Shared experiences will take centre stage this year
Opinion
The CEO of C-Screens makes three predictions for the year ahead.
By now, uncertainty feels firmly baked into the global business system. However, at least within the media and advertising sector, there are some reasons for optimism. As 2026 gets into gear, a number of emerging opportunities are coming into focus for advertisers, agencies, and media owners alike.
Brands will engage with their audiences by capturing shared cultural moments
If 2025 proved anything, it’s that audiences still crave shared experiences. The Celebrity Traitors finale was a standout example: a cross-generational cultural flashpoint that took on a life of its own. Moments like this remind us that although mass attention is less common and predictable than it once was, it’s far from dead.
In 2026, brands, advertisers, and media owners will need to get far better at identifying these cultural spikes early and responding with dynamic, contextually relevant content.
Brands that capitalise fastest by pivoting their creative, adjusting messaging, or activating out-of-home assets in real time will be the ones that get noticed.
Leaders in this space will look to take big shared moments offline and turn them into experiential or community-driven campaigns that meet audiences where they are – whether that’s shopping centres, sports stadia, travel hubs, or town squares.
The FIFA World Cup is one obvious opportunity for exploiting a shared moment. However, the World Cup is only one event in a year filled with potentially many cultural highlights.
Canny marketers will map these moments by quarter, across both anticipated events and surprising culture flashpoints, and build a content strategy designed to entertain audiences wherever they are.
In a year of consolidation, the industry will thrive by collaborating more closely
As consolidation continues across the marketing and media landscape, collaboration will rapidly become a commercial necessity. Pressures facing agencies, such as shrinking teams, tighter margins, and the destabilising impact of AI on workflows, are making traditional ways of working unsustainable.
Brands, advertisers, agencies, and media owners will need more support, more shared thinking, and more integrated solutions.
On the media side, we’re already seeing the benefits of this approach. Our partnership with Sky is a case in point. Sky’s strength in producing high-quality content combined with our ability to distribute that content into out-of-home environments that Sky doesn’t reach – such as screens in shopping centres and motorway service stations – creates value on multiple levels.
Football fans get live updates wherever they are. Sky benefits from extended brand presence. And we jointly monetise the space by running contextual advertising alongside real-time content, unlocking incremental revenue streams for both parties.
Media owners are uniquely positioned to help agencies innovate, especially those that are stretched thin and operating with reduced headcount.
Media owners should look to become more forward-thinking – proactively generating ideas, offering ready-made solutions, and smoothing the path for agencies to deliver campaigns with greater impact.
This year, progress will come from partnership: competitors finding shared ground, complementary businesses combining strengths, and the industry collectively simplifying how advertising gets done. Nothing is fundamentally broken; we just need to realign and collaborate more widely.
The only thing we can be certain of in 2026 is more uncertainty
If recent years have taught us anything, it’s that even our most confident predictions are like houses built on sand.
Take last year. At this time in 2024, many of us were gearing up for a period of strong growth. Yet the unexpected twists of the global economy meant that no sector delivered the performance it had anticipated.
The pace and unpredictability of change have become so extreme that the line between macroeconomics and microeconomics has all but vanished. We now operate in a world where a single late-night Tweet can move markets and where economic surprises show up on the bottom line almost instantly.
In this environment, the only effective response is to build resilience through partnerships. As explored earlier, companies that operate within collaborative ecosystems are far better placed to adapt, pivot, and protect value when conditions shift.
No one organisation can control the economic climate, but every company can control how well it connects, collaborates, and shares ideas.
What remains firmly within our power is the work we do together: generating better ideas, creating smarter solutions, and helping clients make their money work harder in a landscape where every pound counts.
Here’s to making 2026 the best it can be.
Robert Hicks is co-founder and CEO of C-Screens