Strategic Reversion to Owned Channels: Marketers Reinvest in Email as AI Becomes Essential Infrastructure

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Marketing executives across retail, direct-to-consumer (D2C), and B2B sectors are engineering a strategic pivot, demanding that media sales professionals and advertising agency strategists redefine their value proposition for the coming fiscal year. A late-2025 survey of Marketing Trends for 2026 by Adroll and WBR Insights collected insights from100 senior business leaders. It reveals a dual-pronged movement: a decisive strategic reversion to owned channels, most notably email, and a ubiquitous integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into every facet of campaign execution. This convergence signals a fundamental shift in resource allocation, prioritizing direct customer relationships and attributable performance over broad reach.

I. The Reinvestment in Email: Seeking Anchor in a Fragmented Sea

After years of being overshadowed by newer social and programmatic platforms, email marketing is experiencing a planned resurgence. A significant 65% of surveyed organizations plan to reinvest substantially in email marketing as a strategic priority for 2026. This high-water mark marks a reversal of the declining focus the channel has experienced, reflecting an industry-wide need for greater stability.

The core motivation is one of control and diminishing platform value. As major advertising platforms consolidate power, restrict data access, and drive up paid media costs, brands are seeking reliable, direct relationships with their customers. Email represents an "owned channel"—a direct line of communication unmediated by external algorithms or fluctuating gatekeepers.

For ad agencies, this reversion has two major implications:

1. CRM Integration Mandate: Agency pitches must now center on how their strategies—be they paid media or creative execution—feed into and enhance the client's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and email list. This elevates data flow and integration expertise to a premium requirement.
2. Performance Over Awareness: The budgetary focus shifts from mass awareness buys to accountable, segment-driven engagement. Media sales teams must demonstrate how their inventory can capture highly qualified leads (e.g., through exclusive content or co-branded campaigns) to fuel the client's high-value email funnel.

II. AI as Essential Infrastructure, Not an Experiment

The research underscores that AI has transitioned from an experimental tool to critical marketing infrastructure across the enterprise. 97% of respondents reported AI influencing their marketing performance in 2025, with a strong majority characterizing the impact as "somewhat" or "very significant."

For marketers and their partners, the benefits of AI are concentrated around two operational pillars: personalization and efficiency.

• Better Audience Targeting and Personalization (59%): AI is being leveraged to refine segmentation and deliver hyper-contextualized messaging, moving beyond basic demographics to behavioral and predictive modeling.
• Faster Time-to-Market (59%): AI tools accelerate content generation, creative iteration, and campaign deployment, allowing businesses to react instantly to market shifts and competitor moves.

Critically, adoption confidence lags behind intent. While 72% of marketers plan to expand their use of AI, only 45% feel fully confident in their ability to execute successfully. This confidence gap presents a prime opportunity for consulting and agency partners to position themselves as implementation experts, particularly in areas like dynamic creative optimization and the sophisticated application of predictive analytics for customer behavior.

III. The Fractured Paid Media Landscape: CTV and Retail Media's Ascent

Despite the emphasis on owned and organic channels, paid spending is simultaneously increasing across core digital channels, suggesting an overall expansion of the marketing budget that is heavily channeled into high-attribution platforms.

A. Connected Television (CTV): The New Primetime

Connected Television is experiencing particularly strong momentum. 54% of organizations increased their CTV investment in 2025, and no organizations reduced budgets. The driving forces are:

• Audience Reach (49%): Accessing specific audiences who have migrated from traditional linear television to streaming services.
• Integration with Digital Channels (48%): Connecting television exposure with down-funnel digital actions (e.g., website visits, search queries).
• Measurable ROI and Attribution (28%): The ability to track exposure to outcome is a key differentiator from legacy media, fulfilling the modern marketer’s demand for accountability.

For media sales teams, the pitch is no longer about gross rating points (GRPs) but about household-level targeting, cross-screen frequency management, and post-exposure conversion attribution.

B. The Retail Media Network Challenge

The rapid ascent of Retail Media Networks (RMNs)—now at 70% adoption—is profoundly altering the digital paid media mix. These networks allow brands to advertise directly on the retailer's properties using rich first-party purchase data, offering superior sales attribution. This channel is projected to capture approximately $300 billion globally by 2030, representing a significant and often non-fungible pool of ad dollars dedicated to performance at the point of purchase.

IV. The Untapped Audio Opportunity: Podcasting’s Growth Gap

For audio publishers and content creators, the most salient finding is the significant disconnect between current podcast usage and perceived future value.

• Only 22% of marketers currently use third-party podcast advertising, but a massive 78% view it as a significant opportunity for 2026.

This represents the largest disparity between adoption and perceived value across all examined channels. Despite the fact that consumer audio engagement accounts for 31% of total media time, it receives a disproportionately small 9% of advertising budgets.

This gap signals a clear market inefficiency. Audio publishers and agencies must reposition their podcast inventory not just as an awareness medium, but as a scalable, attributable performance channel, aligning its capabilities with the data and attribution demands that drive investment in CTV and email.

V. Focus on Values: The New Brand Mandate

Brand awareness strategies are shifting away from stale demographic targeting toward authenticity and community-driven engagement. Marketing leaders cited several critical shifts for 2026:

1. Contextual Relevance: A move toward hyperlocal and cross-platform presence that integrates seamlessly into consumers’ daily routines.
2. Trust and Transparency: The consensus is that "the future of brand awareness in 2026 will revolve around data privacy and trust-based marketing." This necessitates more ethical marketing practices and transparent communication about customer data usage.
3. Community over Demographics: Brands plan to focus on "communities that share our values" rather than broad demographic slices, requiring partners to execute targeted, values-aligned campaigns that foster deeper connections.

In summation, the 2026 marketing roadmap requires media and agency partners to abandon siloed thinking. Success will hinge on integrating owned media (email, CRM) with performance paid channels (CTV, Search, Podcasts) and leveraging AI to deliver the speed, personalization, and accountability that modern marketers now consider essential to maintaining competitive relevance