Bold 2026 Marketing Predictions: Why 2026 Won't Be What Marketers Expect

Todd all this stuff is impacting marketers and marketing whether it's AI driven media buying or planning or audience identification or generative creative So if you're in a marketing right now how do we achieve great marketing in 2026 What's your prediction? Intro/Outro: Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bo Jee Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms, because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action. So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

Kelly Hey everyone. Kelly McGuire with Gie Day Digital. Excited to get into today's topic for the new year.

Todd Hey everyone. Happy New Year. This is Todd Kelly's co-host and partner at Vja Day. Kelly just wants to dive right in, but first and foremost before we start, it's a new year, Kelly. It's January 5th. Did you have a good holiday?

Kelly I did. I did. It was, [00:01:00] more, it was quieter than they usually have been in the past, which was nice.

Todd Because we did not have any consumer electronics clients to run massive holiday shopping promo deals between, or Major fitness

Kelly New Year, new you.

Todd Yeah. Or, or a fitness client. So yeah. Was a little bit more quiet.

Todd Um, alright, well, what we were both thinking about, to talking about today is what do we think is gonna happen this year, 2026, from a. Agency and marketing and advertising, perspective. what are our predictions? And so you and I, chicken scratched out some things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna restate those predictions to you to get your opinion.

Todd And if you opine on anything that I disagree with, I'm going to share that as well. or even if I agree, maybe I'll have something to,

Kelly I'm, I'm sure there'll be some counterpoints.

Todd We'll see. All right. 2026. I wonder if this is the year, remember when [00:02:00] we started saying the year of mobile?

Kelly Oh yeah.

Kelly For like 10 years. Yeah.

Todd Remember it took, I, I think I ended up really, really like focusing on that. I think it was seven years that we were saying this is gonna be the year of mobile end.

Kelly There was a year of virtual reality, the year of, I mean, we all know ai. We're the year of AI now. That's the whole thing now, but yeah.

Todd Well, so that's, that's what I'm gonna say. So is it fair, can I go on the record and say that is 2026 the first year that we say this is the year of ai or was that 2025?

Kelly it's gonna blend multiple years into it. I think we're already into it, but yeah, I think you'll start to hear nonstop.

Kelly And that'll be going on for a while.

Todd I'm gonna say for the record that I think 2025, everybody was starting to dip their toes in it, start to adopt it, start to work with it. But I'm gonna say that 2026 is the year that people are gonna say they've fully operationalized it. And so that makes this the beginning of the year of AI for marketing and advertising institutions.[00:03:00]

Todd Alright, with that, one of the things that you and I have been hyper-focused on. Is ai, and is it hype? Is it real? You know, what's sort of the maturity state of it? and what have you read? what are you hearing brands, companies, agencies, where are they at with their ai?

Todd Do you think they're ready? Do you think they are completely. Just underestimating what it's gonna take. Are they being fooled? what do you think about 2026 and where companies are with ai? Yeah.

Kelly yeah. So my first 2026 prediction is that many brands will realize that they are nowhere near ready to utilize AI appropriately and will need to heavily invest in foundational data work.

Kelly And basically by this, what I'm saying is that. Kind of along what you just said, this whole 2025 was a lot of people discovering and and exploring AI and kind of getting started and what I saw thematically for me was [00:04:00] an oversimplification of what AI can do and what it's going to take to truly be as transformational as I do believe it has the potential to be.

Kelly This idea of it being an easy button or it just doing everything, or it just being, I just simply pay for a tool and it works. I think a lot of people are going to sort of be bitten by the idea that it's not that simple that like many things, it's only as good as what you put into it. And for better or for worse, AI is fundamentally driven by.

Kelly Data and patterns and history and organization. One of the things that I've painfully learned in my journey with AI a lot over 2025 is the need for taxonomy and labeling and organization and. Being really specific on how the information is structured, how the data's structured, and guiding the systems to be able to appropriate look at it.

Kelly If you just [00:05:00] simply give AI something and say, I want this outcome, that's where you hear these things like hallucination and all these errors come up, is because if you just leave AI to its own devices. It can't fill in gaps really. Well, it can't figure things out. it takes these semantic things and, I learned a lot of this going down the rabbit hole of literally how LLMs work and fundamentally way, and it's really interesting.

