At CIMM, six crucial shifts emerged: AI agents now execute ad deals, measurement fuels real-time attribution, identity quality threatens the entire ecosystem, creative versioning explodes into thousands of variants, human research gains importance, and collaboration becomes non-negotiable.
That shift is moving the industry beyond what I think of as the “Content Economy” and into the “Participation Economy,” where value is created not only by what media companies produce, but by what audiences choose to do with it. They share, create, discuss, recommend, remix, attend, purchase, and build communities around the stories and creators they love.
The shift is expected to continue. Performance-based fees have the strongest projected growth, with 58% of respondents expecting to increase their use, followed by value-based models at 43% and fixed-fee or output-based approaches at 36%.
For the first half of 2026, Publicis Media was tops in new business with billings of $3.24 billion, according to agency research firm COMvergence. That’s a global net figure that factors in wins, losses and retentions. Group level wins included Adidas (Greater China), HP, Microsoft and Prada. Omnicom Media ranked a close second with $3.15 billion with wins including Delta, IBM and Subway.
Stephen Paxton, founder of the awards, remarked: “We raised the benchmarks significantly this year, and our industry delivered beyond expectation. The sheer volume, quality, and creative bravery of the work submitted surpassed our highest expectations, with many Silver and Bronze winners reaching the gold benchmark of 82% and above.”
A study of more than 13,000 current US CMOs found that CMOs have shorter tenures than CEOs, and that company ownership plays a role here. A historical start-cohort analysis shows how median tenure has changed over time, falling from 4.0 years for CMOs who started in 2010 to 2.6 years for the 2022 start cohort.
South Africa’s retail sector recorded stronger growth in July, with retail trade sales increasing by 3.4% year-on-year in real terms, according to the latest data
Kantar’s annual Media Reactions study shows marketers are betting on AI, but many remain uncertain they have the right media mix or right data to deliver growth.
Marc Dhalluin, co-founder of TruthsetsOnline.com, estimates South Africa’s digital advertising market at between $2.1 billion and $2.4 billion, or about R35 billion to R40 billion, with programmatic advertising accounting for an estimated 40% to 50%. Applied to the estimated programmatic market, that would put potential losses at between R2.8 billion and R12 billion a year.
The issue is that different retailer networks use different attribution windows. Different reporting methodologies. Different definitions of success. Everyone shares some form of performance data, but not everyone is speaking the same language. This matters now because retail media is entering a new phase.