Traditional Media Planning Is Dead. What Comes Next Is Messier.

WARC’s latest research confirms the advertising industry’s dirty secret: nobody knows how media planning actually works anymore.

Global ad spend is predicted to hit $1.30 trillion this year. That’s $150 per person, double what brands spent during the pandemic. Where’s it going? Almost 80% flows into three channels: retail media, paid search, and social. Everything else splits the remaining 20%.

Broadcast, print, outdoor, display advertising. The entire traditional media industry is fighting over table scraps while Google, Meta, and Amazon carve up the market.

Paul Stringer, WARC’s Managing Editor for Research, doesn’t mince words. “The established model for media planning and buying is breaking apart. Nobody knows exactly what comes next.”

Why the Old Model Failed

Media planning used to be straightforward. Build personas. Map customer journeys. Allocate budget across channels. Rinse and repeat.

That playbook assumed consumers behaved predictably, channels stayed stable, and attribution models could actually tell you what worked. All three assumptions are now fiction.

AI platforms shift how people search and shop. Media fragmentation means audiences scatter across hundreds of platforms. Attribution remains fundamentally broken, with most models just creating the illusion of understanding.

Dan Gilbert, CEO of Brainlabs, argues the industry needs what he calls ‘systems planning.’ Less jargon: stop treating media as fixed channels and start thinking about how influence actually spreads across touch-points. Context matters. Category matters. Individual consumers matter in ways demographic buckets never captured.

This isn’t just theory. It requires different people with different skills. Planners who can connect data, commerce, and creative. Teams that understand how AI platforms actually work, not just how to buy ads on them.

SEO Is Dead. Long Live GEO.

AI search is rewriting discovery. Consumers ask longer, more complex questions. They’re researching differently, making decisions differently. Traditional SEO tactics built around keywords and backlinks are losing relevance fast.

Enter GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation. The acronym is terrible but the concept matters. Brands need content that works for both humans reading it and LLMs scraping it. Structured, authoritative, credible content that answers questions AI models will surface.

This shifts media investment. Owned and earned media become more valuable. Paid search becomes harder to optimise when the search engine doesn’t show traditional results. Some categories will see massive disruption. Others won’t notice much change. Nobody has reliable data yet on which is which.

The Creator Economy’s Growing Pains

WPP Media forecasts the creator economy will hit $376.6 billion by 2030. More than double current levels. Most of that money will get wasted.

The problems are basic. Brands can’t define what creator marketing actually is. They pick influencers based on follower counts instead of audience fit. They measure vanity metrics instead of business impact. They treat partnerships as one-off transactions instead of ongoing relationships.

Fixing this isn’t complicated in theory. Work with creators who actually align with your brand. Set real goals. Measure real outcomes. Test, learn, iterate.

In practice, most marketing teams lack the processes to do this well. They’re used to briefing agencies, not managing creator relationships. They’re used to reach and frequency, not engagement quality and audience loyalty.

What Actually Changes

The concentration of spend in retail media, search, and social isn’t reversing. Those platforms work. They deliver measurable performance in ways traditional channels struggle to match.

But total dependency on walled gardens creates risk. Platforms change algorithms. They increase prices. They shut down features. Brands with no alternative distribution channels have no leverage.

Media planning in 2026 means balancing performance on dominant platforms against building owned audiences and alternative channels. It means understanding that attribution will never be perfect and planning accordingly. It means accepting that AI will reshape search, social, and commerce in ways we can’t fully predict.

WARC’s research doesn’t offer a tidy solution because none exists. The old certainties are gone. Last-click attribution, media mix models, demographic targeting. All increasingly useless for understanding how marketing actually drives business outcomes.

What replaces them is messier, more experimental, harder to standardise. Which is probably closer to how marketing has always actually worked, before the industry convinced itself otherwise.

The full Future of Media 2026 report is available to WARC members. A companion podcast launches in early February.