In her latest column, Shirley Marschall kicks-off Q4 with her own take on annual end of year predictions...

Crystal ball polished? Tea leaves sorted? Tarot cards dusted off? What does they all say about advertising in 2026? Ad tech in 2030?

Predictions: that strange space where wishful thinking, sales decks, and reality blur.

And that’s the beauty, isn’t it? The one time of year you can either disguise your agenda as foresight or put your gut feeling on paper. Hated by some, skimmed by most, but irresistible nevertheless. Humans simply can’t help but click on “Advertising 2030” deck number 100…

We click, skim, roll our eyes, and close the tab slightly disappointed. These aren’t predictions; they’re educated guesses at best and more of the same usually. Yes, CTV is growing. Yes, RMNs are growing. Yes, AI is everywhere. Yes, yes, yes. We knew that already.

To be fair, it’s hard to get it right. Repeat the obvious? You’re lame. Go full visionary? You’re nuts. (Once, “visions” were a medical diagnosis, not a LinkedIn headline…good old days.)

So here are some predictions about predictions. Things we can safely say will either stubbornly refuse to change or flip entirely. Not by 2026, probably not by 2030. Maybe ever. Maybe never.

The good, the bad, and the completely made-up, curated for that small group of us who obsess daily over the esoteric world of programmatic advertising.

Flat-Earther Marketing

Call it the easy button, call it short-termism, or as Dan Gee put it brilliantly: flat-earther marketing. Ad spend forecasts lay bare the fear of our era: homogenous, short-sighted logic rules. WARC’s latest numbers show the vast majority of ad spend growth flowing straight into the monopolist coffers. Between now and 2027, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and TikTok will absorb over $200bn in new revenue.

Prediction: flat-earth marketing will prevail. It’s a trap. And worse, it will be reframed by the same platforms soaking up the spend, persuading advertisers they’re “thinking bigger.” Case in point: Meta’s sudden bid to crown itself the arbiter of incrementality. Or the hot takes insisting you can build a brand purely with digital. Same small world, same flat earth… just with shinier slides.

Fraud

Walk down fraud memory lane and read Bob Hoffman’s newsletters from a decade ago. Sigh, and you’ll reach one conclusion: nothing will change. Why would it? Incentives are everywhere, keeping the fraud machines humming. 

Prediction: still broken, still profitable. S‘all good man…

Podcasts

The sheer number of podcasts (human and AI-made) leaves one question: how does anyone listen to even a fraction of them? Text can be skimmed but audio demands time. And yet (as overhead on … yes, a podcast): nowadays it’s harder to find a person who doesn’t have a podcast, than one who has. 

Prediction: where ears are, ad budgets follow. Where ad budgets are, more podcasts appear. And so the vicious circle spins.

Deals

AI deals… what’s next? Can anything top the most eyebrow-raising one, the infamous Nvidia + OpenAI + Oracle ménage à trois? As for ad tech, it’s all about big tech sucking up the open web and the battle of the three DSPs. Amazon was especially busy: Amazon + Netflix + Spotify + SiriusXM… What do all of these have in common? None are unique to Amazon, yet each is hyped as if they were.

Prediction: Want to guess the next big Amazon deal? Follow whoever’s already plugged into The Trade Desk.

Gen Z, Gen Alpha, Gen Nano

Gen Z obsession is so 2025. Gen Alpha and Gen Nano are the AI natives and the new hot thing. Asking for a friend: Does that mean the rest of us can retire from advertising? We had our turn. Can we hand it over now? 

Prediction: endless decks on “unlocking Gen Alpha and Nano.” And no, no opt-out for “oldies.”

Ads in AI chat

Ads, ads everywhere! Of course there will be ads in AI chat. At the end, all tech becomes ad tech. That’s not a prediction, just a waiting game. And while the ad tech world and advertising budgets are impatiently waiting for the first real, scalable ads in AI chats… Hear that sucking sound? That’s the sound of agentic and AI integrated browsers, pulling data out of … everything. A direct line into the most personal signals of how you work, communicate, and spend your time. What will they do with it? Short term: Meta will use AI chat data to target ads, and others will follow. 

Prediction: long term, the lower-funnel will collapse and marketing teams will lose their minds.

Slop

The amount of slop-related posts, discussions and articles is unbelievable. So much that one might wonder if writing about slop is just adding more slop… here, here and yes, here (all worth reading!). 

Prediction: Or rather, a quote from Mountainhead: "When people first went to the movies, they thought they were going to get hit by a train. The answer wasn’t to stop movies, it was to make more movies… We’re going to show people so much shit that they realise that nothing is serious anymore."

Finally some Advertising in 2126 predictions, brought to you by the greatest hallucinator of them all…ChatGPT: 

Ads in Your Dreams: Forget CTV, by 2126, sleep-time ad slots are prime inventory. Brands bid in real time to sponsor your subconscious. Sweet dreams? Premium CPMs. Nightmares? Discounted.

Time-Travel Retargeting: Ads before you want something. Sometimes before it exists. (“We see you shopping jetpack helmets in three weeks. Here’s 20% off today.”)

Nostalgia Marketing, Level 999: 2020s TikTok dances packaged as “heritage.” Millennials in nursing homes: top influencer segment.

And then there’s everything we didn’t predict: lawsuits, regulation, consolidation, fragmentation and the usual unpredictable mess…