Many companies plan their budgets annually – and their marketing departments are no exception. However, the number of changes to how digital marketing is operating and the speed at which those changes are taking place make annual planning riskier than ever.
That’s why I’d like to propose that now is the time for digital marketing departments doing annual planning to rethink their processes, or at minimum, to think about how they can keep flexibility in their budgets to allow for all the changes that will inevitably take effect over the next year.
The rigid way of budget planning won’t serve the savvy advertiser of 2026
For companies with a December year-end close, annual planning for the following year can start as early as Q2 of the year prior. But if your budget for 2026 is being set in June or July of 2025, that means it was set before AI Max was released, let alone before Asset Studio and Nano Banana Pro. By this time next year, it is likely that there will be even more ad platforms to consider, with ChatGPT expected to release advertising opportunities any day now and Perplexity having recently paused accepting new advertisers as they reconfigure their offerings. But if your budget was already set in detail in 2025, it will likely be harder to get money and resources to tackle 2026’s releases until 2027.
Don’t get me wrong: digital advertising platforms have always been releasing updates and algorithms have constantly changed over time. But in a medium that does not require advanced planned media buys and utilizes real-time auctions, it behooves companies to have the flexibility to think about their budgets in real-time too.
The solution – build flexibility
I don’t know what 2026 will hold and what new things will be coming out soon – but I believe that companies that are able to capitalize on the new opportunities soonest will have an advantage over those that don’t. So set aside some budget for new things in 2026 and beyond – given the rate of Google releases in 2025 alone, there’s no reason to assume the pace will slow down or that the other platforms won’t be releasing their own solutions to catch up. Even if we don’t know what they are yet.
