The advertising business has always had a complicated relationship with commitment. Clients want guarantees; agencies want retainers; networks want upfront dollars locked in by Memorial Day. And yet the industry that sells certainty to consumers has never been particularly good at practicing it internally.
This tension was on full display in the May 2026 upfronts, which, according to a survey of agency professionals conducted by Digiday, served less as the traditional buying bazaar and more as a kind of financial crouch. Thirty-six percent of respondents said client media budgets remained flat this year, while 32 percent reported increases — not exactly a boom, but a modest improvement over 2025, when tariffs and inflation left their marks on the spreadsheets.
The budgets may be stable, but the willingness to commit them is not. "We have seen more clients looking for flexibility and holding back their dollars in the upfront," said Marcy Greenberger, chief investment officer at UM, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. "It may not signal that spending is necessarily down, but that people are looking to spend in a different way."
(Flexibility, in the agency business, is one of those words that can mean almost anything. In this case, it appears to mean: we'll give you the money, but not yet, and not all of it, and we'd like to be able to change our minds.)
The channels attracting the most new investment were, perhaps predictably, the ones that barely existed a few years ago. Eighty-nine percent of respondents said clients increased spending on AI search, a category that WPP has forecast as the fastest-growing advertising segment. An equal percentage cited streaming video and connected television. Creator and influencer marketing came in at 78 percent, as did social media.
Out-of-home and broadcast television, meanwhile, found themselves on the other end of the allocation — 60 percent of respondents said those channels saw decreases. (Or as one might put it less charitably: the places where consumers used to be versus the places where they are.)
The rise of creator marketing is not merely about reach. David Dweck, president of Go Fish Digital, noted that brands have loosened their grip on creative guidelines, accepting content that looks less like advertising and more like something a person might actually post. "We're seeing a 40 to 60 percent uplift against typical, traditionally produced creative units," Mr. Dweck said, "mainly on TikTok, but the uplift is similar across Instagram and YouTube."
There is also, as always, the matter of artificial intelligence — which is saving money, costing money, and generating money, sometimes all at once. Seventy percent of respondents said AI has reduced costs by making tasks more efficient, while 31 percent said it has cost more than expected to deploy. Go Fish Digital now tracks token usage at the employee level, "by the penny," Mr. Dweck said.
"Every small agency and team is building a tool," said Olivier Pepin, chief technology officer at Novus. "Now somebody in central will have to unify and connect all of that, and figure out which ones are real versus a waste of time."
Which is, in a sense, the whole industry's question at the moment — applied not just to software, but to channels, to commitments, to the upfronts themselves. The agencies are adapting. Whether they are adapting fast enough is the part no survey can answer.
Original story published in Digiday: "Digiday Media Agency Report 2026: How agencies adapt to a media landscape shaped by AI and creators"