FOMOMO and dying confidence

Opinion

Kantar finds that marketers have a growing lack of confidence in their media decisions. This could be due to ‘fear of missing out on marketing opportunities’, argues Thinkbox CSO Elliott Millard.

Almost half of marketers don’t feel they have the right media mix. That’s one of the more eye-catching findings in Kantar’s Media Reactions 2026.

It’s a bold admission from 800 marketers across 33 countries. Half – perhaps the same half – also admitted they don’t think they have the right balance between brand building and performance.

What’s going on? We have more data and more dashboards than we can shake a tech stack at, and yet. Kantar found that uncertainty has been growing in recent years.

There are clues to how we arrived here. And there are ways to help uncertain marketers regain confidence.

How did we get here?

The world has been an uncertain place for…well, I can’t be certain. It’s ages anyway. Maybe uncertainty is just what humans feel about everything now. I’m not sure. But let’s zoom in …

Marketers have developed a growing feeling of uncertainty about their media mix at exactly the time when they’re experimenting with it most, and, according to ad spend data, running in the opposite direction from the evidence of what works.

Kantar offers noteworthy examples, such as 75% of marketers planning to increase investment in AI visibility, while only 23% of consumers trust AI recommendations.

Then there’s the 61% of marketers intending to upspend on nano-influencers.

Are those piling into AI and the nanosphere making decisions with evidence-backed confidence? Or, rather, are they a result of a herding effect from the hype around AI and influencers – the latter fuelled by some major advertisers’ public pronouncements?

Is it, in other words, FOMOMO (fear of missing out on marketing opportunities)?

Investment trends mock evidence

WPP Media’s ‘The Growth Gap’ shows how a media plan can deliver right now without sacrificing future growth – proper cake-and-eat-it stuff in a world of short-term pressure.

‘The Growth Gap’ was based on 7,488 Media Mix Navigator scenarios, the free tool built on the econometric database behind Profit Ability 2 (if marketers want confidence in their media mix, it is sitting there waiting for them).

It found that short-termism isn’t necessarily bad; we’ve just been doing it badly. Doing it better requires re-balancing the media mix: TV, online video, cinema, and print get greater investment; search, social, and online display get less.

But that’s almost precisely what isn’t happening. Kantar found that many marketers are planning to disinvest in some of the most effective media. The pattern is clear: increased investment flowing to the new at the expense of the proven.

There are lots of reasons for this: signalling to investors, making the dashboard go green, pursuing efficiency over effectiveness. Whatever the reason, the outcome is stark: Les Binet has shown that the incremental profit driven by advertising has fallen by 11% in recent years.

What can be done?

Try The Media Mix Navigator.

Also, if you are a marketer unsure about your media mix, understanding the relative risk of your choices is a good place to start.

Nothing in media is guaranteed, but we can assess risk. ‘Profit Ability 2’ shows that different media have wildly different risk profiles based on the variability of their returns.

The media with the lowest risk profiles include Linear TV and BVOD, alongside Print, Online Video and Audio. Conversely, Paid Social and Online Display have the highest risk profiles.

And this isn’t low risk at the expense of reward. In the £1.8bn of media investment analysed by Profit Ability 2, the very best-performing Paid Social campaign only matched TV’s average return.

So if marketers are losing confidence in their media decisions, perhaps the answer is to put more confidence in the evidence at their fingertips.

Elliott Millard is Thinkbox’s chief strategy officer.