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In the race to 2026, the mandate for brands has shifted from “grow at all costs” to a starker, more urgent reality: Adapt or Die.

Stadium Goods ,a premium sneaker and streetwear marketplace, saw email revenue jump 268 percent year-over-year this Black Friday. That kind of lift didn’t come from a single campaign or holiday gimmick, but from a year of refining our CRM playbook: reactivating cold subscribers, merchandising around the products sneakerheads were already hunting for, and making the path from email to purchase as frictionless as possible.

Not only is creating a YouTube channel a fantastic way to promote your brand, but it also allows you to connect with your audience on a whole new level. Here’s what you need to know about using YouTube for your business.

For a decade, marketers built growth strategies around deterministic measurement: knowing exactly who did what and when. That world has changed dramatically. The shift to privacy-first frameworks has fundamentally disrupted what’s measurable and how.

Buyers are more self-directed, more skeptical of promotion and more influenced by relevance, trust and timing than ever before. They expect brands to anticipate their needs, respect their attention and deliver valuable content at every touchpoint, from AI visibility to purchase decision.

Hundreds of marketing leaders across industries told us what they’re seeing every day: Only 18% are very confident in their attribution data, 36% cite cost-efficient scale as their biggest challenge, and 71% say privacy blind spots are affecting revenue.

Marketing operates a predictable loop: measure performance, optimize based on data, repeat. But in 2025, we’ve watched the fastest-growing technology adoption in human history unfold while our ability to measure it lagged years behind. The pace caught marketers flat-footed. 2026 is when they catch up.

The marketing playbook used to feel fairly straightforward: optimize your content, scale it to the nth degree, repeat. Performance-first was the mantra with every test built to deliver immediate ROI. Essentially, the strategy assumed more money invested in this approach would convert to more growth. But the ground has shifted.

The news: Privacy regulations and platform changes are creating blind spots for mobile marketers and forcing them to rethink how they attribute app installs and measure performance.