July 2026 · 5 min read
Ad costs went up again this year. Results, broadly, did not.
That’s the first half of 2026 in two sentences. The rest of this post is about why it happened and what we think it means for the second half. It’s also, fair warning, the argument our whole firm is built on.
What’s actually happened in 2026… so far
Three numbers tell the story.
First: spend kept climbing. IAB’s 2026 outlook projected US ad spend up 9.5% this year, with social growing near 15%. The money showed up as promised.
Second: everyone automated at once. Industry benchmarks from AdAmigo put roughly 78% of Meta advertisers on automated Advantage+ campaigns. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey has CMOs putting 15.3% of their budgets into AI. Whatever the tool category, adoption stopped being a differentiator and became table stakes sometime around last Christmas.
Third: the auctions collected the difference. US Meta CPMs rose about 20% year over year on the same benchmark data. When every bidder gets smarter at the same rate, nobody outbids anybody. The auction just gets more expensive for everyone in it.
Put those together and you get the strange flatness a lot of marketing leaders are feeling right now. More spend, better tools, same results. It isn’t a failure of execution. It’s arithmetic.
The convergence problem
Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in the benchmark reports.
Automated buying doesn’t just equalize efficiency. It equalizes output. The same optimization pressure, applied across an entire category, produces the same media plans, the same audiences, and increasingly the same-looking ads. We see it every time we audit an account: strip the logos out of a category’s creative and you often can’t tell whose ads are whose.
When the machine picks the audience, the placement, and the bid, the only input left that’s actually yours is the thing you put in front of people.
That used to be one variable among many. It’s now close to the only one.
Why the money is quietly agreeing with us
You don’t have to take a consultancy’s word for this. Watch where the budgets moved.
The same Gartner survey found the people share of marketing budgets rose from 21.9% to 24.5% this year while tool spend flattened. After two years of buying software, CMOs are buying judgment again. Gartner also reports that only 30% of marketing organizations consider their AI capability mature. The gap between owning the tools and knowing what to feed them is now the widest gap in the industry.
Tools don’t close that gap. Taste does.
What we’d do for the rest of the year
If we were sitting in a marketing leadership seat right now, second half of 2026, this is the shape of the plan:
Stop competing on infrastructure. If 78% of the market runs the same automation, your account structure is not your edge. Simplify it, hand the mechanics to the machine, and reclaim the hours.
Reallocate the saved effort to creative development. Not more variations. Fewer, bigger swings: different arguments, different offers, ideas a competitor would decline to run. Testing thirty crops of one concept is measuring noise.
Judge everything on profit. Automated buying is very good at manufacturing pretty in-platform numbers. Fully loaded acquisition cost against real contribution margin is the score that counts. If a metric can’t change a decision, stop reporting it.
Keep senior people close to the work. The market just repriced judgment. Renting it out cheap, or burying it three layers from the account, is the expensive option now.
The bet
Every era of marketing has a scarce resource. For the last decade it was targeting data and platform skill. The platforms just absorbed both.
What they can’t absorb is the decision about what to say and the nerve to say it. That’s a human edge, it compounds, and right now most of the market is underinvesting in it while overpaying for tools that no longer differentiate anyone.
Our bet for the second half hasn’t changed since we wrote it on LinkedIn: the gap between brands won’t be who has AI. Everyone has AI. It’ll be who has taste.
That’s the work we do. If it’s the work you need, reach out.
Delmonte International is a growth and creative marketing consultancy. Australian founders, US operations. Creative-led growth for ambitious brands.