Planning resolutions for 2026
Opinion
Caroline Manning shares the reflections and resolutions that will guide her planning in the year ahead.
January always feels like a fresh notebook: crisp, hopeful and destined to become chaotic by February. But for planners, it’s more than a symbolic reset – it’s a rare pause before the year accelerates. A moment to consider the year ahead and what it means for us.
If 2025 was the year planning stopped being “the middle bit,” then 2026 is the year we step fully into our new identity: integrated strategist, commercial advisor and cultural interpreter. Planning isn’t the bridge between teams anymore; it’s the engine that pulls them together.
As we begin a new year, these reflections and resolutions will guide my planning in 2026.
No planner is an island
The industry and media landscape is changing and reshaping at a pace of knots. In 2026, teams will integrate more than ever before, and rather than just paying lip service to integration (by combining a creative and media deck an hour before an RTB), we need to start by thinking with integration.
This means our first instinct can’t be media planning’s bread and butter; instead, we need to think holistically.
We must understand and consider the full ecosystem, not stubbornly stay in our paid media lane.
This is true whether it’s two different media teams coming together or a whole ecosystem that includes creative, PR, and commerce. This will mean joining our tools and thinking together to boost our capabilities and ultimately, make the work better.
Re-centre on coherence
This integrated thinking is even more important when you consider that the media landscape now behaves like a jigsaw, with pieces shifting and the box image changing hourly.
Fragmentation remains both our biggest challenge and our richest opportunity. Consumers bounce from TikTok discovery to Amazon research to YouTube parody with unpredictable ease, and somehow, we’re expected to stitch that into something that feels seamless.
This is where planners earn our place. Turning a strong strategic spine into an integrated, coherent whole experience across paid, earned, owned and shared. It’s about crafting entire ecosystems against the North Star that delivers for our clients.
Coherence isn’t a “nice to have” – it’s now the foundation of planning.
Embracing the planner-as-advisor mindset
If coherence is all about creating ecosystems that deliver for clients, we need to be able to talk to it, too. If 2025 proved anything, clients don’t want media plans; they want commercial outcomes.
As planners, we must all deepen not just media literacy but commercial fluency – margins, distribution, retail velocity, P&L logic. As leaders, we need to equip planners to speak financial language confidently.
Our seat at the boardroom table is no longer aspirational; it’s necessary. And we need to use it with insight-led conviction.
We’re no longer the postmen of the process. We are the partners.
Navigating data overload with clarity
To do this, we must focus on the metrics that matter. But herein lies the challenge, we don’t suffer from a lack of data but from too much of it – dashboards multiplying faster than insights, ‘insights’ contradicting one another, and decision-making slowing under the weight of information.
This is one instance where AI will handle a large share of the grunt work, freeing planners to resist the urge to optimise toward whichever metric is shouting the loudest and instead champion consistency, transparency and cross-media measurement.
Any planner or AI agent can report data; good planners interpret it; great planners know what to ignore.
Building for a brand-driven future
As for metrics that matter, ISBA’s latest signals point to advertisers returning to brand investment in 2026 – a long-overdue shift after years of short-term focus. For planners, it’s frankly exciting; it signals a moment to think bigger and longer.
Brand storytelling is a multiplier of memory, but investment must be driven by strategic intent, not just reach-maxing. And outcome-based models should reward meaningful impact rather than sheer activity.
Brand drives demand. Media shapes memory. Planners sit at the centre of reconnecting the two.
Planning’s power position
In an accelerated year, the skills that matter most remain profoundly human: empathy, curiosity, cultural fluency, commercial instinct, storytelling and the confidence to ask uncomfortable questions.
So as 2026 begins, let’s finally retire the narrative that planning is overwhelming or under siege. Planning isn’t shrinking; it’s expanding. And it’s becoming more valued.
We are the collaborators and integrators.
The conductors of coherence in chaos.
The translators of data into purpose.
The connective tissue between “what if” and “what works.”
If we bring conviction, commercialism, curiosity and coherence into this year, 2026 won’t just be another planning cycle – it will be a renaissance.
Here’s to sharper thinking, braver work and stronger planning in 2026.
Caroline Manning is chief design officer at Initiative