How Marketers Should Navigate Uncertainty in 2026

By Rob Murray, CEO, Overdrive Interactive

It’s the time of year when the experts predict how the next 12 months will unfold for the marketing world. And I’m reading a lot about marketers bracing for uncertainty. Over economy. The ongoing impact of AI. And more. I feel like I’ve seen this movie many times recently, such as during the major disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic, the economic ripple effect of geopolitical conflict in 2022, and global trade policy in 2025.

What’s a business to do?

If you reduce your marketing spend because of uncertainty or volatility, your brand becomes invisible when conditions rebound. But no one wants to turn a blind eye to potential changes in your market, either.

I believe the answer is to stay visible without being reckless: protect investments into long-term brand equity, tighten measurement so you know what is actually working, be ready to adjust your tactics as conditions change.

Here’s how I’m advising clients to approach marketing strategy in 2026.

Protect Your Brand Investment (Don’t Abandon It)

There’s a classic McGraw-Hill study of 600 companies during the 1981-82 recession, which found that businesses maintaining or increasing advertising achieved 256% higher sales by 1985, while those who cut spend saw only 19% growth. This pattern has repeated itself. A Covid‑era survey found that companies increasing online ad spend during the pandemic saw lifts in paid traffic. Certainly Procter & Gamble benefitted by keeping its ad spend strong.

Why does this pattern repeat itself across every period of economic uncertainty and even disruption? Two reasons. First, when competitors pull back, media becomes cheaper; your maintained budget buys more reach and frequency than it would in boom times. Second, brand equity compounds. When you go dark, you lose 2% of long-term revenue every quarter, and it takes three to five years to rebuild what you’ve lost. That’s an expensive bet on conditions improving faster than your competitors can outspend you.

Don’t starve your brand work; keep at least half your budget doing the long-term job of making sure people know you, remember you, and feel something positive about you.

Tighten Measurement and Prove What’s Working

Uncertain times eliminate tolerance for fuzzy metrics. If you’re still reporting on impressions and engagement without connecting those numbers to revenue, you’re making yourself vulnerable.

Thriving during volatility means demonstrating incrementality. That means implementing rigorous attribution models, understanding the cross-channel interactions in your media mix, and tracking business outcomes such as customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, return on ad spend.

Advanced scenario planning can help you do that. Using measurement and scenario‑planning tools built on marketing mix modeling, you can simulate different media and budget decisions before you commit, testing variables like spend, pricing, and promotions and forecasting their impact on sales, ROI, and market share.

Build Flexibility Into Your Media Plan

The old model of setting your annual budget in Q4, executing the plan, and making modest adjustments at mid-year doesn’t work when conditions can change in a week. Structure your budgets with roughly 50%–60% on brand building and 40%–50% on activation, then make the activation portion as flexible and optimization‑driven as possible so that you can pivot quickly toward what’s working as conditions change.

When tariff uncertainty spiked in 2025, some brands cut media spend by as much as 50% or stopped advertising altogether, while others kept investing but shifted toward proven performance channels like Facebook and Google search. Agencies with clients that reduced early and then increased investment later, and those that stayed active in performance channels, ended up growing revenues and accounts despite the turbulence. The difference wasn’t budget size; it was budget structure.

Model your best, base, and worst case scenarios. Define the triggers that would cause you to shift from one to another. This exercise forces clarity about what you’d actually do when conditions change, instead of scrambling to figure it out in the moment.

Adapt Your Message to What Customers Are Actually Feeling

During the 2008 recession, Hyundai launched its Assurance Program offering to take back cars from buyers who lost their jobs. The company’s sales increased 14% that year while the rest of the industry declined 37%. The program cost Hyundai very little (only a handful of customers actually returned cars) but it spoke directly to the fear customers were feeling. Hyundai revived the program in 2020, too, which generated public goodwill.

Customers experiencing economic stress, political anxiety, or technology disruption don’t want to hear aggressive sales pitches. They want brands that acknowledge reality and offer genuine value.

