Why Decision Clarity Will Be the Most Expensive Marketing Failure of 2026

The most expensive mistake marketers will make in 2026 will be about decision clarity and governance

Every January, marketing declares a new inflection point. Agencies are “dead” (again). Holding companies are merging (again). AI is about to replace everything from strategy to creativity to media planning (apparently). Retail media, commerce media, creator economies, agentic systems – all very real, all important, all loudly debated.

But if you zoom out, something feels familiar. For those of us who have been around long enough (my children like to say “way back in the 1900s”), we have seen these cycles repeat.

Accountability diffused, new silos emerge

I started a web agency 25 years ago at a time when the internet truly did change everything. Business models shifted, barriers to entry collapsed and marketing began its monumental transformation. These shifts required new skills, new disciplines, new partners, and new organizational responses.

Decoupling, capability specialization, in-housing, and major changes to legacy agency models have all been understandable adaptations in response to a massive increase in market and technological complexity. But each of these adaptations also fragmented decision-making.

Now with AI, we’re faced with the biggest disruptor we have ever seen. And we’re told that for marketing, it will simplify everything and finally change all the rules. In some ways, this will be true. But not necessarily in the way most people think.

Disruption doesn’t remove complexity,
it relocates it

Across every major disruptive shift in our industry, the pattern has been remarkably consistent:

• Technology changes how marketing is executed
• Business models adapt
• New intermediaries emerge
• Old ones rebrand, consolidate, or fragment

What rarely keeps pace is decision-making.

• Search didn’t simplify decisions. It shifted power toward platforms and algorithms.
• Social multiplied ‘performance’ narratives.
• E-commerce redistributed friction across supply chains, platforms, and data owners.
• Decoupling and in-housing shifted where risk, capability and accountability sat.

AI will be no different. AI is accelerating output faster than most organizations can arbitrate truth. More models. More signals. More optimization. More “insight.” But less agreement on what really matters.

Which brings us to the most expensive mistake organizations are making right now.

The real failure isn’t technology

Most organizations do not fundamentally have a technology problem. They do not have an agency problem. They do not have a data problem. They have a decision clarity and governance problem.

Decisions are being made across increasingly complex ecosystems – without shared clarity on what matters, and without a system to govern trade-offs over time. In many large enterprises, marketing decisions have grown increasingly fragmented by design:

• Performance data sits in platforms
• Media is disconnected from creative
• Commercial realities live separate from brand strategy
• Customer insight sits in disparate tools, buried in data
• Structural decisions sit with leadership but operate in functional silos

And governance sits…nowhere in particular.

When change is slow, this is survivable. When change is rapid and constant, it becomes existential. AI won’t resolve this fragmentation. It will expose it.

If no one can reconcile competing signals.

If no one can arbitrate trade-offs between growth, efficiency, and long-term value.

If no one governs how decisions are made consistently over time.

Then AI will simply help organizations make the wrong decisions faster.

Getting clarity on what matters

The most future-critical decision companies are getting wrong is not which operating or agency model to choose, which platform to invest in, or which AI tools to deploy. It’s failing to establish clarity on what matters, and governance over decision quality across the marketing ecosystem.

That does not mean that everything should now be centralized or consolidated. It means recognizing that fragmentation was the price of progress, and that clarity now requires deliberate unification, regardless of where execution sits.

That means answering uncomfortable questions:

• Who has the authority to challenge platform narratives when performance stories conflict?
• Who can compare value across agencies, in-house teams, creators, channels, and markets on a like-for-like basis?
• Who governs marketing investment as an enterprise asset, rather than a campaign function?
• Who stays accountable as conditions change, rather than disappearing after recommendations are made?

Most organizations can’t answer these clearly. They default to familiar muscle memory: new partners, new tools, new restructures, more “transformation” charters. Activity feels like progress. It isn’t.

Sustainable competitive advantage in marketing will not come from doing more things faster or cheaper. The advantage will come from better decisions, made earlier, with less bias, and governed continuously. That requires an objective system that unifies and connects intelligence to decision-making, not just reporting.