Kick-start 2026: must-reads for every marketer

Tired of the brand-vs-performance battle in every budget meeting? Brand and performance don’t just coexist, they multiply. Brand building doesn't sit politely alongside performance marketing. It actively enhances it. Strong brands drive stronger performance.

The most useful part of this paper is the budget guidance, including ideas like a ‘brand baseline’ and a ‘search ceiling’ (often cited as ~30% and max ~25% respectively). If you’re tired of vague ‘60/40’ talk, this is a sharper provocation. The research also names the trap you may already have fallen into: the ‘doom loop’, where optimising performance hits a ceiling or even starts to shrink your returns. Sound familiar? There's a way out.

Source: page.warc.com/the-multiplier-effect-report

Let's face the main mistake our industry keeps making: we want fresh creatives every year or even every quarter. Yet this is not how you build brands. What if I told you keeping the same campaign for three years multiplies profit by 7.5x? Consistency doesn't kill creativity, it focuses it.

The next big misstep? Trying to convince consumers with a pile of rational arguments. What you actually need are emotional ones. Because if no one feels anything, nothing changes. And no, that doesn’t just mean ‘heart-warming and touching’.

This essential paper reveals five crucial components every creative campaign should build in if it wants to be effective. I already mentioned two, you can discover the other three yourself.

Source: system1group.com/the-creative-dividend

Still treating TikTok as your intern's side project for Gen Z? The platform you're underinvesting in might be more powerful than you think. Short-form video isn't just a direct-response channel. It can effectively serve both long-term brand building (through high reach and active attention) and short-term conversion (through targeted intent signals). The magic recipe? Entertainment combined with attention. If you want to know how to actually excel in short-form video, this is a must-read.

Source: system1group.com/creative-effectiveness-tiktok

Remember feeling satisfied with those MRC-compliant impression numbers that beat the target last quarter? Well, only 20% of ads are actually seen, not just served. In 2024, ‘the cost of being dull’ was a popular theme. In 2025, Karen Nelson-Field, Adam Morgan and Peter Field went a level deeper and researched the cost of dull media. It turns out the cost of dull media is even higher than the cost of dull creative. So, think twice when you look at your impressions. This paper is a wake-up call to stop pouring so much money into fast-paced, low-attention media and is especially interesting for anyone making media choices.

Source: www.amplified.co/resources/cost-of-dull

Your ROI looks great, so why is total profit declining? That’s probably because ‘size does matter’. Les Binet opened his talk with Will Davis at the IPA Conference with this provocative line and the data backs it up completely. Budget is eight times more important than ROI for predicting success. While you've been hyper-targeting specific audiences and celebrating efficiency gains, you may have been optimising for the wrong thing. And if you’re thinking, ‘That's great for brands with deep pockets, but what about the rest of us?’, here's the good news: even on a limited budget, you can still go big. How? The link below reveals the answer.

Source: ipa.co.uk/knowledge/effectiveness/ipa-effectiveness-conference-2025/go-big-or-go-home

What about those creator partnerships, are they worth it? For years, influencer marketing has felt like the Wild West of advertising: full of potential, but without the rigorous measurement we apply to more traditional channels. 2025 brought us the first large-scale study measuring influencer impact properly. The results challenge some common assumptions, while validating others.

The most important finding? Influencers don't just deliver short-term ROI spikes. They excel at building long-term brand value. What determines success isn't follower counts or engagement rates, though. It's something else entirely...

Source: ipa.co.uk/knowledge/effectiveness/ipa-effectiveness-conference-2025/the-wild-west-of-influencer-measurement

Reading through last year's research, a clear pattern emerges. The industry has spent years optimising for the wrong things: hyper-targeting over reach, efficiency over effectiveness, novelty over consistency. These studies collectively point towards a different path: invest in distinctive and emotional creativity, distribute it broadly, place it in contexts where it will actually be seen, keep it running long enough to build equity and, above all, make it entertaining enough that people choose to engage with it. The data is clear. The question is whether we'll have the courage to act on it in 2026.