By Catherine Wolf • April 20, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
Between the war in the Middle East’s potential impact on ad spending and the rapid integration of AI tools across workflows, agencies have a lot on their minds in 2026.Overall, agencies’ top concerns this year are client spending and the effects of AI. Thirty-eight percent of agency professionals anticipated that the biggest challenge the agency industry will face in 2026 is reduced client budgets, while 38% said the same about the effects of AI. That’s according to a Digiday+ Research survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2025 among 62 agency professionals.
This continued the trend of spending pessimism from 2025: Forty-seven percent of agency pros said reduced client budgets was agencies’ top concern last year, ahead of other roadblocks such as scope creep (16%) and the external effects of AI (11%).
