Vendor reportMars, Incorporated, 6 Oct 2026

In the upcoming years shopping moments might start showing up inside social, gaming and streaming environments

Channel mix & planning

Reader Note:: This is a forward-looking recommendation from Mars in the 'What’s next' section, not an observed usage share. It points to where commerce interactions may appear in future rather than to one named platform. The source does not specify formats, conversion metrics, or which audiences are most likely to shop in each environment.
Evidence:: Expert judgment
Vendor interest:: High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: More than 180,000 global data signals across four continents, including 11 stakeholder and shopper/channel expert perspectives, 30+ prior research reports, 91,500 channel publications, 79,300 shopper publications, 4,999 curated consumer and channel podcasts, and 150+ drivers of change; English-language news and podcast content collected with no location filters.

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Hearing how someone who knows the field reads it, and deciding what to check yourself.

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Anything that needs a measurement. Nobody counted or tested this.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.

Paid media overtook martech as the largest slice of the marketing budget between 2018 and 2025, rising from 23.2% to 30.6% while martech fell from 29.2% to 22.4%

Change in marketing budget allocation by resource, 2018 to 2025
Resource	Change 2018 to 2025 (percentage points)
Paid media	7.4
Labor	-2.6
Agencies	-2.3
Martech	-6.8

33.8%

of US Fashion site visits now come from paid channels (Search + Social + Display), overtaking Direct traffic's 27.8% share for the first time in three years (Jul 2023–Jul 2026).

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Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

53.9% of US marketing leaders say marketing keeps influencing a customer for a year or longer, though the most common single answer is several months at 24.4% and the report's median is six months

Marketing Performance: Perceived marketing influence duration on customers, as reported by US CMOs in 2026
Duration	Percent (%)
An hour	0.6%
12 hours	0.6%
A day	1.3%
A week	2.6%
A month	6.4%
Several months	24.4%
6 months	10.3%
1 year	21.8%
2 years	18.6%
5 years	9%
7 years	0%
10 years or more	4.5%

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9.6%

of overall budget and company revenues go to marketing on average (2026 survey of US companies)

SEO, social, email, retail media and influencer all rank higher on impact than on the budget they receive

Marketing budgets ranged from 5.8% to 9.7% of company revenue across industries in 2025, with consumer products highest and IT and business services lowest

Marketing budget as a percent of total revenue by industry, 2025
Industry	2025 (%)
Consumer products	9.7%
Manufacturing	9.5%
Pharma	9%
Media	8%
Insurance	7.5%
Financial services	7.2%
Retail	7.1%
Tech services and products companies with over $250M revenue	7.1%
Travel and hospitality	6.7%
Healthcare	5.9%
IT and business services	5.8%

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In the upcoming years shopping moments might start showing up inside social, gaming and streaming environments

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