Paul Sinkinson.
The AdNews end-of-year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
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Paul Sinkinson, Managing Director (Australia and Asia), Analytic Partners
If there’s one thing this year has made clear, it’s that marketing is moving faster than our ability to truly understand what’s driving it. Data is available at the click of a button. Dashboards refresh constantly. Reports are produced instantly.
But what’s missing is not speed. It’s completeness and context. Too many high-stakes decisions are being made on partial views of the truth.
We’ve created an industry obsessed with outputs and dangerously relaxed about understanding. Reach curves are treated like gospel. Automated reports are mistaken for insight. And now the conversation has shifted to whether AI can replace the very roles we urgently need to strengthen. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: you can’t outsource thinking.
Tools can accelerate execution. They cannot define strategy. They cannot tell you why performance moved, whether a spike is signal or noise, or what decision actually matters next. Without a strong strategic core, speed simply amplifies error.
And this is the real risk in the current rush toward automation and “real-time” marketing. We are optimising activity without stabilising the foundations underneath it. Before brands talk about growth, experimentation or transformation, they must first be clear on the fundamentals: how demand is created, how brand and performance work together, how channels interact, and what truly drives incremental return.
That strategic grounding is what turns data into intelligence.
Once that foundation is in place, something important happens. You earn the right to experiment. Not randomly. Not constantly. But intelligently. Because you understand what levers matter, what outcomes you are trying to shift, and what success actually looks like beyond short-term conversion.
This is where the two-speed industry becomes impossible to ignore.
On one side are marketers under enormous pressure: rising media costs, shrinking budgets and limited natural market growth to lean on. The response, understandably, has been to squeeze harder for short-term results. Search. Promotions. Last-click optimisation. Volume over value.
On the other side are teams that have stabilised their core strategy and are now using experimentation as a growth accelerator, not a substitute for direction. They are not chasing every new format or platform. They are deliberately testing how creative works harder, how brand and product link more tightly and how channel combinations drive compounding returns over time.
What’s been most encouraging is that this discipline has thrived even under constraint.
When budgets tighten, the temptation is to retreat into safe, familiar activity. But some of the strongest growth we’ve seen this year has come from small, well-designed tests built on solid fundamentals: refreshing distinctive assets, testing consistent sonic branding in radio, strengthening the link between master brand and product communications, or restructuring how long-form video supports brand memory rather than short-term clicks.
These are not headline-grabbing innovations. They are strategic refinements. And in flat or declining markets, those refinements compound. They separate brands that are deliberately building future demand from those simply harvesting what already exists.
It’s why the most impressive work that stood out to me this year wasn’t defined by a single ad, but by truly integrated thinking. Telstra’s EOFY activity stood out not because of scale, but because of coherence: staff training, product experience, brand and communications all working together in service of a single commercial outcome. That’s not experimentation for experimentation’s sake. That’s strategy in motion.
Looking ahead, the economic signals suggest conditions will begin to improve toward the end of next year. History tells us what happens next. The brands that cut hardest and retreated entirely into short-termism will take the longest to recover. The brands that protected their strategic foundations, even at reduced spend, will accelerate fastest when demand returns.
So if I have one piece of advice for marketers heading into 2026, it’s this: rebalance.
Rebalance away from default conversion activity as the sole growth engine. Rebalance toward brand investment that creates future demand. Rebalance toward real strategic thinking, not automated shortcuts. Because right now, we are over-optimising the bottom of the funnel and under-investing in the mechanisms that actually fuel long-term growth.
This is also where capability returns to the centre of the conversation. Over the past few years, many businesses stripped out the very layers that connected strategy to execution. The result has been an over-reliance on tools to compensate for lost experience. AI now promises to fill that gap. It won’t. Without rebuilding strategic capability, faster tools will simply create faster mistakes.
If 2024 and 2025 were the years of the two-speed industry, 2026 will be the year those two speeds pull even further apart.
The marketers who invest in learning, who understand their market and their data, who stabilise their fundamentals and then test with intent, who resist the temptation to hand their thinking over to technology – those are the ones who will accelerate out of the downturn.
Because growth isn’t coming from obvious moves anymore. It’s coming from disciplined strategy, applied at the edges by people who know exactly where to look, and have the confidence to act.
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