• 01 Introduction
• 02 Methodology
• 03 Clients tighten 2025 budgets amid U.S. economic concerns
• 04 Clients are hesitant about 2026 spending, but optimistic for 2027
• 05 Spending set to accelerate in digital channels in 2026
• 06 Clients are bullish on streaming and CTV as costs decrease
• 07 Clients have questions about agentic AI
• 08 Key findings

NOVUS’ Rob Davis is a contributor to this article, here is what he has to say about spending in 2026:

Interestingly, Rob Davis, president and CMO at Novus, and Scott Shamberg, president and CEO at Mile Marker, both told Digiday that clients have said their 2026 budgets won’t increase much, but that they expect them to spend big in 2027.

“A couple of new business pitches have noted the 2026 budget is X [amount], but the 2027 budget is already projected to be X times, plus 50%,” Davis said. “[The message is] ‘we’re still going to wait and see, but then the next year — 18, 24 months out — is when [we’ll spend].’ It was almost like [hearing], ‘our budgets aren’t that big, but trust us, they’re
going up when we think things will really settle, which is the following year.’ I had never seen that before.”

Rob also weighs in on client questions about agenic AI:

Digiday’s focus group participants said that clients have questions about how AI agents are made, what they’re capable of doing and what they can’t do.
“One [question] is just how and where are you [the agency] using it,” Novus’ Davis said. “How are you going to reduce fees by saving time and energy? How is what you’re doing going to make us smarter than the competition? Then, there’s a very specific question that I don’t think I’ve talked to a client in the last four to six weeks that they haven’t asked,
‘how is it impacting both paid and organic search?’”

Davis said some clients are seeing site traffic declines of as much as 30% and they are attributing most of the drop to agentic AI’s effects on search results. For example, Google’s AI Overviews feature has been credited with tanking search traffic to publisher and brand sites since it was launched in the U.S. on May 14, 2024. The feature shows users AI-generated summaries at the top of their search queries, ahead of links to articles and websites. And, according to research published in December by consultancy Bain, 80% of consumers resolve 40% of their searches without going further than the search results page.