First Footers 2026: Why the Industry Needs a Mirror, Not Another Trend Report

First footing is a Scottish Hogmanay (or New Year) tradition. The first person to cross your threshold after midnight is your 'first footer', and who they are and the gifts they bring set the tone for the coming year (you want someone bringing coal, money, whisky or food!). With that in mind I'm inviting the advertising and marketing world's first footers to set the tone for the industry this year. We're looking for op-eds that look to tomorrow - rallying cries for issues the industry needs to tackle, future-casting insights for the trends and themes we'll likely come across and reflections on how they plan to navigate the shoogly, shifting path ahead. Carly Miller, vice president of strategy at Broken Heart Love Affair, is up next. You can read other entries from the series here.

The advertising industry doesn’t need another deck of predictions or trends. It needs a wee bit of a reckoning.

We tend to end every year the same: trends, tantrums, tech, turmoil. We obsess over platforms, promise ourselves we’ll finally use AI “properly” next year, whisper about shrinking budgets, rage about shrinking budgets, talk endlessly about what’s broken. And then… we normalise it.

So, if I’m to be a first footer this year, I’m not bringing coal or whisky. I’m bringing a mirror.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that our industry isn’t in crisis because of technology, cost pressure, or culture shifts. It’s in crisis because we’ve slowly, almost politely, lowered the bar for what we believe our work is meant to do.

We’ve confused noise with nuance and output with outcome. And in the process, we’ve taught an entire generation that marketing is about filling feeds, not shaping futures.

The next era won’t be defined by better tools. It will be defined by better intent (which can be enhanced with better tools).

So, in bringing a mirror into 2026, the skill our industry needs most isn’t AI fluency or more best practices. It’s unlearning.

• Unlearning the reflex to make everything faster at the expense of making anything that will last.
• Unlearning the comfort of saying “that’s what the client wants” instead of asking whether it’s what the business (and the audience!) actually needs.
• Unlearning the idea that creativity is the decorative layer versus intention builder.

If we don’t unlearn these auto pilot reflexes/industry mantras/fast track practices, we’ll never get past surface level.

I bring this up because sometimes it’s easy to forget our job is a privilege. We get the honour of building brands, which at their core are complex systems. Cultural, emotional, economic systems. And systems don’t change through polish or speed or one-offs. They change through pressure, friction and brave decisions that feel uncomfortable when they’re being made.

And with the future carrying so much uncertainty and consequence, it feels like we’re entering a moment that asks us to look a little deeper.

Audiences are no longer just distracted, they’re discerning, they’re sceptical. They don’t just scroll past nonsense; they reject it. They can smell borrowed purpose/clout/BS from a mile away. They know when a brand is cosplay caring. And they’re ruthless with brands that try to manipulate emotion without earning it.

The work that will survive this next chapter will not be the loudest, it will be the truest.

Not the trendiest, the most grounded.

Not the most reactive, the most deliberate.

We are entering an era where brand trust is not a comms metric. It’s a business strategy. And with that shift comes a responsibility to behave more like builders. Not the ones you find off Kijiji, but the kind entrusted to build things that last.

Builders who:

• Build belief.
• Build economic momentum.
• Build social movements.
• Build institutions people trust…or learn to distrust.

Because if trust is the strategy, then our work must move beyond 'engaging' and into 'consequential'. Did it shift behaviour? Did it unlock opportunity? Did it create access? Did it make someone’s life tangibly better, not just momentarily entertained?

The next decade belongs to marketers who can prove they aren’t just selling attention, but shaping outcomes. Which means reviving the art of taste and curation.

Walking into 2026, I don’t think the path ahead will stabilise. It will keep shifting. Faster. Sharper. Less forgiving.

So, my strategy is not certainty. It’s calibration.

• To keep returning, obsessively, to the patterns beneath the noise.
• To anchor every brief in human tension, not tech novelty.
• To measure success in real results, not rhetorical wins.
• To protect space for slow thinking in a culture addicted to speed.
• And to surround myself with people that give a sh*t.
  

The industry doesn’t need louder voices this year. It needs steadier, more thoughtful ones.

Ok enough yammering, if I could leave one thing on the industry’s threshold this year, it wouldn’t be a trend or a tactic. It would be a reminder: Marketing still matters, because at its best it helps people make sense of the world.