Kelly But without going too far down that rabbit hole, what I think brands are going to painfully learn is that in order to get what they want and not be misled. There's a lot of work that needs to be done in collecting historical information, organizing that information, organizing it into systems, labeling it, having the structures, building out all of the thinking and the techniques and the guide rails and the parameters on focusing AI into the outcomes that they want, which is a lot of that training and a lot of that knowledge base.

Kelly my prediction is that so many brands that are like, oh, I invested in this thing, or [00:06:00] I hired these people and I did these things and it's just gonna be this amazing thing, are gonna be fundamentally disappointed in what they get early on and realize that there's a lot more lift and a lot more that's going to be required before those, I'll call magical promises that everyone's getting so excited about will come anywhere near to fruition and truth.

Todd Yeah, but isn't there AI that can just do it for me?

Kelly No, there definitely is not.

Todd Oh, there's not. I can't, I can't just press the easy button and all that infrastructure stuff that you said needs to be structured. There's not AI to just do that part.

Kelly there's AI to help with these things.

Kelly Definitely. But that's the problem is it's, it's a help. It's a not do it for you. Again, one of the painful lessons that I myself have learned is no matter how specific, and we all know how long-winded that I can definitely be in certain things no matter how guard, guardrail, anticipatory, everything I can try and put in.

Kelly Everything still comes with iteration, refinement and growth in every single [00:07:00] thing that I put through. And so again, AI is amazing at supplementing and building these things and making it easier and faster. But I am yet to come across almost any AI that literally just does it for you without any of a lot of that thing, and most of the time is preparing.

Kelly It's almost like the idea of, I'm trying to think of an analogy of like cooking an amazing meal, right? Like you can ultimately have. This system, like the crock potter, if you will. Right? You throw it all in and it does the cooking. But in order for that to work, you still have to go get the ingredients, lay 'em all out, read to a recipe, make sure it's all in there.

Kelly Once it goes into the crockpot, great. The cooking's done. I don't have to sit there and do the cooking and that's amazing. But there's so much that goes into that having an amazing meal or the worst thing you ever had going into it, if it's not done right.

Todd So as a side note, before we get into our next, prediction.

Todd How many hours do you think you personally have spent in the last 90 days [00:08:00] teaching, exploring, crafting, iterating, exploring, learning, like just think about everything you've been doing from an AI standpoint, building GPTs, all the stuff you and I have been. How many hours do you think you've personally put in?

Todd That goes completely unaccounted for as a value add of knowledge, institutional knowledge that we are developing as a company for our client's benefit.

Kelly I think. I think there's two parts to that.

Kelly I think there's a percentage of my normal working time that has been dedicated towards that. And then I think there's a percentage of above and beyond time Okay. Than what I would've otherwise been doing that goes into that. And so I would say if I had to guess in 90 days, let's say, I mean a decent amount of that's gonna be certain weekends and elements of that.

Kelly So let's say it's. Call it 70 working days. Within that, in total, I'm gonna say somewhere between [00:09:00] five, somewhere between 500 and a thousand total hours. I think is, is reasonable to, to say is, has gone into that easily at this point. And if you take in the entire year leading into that, it would go way above that.

Kelly But if you imagine, a, a working technically 40 hour work week over the course of years, 2080 hours. I would say, coming up to a thousand hours, so almost 50% of total bandwidth and time and energy of what should normally be going into an individual's work week. Obviously that's not necessarily mine, but if you think about it from that capacity is, is AI building up and, and expertise leveling that goes into that?

Todd Well, that's why I'm asking the question 'cause I think a lot of, companies, people, what have you believe that AI is, sort of this, just this easy button that's gonna streamline and make everything more efficient. I don't think anybody's accounting necessarily, except for those people who are really diving into it like we are, how much time, energy, and effort.

Todd We have to put in to learn and [00:10:00] upskill and develop the knowledge base and the capabilities around these tool sets, and nobody's paying for that. We just have to make that own human sort of sweat equity investment and the knowledge and the upskill demand and need in order to just be able to turn it into something usable and valuable that will help a, a business out.

Kelly Well, that's the way we've chosen to use it, right? There is another route that I do think gets used where instead of it taking a thousand hours, like I just talked about, there is a world where it could have saved me a couple hundred hours and I could have just banked those and gone and done hobbies and done, done other things if I, if I wanted to.

