Every year, without fail, the marketing world does the same thing.
Someone publishes the big predictions for next year. Then someone else publishes why those predictions are wrong. LinkedIn fills up with hot takes, podcasts pile in, and suddenly everyone is talking with absolute certainty about what marketing will look like in 2026.
- SEO is dead.
- Email is finished.
- Agencies are about to be replaced by AI.
Again.
And every year, I find myself thinking the same thing: we’re spending far too much time predicting the future, and not nearly enough time paying attention to what’s already happening.
Predictions feel useful. They rarely are.
I understand why predictions are appealing. They give us something solid to hold onto. They make uncertainty feel manageable. If someone is confident enough to tell us what’s coming, we can plan for it, budget for it, and brief our teams with conviction.
But marketing doesn’t really work like that.
It doesn’t move neatly from A to B. It lurches. It accelerates. It slows down. It behaves very differently depending on your sector, customers, internal maturity, and appetite for change.
The idea that one person can confidently declare what everyone should be planning for in 2026 is, at best, optimistic.
At worst, it’s a distraction.
The direction of travel matters more than the destination
What I find far more useful than predictions is watching movement.
- What are customers doing slightly differently this year than last?
- What’s being adopted quietly before it becomes mainstream?
- What’s speeding up and what’s stalling?
Trends, when you look at them properly, tell you far more than forecasts ever will. Not the headline-grabbing ones, but the subtle shifts that keep showing up in data, conversations, and behaviour.
And just as importantly: how fast are those shifts happening?
Speed changes everything. A slow trend gives you time to build capability. A fast one demands attention now. Most predictions don’t tell you that. They just tell you something “will happen”, without any sense of momentum or friction.
Marketing isn’t a graveyard (despite what LinkedIn says)
One of the things that always makes me smile is how often marketing channels are declared “dead”.
- SEO has been dying for well over a decade now.
- Email apparently never survived social media.
- Websites were meant to be replaced by platforms.
- Agencies were meant to disappear entirely.
And yet, here we are.
Channels rarely die. They evolve. They narrow. They become more specialised. Their role changes.
When we focus too much on “the death of X”, we miss the far more interesting question: what is X becoming, and where does it still add value?
Binary thinking is comforting. Reality is messier—and much more useful if you’re willing to sit with it.
Better planning comes from optionality, not certainty
At Mobas, the most effective strategies we see are not built around bold bets on a single future. They’re built around flexibility.
That means being clear on what you’re trying to achieve, but open on how you get there.
- It means investing in skills and thinking, not just tools.
- It means testing early, learning quickly, and adjusting without drama.
- It means making decisions based on what’s happening now, not what someone says will happen later.
This kind of planning doesn’t make for exciting prediction posts. But it does make organisations far more resilient when things change, as they inevitably do.
The questions worth asking
Instead of asking “what should we be doing for 2026?”, I think better questions are:
- What are our customers doing differently right now?
- Which changes keep showing up, even when the hype dies down?
- Where are we seeing momentum building, not just noise?
- What capabilities would still matter if half the predictions turn out to be wrong?
Those questions don’t give you neat answers. But they do lead to better decisions.
A final thought
Predictions are easy to share. Trends take effort to observe properly.
The businesses that will do well over the next few years won’t be the ones that guessed the future most accurately. They’ll be the ones who paid attention early, noticed the speed and direction of change, and responded calmly rather than reactively.
The future rarely arrives with a trumpet fanfare. It creeps up, then suddenly feels obvious.
The real skill in marketing leadership isn’t predicting what’s coming next. It’s noticing what’s already moving, and acting before everyone else starts shouting about it.
Stop chasing predictions. Start making better decisions.
If you want a marketing strategy built on what’s actually changing, not what someone thinks might, Mobas helps you spot the signals early, build real capability, and stay flexible as things move.
