Digiday’s extensive guide to what’s in and out for creators in 2026

2026 will be the year authenticity gets repriced in the creator economy. 

The importance, reach, and financial power of the creator economy is well-established — now everyone is fighting for a piece of the pie. As such, it will become increasingly important that these pies feel freshly baked by hand rather than stale and mass-produced.

With AI-generated content flooding social media platforms, embracing the messiness and imperfection of being human will help creators stand out in the spreading sea of slapdash slop.

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Walmart Connect takes a play out of the Amazon playbook to make agentic AI the next battleground in retail media

Walmart is going all in on artificial intelligence and agentic technologies for its ad platform. What was a retail media arms race has morphed into an agentic AI race so far this year, and Walmart seems to be taking aim at Amazon’s ad business.

On Tuesday, Walmart execs said they would put ads in Sparky, its AI shopping agent, as well as provide generative AI-powered performance insights and creative. There’s also Marty, Walmart’s agentic advertising assistant, in beta for sponsored search campaigns to help with billing and bidding, with plans to make it available widely later this year. The announcements come on the heels of Walmart’s tests last year with Sparky and Marty.

It’s a play out of Amazon Ad’s playbook with Rufus, which began running ads in 2024, according to commerce execs. At last year’s unBoxed conference, Amazon rolled out agentic AI tools that can generate creative, build campaigns, recommend targeting and write Amazon Marketing Cloud queries using natural language, as Digiday previously reported.

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