Kelly There are ways in which it can be done. I just see the power of it being used for enhancement versus savings. And again, that's a whole argument We've had dozens of times now.

Todd next prediction. brands getting burned, learning some hard lessons, that are already starting to over rely on AI platforms [00:11:00] specifically.

Todd in media, media buying, media planning, strategy. do you think there's brands out there already making mistakes 'cause they're over relying on these tools?

Kelly Yeah, so I would boil this down into the claim and, before I make this claim, I will give the caveat that is, this is not 100% universal. I'm saying that more, more than not, the majority, not the everything, but I, my claim for 2026 in predictions is that AI will make a lot of marketing worse, not better, at least in the next year.

Kelly That is based on the idea That kind of dovetailing off of the conversation we just had, which is what I am most fearful of when it comes to AI running paid media campaigns is as much as it can improve and learn things, if it's done right, it can amplify and accelerate wrong decisions just as quickly and.

Kelly It can be sort of an echo [00:12:00] chamber of learning. So if you're not feeding it the right information, if you're misguiding in any way, it builds upon itself and it's an exponential worsening of these outcomes in a vacuum. And when you start to remove people who can catch those things and you rely on those outcomes, yeah, I think it can make things a lot worse.

Kelly And I think that that's exacerbated by the idea that we've always known for as long as I've run digital media. the kind of the dark side of the medium is that if you want to, if your goal is to look good, if your goal is to deliver a, green arrows up report or the perception of value or making things appear as though they are better than they are.

Kelly That's not that hard to do in this world because we, operate in this sea of numbers and lack of understanding in a lot of ways where it's pretty easy to, I, I mean you used to see this a lot with like Facebook ads, right? With what I would call cookie bombing, [00:13:00] right? Where things would just go out there and it would take a lot of credit for things that were happening versus actually driving incrementality and growth on things.

Kelly And there's just a lot of ways that that can happen. You could always buy really cheap. Remnant inventory on less than reputable sites, and you could inflate your impression numbers. You could easily run on things that were very click heavy. You could run on mobile that was over-indexing on clicks, and you could make your click through rates look better.

Kelly Like there's ways for the numbers to look better than the value they're actually delivering. And. When you look at a system like AI, that again is very focused on inputs and outputs, it's very zeros and ones. If you start to create this echo chamber, this feedback loop of I did this, I saw this, that was what my mandate was, and I'm gonna do more of that, it can really narrow in and if it's kind of off track.

Kelly It's just too easy for perception of value to drift apart from actual value very, very quickly. And so the wrong [00:14:00] inputs, the wrong data, the wrong controls, the wrong outputs, whatever you want to say. I think that can be that governance and that protection, that judgment element that needs to go into running this.

Kelly Is a really slippery slope, and I think a lot of people are gonna get really, really burned by over relying on this idea that AI can just do it for me, and a lot of money's gonna get wasted into those systems on what looks like value, but turns out to not be very valuable. There's gonna be a ton of opportunity cost where there's over-reliance and focus on that and people not doing some of the less obvious, less clear kind of marketing activities that are long-term valuable for a brand.

Kelly And I think there will be a correction for that. I think a lot of. Brands and companies are gonna buy into ai, buy into the promise, they're gonna be hyped up and it's gonna be an over promise, under deliver experience. It's going to eventually reset this, okay, that didn't work like I expected.

Kelly Now I need to go back to the drawing board and pick something else. Like I [00:15:00] gave it a try. It's very few of them are gonna live up to the hype in the promise, and then people will kind of be like, alright, alright, I need to actually try something else Now. It's not that easy.

Todd I feel like we're already seeing that sensibility in a lot of things, especially around creative.

Todd I think we're already seeing the fatigue set in and, and the realization that it takes a lot of work to get the right outputs. it's just not gonna be an overnight instant, instant button that just changes things. I and the media side of things. I, I don't know. I mean, I'm curious, you know, there's some new all channel ad platforms out.

