Marketers Shift Budgets Toward AI Capabilities

Mediaocean released its 2026 H2 Market Report, which Mumbrella summarises as documenting a budget shift toward operational AI in marketing. According to Mediaocean's report (reported by Mumbrella), 75% of marketers identified AI as the most important consumer trend; AI adoption for data analysis reached 50%; usage for creative development and personalisation increased more than 50% year over year. The report also records a decline in the share of marketers who say AI is producing a major workflow transformation, from 28% to 19%. Additional findings attributed to the report include 60% of marketers planning to increase spend in AI Media, 89% planning to maintain or increase investment in CTV, and 35% moving away from spreadsheet-based workflows toward API-driven automation and direct-to-publisher transactions.

Industry-pattern observations: Marketers' movement from experimentation to specific AI use cases typically elevates the importance of production-ready data infrastructure, model monitoring, and automation around creative supply chains. In comparable transitions, demand rises for tooling that integrates model outputs into campaign orchestration, measurement, and content-personalisation pipelines rather than one-off prototype experiments.

Industry observers note that the reported uptick in budget for AI Media and sustained investment in CTV reflects two concurrent trends in advertising tech: greater allocation to programmatic and AI-driven media buying, and continued prioritisation of streaming channels for audience reach. These patterns increase the need for cross-channel attribution and real-time optimisation capabilities in ad tech stacks.

For practitioners and vendors: watch adoption signals such as procurement of API-first automation platforms, growth in creative automation tool contracts, and vendor integrations that expose model scoring and measurement hooks directly to media-buying systems. Observers should also track whether the drop from 28% to 19% in perceiving AI as a workflow-transforming force corresponds with longer procurement cycles or a shift toward incremental efficiency gains rather than wholesale restructuring.

The summaries above paraphrase Mediaocean's report as presented by Mumbrella. The report's methodology and sample details are not reproduced here; readers should consult the original Mediaocean release for sampling and survey methodology.