Ad spend is pouring into the same three platforms, while this year's most effective brands won by sticking with one clear idea.
It's around this time of year that next year's marketing plan starts to take shape. Maybe you're sketching it yourself between everything else. Maybe you, or your marketing manager, have typed "give me a marketing strategy" into an AI tool and are running with whatever came back. Maybe your freelancer or agency has sent through a plan. Either way, it probably lands in the same place: a bit more on Meta, a bit more on Google, maybe a test of something new.
Two pieces of news from the past week suggest that's exactly the plan worth questioning.
WARC, which tracks global advertising spend, now expects ad spend to grow 11.9 percent this year to around US$1.34 trillion. Two thirds of it is going to just three places: social media, search, and retail media (the ads on sites like Amazon). Alphabet, Amazon and Meta alone are on track to take almost 60 percent of ad spend outside China.
Most of these platforms sell ads through auctions. When more money chases the same audiences, you pay more for the same attention. If next year's plan is "what we did this year, plus 10 percent", you may just be paying more to stand still.
The same week, the Australian Effie Awards were handed out. They judge advertising on business results, not on how clever it was. The top award went to Uber Eats for its "Almost Anything" platform, with the jury praising it for backing long-term brand building while the industry chases short-term results.
I'm not suggesting you spend like Uber Eats. The lesson isn't about budget. It's about discipline. The winners picked a clear idea about who they are and stuck with it long enough for it to work.
More spend in the same places isn't a strategy. A clear idea, repeated long enough to stick, is.
For most $2M to $20M businesses, the problem isn't too little marketing. It's too much changing direction.
If you're doing it yourself, the message changes every time you sit down to write something. If you've asked AI for a strategy, you've got a generic plan built for an average business, and you'll get a different one if you ask again next month. A freelancer is usually briefed one post at a time. An agency often plans channel by channel, rather than around what you want customers to believe about you.
The common thread is that nobody is joining the dots. Without someone whose job is to manage the marketing as a whole, holding the strategy, briefing the tools and specialists, and keeping everything pointing the same way, the marketing changes every time someone new touches it. Each quarter starts from scratch. And when results dip, the instinct is to spend more in auctions that are more crowded than ever.
Long-term brand building isn't a big-company luxury. For a smaller business it simply means being known for one clear thing by the people most likely to buy from you, and saying it the same way everywhere, for longer than feels comfortable. That only happens when someone owns it.
Write down, in one sentence, what you want your best customers to remember about you. Plain English, not a tagline. If you can't, that's the first job for 2027, before a single dollar is allocated.
Then look back over the last 12 months of your marketing. Did it all say that same thing? Most businesses find they've said five different things and wonder why none of it stuck.
Finally, split next year's budget into two buckets: money to drive sales this quarter, and money to make you better known by the right people over the year. Whoever is doing your marketing, ask them to show you the split. If everything sits in the first bucket, you're renting results from the platforms, and the rent is going up.
You can't outspend the big platforms. You can out-think them.
Nothing changes if nothing changes.