In practice, this means:

• Lead with customer challenges, not product features
• Be transparent about pricing, especially if costs are increasing due to external factors like tariffs
• Highlight concrete value, such as financing options that reduce perceived risk
• Don’t pretend everything is normal when it isn’t

Also, read the room: when people are stressed, they might not want to be inspired by your brand’s lifestyle imagery; they might simply want to be helped. AI-powered real-time sentiment analysis can help you do that. AI can process and categorize the sentiment of unstructured data such as social posts and reviews much faster than manual human review, which allows brands to respond to emotional shifts faster. When you monitor shifts in customer emotion across social and support channels as they happen, you can pivot your messaging before a well-intended campaign becomes a liability. 

If your customers are worried about how a new regulation or economic shift affects them, don’t just run an ad saying you’re here for them. Build a tool. Create a calculator, a comparison engine, or a concierge service that solves a specific problem. When you provide utility, you give customers a reason to stay connected to you when they are cutting discretionary ties elsewhere. At times of uncertainty, utility is the ultimate form of brand loyalty.

Prioritize Retention

The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is higher than ever, driven by privacy shifts and a crowded digital landscape. In uncertain times, your most predictable revenue comes from the last customer you served.

Marketing needs to move closer to the customer success team. Consider launching save campaigns before the customer even thinks about leaving. Use your data to identify when engagement drops and intervene with high-touch, human-centric outreach. A personalized video message from an account manager or an exclusive loyalty lock on pricing might do more for your bottom line during a downturn than a thousand cold emails. Stability is the best defense against macro-economic swings.

Use AI to Move Faster, Not to Replace Judgment

I’ve written before about how AI is transforming marketing operations. In uncertain conditions, AI’s speed advantage becomes even more valuable. Real-time sentiment analysis can detect shifts in customer mood within hours, not weeks. AI-powered personalization engines can adjust messaging and offers at the individual level based on behavioral signals.

But AI amplifies whatever strategy you feed it. If your positioning is wrong, AI will execute that wrong strategy faster and at greater scale. Winning with AI means combining human judgment on strategy and brand with machine execution on optimization and personalization.

A practical approach: use AI for backend operations (bid management, content optimization, and sentiment monitoring) while maintaining human touchpoints where trust matters most (customer service escalations, brand storytelling, campaign strategy). The efficiency gains from AI shouldn’t come at the cost of authentic connection.

Treat Channels as a Portfolio, Not a Lineup of Winners and Losers

When budgets get tight, it’s tempting to declare winners and losers and cut whole channels. The problem is that most of the lift in your program comes from how channels work together, not from any single one in isolation. Instead of shutting channels off, treat them like a portfolio:

• Dial weights up and down based on clear ROI and incrementality but keep at least a light presence in the tactics that drive reach and discovery.
• Use underperforming channels as test beds: tighten targeting, refresh creative, try new formats and placements before you cut them entirely.
• Let performance channels “harvest” the demand your brand channels create, and watch the total system, not just the last click.

​The wild card: the wily consumer. They have a habit of shifting channels for reasons that go well beyond uncertainty. Be vigilant and adapt as they do. 

The Winning Mindset

Marketers who navigate uncertainty successfully share a common mindset: they treat volatility as a competitive advantage rather than a threat to endure. When others are cutting and retreating, they’re optimizing and pressing forward. When others are frozen by indecision, they’re running tests and learning.

This doesn’t require recklessness or unlimited budgets. It requires discipline: tight measurement, flexible planning, empathetic messaging, and the organizational agility to act on what you’re learning in real time.

2026 will bring surprises. Your choice isn’t between action and caution. It’s between smart action and expensive inaction.

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In uncertain markets, the advantage rarely goes to the biggest budget. It goes to the teams that can see what is changing, prove what is working, and adjust quickly without compromising the brand. That is where Overdrive helps. We work with marketing leaders to pressure-test strategy, tighten measurement and reporting, build flexible media plans across brand and performance, and apply AI in ways that accelerate learning and execution while keeping human judgment at the center. If you want a 2026 plan built for surprises, we can help you stay visible, stay accountable, and stay ready to pivot.

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