The Trends Shaping 2026 for Channel Marketers

Year after year, Zeta’s award-winning Creative and Strategic Services teams help clients navigate the unique economic, social, and technological issues of the day across their digital marketing efforts.

Here are the 2026 trends our experts see ahead in key areas, from consumer evolution to personalization, analytics, loyalty, and more.

The Consumer

The baby boomer generation is passing the economic baton to Gen X and Millennials. That’s fueling a shift toward marketing driven by ’80s, ’90s, and early ’00s nostalgia to appeal to these younger consumers who are entering their prime spending years. During this transition, brands should be extra aware of their channel mix and marketing messages and how those align with their desired demographic targets.

— Peter Briggs, Vice President of Strategic Consulting

Driving the next wave of value-based marketing, more brands will trumpet labels like ‘Proudly made by humans’ and disclaimers like ‘Our brand will never replace artists with AI.’ For instance, the placeholder text in the search bar on iStock’s homepage says: “Search millions of images and videos free of AI-generated content.” These efforts will intensify as the backlash to AI slop grows.

— Kieran Grant, Art Director

As people grow tired of formulaic messaging and attention-seeking AI-generated images and videos, they’ll gravitate toward brands that lead with empathy, clear values, and an understanding of real customer needs. Relatability and emotional intelligence will be highly attractive, especially for financially stressed consumers.

— Sarah Schad, Senior Graphic Designer

Creative

An over-correction to rapid AI adoption in creative, brands will embrace more organic-looking campaigns. For instance, modular layouts will move away from strict grid systems and feel more pieced together, imagery will embrace grain and texture, and generally there will be more curves and fewer straight lines—almost harking back to print and magazine design.

— Andréa Forsythe, Art Director

Creative assets will stop being ‘files’ and start behaving like data objects. They’ll be scored, versioned, dynamically assembled, and optimized against outcomes, not opinions. This shift will bring much more performance-based objectivity to formerly subjective creative practices.

— Jason Witt, Vice President of Creative Innovation

As AI accelerates output, creative teams will spend more time curating, refining, and protecting brand standards, functioning more as editors than solely as creators. Brands that invest in distinct formats, unique voices, and relatable creative concepts will stand out more in this new creative era.

— Lauren Gannon, Senior Vice President of Creative

With moral and ethical issues swirling around the use of AI-generated images and videos, the new conundrum for marketers is whether to disclose their usage. Accurate labeling invites potentially distracting conversations, while a lack of disclosure ignites blowback from customers who feel ‘fooled’ if it’s discovered.

— Alex Stegall, Principal Data Scientist

Accessibility

While accessibility checkers and plugins already exist, 2026 will see a rise in more agentic tools integrated directly into the platforms that designers, marketers, and developers already use. These tools will make accessibility a natural part of the workflow and not a last-minute checklist or end-of-project audit. This helps teams build more inclusive experiences by default.

— Tylor Loposser, Associate Creative Director

Personalization

To accelerate generative AI’s adoption in making creative assets, brands will replace their Brand Standards & Guidelines with JSON profiles. These JavaScript code documents will allow much more on-brand and consistent outputs than traditional prompting, as well as informing better messaging cadences and personalization. Imagine visiting a theme park and seeing not just personalized messaging, but character illustrations that look like your family, a customized video greeting, and an online shop stocked with items based on your past purchases and browsing, preferences, and predicted affinities.

— Florent Zumberi, Senior Motion Designer

Using a customer’s historical engagement and conversions, brands will use AI to build individualized content test plans and then produce the creative content variations at scale. Performance of the personalized campaigns will be tracked versus a control group to validate the need for more relevant messaging across channels.

— Christine Cucuzza, Global Creative Director

Channel Analytics

With email and SMS inbox providers and social media platforms becoming black boxes in terms of performance reporting, brands will need to shift away from channel metrics as primary KPIs. While they’ll remain useful for measuring channel health, marketers will need to use incremental lift, iROAS, value per subscriber, and other cross-channel metrics to determine true performance. They’ll also need to adopt multitouch attribution models, in addition to last- and first-click models, to better understand the impact of omnichannel behaviors.

— Peter Briggs, Vice President of Strategic Consulting

Email Marketing

After Google and Yahoo issued DMARC requirements for large senders in 2023, and Microsoft followed suit in 2025, one or more of them will likely strengthen their requirements in 2026. Currently, senders are only required to publish DMARC records with policies of p=none, which tells inbox providers to do nothing when emails purportedly from a sender fails authentication checks. They’ll up the DMARC policy requirement to p=quarantine, so marketers should be prepared for that shift.

— Chad S. White, Group Vice President of CRM Strategy

Mobile Marketing

Lagging email by more than 20 years, SMS will see its spam filtering capabilities become much stronger this year. Having your messages routed to the spam folder in Apple Messages, for instance, will be a major challenge for brands, because many users aren’t aware of their new spam folder and how to access it. Marketers will need to be savvy and strategic to avoid trouble.

— Donna Morton, Vice President of Strategic Consulting

Loyalty Marketing

As AI is used for more purchase decision-making, consumers will increasingly game loyalty program points and awards. Optimizing search to ensure loyalty program differentiators are prioritized in AI results will become a key driver of program engagement.

— Donna Morton, Vice President of Strategic Consulting

AI Browsers, Search, and Inboxes

This past holiday season showed that plenty of consumers are open to having AI assist with buying decisions. But getting the best recommendations required users to input a lot of additional information. In 2026, we’ll start to see AI platforms giving consumers opportunities to connect them with past purchase data for better recommendations, whether that data comes from their credit card company, email account, Amazon, or another source.

— Clint Kaiser, SVP of CRM Strategy & Analytics

Brands will increasingly need to consider Agent Optimization (AO) for their marketing messages to ensure they’re properly interpreted by their subscribers’ AI agents, whether those are AI browsers or AI functionality in inboxes. With agents set to screen an increasing share of messages in the years ahead, marketers will need to guarantee they don’t get filtered out by machine intermediaries that decide what gets surfaced.

— Florent Zumberi, Senior Motion Designer

Influencer Marketing

The popularity of influencers will wane in 2026, especially on social media. Most consumers now recognize that product mentions are paid—particularly one-off placements—which diminishes their impact. AI has introduced even more uncertainty, prompting questions like: “Was this review written by AI instead of the influencer?” or “Is this influencer even human?” In response, brands that lead with transparency and invest in long-term trust will be best positioned to build credible, lasting relationships with consumers.

— Sara Tucy, Senior Director of Strategic Consulting

Another Year of Evolution

Unsurprisingly, many of our predictions about marketing channels, marketing processes, and consumers are driven by AI adoption and advancements.

AI is likely to continue to be a major change catalyst for years to come—along with the ever-evolving consumer, of course.