MediaOcean’s latest advertising outlook found that 63% of U.S. marketers surveyed plan to increase ad spend in the connected TV channel in the first half of 2026, alongside expected upticks broadly in other digital channels amid the annual planning cycle. But even as new tech like AI starts to impact buyers’ strategies and processes, familiar industry challenges like fragmentation and siloed systems appear to present continued hurdles.
MediaOcean said survey results from the firm’s 2026 H1 Advertising Outlook, fielded in November 2025, show renewed confidence with dollars flowing towards channels that offer stronger measurement, flexibility and accountability.
CTV tied with digital display and video for the top two categories where marketers plan to increase ad spend compared to the prior year, with 63% signaling intent to do so for each. Those were followed closely by social platforms, where 61% expect to up investment in the first half of 2026.
Further down on the list, retail media held steady as 40% plan to increase ad spend and another 53% expect to maintain investment levels in the channel. More marketers intend to cut back on traditional TV advertising, with expected pullbacks cited in local TV (36% plan to reduce spend) and national TV (34%).
Notably two emerging categories showed up, with more than half of marketers surveyed planning to boost spend in each AI media – aka ads on AI agents - (54%), and influencer and creator marketing (53%).
Continued interest and investment in CTV could also be seen in Proximic by Comscore’s latest State of Programmatic report, which focused specifically on spending via programmatic avenues.
Per the report, 58% of ad buyers plan to increase programmatic spend in 2026 year-over-year while an additional 24% will maintain their level of investment. On average, buyers expect to allocate 26% of media budgets to programmatic CTV – representing the largest programmatic channel and a 3% uptick in average share of budget for CTV
The proportion of buyers who expect to increase programmatic ad spend in 2026 is down notably from 72% who said the same for 2025. However, Proxmic’s report emphasized that this doesn’t signal a pullback in programmatic ad spend investment, but rather “underscores a market that has moved beyond experimentation.”
“Budgets are being deployed with greater selectivity, and growth is increasingly concentrated in areas where programmatic has proven its value through consistent, measurable results,” the Proximic report stated.
Proximic’s report also highlighted shifting budgets, where CTV is gaining favor at the expense of traditional linear. For buyers increasing their programmatic CTV budget in 2026, 45% said they were reallocating dollars from linear TV, while nearly a quarter were pulling from desktop and mobile budgets. Net new CTV budgets – aka not pulled from any other channels – are expected to dip slightly, with 16% planning to fund increased investment with new CTV ad dollars in 2026 compared to 20% in 20025.
In terms of which advertising capabilities and media investments are most key to marketers across channels, per MediaOcean’s survey, known pillars remained top including performance-driven paid media at No. 1 (51%), followed by brand advertising (48%) and measurement and attribution capabilities (48%).
The MediaOcean report also showed that although there’s excitement for AI, less than half (43%) of marketers are using genAI for the top use cases of data analysis and market research, respectively. And AI adoption drops further in processes closer to execution such as creative development (33%) and campaign orchestration (19%) – which the firm said highlights a gap between insight and impact. It’s also worth noting that a smaller percentage of marketers cited using genAI for the top use cases as of November than in May.
Still, AI tech is top of mind alongside the need for systems that communicate.
AI and cross-channel orchestration needs
In addition to established pillars, AI and cross-platform orchestration debuted as two new categories that are considered critical ad capabilities and media investments to more than one-third of marketers, with each cited by 39% of MediaOcean respondents.
“The rise of AI and orchestration marks a turning point, signaling that marketers are no longer just optimizing channel by channel, but architecting the unified, intelligent systems required for durable advantage in an increasingly fragmented market,” wrote MediaOcean.
From the sea of platforms available and audiences splintered across them to siloed measurement, ad tech stacks and internal teams – MediaOcean’s survey indicates the familiar widespread issue of fragmentation continues to be a challenge for the media advertising ecosystem and one that isn’t going away with the introduction of AI.
Generative AI (70%) and connected TV (63%) are the top two consumer trends marketers told MediaOcean they’re watching and both also relate to marketers’ top concerns.
Per MediaOcean, fragmentation across platforms and publishers (56%) continues to be the industry’s top concern for media and marketing initiatives. A close second is the related challenge of complexity of cross-channel measurement and optimization at 49%.
And 43% are concerned with balancing AI adoption with brand safety, accuracy and creative control, while 42% worry about utilizing AI-driven automation without losing human oversight or quality.
Another historical concern with CTV – notably the ability to manage reach and/or frequency – was cited as a top worry by 30% of marketers, down from the 38% that said so in May. MediaOcean said the decline doesn’t mean that the issue is solved but rather reflects marketers turning attention “to structural causes of the problem, namely system silos and inconsistent signals.”
“As budgets shift toward CTV and AI driven environments, the challenge is no longer buying across channels—it is understanding how those channels interact,” wrote MediaOcean. “Consistent metrics, unified frequency management, and clear optimization loops remain elusive.”
Even in terms of adopting genAI more broadly within marketing workflows, the No. 2 most-cited barrier was difficulty connecting AI insights across multiple systems at 41%, while integration challenges with existing tech stacks followed closely at 39%.
And with advent of AI and continued challenges related to fragmentation, MediaOcean’s survey took the time to zero in on cross-channel orchestration – which 86% of marketers surveyed said is at least somewhat important (with more than half saying extremely so).
The firm believes cross-channel orchestration can be helpful but found there’s work to be done on the infrastructure side to catch up.
While the majority of marketers consider cross-platform orchestration important, only 10% said their ad tech stacks are fully connected across channels like CTV, social, display, retail media and so on. Nearly half categorized ad tech systems as partially unified but with significant silos remaining.
“These gaps contribute to several downstream challenges, from inconsistent measurement to creative redundancy and inefficiency in campaign pacing and optimization,” MediaOcean noted.
Cross-channel orchestration is an area where the firm believes efforts need to be taken to close the gap in 2026 as AI-driven insights become part of the picture and media channels become more interconnected, so that existing infrastructure can catch up with marketers’ needs for data sharing, coordinated decisions and unified workflows.