2026 Outlook Study: September Update (IAB)

Summary:

This report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group representing media, ad tech, brands, and agencies in digital advertising, focuses on where U.S. ad spending is heading in 2026, which channels are expected to grow the most, and how AI is reshaping planning and measurement. It's a September update to IAB's earlier 2026 outlook.

The findings come from an email survey of 211 U.S. buy-side ad investment decision-makers, mostly from agencies (52%) and brands (44%), fielded July 17–31, 2026. This is a survey of stated expectations and plans, not a read of actual spend or platform data.

Key findings:
• Ad spend forecasts keep climbing — buyers now expect FY 2026 U.S. ad spend to grow 12.3%, up from 9.5% in January.
• Social media and CTV keep pulling ahead of other channels, with commerce media growth also upgraded, to 13.6%.
• Goals are shifting back toward new customers — customer acquisition and brand equity both jumped, while focus on repeat purchases stayed flat.
• Creator/influencer and cohort-based ads are the ad types gaining the most added focus, followed by publisher first-party data and contextual ads.
• AI-driven search and low-quality "AI slop" are buyers' top new challenges, and comparing AI-driven vs. traditional customer journeys is their hardest measurement problem.
• 86% are already changing, or plan to change, measurement for the AI web — mainly by tracking brand visibility/citations in AI tools.

Margin notes:
This is a trade-group survey of stated intentions from a modest sample (211 people), not observed ad-spend records — and IAB, as an industry association, has a general interest in showing digital ad growth.