Our 2026 Marketing Spend Outlook forecasts resilient marketing spend growth amid ongoing geopolitical challenges and AI-led disruption.
Marketing Spend Outlook 2026 trends uncovered:
Business confidence drives cautious optimism
In spite of multiple shocks to businesses – the war in the Middle East driving up inflation, advancements in AI impacting company valuations, particularly in technology, and ongoing impact of US tariff policy – underlying economic performance is strong, with business confidence remaining resilient in the face of macroeconomic pressures. These underlying drivers will accelerate marketing spend growth in 2026 versus 2025: US marketing spend is forecast to grow by 5.4% ahead of European spend growth of 4.2%.
This year, we have expanded our coverage of B2B marketing to include APAC. We forecast B2B marketing spend to grow by 3.6% to a total of $226bn in 2026 across these three regions.
Strategic allocation shifts towards digital, face-to-face channels and AI
These challenges have forced marketers to become more active when it comes to budget allocation, with more time spent re-evaluating channel effectiveness, while total growth rates mask divergence in spend across media channels and marketing activities. Marketers are increasingly allocating budget towards digital and face-to-face, with these channels outperforming. Overall, we’re seeing mid-term (2026-2031) budget growth rates of 5.6% p.a. in the US, 4.5% p.a. in Europe, with global B2B marketing spend growth of 4.9% p.a. to 2031, driven by growth in APAC.
AI’s growing use is dampening internal and external priorities
Developments in AI persist as a main driver of influence on marketing budgets. Adoption of AI tools has rapidly increased in the past year with almost all marketers using a form of AI across everyday tasks. Although most marketers lack a formal AI strategy, they are finding pockets of success. As investment in AI continues to grow at pace across the marketing function, while full automation is not expected, growth in spend on internal teams and external services will be dampened as a result.
Download the report to read our detailed findings, including:
- AI’s disruption of the buyer journey and the rise of agentic search
- The role of AI in the marketing function and its impact over the coming three years
- Where marketing investment is slowing, and which channels are a strategic priority
- Where B2B and B2C marketing leaders are focusing their budget allocations
