The ancient Romans had their pantheon, a rotating cast of deities to whom one might appeal depending on the crisis at hand. Madison Avenue, it seems, prefers an annual list.
Ad Age has released its 2026 Tech Power List, the trade publication's periodic attempt to identify which executives are most successfully navigating the intersection of advertising and whatever technology happens to be ascendant at the moment. The winners, according to the announcement, are "pushing the bounds of the core emerging tech trends in the industry."
What those bounds are, precisely, and how forcefully they are being pushed, the publication did not immediately elaborate. (One assumes the details will follow in the manner of such franchise exercises, with individual profiles parceled out over the coming days like advent calendar chocolates.)
The Tech Power List has become one of several recurring honors through which the trade press attempts to impose order on an industry that resists it. Ad Age also maintains an A-List of agencies, a Creativity 50 of individuals, and various other taxonomies of achievement, all of which generate the sort of coverage that holding company communications departments can forward to their boards.
Whether such lists reflect genuine influence or merely the willingness to return a reporter's phone call remains, as ever, an open question. But the annual ritual endures, as it has for years, because advertising has always loved a leaderboard — even one measuring qualities as ineffable as technological vision.
The 2026 roster arrives at a moment when the industry's relationship with technology feels particularly unsettled, though that sentence could have been written in any year since approximately 1994.
The honorees, presumably, will be celebrated at an event of some kind. There is usually an event.
Original story published in adage.com: "Introducing the 2026 Ad Age Tech Power List - Ad Age"