Sixty-five percent of British advertisers expect to increase their marketing budgets in 2026, according to ISBA’s 2026 Media Budgets Survey.
The study — published today by ISBA in partnership with Ebiquity and the World Federation of Advertisers — also found that 19% of advertisers expect this increase to be ‘significant’.
TV will continue to play an important role, though its shape may shift: 60% of advertisers plan to reduce spend on linear TV, while 83% said they want to put more money into addressable and connected TV, with 32% of that latter group expecting to increase their spend by more than 10%.
Alongside this growing interest in targeted and data-driven TV formats, advertisers are further ramping up their brand-building efforts, with 37% planning to increase their share of branding spend.
Predictably, the survey also found that advertisers expect AI’s role to become more prominent in media operations in the new year.
2026 could also be the year in which we finally see stronger collaboration between media and creative agencies, as 68% of brands said they plan ‘to pursue greater integration’ between the two.
Hamid Habib, managing director of Arena Media UK, spoke to MediaCat earlier this year about the possibility of such consolidation. While he said it ‘should’ happen, he noted that ‘there’s too much overlap between agencies that can do similar things but want to retain the sort of commercial upside themselves’.
Even so, he added that the best awards tend to go to work created through such collaboration: ‘You say “I wish I’d done that” most of the time when media and creative are working together.’
Commenting on the survey’s findings, Michelle Morgado, managing director for the UK and Ireland at Ebiquity, said in a press release that ‘UK marketers are notably more confident than many of their international peers’.
The study drew on data from 16 countries representing $13 billion in ad spend; the UK accounted for £2.9 billion of this total.
Featured image: Oscar Nord / Unsplash
