Jumps 30 Points in Three Years
55% of marketers now flag short-termism as a major industry problem, up from 25% in 2022. Budget pressure explains why: marketers facing cuts are 42% more likely to invest in performance marketing versus 29% who prioritise brand building.
WARC calls this the “doom loop” faulty metrics, wasted spend, diminishing returns. Chasing quarterly performance targets hollows out long-term brand equity. It’s the classic trap.
“Budget expectations are a lot lower, which will heap more pressure on marketers in 2026,” 54% still expect next year to beat this one, but the money isn’t following.”
Stephanie Siew, Senior Research Executive at WARC.
Economic Uncertainty Tops Every Other Concern
61% cite economic conditions as their top worry for 2026. That beats privacy, brand safety, societal issues—everything. US trade tariffs drive most of this. Slowed investment, supply chain chaos, falling demand, squeezed margins. North American marketers feel it hardest.
40% are using scenario planning to model different outcomes and stress-test decisions. Others are restructuring teams to respond more quickly to macro changes.
“Markets have proven to be pretty resilient up until now; at some stage, that resilience will start to wane.” “Not exactly a confidence booster.”
Alex Craddock, Chief Marketing and Content Officer at Citi
Aditya Kishore, Insight Director at WARC, puts it bluntly: “A significant red flag for marketers is the tension between poor macroeconomic visibility and the need to plan for long-term business growth.”
AI Anxiety More Than Doubles
AI concern jumped from 28% in 2023 to 59% in 2025. That’s not enthusiasm it’s uncertainty about workflows, creative processes, and job security.
Marketers have moved past experimentation. 76% use AI for summarising texts, 74% for competitor analysis, 60% for customer insights. But 35% worry it will replace human marketing functions within three years. The tool is in use, but the value proposition remains murky.
Agencies (40%) feel more threatened than brands (30%). Tight budgets push brands toward AI to scale more cheaply and quickly, reducing agency dependence. Agencies are scrambling to build their own AI capabilities to stay relevant against AI-powered tech platforms.
“strategic orchestration: knowing when to deploy AI, how to combine it with human insight, and maintaining control over your data and brand integrity while scaling at unprecedented levels. That’s the theory, anyway.”
Lex Bradshaw-Zanger, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer for L’Oréal’s SAPMENA
Digital Takes 90% of Ad Spend.
90.3% of advertising dollars now go to online-only platforms. WARC Media projects the global ad market will hit $1.17 trillion in 2025, growing 7.4%. Digital dominates. Most marketers plan to increase spending on online video, influencer marketing, and social media.
Paid search still matters—$274 billion forecast for 2026—but growth is slowing. Consumers are fragmenting across Amazon, TikTok and other platforms for search. Google’s traditional model is under pressure.
Marketers need to move beyond pure SEO toward optimising for LLM-based search. A third expect to increase retail media investment, though 30% still don’t use it at all.
What It Means
The 40-point gap between business optimism and budget reality isn’t an anomaly. CFOs see the same economic data as marketers, but they’re not opening the chequebook. Marketing teams have to prove ROI more effectively while maintaining long-term brand investment.
The pressure creates predictable behaviour: performance marketing over brand building, AI adoption driven by cost-cutting rather than strategy, and scrambling to follow consumers across fragmenting digital platforms.
Success in 2026 means balancing performance returns with brand value, using scenario planning to address economic volatility, deploying AI where it actually works, and rethinking search in an LLM-dominated landscape.
Whether marketers can pull that off while budgets stay flat is the question the data doesn’t answer.
The full Voice of the Marketer report is available to WARC members. It follows the recent Marketer’s Toolkit report, which covers five trends: the vanishing middle, the creator gamble, the great escape, the zero-click customer journey, and the reset of consumer milestones.