Todd That are proposing that, you know, you can just input your website URL so it can get creative and you know, your brand colors and logos and you can give it some, photography or assets and a target audience and put your credit card in and give it a budget. And, often it'll run to the races. And I, I do wonder, you know, if you're a small business, let's say in the franchise industry, which we used to do a lot of work in, if you're a small franchise, it can spend a thousand dollars a month.[00:16:00]

Todd I don't know, maybe that'll be, maybe that'll be a good thing that they can, they can just deploy themselves instead of trying to get an agency's attention, you know, or even a freelancer's attention to try and just handle those kind of budgets. So, I, I am curious. I, I don't think a CMO at a company that's spending hundreds of thousands even, or certainly millions, is gonna, rely on one of those tech platforms to run their advertising, purely through an ai.

Todd Output. You know, maybe one person manning that machine and they're thinking, oh, I can get rid of paying my agency. I'm gonna run this one platform with one person and it's gonna run $5 million worth of ad media for me across all channels.

Kelly You know what's funny is, is my so I will concede. I do think that, the smaller advertiser that cannot get access to what the best marketing systems can be.

Kelly Pretty good is still better than nothing. Sure. And so that is an improvement for them, even if it's still just pretty good and not amazing. I would argue that if you're anything beyond that, you should be [00:17:00] striving for amazing, which is not that easy to find. but yeah. And I, my fear is less about the clients are the CMOs as much kind of buying into that.

Kelly Although I do think that there's gonna be a lot of problem in them believing the whole, I can just put it into a system and run it. Yep. My bigger fear is actually it's gonna be the agencies that overly believe that they can lower their costs and overhead and fees and do the quality work, or do good enough to not lose their clients.

Kelly And that methodology and that it'll kind of backslide into a little bit of this black box that used to exist. I mean, we all know when programmatic first came up, right? It was this, it was just ripe for problems. Like you could, Kind of snake oil salesman your way through it and basically sell this amazing thing, show something on paper, and no one really knew enough to dig under and know how true and real it was.

Kelly And there was a lot of profitability to create. I mean, this is back in the days when you'd learn about companies that were making 60, 70, 80% margins on these types of things. And that only existed because of lack of understanding and clarity. I'm not saying it's exactly like that, but it's an [00:18:00] environment that is possible in that, in that realm for a little while on that front where it's like.

Kelly I give my money over to an agency thinking I'm getting X, they're operating it via Y and benefiting from all of that savings and, and things like that. From what I, could be getting. maybe that produces good enough, right? Maybe the AI produces good enough outcomes to where it doesn't upset me and I'm not gonna leave them, but because they took that route, what I gave up on is all of the amazing that could have happened, right?

Kelly So much of what I look at in the problem is not. Things being bad or invaluable. So much is opportunity cost. It's what could have been You know, we always talk about when good enough isn't good enough. But that is the problem that I see happening here, right? Is is we talked about you can make great teams incredible and it can make decent teams good.

Kelly But now if you're just trying to get to that good layer, you're missing out on this incredible or this amazing opportunity that. I feel like that opportunity [00:19:00] cost is problematic to miss out on.

Todd I don't disagree. I mean, I think we've already seen some examples. Of that.

Kelly but further than that, when it, when I say AI is worse, this is the minority of what I'm saying.

Kelly But I genuinely think that some of these AI systems are going to truly waste and burn a lot of paid media dollars. Like, when you see those things where. You know, you're, you're buying ads on the wrong sites or the wrong targeting or the wrong area, like these things you should never see, but we have come across in auditing and those types of things.

Kelly It's like, oh man, the client spent 75 grand on a campaign that like was going after the wrong people. Like that's crazy. That happens. But it even happens in human driven things. I think you're gonna see a lot of those instances that come up with ai and unfortunately, I think what's gonna happen is when that happens.

Kelly The person responsible I don't think is, or you know, the agency or, or whatever's responsible for that isn't necessarily gonna own up to it. They're gonna find a way to bury it and hide it and put it in there. And the client's gonna have a bunch of wasted money that, is like, oh, we had it down month because the marketing's got pressure [00:20:00] on it when it's actually no.

Kelly We like wasted a bunch of money and we had to bury it in there and now we're explaining it away. I do think there's gonna be way too much of that for a while.

Todd I do too. I can't disagree with you on that one. so that takes me to the next one. a lot of the partners that we work with are creative agencies.

Todd I am definitely hearing from creative directors, the CDs, people like that, that there's definitely a sensitivity and, sense of awareness around. you know, AI created creative, and how that's already sort of getting a little bit of a black eye. where is your opinion around generative AI for creative's sake?

