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Between mass layoffs and shaken consumer confidence, brand advertisers are cautiously wading through the first weeks of 2026. With consumer demand harder to predict, advertisers are looking for clearer signals before committing to ad spend.

“Marketers are prioritizing spend where data shows the highest propensity to perform, while still recognizing the need to prime demand,” Swapnil Patel, co-president at Attention Arc, a performance marketing and media agency, told Digiday in an email.

Massive advertisers like P&G, Kimberly Clark and others have already set the tone, focused on improving the effectiveness of its advertising — at least that’s the case based on earnings calls at the start of the year.

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Last week, Google’s parent company Alphabet reported that 2025 revenue was an eye-popping $403 billion, making the last 123 months its highest-earning year – almost $114 billion in Q4 alone – with these sums representing a 15% and 12% respective annual increase.

But as dollar bills stacked up, so did the legal citations. All this came the same week the IAB hosted its flagship annual conference, where the growing chorus of adland voices willing to try a new means of measuring effectiveness – many cite this as the crux of Google’s near stranglehold on ad spend –  could be heard.

For example, state plaintiffs in Google’s search antitrust case filed a motion to challenge Judge Amit Mehta’s poorly received (among voices in the ad industry, anyway), just weeks after the European Union issued a preliminary ruling against Google’s ad tech, echoing a ruling in a separate U.S. courtroom in 2025.

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