2025 Forced Marketers to Rethink Everything. Here’s What’s Coming in 2026

If 2024 introduced chaos into marketing measurement, 2025 made it impossible to ignore. Tariffs disrupted margins. AI accelerated analysis, but also accelerated misunderstanding. Platforms doubled down on black-box automation. And most critically, attribution continued to break down as a reliable source of truth.

Across hundreds of brands, one theme became clear: what worked five years ago, or even five months ago, no longer works today.

In this year’s State of Marketing Measurement webinar, fusepoint’s Director of Growth Mallory and VP of Data Intelligence Bryce reveal the real patterns behind the noise and share a data-backed roadmap for how marketers should measure, test, and allocate budget in 2026.

Below is a deeper look at the themes we covered, but the full webinar goes even further.

2025 revealed three pressure points that shaped decision-making across nearly every brand:

With cost of goods rising, marketers were tasked with making up the difference through “efficient growth,” often without having reliable measurement to guide investment.

Teams adopted AI tooling before fully understanding its limitations. Some saw efficiency gains. Others leaned too hard on automated outputs without interpreting the context behind the numbers.
The result? Faster decisions, but not always smarter ones.

Predictability dropped across industries. Quarterly targets became moving goalposts. This forced teams to rethink how they validated impact and justified budget.

For all the sophistication marketers have access to, 2025 showed one truth clearly:

Attribution alone is not enough, and often leads brands in the wrong direction.

Mallory and Bryce walk through examples where:

These signals weren’t just misleading, they were expensive.

The full session explains why attribution over-credits certain channels, how algorithmic bidding masks waste, and why incrementality testing has become the new standard for understanding what actually drives revenue.

Too many organizations are making marketing decisions with mismatched definitions of “success.”
2026 demands alignment around:

When finance and marketing aren’t speaking the same language, measurement collapses.

Platform dashboards can be manipulated, your P&L cannot. Marketers who ground decisions in business truth rather than vanity metrics will be ahead of the curve next year.

Running tests is easy. Knowing how to interpret the results? That’s the real advantage.

While the industry focuses on algorithms and automation, the biggest untapped advantage lies elsewhere:

Brands that stand out win incremental lift. Brands that “blend in” rely on paid reach to do the heavy lifting. In the webinar, Bryce explains why creative should be treated as a measurement input, not just a marketing output.

Over-indexing on bottom-of-funnel in 2025 quietly increased CACs across industries.
2026 will demand a healthier balance:

Based on hundreds of matched-market tests, fusepoint reveals:

The webinar includes the full breakdown by channel and by industry, plus how brands should use this data to guide 2026 allocation.

Mallory and Bryce outline five trends that will shape next year:

If you measure your marketing the same way next year that you did last year, you will fall behind.

This blog skims the surface. The real value is in the full walkthrough, where Mallory and Bryce:

Watch the Webinar On-Demand