Own the Signal
For more than a decade, marketers have lived in a paradox. On one hand, tools, platforms, and data have never been more abundant. On the other, clarity has never been harder to find. Every quarter brings a new dashboard, a new acronym, and a new promise that this time the numbers will tell us exactly what to do. Yet, in boardrooms and budget cycles, the same frustrations echo: We’re spending more, but what are we actually getting back?
Noise is the problem. And too often, marketing is guilty of amplifying it rather than cutting through it.
“Own the Signal” is not just a phrase … it’s a call to action. The signal is what drives outcomes: customers choosing your product, deals closing faster, brand equity compounding. Everything else is distraction. And 2026 should not be another year of optimizing around the edges of “same old” plans.
If your 2026 plan looks like your 2025 plan with a few tweaks and an “AI” bullet, you’re not planning, you’re stalling. The uncomfortable truth is that many teams will spend September sliding last year’s deck forward: same allocations, same vendors, same KPIs, with a fresh coat of formatting. It feels like progress. But is it?
Teams take their signal cues from leaders. If the plan is a collage of last year’s charts and this year’s buzzwords, the message is “play it safe.” If the plan is clear, selective, and brave about what we’ll stop, the message is “outcomes first.”
Why the “Same Old Plan” is so Tempting, but Costly
Recycling last year’s plan is seductive because it lowers friction: you keep your calendar, keep your vendors, keep your numbers “consistent.” But the costs compound:
Misallocation persists. Spend drifts to habit, not opportunity. Dollars keep flowing to channels that are easy to defend, not the ones that actually drive growth.
Organizational trust erodes. When results stall but the plan looks the same, C-suite confidence drops, and marketing can lose its strategic voice.
Opportunity costs balloon. Markets move. Buyer behavior shifts. Privacy, data, and attribution rules change. Standing still quietly becomes moving backward.
The through-line is simple: noise preserves the past; signal creates the future. If you want next year to look different, the plan must be different. From now through October, as the plan hardens. This is your window to get out of the rut.
Why Noise Hurts
Noise is expensive. According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), U.S. marketers waste roughly 25% of their budgets on media that never reaches the intended audience [1]. Wasted impressions, redundant tech, duplicated agency fees; these all add up to billions.
In the age of AI-powered media buying and infinite content, the temptation is to churn out more. But more content, more spend, and more tech often generate more noise, not more growth. Gartner found that 75% of CMOs feel increased pressure to “do more with less,” yet most admit their organizations struggle to connect marketing activity to business outcomes [2].
In my experience, I have heard marketing leaders admit they don’t use ROI to steer strategy. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t trust the underlying measures enough to make bets with them. That’s not a good sign.
Owning the signal means confronting this directly: cutting spend that doesn’t serve strategy, reducing vanity metrics, and demanding proof of impact.
Noise isn’t just inefficient; it crowds out signal. Every tool added without a clear use case, every KPI that isn’t tied to the P&L, every “quick win” that isn’t really a win; these bury the few things that truly matter.
A simple signal test: if a tactic, metric, or tool disappeared tomorrow, would the business notice?
Agency Markups and the Illusion of Value
One of the least-discussed sources of noise is cost opacity. Too many clients still pay 20–30% markups on outsourced services like programmatic media, influencer partnerships, or production [3]. These costs often sit buried in pass-through invoices, fees that don’t generate additional value but make campaigns look bigger on paper.
Agencies defend these markups as “standard practice,” but in a transparency-driven market, they represent friction. They make it harder for marketing leaders to draw a clean line between dollars in and outcomes out.
If 2026 is to look different, this has to change. Leaders must insist on clear contracts, full visibility into vendor costs, and value-based pricing that rewards results, not layers of margin.
The Budget Season Trap
Here’s the pattern:
Leadership demands growth.
Finance demands efficiency.
Marketing leaders present a deck, often last year’s plan with tweaks.
Budgets get approved, headcount gets frozen, and execution looks a lot like 2025.
This cycle breeds mediocrity. Companies feel like they’re “playing it safe” when in reality they’re standing still. The market, the customer, and the competition are not standing still.
McKinsey reports that companies that reallocate marketing spend dynamically (at least 50% of budget shifted to the highest-performing channels annually) achieve returns 2–3x higher than those that don’t [4]. Yet most organizations only shift less than 10% of budget year-to-year [5].
2026 cannot be a copy-paste job. It has to be a reset: audit the waste, reallocate aggressively, and rebuild around outcomes.