Kelly Yeah, so one of the, Phrases that became really popular in 2025 is this creative is the new targeting, and this is based on the systems reading and saying, rather than you saying who you want your ad to be served, to build creative that that audience will care about and respond to.

Kelly And then the systems will go find the people that [00:21:00] respond and then they will optimize on the data. That's the idea is don't pick who you wanna show to build something that that's who will care about it. And then that's lets the system find it. So with that in mind, my idea or claim for that prediction is that creative fatigue is gonna replace audience fatigue as one of the number one problems.

Kelly In, in that, which is to say, I had this theory on, on one of our other podcasts we talked about where with the rise of ai. The ability for more people to be more quote unquote creative and to produce things. Right. I think, the thing that we talked about then is, you know what, if people start to be able to make their own music or make their own movies or do all these things, and you know, we're not there yet, but let's say that comes up, there's an amazingness to that where there's so much more creativity that comes to the surface outta that.

Kelly I think what the problem that happens within that though is the really, really good stuff that comes of that is going to be buried under a mountain of crap, basically. So much noise and so much extra things that starts to make sorting through for the good stuff [00:22:00] really, really difficult. And so with this idea that created becomes so much faster to iterate on and so much more normalized and so much more AI driven.

Kelly There may be a small bounce to that in, in terms of the people that are early on that curve. But as more and more get on board and people are seeing ads more often and they're flooded more often, and the change more often, I think it gets really, really noisy. And that idea of having to sort through messaging and inconsistency and seeing too much AI driven stuff that starts to become sort of those types of things.

Kelly Actually, it's funny, I had, My grandma actually texted me, in this thing where she's, she saw like a commercial that was clearly ai and you know, she's older than that and has an opinion on it. She's like, oh my gosh, do you see the AI commercials? They're the worst thing ever. They're terrible and, you know, it just hits her in a different way.

Kelly But you know, it just exacerbates. There is sort of a pushback against. The non-reality of AI creative and the messaging and the deterioration of that. I don't buy so much into, I think younger generations as they're more used to it and come up will accept it [00:23:00] more and more. But I do think it creates a lack of authenticity and a lack of breakthrough that will become exhausting for people to figure out what matters.

Kelly What hits home like. I think about some of the best commercial, I, I just said this to my wife the other day. One of the best commercial series that I see right now that I really love It's the one that says we can't keep you from becoming like your parents.

Kelly It's the Homan insurance thing. it's the one where it's like shows like. People in their thirties and forties, but like, or you know, younger talking about like the really odd things that their parents do, like trying to take pictures of groups and stuff like that.

Kelly And I just think it's so clever and it reminds me of the ones like, you know, the Budweiser Real American heroes things or the things that are so resonant and fun and really, really good creative. I think you're just gonna see less of that come through and less of that, breakthrough and that lack of really.

Kelly Hard hitting humor or heartstrings or these great campaigns, I think is going to make it harder to actually create resonance and impact with the consumers that ads [00:24:00] are trying to reach and convince to do stuff.

Todd Yeah, I, I've noticed my kids even said to me, Hey, have you noticed if you're scrolling in your feeds, how much of the content AI created now?

Todd And there's stuff that's, I mean, you talk about, well, I don't know when people are gonna start creating movies or whatever, or music. It's definitely already happening. little shorts, you know, I like feature link films, but little video shorts or vignettes or things like that. And it's pretty scary.

Todd Like the magnitude of how much of it's being created, how obvious it is. and then as a result of that, I can see right through it. And, and then I just skip right past it. 'cause it's, I can tell already it's ai, but I don't know if Gen Z or Gen Alpha is doing that. Right.

Todd They just might accept it as well. That's just my new reality. 50% or more of the stuff I begin to see, or, or I'm gonna see is gonna just be AI generated and they're just gonna be,

Kelly but, but if you get more and more bombarded. with that stuff, does it just become [00:25:00] harder for anything to stick or to matter?

Kelly Is it just, does the attention span become more and more of a problem

Todd if it's good? Right. If you're, brilliant creative director at one of the, it doesn't matter what, what agency you're at. Let's say you're a brilliant, you're, creative person. You've created some of the best content out there for ads or whatever.

