What Advertising Trends to Expect in 2126

It’s the new year, so you’re about to see a ton of blogs titled “How to Market in 2026” and “What Advertising Trends Are Here to Stay in 2026,” and blah blah blah. Every agency and their momma is writing blogs like that, and every CMO is reading them, because everyone wants to be on the “cutting edge” and “ahead of the curve.” It’s a spirited effort, but frankly, too shortsighted. If you want to actually be at the forefront of the industry, you need to start thinking about the advertising landscape further into the future. 100 years into the future to be exact. You laugh, 100 years in the future will be here before you know it. 

The future belongs to those who worry about it way in advance. While every LinkedInfluencer is writing 4,000-word posts about how 2026 is the perfect year to “grind like you’re in your 20s, but think like you’re in your 30s” or something like that, we will be putting them to shame by looking a full 100 years ahead.

Autonomous Agents as Consumers

We’re already starting to see the beginnings of this, with stories like this one from the Today Show detailing how people are starting to use AI agents to help them with their holiday shopping. The purpose of AI agents is to act on behalf of their users, and of course buying a present that says “I really know you” for someone you love is one of the first menial tasks to be outsourced to robots.

By 2126, agents will have near-perfect ideas of the types of gifts their users would buy and have incredible context windows that contain all the nuances of their relationships with family and friends. If a user has a mutual attraction with someone in their friend group but both are too chicken to say anything, the agent knows and will find the perfect gift for that exact situation. If the user’s estranged father has recently re-entered their life and tried to atone for everything they did wrong and there are a lot of bottled-up emotions but they're willing to give this relationship another shot, the agent knows. They will find the perfect gift for that exact situation.

Optimizing websites for AI agents is increasingly becoming a focus today, but it will be crucial in the year 2126, as online shopping will be done almost exclusively by agents. And agents will have been developed past the digital-only space as humanoid robots can eventually act as agents in the real world on behalf of their users. That’s right, a not insignificant portion of in-person shopping will be done by agents, their robotic frames able to change into the dimensions of the user, or whoever they’re shopping for. They can try on clothes to see if they fit their owner's actual body after eating Thanksgiving leftovers for three weeks. 

A key focus for advertisers will be to create in-person and experiential marketing that appeals to the design sensibilities of both humans and humanoid robotic agents. Signage should always include a small, nearly imperceptible QR code that the multimodal sensors of the robots will be able to detect and give them a complete breakdown of each store’s inventory, prices, and seasonal deals. 

All the time these agents spend out in the world and all their interactions with humanity will be incorporated into their training data and will start to give them differences in their personalities. So customer service will actually be more important than ever as a need to accommodate the potentially extreme differences in agent personalities. Sure most may be perfectly courteous, but there will always be the occasional Karen bot who is inclined to yell at a minimum wage retail worker because their data was poisoned by seeing too many such interactions. It will be crucial to remember that behind each Karen bot who is even more unwieldy than a human Karen because they’re incapable of empathy, is a sale to be made.

Hyper-Adaptive Creative

In 2026, and every year up until this point where there have been ads, once you create an ad and put it out into the world, that’s more or less the end of the creative process. Today, there’s of course the common practice of A-B testing, which is just a fancy way of saying you put out two different versions of the same ad and see which one gets better results. Then refine it until you arrive at the perfect ad.

This is an effective and time-tested technique, but it requires the pesky steps of collecting data and making revisions. These problems will have long been solved by 2126. Our projections show that by 2045, A-B testing will give way to A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-and-Z testing (patent pending). Generative AI allows creatives to more quickly make slightly different versions of the same ad, allowing advertisers to test more and more quickly arrive at the most optimized versions.

By 2126, they won’t even have a name for this process because they will have run out of letters of the alphabet. Instead of testing ads, a superintelligent AI that has synthesized centuries of geographic data, psychological profiles, employment histories, and family relationships to optimize ads for any target demographic, no matter how small, before a campaign launches.

Today, a client might tell us that they want their campaign targeted at 25- to 34-year-old men in the greater Jackson metro, and we will do our best to make an ad that appeals to that group. In 2126, we’ll be able to have the perfect ad for the 29-year-old, college-educated, white-collar, left-handed, upper-middle-class upbringing, they stopped keeping up with the Marvel movies after phase three, always order the Caesar salad instead of the house salad demographic before it’s even out the door. No refining necessary. Everyone will only see ads that are perfectly crafted for them.

Sensory Marketing

So much of advertising is about invoking a feeling in the viewer. We might want them to feel a certain emotion, or a desire for a product, or motivation to do a certain task. This is currently accomplished through the incredibly limiting mediums that we have at our disposal; namely visual and auditory. People can see the visuals that we put together, whether that be graphics, logos, videos, or photographs, and they can hear the music and voice-over. All of these elements are meant to create a feeling in the viewer, but by 2126, we’ll finally be able to cut out the middleman and just make them feel what you want through all their senses.

When you watch an ad for Coors Light, you see the giant can-shaped train plowing through the snow, and you make the connection in your mind to the feeling of being refreshed. But in 2126, your brain won’t even have to do that much work. What if you watched a Coors ad on a hot summer day and then you actually felt cooler, more refreshed, and more relaxed? With the everpresent microbots in everyone's bodies connecting to nerve endings and regulating brain chemistry, now you can. 

Ready to start planning for your advertising future, both immediate and incredibly distant? Schedule an appointment and let’s get started. We can talk over coffee or computer chips that go into your temples and give you the sensation of drinking coffee.