Mark Ritson Is Right About 2026. And He's Wrong About It Too.

I had the pleasure of hearing Mark Ritson deliver his 2026 predictions recently. As always, he was provocative, grounded, and refreshingly immune to hype. His core thesis: 2026 will look remarkably like 2025. The pornography of change, as he calls it, overstates year-over-year differences. Zoom out and the lines blur.

He's right, but not entirely. Let me explain.

Same Outputs, Different Journey

I'll concede on the outputs. A 2026 media plan won't look dramatically different from a 2025 one. The creative won't be unrecognisable. The channel mix won't invert. Marketing fundamentals will remain marketing fundamentals. The media landscape will be only subtly different: OpenAI buying ads, Meta and Google's AI upgrades incremental rather than revolutionary. Change can be overstated. I agree.

But how we get there? That's already different. The tools we use. The data we rely on (as Mark himself pointed out with synthetic data). The people we hire. The strategic imperative for a healthy marketing operation. These are changing now, not in 2027.

This is partly a difference of lenses. I won't hold a candle to Mark on brand building, and much else besides. But on the foundations of data and technology that underpin modern marketing, I'd have a strong view. And from where I'm standing, 2026 looks very different to 2025.

Let me work through his predictions and explain why.

The Job Market Is Already Shifting

Mark identified something important: we're in a weird economic moment. The COVID-era cohort clings to roles they'd never land again in an open market. AI is already chipping away at marketing headcount. This isn't a 2027 problem. It's happening now. If AI is already reshaping which roles exist and which skills matter, marketers can't wait until 2027 to skill up. The preparation window is 2026. CMOs have a workforce readiness problem to solve this year, not next.

Synthetic Data Is Ready. Enterprises Aren't.

Mark was bullish on synthetic data, and rightly so. It's superior to traditional consumer research in many contexts: more predictive, cheaper, faster. Traditional research carries well-documented methodology biases. He positioned this as ready now, particularly in B2B, with B2C to follow. I agree. But here's the gap: most enterprises don't know how to do it. They don't have the infrastructure, the prompting expertise, or the validation frameworks. That's a 2026 capability-building exercise. Waiting until synthetic data is ubiquitous means arriving late to a race that's already started.

Strategy and Execution Are Ready Now

Mark suggested AI isn't ready yet for strategy development and media execution, with serious applications arriving around 2027. On this specific point, I think it's a question of perspective. The capability is here. Campaign setup, optimisation, analysis: AI should be doing this now. Teams are more time-constrained than ever, and the automation they need exists today.

On strategy, the picture is nuanced but still immediate. AI isn't replacing senior marketing judgement. But AI is superior to humans at collating wide sources of information and helping senior marketers dissect it to make decisions. The strategist's role changes from researcher to interrogator. The output might look similar. The process to get there is already fundamentally different for teams who've adopted.

An easy proof point: look at what happened to coding. In early 2025, most development was done manually. AI assistants were emerging but not the primary workflow. By late 2025, the transformation was undeniable. AI-first development is now the norm for anyone paying attention. Marketing follows roughly 12 months behind because it's a more specialised application of the same underlying capability. What happened to coding in 2025 is happening to marketing in 2026.

What Mark is measuring is enterprise adoption curves, not capability curves. He's right on adoption. But capability is what should matter for CMOs deciding what to do now. Even if you accept his more conservative framing, piloting and learning takes 12-18 months. Starting in 2027 means meaningful results in 2028. The CMOs who begin serious work in 2026 will have compounding advantages by the time their competitors are just getting started.

Creative Production Has Already Shifted

This is the area where the change is most visible. Asset production, versioning, localisation, dynamic creative: these workflows are already being transformed. The economics of creative production are fundamentally different when AI handles the long tail. This isn't a prediction. It's happening in production environments today.

Squeezed Departments Need a Release Valve

Marketing budgets are flat. Headcount is down. Expectations are up. Mark didn't frame this as an AI story, but AI is the protagonist in this story. That pressure intensifies in 2026. AI is the release valve, but only if you've built the muscle. Departments that haven't invested in AI capability will feel the squeeze more acutely than those who have.

Political Instability Demands Speed

Mark predicted a dramatic increase in political instability. More volatility means more need for rapid response: messaging pivots, audience shifts, creative updates. That's an AI use case. The brands best positioned for turbulence will be those with the operational agility to respond in hours rather than weeks.

The Capability Curve Is Steeper Than You Think

Here's what Mark's output lens misses: the rate of capability growth is itself being turbocharged. AI coding tools mean we can build and iterate faster than ever before. Model development is accelerating. What took six months a year ago takes six weeks now. The compounding effect is real. Each new capability enables the next. This isn't linear adoption. It's capability stacking. Extrapolating from historical technology adoption curves will underestimate what's coming.

The CMO's Journey Has Changed

Mark is right that the outputs of marketing may look similar in 2026. But the journey to get there doesn't. In 2026, CMOs need to: prepare their workforce for a transformed job market; build synthetic data capabilities before competitors do; deploy AI in execution and use it to support strategy; transform creative production economics; find operational leverage against squeezed budgets; and build response agility for political volatility.

That's not a 2025 to-do list. The destination might look familiar. The route to get there is fundamentally different.

An Invitation

I have enormous respect for Mark Ritson. But we're looking through different lenses. His lens is the output, the brand: what marketing looks like. My lens is the infrastructure: how you get there. Through his lens, 2026 looks like 2025. Through mine, it doesn't.

Let me be clear: we are going through a revolution in marketing. Quibbling over whether it lands in 2026 or 2027 is perhaps minor. Mark himself mentioned he has a new AI marketing strategy offering coming in 2027. He's not dismissing AI. He's timing his entry, but that timing matters. Those who don't build the foundations now will find themselves blown away when the storm rises from a gale to a hurricane. That's why what gets done in 2026 is so important.

The commercial implications matter. If more nimble players can make smarter decisions, act faster, and be more relevant to customers, that changes the game. The competitor you dismissed as a small dot on your matrix suddenly looms large. More importantly, they're laying foundations: internally building expertise and adaptiveness, externally building signals that AI will use for recommendations.

Now, I run an AI technology and consultancy business, so I have skin in this game. But that also means I'm seeing what businesses are building beneath the surface, not just what's appearing in campaign outputs.

I'd genuinely love to compare notes. The gap between what's possible and what's deployed is narrowing faster than most realise. The CMOs who understand that will define what marketing looks like in 2027 and beyond.