Only the paranoid survive: rethinking effectiveness in 2026

Amidst talk of an emerging decline in advertising profitability, the debate has missed one critical factor: the role of a changed media landscape increasingly hostile to effectiveness. As distraction, clutter and ad load hit new heights, marketers have an opportunity to outmanoeuvre their rivals by better understanding and responding to a changed advertising environment.

After the Great Depression, some economists feared that the US economy was “stuck in a rut”, its performance capped by structural factors beyond the control of policy makers. Whilst the specifics of this core idea – dubbed “secular stagnation” by Alvin Hansen – remains controversial, the essential truth it communicated was that economic performance is significantly conditioned by environmental factors outside of our direct control; politicians cannot always magic up more by dint of policy.

This idea – that context intrudes on outcomes – is underemphasised in advertising. Mostly, performance is framed as a product of insular excellence, or at least intent: your understanding of audience, your application of effectiveness principles, the quality of your advertising assets, the wisdom of your media choices. Amidst the inestimable back-seat critics, it is to be inferred that your fortune always rests in your hands: if that market share isn’t moving in the right direction, well – that’s on you.

And whilst marketing communications are often executed imperfectly, there is reason to believe that – due to changes in our media environment that none of us can control – advertising performance may be facing a period of secular stagnation.

Are we seeing a form of advertising “secular stagnation”?

You may be asking why it’s reasonable to fear secular stagnation. Whilst advertising effectiveness is notoriously difficult to define – let alone measure – at an industry level, we have some evidence that would suggest advertising in recent years has become more efficient and less effective. Some explanations would define this as another issue of execution – a failure to invest sufficiently or to apply core principles. Others would suggest that it reflects a statistical mirage, a clumsy conflation of big brands and small brands – and their differing tactics and outcomes – in the same datasets.

There is another potential explanation, however, and it is about the context in which advertising exists. For decades, marketing science has been relatively consistent on a number of related findings: that advertising outcomes (especially brand recall but also some measures of sales effect) are influenced by how and where that advertising is consumed. Advertising that is consumed by distracted people seems less well remembered (as shown by a range of sources: Armstrong & Chung (2000), Bolls & Muehling (2007), Kischner & Karpinski (2021) and 2014 research by AOL and Nielsen). Advertising that is consumed in cluttered media environments seems less well remembered. Advertising that is consumed amidst more other advertising – in higher ad-load environments – seems less well remembered. Whilst effectiveness is never solely determined by any one of these factors – advertising to distracted audiences, in cluttered environments, or amongst other ads can still work – it is clear that these act as a drag on performance.

A media landscape increasingly hostile to effectiveness

It is therefore notable that today’s media consumption – at a population level – is more distracted, more cluttered and more oversaturated than ever. Since the middle of the 2010s, Ofcom has shown that much of our smartphone usage hasn’t been substitutive but incremental to our remaining media diets, layering on extra hours on top of what already existed. Not only does that mean more advertising being consumed concurrently on separate platforms, but it also means more ad-load in general, because digital platforms typically serve out more advertising per minute of consumption. And – to top it off – the explosion in new media touchpoints and advertising opportunities further clutters most of our consumption, in-platform or not.

But that’s not all. It is also reasonable to hypothesise – in a world of greater media consumption, where any advertising impact occupies an ever-smaller fraction of any one person’s time – that share of voice effects will have diluted, and buying your mental availability has become more expensive. Equally, our move towards an increasingly algorithmic media landscape – where recommendations are informed by your historic consumption, or the consumption of people like you – largely benefits the already big, and often punishes the unknown and untried. This effect – often called the “Matthew Effect”, or the “rich get richer” – can be seen in the increased returns from advertising going to the biggest advertisers, as illustrated by Paul Dyson’s Top 10 Drivers of Profitability research from 2013; it is also present in cultural spaces such as Spotify, where algorithms have taken over recommedations.

In turn, these observations strengthen the suspicion that the modern media landscape is one increasingly and inherently hostile to advertising effectiveness. Not one in which advertising effectiveness is impossible, but one where your expected rate of return might well be lower – especially for smaller, less well-known brands. The critical difference, however, between economists surveying a sluggish economy and marketers inspecting a disappointing econometrics debrief, is that marketers still have more influence on those outcomes. And – critically – that, unlike central bankers, marketers are not responsible for the performance of the market. Those who recognise this potential inflection point will have a headstart on stealing the market share of those who don’t. It is an opportunity which some will take, and others will not.

Responding to a harder world: what changes, and what shouldn’t

But if the hypothesis of a more difficult media environment sounds plausible, and if you see this as the opportunity it is, that does not solve your problem. And solving this problem is where things get a little less clear, not least because changes in these conditions are outrunning the quality of our industry’s evidence.

In this context, some will pitch answers that do not grapple with the essential challenge of an oversaturated and attention-starved world, and those answers should be met with scepticism. Others will pitch radical technological solutions – not least the use of personalisation and AI to find the needles in proverbial haystacks – and we should be open to those, as the evidence emerges. But with that evidence increasingly lagging the change we see in the world, we must address the most glaring issues this landscape creates and prepare ourselves to take a great leap forward in effectiveness.

Advertisers need to reassess budgets from first principles

The first question to address is budget. With share of voice diluted by increases in media consumption – and budget a huge driver of advertising outcomes – a reasonable assumption will be to increase spend. This is well-intended, but likely incomplete: whilst some brands will find themselves drastically underspending what is necessary to grow in this new environment, others will – amongst a head-spinning choice of channels, platforms and ideas – have been lulled into spending the right amount very badly. Others – especially the very biggest brands in highly-digitised categories – might find they are over-spending, their market position protected by the feedback loop of the algorithm. Advertisers need – as a matter of priority – to reassess budgets from first principles, not just the amount they are spending but where the money is going. Be granular and be sceptical; assume what was right in 2019 isn’t right in 2025.

Don’t jump headfirst into the unknown

Second, if ever there was a time to invest in analytics, insight and strategy – this is it. If you worry that your current best practice will be increasingly unable to deliver the outcomes your business needs, then you need precise, data-driven understanding of exactly what that gap is – what the limits of optimisation are – and a responsible plan to bridge it. And the latter demands a more responsible, evidence-based approach to change – not jumping headlong in the unknown like the mavericks of yesteryear, but systematically testing, experimenting, and prototyping, “crossing the river while feeling the stones”, building new effectiveness knowledge before scaling it.

A step backwards — and the possibility of a leap forward

Third, don’t rip everything up - consider that few great leaps forward in advertising effectiveness have ever come from discarding a brand’s distinctive strengths. Whether “Vorsprung Durch Technik” or “Glass and a Half”, brands that can harness and catalyse their own history – be that internal mythology or external experience – are brands that win. Even in straitened times, brands must avoid the temptation to throw everything away; they must become their own historians, archaeologists and archivists, and assume that – in a world defined by ever smaller, faster media exposures – it is now more important than ever to constantly audit and prioritise the elements that make their brands instantly recognisable.

Of course, like those economists of the 1930s, these fears of structural change might be misplaced. Humans – endlessly adaptable as we are – might have got better at parcelling out our attention, at extracting salient information from ever smaller exposures. The democratisation of effectiveness insight might have offset the effect of these changes, and the new formats and technology available to us might have pushed returns even further. But as a wise man once wrote, only the paranoid survive. And – with an honest embrace of change – the step backwards in our media landscape could mean, for a select few at least, a step forwards in effectiveness.

Charlie Ebdy is Chief Strategy Officer of Omnicom Media Group UK and Convenor of Judges for the 2026 IPA Effectiveness Awards. 

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.