How Top Brands Are Designing Marketing for Continuous Change, AI, and Business Impact
My career in marketing began in 1998 in the halls of Procter & Gamble. Like many of you, I’ve lived through the dot-com bubble of 2000 and the market crash of 2008; what felt like the decade-long “year of mobile”; the rise (for better and worse) of social media; the omnichannel evolution of commerce; the invention of programmatic media; and countless other paradigm-shifting developments over the past 27 years.
In 2025, however, I’ve sensed a shift with broader implications than any of those before it.
Yes, AI has captured everyone’s attention—and in some cases, their anxiety. And no, it is not yet delivering otherworldly results for the majority of businesses. But AI is forcing a re-engineering of how work gets done, how organizations operate, and how value is created. This is particularly true for marketing.
The real impact of AI is not better ads or faster content creation. It is a fundamental rethinking of how marketing functions as an operating system inside the enterprise.
Recently, executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart surveyed more than 100 CMOs on AI and marketing. Several findings stood out. CMOs broadly feel they are in the “messy middle” of AI adoption, with 51% rating their organization’s ability to use AI to advance marketing objectives as merely average. For now, AI adoption is more about how work gets done than who does it: 69% of CMOs reported holding marketing headcount steady over the past year while shifting capabilities toward AI.
At the same time, a change is clearly coming.
Nearly half (47%) of CMOs at large companies expect to reduce marketing headcount due to AI over the next 12–24 months.
These findings closely mirror what we see every day at Transparent Partners. Marketing leaders recognize the imperative for change, the risks of standing still, and the opportunities ahead. Many are actively seeking to re-engineer how marketing operates in an AI-enabled workplace—not simply to deploy new tools, but to rethink how marketing creates business value.
As 2025 draws to a close, I believe 2026 will be the year when this transformation becomes impossible to ignore. I’ve spent a great deal of time reflecting on what “great” actually looks like in this next chapter.
This is not a reflection on great campaigns or creative work. Great marketing will always require inspired ideas and strong execution. Instead, this is a reflection on how marketing gets done: the operational traits that distinguish the best marketing organizations as they prepare for 2026.
Drawing on work we’ve done with clients and broader industry observation, below are the defining traits of great marketing operations in 2026.
Traits of Great Marketing Operations in 2026
These traits define what great marketing operations in 2026 look like as organizations adapt to AI, continuous change, and rising business expectations.
1. Great Marketing Has Clear Business-Objective Alignment
The best marketing organizations can draw a straight line from enterprise-level business objectives to marketing strategies and initiatives. Great marketing leaders think like operators, with a clear understanding of the specific jobs marketing must perform in service of business outcomes.
If a business objective is to drive disproportionate growth among a brand’s largest customers or retailers, are the marketing capabilities in place to support that goal? That may include data clean room expertise to enable data collaboration and deeper shopper insights.
Reflection:
Could you justify every marketing capability and initiative on your roadmap by clearly connecting it to a top-level business objective?
2. Great Marketing Is Built for Continuous Change
The accelerating pace of progress—particularly in technology and communications—has rendered the traditional notion of “transformation” obsolete. Marketing leaders can no longer plan linear progress from one stable state to another. Instead, they must operate in a mode of continuous adaptation.
A widely cited study recently suggested that as many as 95% of AI initiatives have failed to generate positive ROI. In many cases, the issue is not AI capability itself, but an organization’s ability to absorb new capabilities and evolve ways of working. The marketers seeing positive results are already re-engineering their ecosystems—internally and externally—to support ongoing change.
Reflection:
How flexible are your marketing capabilities and partner ecosystem today? If a breakthrough solution emerged in Q1, how quickly could your organization adopt it and realize value?
3. Great Marketing Treats Data as a First-Class Citizen
Over the past year, this is where we’ve seen the greatest urgency among world-class marketing teams. Leading organizations recognize that marketing data must be treated with the same rigor and governance as financial, HR, or other mission-critical data assets.
Engineering your marketing data starts at the foundation. Brands frequently seek insight into what drives performance across audiences, content and experiences. Without a well-designed and governed data taxonomy and data management system, they struggle to consistently collect the data required to generate those insights—limiting both optimization and confidence in decision-making.
Reflection:
How mature is your marketing data management today compared to other enterprise data assets? What would it take to meaningfully elevate it?
4. Great Marketing Collaborates Across Functions
By 2026, AI will introduce unprecedented transparency into marketing performance. In siloed organizations, that transparency can feel threatening. The best marketing leaders, however, embrace it—understanding that shared visibility strengthens collaboration across finance, sales, HR, and other functions.
Over the past two years, we’ve supported multiple brands through large-scale evolutions of their marketing capabilities. Every successful initiative began with executive-level working sessions that included leaders from sales, finance, HR, IT, and beyond.
