This FAQ covers affiliate market size, publisher types, AI disruption, and what marketers should prioritize in 2026.

This FAQ examines why the brand-versus-performance tension is intensifying, what the data reveals about budget shifts, and how marketers can prove brand marketing's value in an era of heightened accountability.

Currency debates are fading as advertisers shift to outcome-based measurement. As performance takes priority, marketers are focusing more on lower-funnel outcomes, while measurement vendors double down on specialized offerings.

Retail media has reached a point where measurement is table stakes. But what table stakes actually look like is changing fast. With the launch of its latest measurement tool, Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) is signaling its priorities for retail media measurement: Speed, incrementality, and clearer decision-making.

Agencies are increasingly acting as commerce media guides, helping brands move past outdated structures, sort through measurement standards, and bring AI into their planning. While commerce media networks (CMNs) have expanded to capture more than just retail media dollars, the silos between brand, retail, and sales teams make integration a challenge.

Marketing professionals see AI leading to several shifts in consumer behavior that will greatly impact the fundamentals of digital advertising in the next 2 to 3 years, per a Funnel and Ravn Research study of in-house marketers and agency professionals. As AI reshapes digital and search advertising, the brands that thrive will be those who seize the opportunities presented by AI-driven changes.

At the Marketecture conference, MiQ’s global VP of strategy and partnerships, Moe Chughtai, said advertisers are finally connecting platforms like Meta, YouTube, and TV through clean room technologies that enable unified measurement. Traditional marketing mix models are being replaced by one- to three-month measurement cycles that allow for real-time optimization and smarter KPI alignment. The result: advertisers can move beyond isolated reporting and toward integrated, cross-platform performance strategies that strengthen confidence in ROI.

Marketing measurement is entering a new phase of speed and precision. InMarket’s Michael Della Penna told EMARKETER that marketers are moving beyond static reports toward real-time insights—fusing marketing mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) to understand what drives incremental sales as campaigns run. AI-powered models now forecast lift, optimize spend, and connect awareness to conversion through unified platforms. With 56% of marketers prioritizing sales lift and nearly half investing in MMM, the focus is clear: decision speed over dashboards. InMarket’s end-to-end system exemplifies this shift, reframing measurement as a continuous feedback loop rather than a quarterly report.

Nearly half (46.9%) of US brand and agency marketers plan to invest in marketing mix modeling (MMM) over the next year, according to a July survey from EMARKETER and TransUnion.

Privacy regulations are mounting. Signal loss is accelerating. Omnichannel advertising has become impossibly complex. These forces are driving marketers back to MMM for holistic, privacy-safe measurement.

GenAI search is gaining traction, but not all consumers are seeking out the conversational experiences that will eventually disrupt the search ad market.

An increasingly fragmented retail media ecosystem has made it difficult for advertisers to track campaign performance across multiple retail media networks (RMNs), said Liz Roche, vice president of measurement and media at Albertsons Media Collective.

The future of measurement lies in weaving the best of marketing mix modeling and multitouch attribution into a unified analytics solution.

Addressable advertising is the default for digital—but users are getting harder to identify thanks to governments and platform controllers stepping in. Read on to learn how advertisers and their partners are hoping to continue tracking users and measuring the results of digital advertising.