How Marketing Will Completely Change in 2026

Alright, guys. It's Christmas Eve. Neil's in Vegas. He doesn't have his microphone, but it doesn't matter. We're here to record. We're here to bring the value. It doesn't matter if someone's sick, someone's having a baby, someone's traveling. We make this podcast happen no matter what. So, Neil, I thought it might make sense for us to also talk about predictions for 2026 too because we did we kinda did a review for the last episode. I think it's good to maybe talk about trends or predictions that we see for the next year. Yeah. And and some of them, I'm already starting to see towards the, you know, November, December 2025, and we know they're gonna carry in. Like, one of the big things that we saw is in the agency world, there was a slowdown because of SEO. And what I mean because of SEO is the uncertainty of SEO and AI and what's gonna happen. So if you look at 2024, a lot of agencies were impacted who are performing SEO. 2025 as well to some extent, not as bad as 2024. The second half was much better. But if I look at 2025, honestly, a lot of companies are getting back into SEO, and they're like, oh, it's not dead. It's still a valid channel, and they're doubling down on it. And we saw budget cuts in 2024 for some companies. Not all, of course. I'm not even talking about the majority, but a lot of people had that sentiment that AI is gonna screw up SEO. And we saw issues there. We also saw issues with social media. And what I mean is social media is people are just like, oh, organic social is not gonna work the same now that they're monetizing through selling products specifically on Instagram and TikTok. You know, when you're shopping, people are just like, oh, organic social is not gonna be as important. If they want you to monetize, they want you to monetize by selling stuff so they can end up making money. We're seeing companies go back into organic social because if you don't have that communication channel with your potential customers, you're missing out on what people feel, hear, say about your brand versus, you know, if you don't leverage that channel, people just assume whatever they wanna assume. So companies wanna make sure they're controlling their own narrative. Yeah. So what I would say is in terms of predictions for 2026 on the marketing side, one thing is what Neil said, we are getting more and more people are coming back. Sometimes it's SEO. Sometimes people are looking for AEO. But when we send outbound emails, there's a lot of people that respond and say, hey. We're actually looking to revisit our strategy for the next year. And so, we're both seeing that right now. But I think we're also gonna see and we kinda talked about this a little bit, but more in …