Reflection:
Could leaders from other functions clearly articulate marketing’s objectives and capabilities without you in the room? Could you articulate theirs just as clearly? Can you identify opportunities greater collaboration could unlock?
5. Great Marketing Utilizes a Modular Technology Infrastructure
AI is rapidly disrupting the traditional SaaS-centric marketing stack. New capabilities can now be imagined, built, and deployed in hours rather than months. A modular, composable technology infrastructure enables organizations to adapt quickly and take advantage of new possibilities as they emerge.
Historically, marketing and IT leaders focused on assembling the “right” martech stack—often centered on a data warehouse, CDP, ESP, and supporting tools. Often these “franken-stacks” result in inefficiencies and wasted investment on unused capabilities. In 2026, great organizations will ensure these capabilities are composable, interoperable, and increasingly AI-powered.
Reflection:
If you had to estimate the utilization rate of your current martech platform(s), what would it be – 30, 60, 90%? How rigid is your current martech infrastructure? What effort would be required to fully realize the efficiency and effectiveness promised by AI?
6. Great Marketing Seeks AI Collaboration
Using AI effectively is a significant advantage—but it does not imply artificiality or the replacement of humans. In 2026, the “A” in AI should increasingly stand for augmenting, automating, and agentifying marketing capabilities in ways that enhance human agency.
Many of our clients are using AI as a thought partner to uncover insights that would otherwise go unnoticed. By connecting and interrogating data across not only marketing, but finance, supply chain and other operational systems, teams can surface new opportunities and unlock previously unseen value.
Reflection:
Is your organization resisting AI adoption due to fear or uncertainty? How might you reframe AI as a collaborative partner rather than a threat?
7. Great Marketing Is Deeply Customer-Centric
Putting the customer at the center has always mattered, but in 2026 it will become more challenging—and more critical—than ever. Customer behavior is shifting rapidly as new technologies reshape how people seek information and make decisions.
Consumers’ searches for answers are increasingly moving away from traditional search engine queries toward AI-driven conversations. Many brands are not yet represented in these emerging “answer engines” the way they are on a search results page today. A best in class consumer-centric approach allows brands to keep up with how, where and when consumers engage and select them over alternatives.
Reflection:
As technological change reshapes how your customers discover, evaluate, and engage with brands, how is your marketing organization championing efforts to keep pace with their reality?
8. Great Marketing Has a Culture of Innovation
Innovation is often discussed as a standalone virtue, but in great marketing organizations it is an outcome of strong foundations rather than an isolated effort. When business alignment, data maturity, collaboration, and flexible technology are in place, innovation becomes continuous and repeatable—not episodic or performative.
Rather than relying on ad hoc “innovation labs” or one-off pilots, leading organizations create structured environments where experimentation is expected. Clear guardrails around data, technology, and governance allow teams to test new ideas quickly, learn from failure, and scale what works without disrupting core operations.
Reflection:
Is innovation in your organization a repeatable capability, or does it depend on extraordinary effort from a few motivated individuals?
9. Great Marketing Prizes Curiosity and Lifelong Learning
As AI reshapes the nature of marketing work, the most valuable talent will not be defined solely by existing skills, but by the ability to continually acquire new ones. Great marketing organizations actively prize curiosity—recognizing it as the engine behind adaptability, innovation, and sustained performance.
Leading teams encourage marketers to explore new tools, question established practices, and deepen their understanding of adjacent disciplines such as data science, product, and technology. Learning is embedded into the rhythm of work rather than treated as a separate or optional activity.
Reflection:
Are you recruiting for curiosity and initiative-taking? Do the individuals in your organization exhibit these traits on a regular basis? How are you encouraging your existing employees to upskill and adapt to a 2026 reality?
10. Great Marketing Drives Measurable Impact
Ultimately, great marketing earns its seat at the table by demonstrating impact. While measurement is often discussed as a standalone capability, in practice it emerges from the cumulative effect of strong alignment, data maturity, collaboration, and disciplined operations.
The best marketing organizations define and align success metrics to company goals—growth, efficiency, customer value—and consistently connect marketing performance to those outcomes. Shared metrics, transparent reporting, and regular performance reviews enable marketing leaders to have credible, data-driven conversations with executive peers.
Reflection:
Can you clearly and confidently explain how marketing contributes to business results today? Where do gaps in measurement still limit that conversation?
Closing Thought
Taken together, these traits are not about incremental optimization. They reflect a fundamental re-engineering of how marketing operates. Marketing must align to the business, collaborate across the enterprise, prioritize data stewardship, leverage technology, empower people and ultimately take agency as appropriate.
These traits resonate with us as they are what our clients and we strive to achieve together. Our goal is to elevate marketing performance by uniting data-driven strategy, operational precision, and agentic intelligence. If we can provide you with a starting point or roadmap towards these best-in-class traits, please reach out.
Aaron Fetters, Managing Partner, CEO
