Marketers are rapidly ramping up their investments in AI assistants, while consumers remain cautious about the recommendations these systems make. This emerged from Media Reactions 2026, Kantar’s annual study of more than 800 senior marketers and over 23,000 consumers worldwide.
Almost two-thirds (62%) of marketers said they expected generative AI to play an important role in brand and product recommendations. Seventy-five per cent wanted to invest more by 2027 in visibility within AI assistants. However, consumers are not yet moving at the same pace: worldwide, 32% used AI assistants to research brands and products and only 23% trusted the resulting recommendations.
According to Kantar, this limited trust can have various causes. Think of the general attitude towards AI, existing perceptions of a brand, the sources on which AI answers are based, and the way those answers are presented.
According to Gonca Bubani, global director media at Kantar, a lot of money is flowing into AI based on the assumption that people will use the technology in the way the industry expects. But marketers still do not sufficiently understand how people experience AI environments and what role these play within the broader media mix. “That does not have to stand in the way of experimentation, but it does call for careful testing, measurement and learning,” she said.
While AI and creator content continue to develop, marketers’ confidence is actually declining. They are struggling with an increasingly fragmented media mix and a growing volume of data: only half of advertisers have confidence in the balance between brand-building and performance marketing, compared with 60% in 2025.
Fifty-seven per cent said their own organisation used the right media mix, compared with 64% in 2025. Only 51% believed that the available data yielded enough usable insights to support marketing objectives.
Yet the strength of a campaign increasingly lies in the successful collaboration between channels in the media mix. Data from Kantar LIFT+ showed that the interplay between channels accounted for 43% of the total campaign effect between 2020 and 2025. In the period before 2014, that figure was 18%.
Planned investments in the creator economy are continuing to grow as attention shifts from big names to creators with engaged local communities. Micro-creators (66%) and nano-creators (61%) are the creator categories most marketers want to invest in. They are ahead of macro-creators (48%) and mega-influencers (42%).
This shift towards smaller, more targeted creators is in line with findings from Kantar’s Creator Game Plan published last June 2026. That report also showed that platform engagement and brand impact in creator campaigns go hand in hand in only one out of three cases. Those who select creators solely on engagement figures therefore run the risk of making the wrong choices.
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