Ad budgets are still flowing as the year winds down but the mood on the ground tells a different story.
Marketers are holding their bets. Few want to commit too much, too early — especially with tariffs threatening to undercut margins and turn a decent quarter into a loss. The result: deals are more fluid, structured around flexibility rather than firm commitments. Discounts now kick when spend thresholds are reached, not upfront guarantees.
“There’s a lot more flexibility for how to get to the guarantee or to the objective that marketers are asking for now than they have in previous years,” said Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer of the Americas at PubMatic.
It’s an ask that started during the pandemic, when agility became a survival mechanism. Now, it’s just how business gets done.
“I’m seeing a lot more conversations around ad spending in the final quarter revolve around this idea of spending thresholds with discounts versus upfront commitments,” said Dan Larkman, CEO of CTV performance advertising business Keynes Digital.
Still, it’s not the end of upfront commitments — not across the board anyway. What’s taking shape is something more subtle: restraint.
“While tariffs are directly impacting the spend of some advertisers, they have not significantly influenced ad investment overall,” said Jeremy Cornfeldt, president of ad agency Tinuiti. “We’re seeing a lot of brands finding other ways to handle the costs, like renegotiating deals or moving production, so they can keep their ad spending as steady as possible amid a shifting economic climate.”
And that restraint isn’t coming out of nowhere.
The U.S., like much of the world, is stuck in what feels like an economic uncanny valley. People are still spending, but increasingly on credit. They say they’re bracing for a recession, even as the data suggests otherwise. Financial assets are doing more of the heavy lifting than wages. From afar, the market looks solid. Up close, it feels precarious.
“It looks like we are looking at flat year on year,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, global evp, paid social at Jellyfish. “But I would imagine if performance is there, especially for our performance-based clients, if we are hitting ROI targets and there’s room to spend more, I think there will be some incremental budget.”
If that’s true, publishers are struggling to see it. They’re stuck trying to forecast through the fog –especially in the open market, where programmatic auctions have become even more unpredictable. The constant revisions to industry forecasts back that up. WPP initially projected 7.7% growth in global ad revenue this year, by mid year that had dropped to 6%. IPG’s outlook was also revised down, from 4.9% to 4.3%.
“With so much uncertainty in the markets, the tone throughout has been cautiously optimistic,” said Scott Shamberg, president and CEO of independent media agency Mile Marker.
It’s a mindset that’s particularly pronounced among marketers in the CPG space — and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
CEOs across the category made that clear in recent earnings updates. Ralph Lauren raised its marketing investment to 7.5% of sales in the last quarter, up from 6.7% a year earlier. Church & Dwight CEO Rick Dierker said cutting marketing spend is inconceivable – even if it means taking a short-term hit to profits. And Molson Coors CEO Gavin Hattersley echoed the same logic: keep investing now to be better positioned when the market turns, he said.
That calculus becomes even more critical as tariff pressures mount. At some point, the added costs will be passed to shoppers, Marketing is how those CEOs plan to make those price hikes easier to swallow. Of course, that posture could shift. Marketers know better than anyone how quickly CEOs can change their minds when the numbers tighten.
At the root of those fears is the most unsexy but consequential variable for marketers: product. Too much of it – or too little – could turn the holiday quarter into a minefield. It leaves marketers in a familiar bind: play it too safe and risk missing demand, or overestimate and end up sitting on unsold inventory.
That’s the kind of corporate fluency marketers are being forced to develop. As Tucker Matheson, co-founder and co-CEO of brand growth firm Markacy, put it: marketing can’t operate in a vacuum, anymore – not when inventory levels, margin pressure and media allocation are so tightly linked. He’s seeing more direct involvement from CFOs, sharper scrutiny of customer acquisition costs and a broader shift toward financial modeling that ties ad dollars to lifetime value, not just initial returns. Naturally, that means marketers spending more money on measurement – from incrementality testing to homegrown media mix modelling – to prove that dollars spent across platforms and channels aren’t just visible, but valuable.
For the 20 CMOs working with brand commerce agency Blue Chip, that means more time in front of CFOs, defending budgets and proving what works.
“CMOs and heads of marketing are having to report back to the CFO in a more significant way than ever before, with a lot of that around defending their budgets,” said Sarah VanHeirseele, chief growth officer at Blue Chip.
That’s shifting the focus from return on ad sales to incrementality — proof that a campaign delivered revenue or market share that wouldn’t have happened without it.
As VanHeirseele explained: “If someone was going to buy your product anyway then what’s the point in putting an ad in front of them – what good is that?”
Her team is working through that question with several clients now. Often it means running smaller, more frequent tests to prove value quickly – giving CFOs enough evidence to protect, or even unlock, more ad dollars.
That’s the hope at least. Because assurances from CFOs right now are like umbrellas in a windstorm – flimsy and prone to flipping the moment President Trump’s economic policy shifts.
