This is an excerpt from our Glossy+ Research report The 2026 guide to holiday marketing strategies, including A-Frame Brands, Mastercard and Ritual, which found that brands and retailers plan to adjust the marketing tactics they’ll use during the 2026 holiday season in comparison to those they used in 2025.

This is an excerpt from our Glossy+ Research report The 2026 guide to holiday marketing strategies, including A-Frame Brands, Mastercard and Ritual, which found that brands and retailers are less focused on using their owned physical retail stores and owned e-commerce sites during the 2026 holiday season than they were in 2025.

As creator marketing becomes a fixture in many brands’ marketing strategies, creators’ roles are shifting and expanding. To measure the impact creator content has on brand campaigns, Glossy+ Research analyzed the engagement levels on leading creators’ social media campaigns.

Glossy+ Research examines how 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.

As CTV matures, the streaming ad industry is entering a period of change. Media giants like The Walt Disney Company and Paramount are pursuing mergers that have the potential to reduce market fragmentation and strengthen scale. At the same time, advertisers are reevaluating how they measure success across streaming platforms...

As the retail media landscape evolves, marketers are rethinking where they invest, how they measure success and which retail media networks deserve a larger share of budget. Although they once viewed retail media primarily as a lower-funnel performance channel, marketers are expanding their ad businesses beyond sponsored product listings into...

Glossy+ Research examined which commerce channels are dominating marketers’ holiday strategies, what discounts brands and retailers are offering, and what revenue expectations are guiding their marketing decisions ahead of the critical fourth quarter.

As brands expand their creator marketing strategies, they are increasingly tapping influencers for more than just awareness campaigns. Many are partnering with creators to help drive seasonal campaigns, support product launches and, in some cases, even help develop products.

Advertisers are embracing AI for social media and retail media marketing. However, they are slower to adopt AI for influencer and CTV marketing. This is according to a Glossy+ Research survey of more than 100 marketing professionals in first-quarter 2026.