Survey of industry professionals seeks to understand how brands are approaching marketing mix and AI
New research shows that 26.1% of retail marketers are planning to pull spending from retail media networks to fund other channels, suggesting that marketers are pulling from certain retail media networks to fund other investments.
However, 65.2% of retail marketers still expect an overall budget increase for RMNs indicating that the RMN Gold Rush is now entering its consolidation phase. Marketers are no longer blindly funding every available network; they are demanding proof of performance.
Keen Decision Systems, a next-generation marketing mix SaaS company, surveyed 120 brand and agency senior leaders in February 2026 to understand their concerns around marketing mix and AI investments.
The report shows that, overall, 65.2% of retail advertisers expect to see their budgets increase in 2026 compared to last year, with social media seeing the biggest increase in investment at 69.6%, followed by retail media networks and AI chatbot advertising (47.8%).
In addition to pulling from RMNs that aren’t working well for them, retail marketers indicated that they would pull spend from linear TV (21.7%) and digital audio (17.4%) to fund other channels.
“As economic constraints impact budgets for retail marketers, they’re becoming more selective in their ad investments– a flight to quality,” said Bradley, Keefer, CRO at Keen Decision Systems. “While retail media still remains popular, they’re choosing networks that are low-cost, but deliver higher efficiency. With more economic uncertainty expected this year, we expect these trends to continue.”
Other key findings include:
- Economic impact on marketing budgets: Due to economic constraints 34.8% of retail marketers have shifted to lower-cost, high-efficiency channels. Another 34.8% of marketers cited economic uncertainty as being the biggest barrier to justifying marketing budget requests to their CFO.
- Preferred metrics: 26.1% of retail advertisers feel that click-through-rates (CTR) are the most overrated or misleading marketing metrics. Marketers would instead prefer to use customer lifetime value (CLV), at 30.4%), followed by total revenue at 26.1%, to define the success of their media mix. This shift moves the conversation from clicks to long-term business outcomes in that fight to proving real business value to CFOs.
- Hesitancy on AI: Almost half (39.1%) of retail advertisers are taking a cautious approach on advertising within generative AI interfaces. Only 21.7% are actively spending on ads within generative AI interfaces like ChatGPT. In terms of overall AI usage, 60.9% are using it for media planning while 56.5% are using it for brainstorming. The loss of human connection (47.8%) was the biggest concern regarding the rise of AI in advertising.
- Media planning uncertainty: Over a quarter (26.1%) of retail marketers said that creative requirements by channel generate the most uncertainty in media planning right now. Budget cuts and channel allocation, at 21.7% each, were the next most cited issues. Additionally, data quality (34.8%) and too many stakeholders changing plans mid-flight (26.1%) were the biggest issues to having more reliable forecasts.
