This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →Marvel has its Avengers movies. Advertising has mediapalooza.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.