Todd I mean, I look at ai, like any of the AI. Generation engines for creative assets is just a different paintbrush. So I think at some point in time it'll get good enough and It'll work. And, and anyway, it doesn't matter 'cause it's just gonna become the new norm unless people just revolt against it, which I don't think is gonna happen.

Kelly Yeah. And, and like I said, I, I'm not, like disastrous on it. Right. I do think it'll become the norm and people used to it and it'll break the what I, again, what I, think is the stickiness and the impact of really great. Marketing and breakthrough stuff will get harder and harder to come by and, and more difficult to go through there.

Kelly And again, my example of this that I see that's really interesting is I look on Reddit [00:26:00] and Reddit had this whole disaster around, they did this AI training and these things. And the whole idea of Reddit is, it is a community of people that you know, it's question and answer. It's forum based things and it's, and it's really powerful in that.

Kelly But I can tell you almost, anything that I go through on Reddit now, I would say. 75% or more. There's always something in the string of commentary that points out this theory or this, thing that, oh, this is AI written. This is AI slot. Like the trustworthiness of people believing that the threads that are existing are real people.

Kelly It is unbelievable. Almost all of them, somewhere along the line, they'll be like. That this story isn't real. This didn't really happen. This is AI generated that you can tell with the writing and, and it's the lack of trust that's been created in that community that any of the stories or questions or anything that's being pointed out is genuine is, it's amazing how much, I mean, I would say the majority of anything that is narrative [00:27:00] based that's produced on that.

Kelly Someone at some point or multiple, many people at some point will question its authenticity, whether it's a real person that post it or whether it's AI or not.

Todd Well, I guess the future remains to be seen though of whether or not that will be acceptable or not. Again, I think in probably in 10 years from now, most maybe 50% of the content we consume will be, generated.

Todd That'll just become the new norm. It just like MP three, just like the cd. superseded the cassette tape and MP three files, you know, took over the CD and there's no stopping it. It's just a matter of we're in that transition period and, and everybody's gonna poo pooh it in the transition period until it gets to a place where it becomes the new norm.

Todd And, you know, everything else catches up with it and then it becomes ubiquitous enough that it becomes okay. Okay, so all this stuff is impacting marketers and marketing, whether it's, AI driven media buying or planning or audience identification or generative creative, [00:28:00] all these kinds of things.

Todd So if you're in a marketing right now, what is your prediction like, how do we achieve great marketing in 2026? What's your prediction?

Kelly So my last kind of prediction for us to cover here is the, phrase of great marketing is as much about problem solving as it is about media buying. And this is, I think, really captures my biggest point of thinking and areas of concern and differentiation going into the year, which is these platforms in these systems have done everything they can to make.

Kelly The active media buying as easy and templatized and simple as possible, but that is a base zero, right? That is just simply using the system at its core minimum to be up and running. From there, there's a spectrum of value and opportunity and effectiveness that comes in. And the promise of AI is that it can help you do that, right?

Kelly I it can help you Pick, [00:29:00] test, pick creatives, all that. And I think it can do a lot of that. It can enhance that. But this all only works in a perfect vacuum. If you pick the right ad and you serve it out and, and things go well, and the data's going well, it will work. But not very few things go that way.

Kelly Even when we work with very sophisticated clients. They generally have a lot of problems that are unique to their situation. their messaging is, hard to nail on. They have competitors. They don't have the big enough budget to break through they have pricing challenges. They have, all of the legal, what they can claim, all these types of things.

Kelly These are all problems that. Again, an AI isn't going to solve on its own, right? An AI is just going to take a set of instructions and it's gonna fill in the blanks, and it's gonna give guidance, and it's gonna execute, and it's gonna streamline. But that problem solving element is looking at the big picture and seeing the blank spots, and filling in the gaps and figuring out how to solve for, I [00:30:00] don't have my attribution data right here.

Kelly How do I get it right? I don't have my. CRM system built out to capture all the right information to give it the most powerful. How do I solve that? I don't have the right nurture system in place to pick up the site traffic that I'm paying to drive and make sure I'm generating the best outcomes out of it.

Kelly There's all these components that go into great marketing, right? Media buying is sort of the fuel that brings it in, right? It is the amplifier of the message. It is the ability to have that. Couple of seconds of conversation with the person that you want to hear what you're saying. But there's so many other things that go into whether or not that works, right?

