This report is adapted from Modern Retail’s sibling publication Digiday. You can read the full report on Digiday.
Media agencies are navigating an increasingly complex advertising landscape, as economic uncertainty, fragmented media consumption and rapid advances in technology continue to reshape how brands reach consumers.
AI search and creator marketing are adding another layer of change to the agency landscape, creating opportunities to expand services while raising new questions about costs, capabilities and the future of media planning.
Bearing this in mind, Modern Retail+ Research examined how agencies and their clients are adapting to these shifts, from media spending and channel investment to creator partnerships and the evolving role of AI.
To understand how agencies and their clients are working with creators and implementing AI, Modern Retail+ Research collected responses from 30 agency professionals in a survey fielded in third-quarter 2026. For additional industry insight, Modern Retail hosted a focus group of five senior media agency executives who oversee media investment and technology.
Agencies that participated in the focus group were:
- Go Fish Digital
- Horizon Media
- Novus
- Tinuiti
- UM
When Modern Retail asked agencies and brands how important creator marketing has become to their business over the last year, the overwhelming majority of respondents (75%) said that creator marketing has become at least a little or significantly more important in the past 12 months.
Focus group participants noticed an uptick in creator partnerships as well, including a shift in the type of work brands are asking creators to produce. “On the creator side, we’re seeing a massive influx,” Dweck said. “Bigger brands are leaning in far more and have been a bit looser with brand guidelines in terms of the content we’ll accept and publish. Alongside that, we’re trying to negotiate as many direct deals for distribution rights for the creative assets we’re getting from creators. We’re seeing a 40% to 60% uplift against typical, traditionally produced creative units, mainly on TikTok, but the uplift is similar across Instagram and YouTube.”
Retail media networks are becoming another key channel for creator partnerships, according to Modern Retail’s 2026 guide to creator marketing. Seventeen percent of respondents to Modern Retail’s first-quarter survey said they are partnering with influencers to create content for retail media — making it the second most used media channel for creator-brand partnerships after social media (96%).
The convergence of creator marketing and retail media is increasingly being formalized through data partnerships, including Omnicom Media’s agreement with Meta to connect Walmart Connect purchase data with Instagram creator campaigns, allowing marketers to better connect influencer activity with sales outcomes. The company struck a similar agreement with TikTok the previous year, underscoring growing demand from advertisers for more measurable creator marketing programs.
When Modern Retail asked survey respondents about their goals for working with creators, the top five responses were community building (61%), paid media amplification and branded content creation (tied at 57%), building authenticity (50%) and establishing expertise and authority (46%).
Go Fish Digital’s Dweck sees creator partnerships as an opportunity to produce authentic, platform-native content that can drive consumers further down the funnel. “I look at influencers for reach versus creators for content creation and a higher volume of assets that look and feel far more lifelike than the typical ads that advertisers are pushing out,” he said. “Creators live a bit more down funnel. It’s taking $100,000 and spreading it across a handful of creators versus trying to spend that on one or two influencers that are going to have mass reach and appeal, but may not drive the bottom line results you’re hoping for.”
Some brands have begun establishing in-house creators programs, like Aerie’s Realmakers Creator Community, to increase the sense of community among brands, creators and their audiences. Leveraging creators with smaller followings can help UGC feel more authentic. These programs can also offer more consistent touch points, as brands can push out prompts to hundreds or thousands of micro- and mid-creators rather than having to reach out to larger creators to organize specific campaigns.
“Creator marketing is becoming much more community-driven,” Stacey McCormick, CMO at Aerie, told Digiday in June 2026. “Creators are especially responding to the sense of access and community feeling like they’re genuinely part of the brand ecosystem rather than just participating in a campaign.”
The executives Modern Retail spoke with for this report said that their clients primarily work with creators to build trust and establish authentic relationships.
“In all of the client conversations that I’ve had at least for this year, the idea of trust has come up most frequently, and the idea that you can use creators and influencers to piggyback off of that existing audience, and [build] trust for your own brand has been something that is especially appealing,” said Harry Browne, vp of TV, audio and display innovation at Tinuiti.
UM’s Greenberger said creators lend credibility and authenticity to a brand in the same way that a celebrity might. “It gives consumers more insight into the experiences our brands are creating, some of the partnerships and sponsorships they’re creating,” she said. “It really just helps a lot of our brands bring consumers one step deeper into the brand versus what a traditional spot can have.”
As agencies increasingly integrate AI into their operations, the technology is creating both efficiencies and new expenses. According to research from Ramp, about 31% of companies spend more than $10,000 per month on AI, underscoring the growing financial commitment to the technology.
An agency’s bill for third-party AI tool costs, for example, could include subscriptions to tools like Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s suite of AI-powered offerings, tokens to operate those tools and employee costs associated with their use.