The AI Wildcard
AI is the loudest signal in the room right now. For some organizations, it’s panic: “If we don’t adopt everything, we’ll fall behind.” For others, paralysis: “Let’s wait and see.” Both responses are flawed.
AI will absolutely reshape marketing, from predictive analytics to creative production to attribution. But the real strategic question is not what AI tool to buy, it’s what business problem to solve. Without clarity on goals, AI just creates faster noise.
A Deloitte survey found that only 29% of CMOs feel confident their teams can use AI effectively to drive measurable business outcomes [6]. That gap is where wasted investment will balloon in 2026 if leaders chase tools without strategy.
Owning the signal means applying AI where it reduces friction and amplifies clarity: automating reporting so humans can focus on insight, using predictive models to prioritize high-value leads, or surfacing customer signals hidden in fragmented datasets.
Customers Don’t Hear Noise
From the customer’s perspective, all the internal noise doesn’t matter. They don’t care how many dashboards you checked or how many agencies you briefed. They care about whether your brand feels relevant, trustworthy, and easy to engage.
Yet too often, internal marketing debates about channel mix, attribution models, or tech stacks obscure the simple truth: the customer experience is the signal.
PwC research shows that 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience [7]. No amount of spend can make up for broken journeys, inconsistent messaging, or tone-deaf creative.
Today’s customers aren’t just comparing you to your competitors, they’re comparing you to the best experience they’ve ever had. That means fast, personalized, and consistent service across every touchpoint.
Here’s what they expect by default:
71% expect personalized experiences but feel frustrated when they don’t get them [8]
73% expect seamless journeys across all channels and devices [9]
This is why alignment with Sales, Product, and Service is non-negotiable. Marketing cannot “own the signal” in isolation. It has to be the connective tissue.
How to Own the Signal in 2026
Owning the signal is not about tearing everything down. It’s about stripping away noise until what’s left is undeniable. For 2026, that means:
Audit the waste. Kill duplicate tools, redundant vendors, and underperforming campaigns.
Rebuild around outcomes. Tie every tactic to revenue, retention, or brand equity. If it doesn’t map, it doesn’t make the plan.
Plan for shifts. AI, attribution, privacy regulation, buyer behavior Don’t treat these as side notes. Make them core to planning.
Insist on transparency. Refuse markups that obscure true cost. Align incentives to performance.
Bridge to the business. Marketing is not a service function. It is a growth engine. Act, and plan accordingly.
Standing Still Is Not Safe
If your 2026 plan looks like your 2025 plan with a few tweaks, you’re not planning. You’re standing still. And in a noisy market, standing still is the fastest way to fall behind. 2026 isn’t the year to optimize around the edges. It’s the year to own the signal.
Owning the signal means being bold enough to reset, disciplined enough to cut, and clear enough to connect marketing activity to business outcomes. The companies that do will win not just attention, but loyalty, efficiency, and growth.
Because the hardest thing about 2026 isn’t the economy, the platforms, or the technology. It’s the gravitational pull of the same old plan. Resist it, and the signal is yours.
If you are struggling with taking that next step.
Sources
[1] Association of National Advertisers. Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study. ANA, 2020. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/programmatic-media-supply-chain-transparency-study
[2] Gartner. The State of Marketing Budgets 2023. Gartner Research, 2023. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-05-16-gartner-survey-reveals-marketing-budgets
[3] Digiday. “Brands Still Frustrated by Agency Markups.” Digiday, https://digiday.com/marketing/brands-still-frustrated-by-agency-markups
[4] McKinsey & Company. The Granularity of Growth: Making Choices That Drive Enduring Value. McKinsey Insights. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights
[5] Harvard Business Review. “Why Organizations Don’t Reallocate Resources—Even Though They Should.” HBR. https://hbr.org/2018/07/why-organizations-dont-reallocate-resources
[6] Deloitte. 2024 Global Marketing Trends. Deloitte Insights, 2024. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/retail-distribution/global-marketing-trends.html
[7] PwC. Experience Is Everything: Here’s How to Get It Right. PwC Consumer Intelligence Series. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/pwc-consumer-intelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf
[8] CSGI, “Are You Truly Personalizing Customer Experience?”, CSG Blog Insights, April 2025. https://www.csgi.com/insights/are-you-truly-personalizing-customer-experience-cx/
[9] Katana, “Omnichannel retail: Seamless shopping experience”, https://katanamrp.com/blog/omnichannel-retail/, September 2024
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