Business Development | AdCellerant
Every advertiser is about to decide what stays in next year’s plan, and they cut what they can’t explain first. Marketing budgets hover around 7.7% of company revenue, and 56% of CMOs say that isn’t enough to deliver on their strategy, according to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey. The partners who bring evidence to year-end reviews, not activity reports, keep the business.
Our latest blog, What Should Your Digital Strategy Answer Before the End of Q4?, covers the questions advertisers should settle now, from which channels earned more investment to whether their reports show what actually drove results.
Read the Blog
The bottom line for publishers
- Report results, not activity. Impressions and clicks show what happened, not what worked. More than half of U.S. brand and agency marketers now use incrementality testing to measure campaigns, and 2% plan to invest more in it over the next year, according to eMarketer. Show advertisers proof that their spend changed customer behavior.
- Check what automation is optimizing for. Seventy percent of CMOs call AI leadership a top goal, but only 30% say their organization has the infrastructure to deliver it, according to Gartner. Automation can push a campaign toward the wrong goal faster. Review each advertiser’s goals and conversion signals before renewal.
- Sell retail media and CTV as one plan. Retailers now bring purchase data into streaming ads, and retail media on CTV is growing faster than retail media overall, according to eMarketer. Programmatic buying opens that inventory to local and multi-location advertisers, not just national brands.
Walk into year-end reviews ready
Download the Digital Marketing Readiness Checklist to score your advertisers’ strategies across five areas before 2027 budgets lock. Want help reading the results? Schedule a call with AdCellerant’s team.
