By Michael Fuchs, Head of Strategy & Planning, Data & Technology
Marketing and advertising are entering a new operating era. What’s changing is not simply the arrival of new tools, but the underlying structure of how value is created. AI is accelerating the pace of capability development, reshaping how marketing work gets done, collapsing the distance between media and commerce, and changing how consumers discover, evaluate, and act. At the same time, advertisers are rethinking how much control they need over decisioning, execution, and measurement. This is not a cyclical shift. It reflects a lasting change in how the industry will operate.
What the New Era Looks Like
For decades, new technologies introduced formats, channels, and ways to reach consumers, but the underlying model of how marketing and advertising functioned remained relatively intact. AI is different. It’s not just creating new capabilities around the edges of the industry; it’s changing the fabric of the work itself. Planning, targeting, creative production, distribution, optimization, and signal processing are all becoming more automated, more dynamic, and more tightly integrated than before.
What once took 12 to 18 months for new capabilities to emerge is now happening in six months or less, and in many cases in near-continuous cycles. That compression matters because it changes not only what is possible, but how quickly competitive advantage can shift.
The market is already behaving accordingly. 80% of buyers are using or exploring generative AI for planning and activation, while IBM argues that the challenge for CMOs is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to redesign the operating model around it. In other words, AI is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. The next phase of advantage won’t come from isolated use cases alone, but from the ability to integrate AI into the flow of decisioning, execution, and growth.
Media and Commerce Collide
At the same time, media and commerce are converging into fewer, faster, more integrated decision environments. The traditional marketing funnel is compressing in both time and space. What once occurred across multiple channels and over longer decision windows is increasingly happening within a smaller number of AI-enabled platforms, in shorter cycles, and closer to the point of transaction. Media companies are enabling commerce within the experience itself, like YouTube shoppable ads, where viewers can buy within the app. Commerce companies are increasingly operating as media environments in their own right. The distance between exposure, persuasion, and transaction is shrinking, with optimization increasingly happening in the same environments.
Current market data reinforces this pattern. WARC forecasts that nine in ten incremental ad dollars are flowing to online-only platforms, and that Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta alone will account for 55.8% of ad spend outside China in 2025. The deeper point is that the environments where discovery, influence, and conversion happen are becoming more integrated, more automated, and more consequential. As those environments consolidate, the pace of feedback loops increases, and the ability to manage growth within them becomes more strategically important.
The Shopper-in-the-Loop
These shifts are also reshaping consumer behavior. As algorithms take on a larger role in shaping what consumers see, the path to purchase becomes more compressed and more mediated. Yet automation doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment; it increases it. This is the rise of the Shopper-in-the-Loop: algorithmic discovery, human validation. Consumers are increasingly recommended products, services, and content by algorithmic systems, but they often validate those recommendations through communities, creators, reviews, and trusted environments before acting.
Discovery may be automated, but confidence is still earned.
That dynamic makes trust even more important. As algorithmic systems influence more of what is surfaced and prioritized, consumers place even greater value on the signals that help them confirm relevance and credibility. Trusted communities, peer recommendation, and creator influence become the validation layer on top of machine-shaped choice. In that sense, the collapse of the funnel doesn’t eliminate brand-building, it changes the job of the brand. Brands must now perform in environments where decisions are accelerated by machines but confirmed by humans. The brands that win will be the ones most efficiently surfaced, and the ones consumers are most willing to validate and choose.
Advertisers Reclaim Control
Advertisers are responding to this new reality by reclaiming control. As platforms become more powerful and automation expands, marketers are seeking greater ownership over the decisions that shape spend, execution, measurement, and performance. In many cases, that means moving closer to the platforms themselves, insourcing parts of orchestration and execution, and bringing more of the decisioning layer inside the enterprise. The motivation is not just efficiency, it’s visibility, interoperability, and control.
That shift is visible in where spend is going. In the U.S., advertiser-direct spend accounted for 30% of the market in 2024, slightly above the 28% controlled by holding companies, according to Advertiser Perceptions data reported by VideoWeek. This doesn’t mean the intermediary model disappears, but it does signal a change in how advertisers want to engage the market. More brands are choosing to own a greater share of their decisioning environment directly, whether through internal teams, direct platform relationships, or more flexible external models.
Brands Want Flexible Tech
The same pattern is emerging in technology strategy. After years of large-scale MarTech investment, most organizations are not looking to replace everything with a new monolithic stack. They’re looking for modular capabilities that make existing investments work better. That is one reason composable approaches are gaining traction. Gartner’s 2025 DXP framing notes that in 2026, at least 70% of organizations are expected to be mandated to acquire composable DXP technology rather than monolithic suites, up from 50% in 2023. Brands want systems that are more interoperable, adaptable, and easier to align to the realities of a rapidly changing market.
Measurement is becoming part of this same push for control. The legacy measurement model was built for a less compressed, less integrated, and less algorithmically mediated market. As media, commerce, and decisioning converge, advertisers need a clearer understanding of what is actually driving growth—not only at the level of direct response, but in how brand influences purchase decisions across shorter and more dynamic customer cycles. That is increasingly a C-suite issue, not just a marketing one. Deloitte’s 2025 CMO Survey says proving marketing’s value is a major challenge, while McKinsey points to the need for stronger alignment between the CMO and CFO around sustainable growth.
The New Architecture for Value
Together, these shifts suggest that value is moving. If AI compresses execution, media and commerce converge, consumers validate through trust, and if advertisers demand more direct control, then advantage shifts toward judgment, taste, integration, and measurement clarity – a new architecture for growth. The future of the industry will be more automated in execution, more compressed in time, and more dependent on human intelligence to guide and govern the system. AI will not reduce the need for expertise. It will increase the value of the right kind of expertise: the ability to connect strategy, systems, operations, and growth.
This is why the current moment is not a technology upgrade cycle, it’s a redefinition of how marketing and advertising create value. The organizations that adapt fastest will be those that recognize the shift for what it is: not simply a new set of tools, but a new operating environment in which decisions are faster, platforms are more integrated, trust matters more, and control over the system itself becomes strategically important. In moments like this, the need is clearer judgment, stronger integration, and a more modern view of how growth is created.