About half of agency respondents to Modern Retail’s survey (45%) said that AI has cost about as much as they expected to implement. However, nearly one-third of respondents (31%) said AI has cost a little or significantly more than expected to deploy, while almost one-quarter (24%) said AI has cost a little less than expected.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of agencies said they are seeing cost savings from implementing AI. Seventy percent of respondents said implementing AI has saved costs by making tasks more efficient, while 17% of respondents said AI has saved costs by replacing roles at the company.
As agencies increase their AI usage, those efficiency gains may eventually reach a ceiling, making it harder to offset the technology’s growing expenses. Go Fish Digital, for example, is tracking AI expenses at the employee level to better understand where costs are accumulating, according to Dweck.
“We use AI to build dashboards that track token usage by the penny for every single employee,” Dweck explained. “When someone is building something meaningful that is costing us a lot, we’ll ship it off, have it actually developed and live in a native site so that way we’re not accruing token usage for things we’ve developed software-wise.”
While tracking token usage can help agencies manage expenses, the proliferation of AI tools across teams is creating another challenge: figuring out which investments are worth maintaining and how to connect them across an organization.
“Every small agency and team is building a tool — the strategy team is building a tool and the investment team is building a tool,” Novus’ Pepin said. “Now somebody in central will have to unify and connect all of that, and figure out which ones are real versus a waste of time.”
Beyond managing AI tools and their associated costs, agencies are also finding ways to use the technology to streamline internal operations and maintain continuity across client accounts.
“We’ve used AI really effectively for client memory [when employees leave] — ingesting as much information inside of the marketplace, but also call notes, recordings, workflows, to-do lists, all those things to help our day-to-day teams prioritize,” Dweck said. “It helps fill that knowledge gap while also ensuring that clients aren’t seeing much if any degradation in service when we have to give an account to someone due to a loss on the client side.”
The question of which AI investments will deliver meaningful value also extends to newer applications such as agentic buying. Browne said Tinuiti is using AI tools to build agents for planning and audience discovery, while exploring how they might be applied to buying.
“Agentic buying is a big topic, but it’s a pretty ill-defined one right now. There’s a lot more press releases than substance,” Browne said. “We’ve been using tools to build agents to start doing some of the planning and audience discovery on our end … setting up MCP [model context protocol] connections to different DSPs and SSPs … trying to find where the actual value is in that kind of a framework.”
Agencies are also finding ways to monetize their AI investments through new products, services and capabilities. Fifty-nine percent of survey respondents said their company is monetizing AI by offering new products, 34% said their company is offering strategic roadmaps or audits for clients’ AI products, and 31% of respondents said their company is monetizing AI by offering it as an additional service to existing products for an extra fee.
At Go Fish Digital, Dweck said the agency has developed new generative creative capabilities for clients, including AI-generated avatars and tools to optimize e-commerce and retail media feeds. “We’ve actually built out a pretty robust, generative, creative solution using stitching together a bunch of different AI tools,” he said. “We have built avatars for clients. We’re using AI to optimize feeds and put video and imagery into feeds, so it powers far better performance in all e-commerce and retail environments.”
UM’s Greenberger said AI technology has helped her team develop AI-generated representations of target consumers and conduct simulated focus groups. “From a strategy and planning standpoint, in terms of culling audience insights, creating synthetic audiences to be able to do focus groups and get more quick real-time learnings, there’s been a lot of use cases for that,” Greenberger said.
Agencies’ use of AI is also extending into search, where the technology is changing how consumers find information and brands. Seventy-seven percent of survey respondents said they plan to increase budget allocation for AI search and GEO search strategies in the next 12 months.
Among those who said they plan to increase budget allocation for AI search and GEO strategies, the majority of respondents said that the budget will come from general marketing (40%), followed by traditional search (20%).
The planned increases in budget allocation for AI search and the fact that some of that money is expected to come from traditional search marks a pointed shift in how brands are allocating spend as brand discovery through traditional search decreases.
Go Fish Digital’s Dweck said the development of ads within LLMs could create new opportunities for brands amid qualified traffic declines. “Site content still matters, but we are cautioning advertisers that there is this gold rush coming to AI search,” Dweck said. “We really think massive adoption is going to be predicated on whichever LLM cracks the most innovative form of ad.”
UM’s Greenberger said clients are thinking not only about how to advertise in AI-powered search environments, but also about how to make their owned properties more visible in AI-generated responses. “What they are needing to figure out is not just how would they show up there from an ad perspective, but how do they optimize their sites and their owned and operated properties so that when a response comes from an LLM, they are being pulled into there in a positive and factual way,” Greenberger said.
The shift toward AI search is part of a broader reassessment of media budgets, though not every reallocation is going toward AI. Dweck said some clients that move money out of paid search are redirecting it toward channels with greater opportunities to reach consumers.
“There’s just too much of a tax being paid because 60% of clicks have evaporated in general, especially on the organic side. So, advertisers have had to spend more to just regain traffic and qualified users,” Dweck said. “It’s shifts from things that were flashier and nice to have versus media plan imperatives that are actually going to perform well or we know we’re going to get in front of consumers in a way that’s going to drive a meaningful outcome — either stop the scroll or lead to some form of event or engagement.”