The ad industry’s next mediapalooza is loading

Every few years, the biggest media budgets get thrown into review, agencies scramble to hold their accounts, and the trade press reaches for the same nickname. And every time, the industry convinces itself this cycle will be the one that actually changes things. It never quite does. The clock resets. The conditions build again. The next installment begins. 2026 is the opening act for that moment. Coca-Cola’s global media, data and technology business is in play.

Microsoft has already moved its media dollars. So have Adidas, IBM, Dyson, Estée Lauder, Heineken, Honda Europe, Jaguar Land Rover and Kenvue. These accounts have contributed to around $13 billion in concluded media moves this year, with a further $11 billion currently under review, per COMvergence. The full-year figure is expected to settle somewhere between $30 and $32 billion — well below the $37.5 billion recorded in 2025, the $40.5 billion 2024 and the $37 billion the year before. But the gap is a feature not a bug because 2026 isn’t light on reviews due to dissatisfied clients so much as they’re not ready. The real volume is still loading.

At least 27 of the world’s top 100 global advertisers have not put their media accounts up for competitive review in over seven years. Several others that moved in 2023 are now approaching the natural end of their contractual cycles. When those two forces collide, probably sometime in 2027, the volume of media billings in play will likely swell. 

The accounts going into review in 2027 may offer the industry its clearest shot yet at resolving the one problem it has been deferring since 2015: how to pay agencies for what they actually produce rather than the hours they spend producing it. 

Every mediapalooza has promised that shift. None has delivered it. The obstacle has never been resistance so much as infrastructure. Tying media performance to business outcomes is harder than it sounds when pricing decisions, competitive moves and macro conditions can move a brand’s numbers regardless of how good the work was. 

What’s different now is that AI has made the inputs so cheap and so fast that paying for them by the hour has become indefensible even to the agencies. The old excuse — that measuring output was too difficult, so billing for input was the only workable model — is running out of road. The next wave of reviews will test whether the industry can finally build something better, or whether it reaches for the same answer it always has and calls it new.

“Clients are still treating pitching as the default answer to problems it rarely solves,” said Patrick Ryan, Founder of The 300 Consultancy. “If moving agencies was the fix, we wouldn’t keep seeing the same accounts come up for review so regularly, and awarding a different agency partner each time.” 

Short-term thinking, he continued,  only amplifies the problem tied with high turnover on both sides means relationships are constantly being rebuilt instead of strengthened. “If we want a more progressive industry, we should all be striving for better partnerships, ones that are built to deliver results and withstand change together,” said Ryan.

outcome-based renumeration is loading

No quest in advertising is more quixotic than outcome-based remuneration. It has looked close for years. A deal here, a soundbite there, then a mirage. Because tying media performance to financial performance is genuinely hard. There’s too much outside media that shapes a brand’s results. Still, the industry keeps chasing it, anyway. The reward is too big to give up. But something is different about this latest push. 

The holdcos are bullish on it, albeit self-interested given their current plight. CMOs are eager too, even with procurement standing in the way. Then there’s AI, forcing both sides to reckon with what a new commercial arrangement actually looks like. There’s a confluence of forces, in other words, making the discourse around outcome-based remuneration more tangible than it has ever been.

Marketers would be wise not to wait for outcome-based remuneration to become a scientific, auditable formula. It may never come, and some people are financially motivated to keep it that way. The realistic version looks more like a negotiated value judgment than a mechanical payout. The industry’s actual failure is that it’s stopped trusting itself to make that argument confidently.