The bar is rising for marketers. For years, teams could point to impressions and clicks and call it a day. Now CFOs want measurable proof of impact. CMOs need clarity that they can defend. And no one is greenlighting spending that can’t hold up in a board meeting.
The shift has been coming for a while, but it’s about to become the norm. In 2026, the only thing that will matter is whether your campaigns produce tangible outcomes.
Advertising Trends On Their Way Out
CFOs are done hearing about “brand lift.” They want to know if your ads actually drove sales that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Several long-standing practices are losing relevance because they can’t stand up to today’s scrutiny:
Counting conversions
A raw conversion count doesn’t reveal whether the ad caused the outcome or captured something that was already going to happen.
Click-based tracking
Consumer behavior is fragmenting across devices, and privacy barriers have made click paths increasingly unreliable as a measure of intent or influence.
ROAS as a primary success metric
ROAS is often inflated by model bias, last-touch attribution, or platform self-reporting. In many cases, it rewards the easiest, least incremental audiences.
Performance guarantees on non-attributed conversions
These guarantees focus on volume, rather than causality, and can give marketers a false sense of security.
In short, unaccountable marketing is out. The industry is moving toward verifiable impact and away from proxies that once passed as proof.
To fill the void, a new standard is taking hold.
Incrementality Is Becoming the New Benchmark
My big bet for 2026 is that incrementality will become the default standard for performance.
It’s time to know whether every dollar is delivering. That’s no longer a “nice to have”; it’s the expectation.
Case in point: In 2025, Meta and Google added incrementality to their measurement frameworks, marking a profound shift in advertising. Even the giants have to prove their ads work.
For those of us who have been championing incrementality over the last decade, it feels validating. The market is finally moving toward outcomes, not optics.
Back when ad spend was cheaper and attribution was clearer, teams could probably afford empty clicks and impressions. But with automation, tariffs, and tighter budgets, there’s zero room left for unaccountable marketing.
The major advertising platforms are finally catching on. They have to justify advertising spend beyond “platform-reported ROAS.” They’re leaning into real accountability.
CTV’s Moment of Truth
You can see this shift most clearly in Connected TV (CTV).
CTV has all the ingredients that make incrementality essential: it’s premium, high-reach, and historically hard to measure. And yet, most providers can’t (or won’t) measure actual incremental sales.
They’ll show you impressions, completion rates, and maybe conversions. But ask them to prove causality and watch them squirm.
We approached Performance CTV differently from day one by using:
– The same Performance Marketing Engine that powers Programmatic Direct Mail, built on billions of real transactions, household data, and actual purchase intent
– The same AI targeting that finds your next best customer
– The same commitment to proving incremental impact
During our beta, we went head-to-head with a major CTV provider. The brand ran its own validation and saw a 9x incremental ROAS from our campaign. They quickly turned that pilot into a $700k investment and told us we outperformed every other channel they were running.
It makes sense when you think about it. Programmatic Direct Mail and CTV are natural partners. Both engage consumers at home. Both create real impressions that last. And both have historically been impossible to measure properly.
Until now.
Where the Industry Goes Next
I’ve said it before, and now it feels truer than ever: Incrementality is the path forward.
It’s becoming the connective tissue across channels, and it’s the only performance standard that answers the question every board is asking: What actually moved the needle?
From here, expect:
– More brands demanding third-party or self-validated lift
– Fewer partners who can’t prove causal impact
– Greater pressure to connect the entire media mix to measurable outcomes
– Incrementality benchmarks to become the default yardstick for channel performance
What do you think?
Is this the year we finally stop confusing activity with impact?
