Marketers Shift Budgets Toward AI Capabilities

Mediaocean, the ad-tech and media-management platform that owns Prisma and Innovid, released its 2026 H2 Market Report on June 16, 2026, the tenth installment of its bi-annual research series (over 6,400 respondents since inception), based on a survey of 312 marketing professionals across brands, agencies, media companies, and technology providers conducted in May 2026. The report found 75% of marketers named AI the most important consumer trend to watch for a fourth consecutive period, while the share who said AI is causing a major workflow transformation fell from 28% to 19%. Adoption of AI for data analysis reached 50%, and use for creative development and personalization rose more than 50% year over year.

"Over the last few years, the industry conversation has focused on whether marketers should adopt AI. But that debate is over," said Aaron Goldman, Mediaocean's CMO. "The question now is how AI gets operationalised across planning, activation, measurement, and optimization." The report also found 60% of marketers plan to increase AI Media spend in H2 2026, making it the fastest-growing investment category; 89% plan to maintain or increase CTV investment; and 35% are moving from spreadsheet-based workflows to API-driven automation and direct-to-publisher transactions. Mediaocean itself sells into this shift through its NIVO AI product line, which the company says runs over $200 billion in annualized ad spend.

The decline in marketers calling AI "transformational" alongside rising adoption in specific categories suggests ad-tech and MarTech teams should prioritize integrations that plug directly into existing planning, activation, and measurement systems over standalone AI features, since the market is rewarding operational fit over novelty. The report's framing of "emerging AI agents" alongside creative and media-buying workflows also signals where vendors expect the next adoption wave to land.

• •Whether the 35% shift away from spreadsheets toward API-driven, direct-to-publisher automation accelerates as more platforms (Mediaocean and competitors) ship agentic tooling.
• •Adoption data in Mediaocean's next bi-annual report as a trend line, since single-period percentages can move with sample composition.
• •Mediaocean's July 14, 2026 webinar (with Sixteenth Note Analytics and Innovid) for additional detail on the report's agentic-AI findings.

This is vendor-commissioned research: Mediaocean sells the AI-powered planning and activation tools (NIVO AI, Prisma, Innovid) that this report's own findings argue marketers should be adopting more of, so the framing, while methodologically disclosed (312 respondents, May 2026, tenth wave of an ongoing series), should be read as an industry-position paper as much as neutral survey data.