Kelly What am I saying? What's the message vehicle? Where am I driving that traffic? How am I following up? How am I even knowing if the right person that I'm speaking to wants what I have to sell? What are my co competitors doing? Right? And so for me. So much of the marketing is being able to look at the big picture.

Kelly And this is generally wrapped up under a phrase of strategy, right? [00:31:00] Strategy is the thinking and the identification of it. The next layer to that is problem solving. 'cause a good strategy is going to look at a lot of things that are not done or ready or working right? And so then the next layer is the strategy knows what a perfect outcome looks like.

Kelly How do I problem solve the probably very many things that are not ideally set up. All the way to possibly totally broken, and how do I fix them or how do I improve them or how do I get them in place? And so, so much of the work is the problem solving that leads into when I make those media buying decisions, how do I make sure I'm maximizing the value out of it?

Kelly And then that allows you to go with, how do I scale? How do I grow? What are my points of diminishing returns? How much could I spend? All those types of things. Don't get me wrong, media buying is very sophisticated as well, and it can be, but just the act of media buying. It's just one cog in a big machine.

Kelly Whereas problem solving most often is the most valuable thing that you can [00:32:00] hire someone to do on your behalf if you don't know marketing that well, or you don't have the time or the bandwidth to look at so many moving parts in a constant changing environment. What you should be paying people to do is to be looking on your behalf to find gaps, to offer solutions, to stress test problems, solves and say, we could do this.

Kelly Maybe it is an AI solution. Maybe it's a, Hey, you guys are not able to iterate on creative fast enough. And so this AI can take a blueprint and it can do it. Maybe that is a solution or maybe it's analyzing data, or maybe it's filling in a CRM, or maybe it's looking at mixed media modeling. But again, AI's not just gonna figure all of those things out, right?

Kelly It is. Problem solving is what needs to happen to get to the state of what is the best environment I can spend my money in to get the best results.

Todd Okay. So the new name of our company is, problem solving will be that for 2026.

Kelly I mean, I, I would, I mean personally, I think that's what we strive to and, and what we talk about doing the very best is, is problem solving.

Kelly Yeah. Is the most valuable thing that we do. [00:33:00] It's neck and neck with investing money, but still,

Todd I would agree. We're ultimately trying to solve a problem, which is how do we get consumers to buy more stuff, more of our client stuff. I'm gonna close with, I'm gonna just say for the record that I think 2026 will be the year everybody.

Todd Sort of postures that AI's in full swing and fully functional and fully deployed. And I think a lot of people are gonna say that and claim that and maybe pretend that. and I think a lot of what you've predicted here today is probably what's actually gonna happen, in more realities than. Not so, we'll be here to help people with that if they need help with AI and implementations and understanding of it.

Todd because not only have you spent a thousand hours doing it in the last 90 days, I've probably spent a thousand hours along with, the rest of our team. So, we're heads down and, I'm excited about some of the stuff that we're ideating to build using [00:34:00] ai. So this is gonna be a, I think a, a very.

Todd Hands on construction zone year for us, and maybe a lot of others out there. So, we'll talk more about it, I'm sure in every show coming up this year, because this is gonna be the year of ai. So we probably can't avoid talking about it in just about every show. It's Monday, January 5th, end of the day.

Todd I'm glad because it's first day back to work and I'm already fading. so

Kelly I will say as much as I've enjoyed this topic, and I, and I have a lot of theories on 2026 and, and what's going in, my kinda last thought is I think this same conversation next year, like the 2027 predictions.

Kelly Those are a lot different in my head where I think the world will shift to by the end of next year with AI and all of those things.

Kelly I think we'll have a very, very different conversation on the predictions for that year.

Todd I think we will too. And I think a lot of it will be reflections of, some of the, well, what happened in 2026 and I think it'll be a lot of reflections on that.

Kelly Thanks everyone. Intro/Outro: Thanks for listening to Contrary to Popular Opinion where we [00:35:00] challenge you to think independently, push the limits, and take uncommon action so you can achieve game changing results in your business and your life. To stay up to date with our latest episodes, be sure to click the follow or subscribe button now. Intro/Outro: Thanks again for listening. See you next time.