While 2025 brought intensified use of AI in media, production, and creative, as well as the use of synthetic data in research, we are starting to see big shifts in culture with AI, too.
Deezer reports that almost one in three songs uploaded to the music streaming platform in 2025 is AI-generated (and 97% of people can’t tell the difference), and we’re seeing the daily rise of virtual influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers.
By 2026, the customer journey will be more fragmented than ever, spanning hundreds of touchpoints across social platforms, streaming services, retail media, and experiential environments.
Recent research from Publicis Media shows us that media impressions (both globally and in SA) are growing at 5 x business revenue.
The result is that brands are producing loads of content, in loads of places, for loads of people, and consumer attention is being completely overloaded.
Brands are chasing consumers across these disconnected ecosystems and struggling to maintain continuity, coherence and relevance. The era of siloed campaigns is over.
Brands must invest in integrated solutions, unified data platforms, cross-channel measurement, and creative orchestration tools to deliver consistent experiences, collapsing the walls between media, commerce, and content, to ensure that every interaction feels connected and purposeful.
The more brands mirror a fragmented customer journey with a fragmented agency ecosystem, the more effectiveness suffers.
With all the hype around AI, I’m reminded of Amara’s Law: that we tend to overestimate the effect of a new technology in the short term and underestimate the effect in the long term.
So, while AI has commoditised efficiency and scale, human imagination will remain the most important currency in 2026 and beyond.
Businesses that use AI only as a shortcut for efficiency will continue to see diminishing returns, but those that double down on human creativity, empowered by the space and time afforded by using AI as a base foundation, as well as the unique opportunities to do more creative things with AI, will thrive.
Retail media is becoming one of the fastest-growing channels in advertising.
Global retail media ad spend is projected to surpass $170bn by 2026, outpacing traditional display and even social in some markets.
This rise is driven by retailers using their first-party data to deliver highly targeted ads at the point of purchase, both online and in-store.
In SA, major players like Takealot, Checkers Sixty60 and of course Amazon, have built retail media ecosystems, but the floodgates are due to open.
Retail media is especially powerful when using retailer 1P data in conjunction with a brand’s growth audience data and other 1P data sources (such as Publicis’ Connected ID platform), providing much greater depth to media planning and measurement.
For marketers, it’s clear that retail media offers a unique blend of performance and brand-building opportunities, but the key is in integrating retail media into macro media strategies without creating siloed measurement systems.
The tension between automation and human agency will continue in the years ahead.
One of my biggest concerns is that as agencies and marketers, we operate in what is largely an apprenticeship industry, where you can learn so much of the logic through studies, but the magic is learnt on the job.
In an AI-driven world, the curation and capability experience of senior skilled employees are paramount, which logically means that junior roles are at AI-replacement risk.
But if we’re not developing the next level of magic-makers, we run the risk of eroding the value of creativity.
As AI systems take on more decision-making roles, agencies (with support of clients) must define clear boundaries: what should machines do, and what must remain human?
In marketing, this means using AI for optimisation and insight, while keeping strategy, storytelling, and brand stewardship firmly human-led.
