Multichannel Optimization

Lowe’s in September 2026 promoted Chief Marketing Officer Jen Wilson from senior vice president to executive vice president, adding digital commerce to a portfolio that already includes marketing, retail media, loyalty and personalization, per details shared with Marketing Dive. 

The addition of digital commerce via the retailer’s website and third-party Marketplace offering to Wilson’s remit comes as online sales remain a bright spot amid a tough climate that has dragged on Lowe’s earnings. While comparable sales increased 0.2% in Q2 2026, online sales were up 15.7%.

The development also speaks to the continued evolution of the CMO role across industries. Chief marketers are increasingly asked to add responsibilities around commerce and customer experience as technology like artificial intelligence disrupts advertising and the economy at large.

For Lowe’s, the move reflects how the retailer is working to provide a more unified journey across channels. More than 80% of all home improvement shopping starts online, Wilson told Marketing Dive, and a seamless experience works hand-in-hand with a similar approach to customer data.

“It was really important for Lowe’s, and it’s important for our customer, to be able to deliver that consistent experience,” the executive said. “When we unify the view of the customer, we’re unifying the same shared audiences and how we want to create a personalized experience for those audiences.”

Personalization has been a marketing imperative for years, but many retailers — Lowe’s included, Wilson said — still personalize by channel, whether in CRM, paid social or several parts of the customer journey, but not all of it together.

“Real transformation is going to happen when we’re creating omnichannel, end-to-end personalization, and to do that, we have to have it all in one place,” she said.

Evolving the organization

Wilson has spent more than 20 years at Lowe’s and was appointed as CMO in June 2024. With her latest promotion, she will serve on the home improvement retailer’s executive leadership team. Wilson has held a variety of leadership roles across both marketing and merchandising, including leading the paint business, and has had a front-row seat to the evolution of retail marketing. 

“The notion that the funnel is evaporating in front of us is true,” Wilson said. “I don’t want to say that traditional advertising is gone. It’s still very important to be able to harmonize a 360-degree advertising campaign, but there’s so much more to the new age or new era of marketing.”

The evolution of social media is one of the changes putting more revenue-driving responsibilities on CMOs. Once seen as a largely upper-funnel tactic, social now has more lower-funnel functions, connecting directly to commerce through avenues including affiliate marketing and creator networks. 

Along with the creator network that Lowe’s launched in 2025, Wilson has led the development of a loyalty program and a retail media network — two revenue-driving functions that speak to modern CMO remits. Experience with profit and loss statements throughout her Lowe’s career has been crucial for adapting to modern marketing realities, Wilson explained.

“It’s not ‘I watched a TV ad and then I saw a print ad and then I drove to the store,’” she said of customer experiences. “Those days are gone, and it’s all a big mashup now. It’s really about driving revenue, driving customer lifetime value and driving more share of wallet.”

As she adds digital to her portfolio, Wilson’s conversations with other executives across Lowe’s have focused on unifying teams and changing ways of working. A focus on customer data can help break down silos as marketers take a horizontal view of their organizations. Data-obsessed CMOs can answer not only what customers think of the brand and its advertising, but also what they think of the brand across the entire experience.

“If I can take ownership of that experience end to end, and help inform and work with other teams to close on those broken promises, then you become viewed as somebody who’s championing the customer, and no one’s going to keep walls up for somebody who’s championing the customer,” she said.

Prepared for growth

The best marketing is still limited by factors outside a CMO’s control. Lowe’s in August 2026 cut its full-year outlook as DIY customers continue to face a poor housing market, elevated interest rates and other pressures.

As Lowe’s prepares for cyclical tailwinds to change, Wilson is looking for new growth opportunities in the additions to her portfolio. Lowe’s Marketplace continues to expand its assortment, yielding revenue in new categories like above-ground pools and demonstrating benefits in unexpected ways.

“Wearing a marketer hat, when you expand your assortment, you expand your SEO value, and your visibility goes up with natural search,” Wilson noted. “Then you have the efficiency of being able to reduce some of your paid search spend, because now you’re more visible.”

Marketplace is also helping Lowe’s identify new customer segments, including a high-end customer that is buying expensive items like premium faucets and chandeliers that are not sold in stores but are available via the third-party offering.

“You start to recognize opportunities in real time based off of where natural demand is coming in,” Wilson said. “The opportunities are just limitless, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for what’s ahead.”

Marketing attracts the most creative minds, but even with top talent on hand, organizations can still fail to deliver. That’s because they’ve built the wrong system, then hired great people into it.

This is the structural problem that no new product launch or campaign brief will fix, and it’s becoming a significantly more costly problem now that artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed where and how consumers encounter brands.

In Deloitte and Duke University’s 2026 “CMO Survey” report, the most cited capability gap by marketing leaders wasn't a missing skill. Instead, more than one in five respondents described the largest gap as the missing people, time and budget needed to put existing skills to work. That's the result of the holes that form in a siloed organization. Each function gets resourced to do its own work, but the work between functions doesn't get resourced at all.

For years, the linear funnel gave fragmented organizations — from product to marketing to sales — a pass. Audiences moved in predictable sequences: search, site, conversion. A brand could paper over internal disconnects with enough media spend. This is no longer the case. Discovery now happens across AI-generated answers, social, PR, community and product surfaces, often simultaneously. If the organization behind it is fragmented, audiences feel it.

No one decides to build silos

Organizational silos are rarely the result of bad decisions — they’re created when fast growth ensues.

When a company scales quickly, the instinct is to hire specialized leaders and give each one ownership of their function. That’s not wrong; deep expertise matters. The problem is what happens next: product tests relevance against current audience, brand seeks value props for audience growth, performance optimizes for efficiency, PR earns coverage. Each team does its job well, but no one owns the system, and silos stand in the way of truly integrated impact.

By the time fragmentation becomes visible, the silos are load-bearing. Realigning the processes and ownership built around them is slow, expensive and politically complicated. The costs of this fragmentation are real, but they rarely show up on a dashboard. Value that never gets created doesn't read as a loss, it just never shows up at all.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades building an integrated marketing function, and the most clarifying thing I can say about that experience: Integration doesn’t only happen by getting the right people in a room, it happens by designing a system where those people share accountability for the same outcomes.

What changed for us was simple to describe but harder to execute. We brought market insights into product development early enough to shape it, and we tied earned, owned and paid goals to the same business outcomes. Once those two connections exist, the impact that follows becomes possible.

It’s about the signal, not the spend

Brands that win in an AI-driven environment won’t be the ones that spend the most or publish the most. They’ll be the ones that feel consistent across areas like AI answers, social, earned media and product surfaces because their organization is designed to produce an interconnected signal.

I think of this as surround sound — not an omnichannel media strategy, not a campaign alignment exercise, but an organizational design that allows brand, performance, PR, product marketing, lifecycle and design to reinforce and complement each other in real time. When that system works, audiences don’t experience channels. They experience a force multiplier. The impact of that coherent brand signal reaches consumers and also opens doors with business partners. It compounds into B2B credibility that no media plan anticipates.

This requires one leader with genuine line of sight across all functions — and the authority to make tradeoffs. A single point of integration with real accountability.

This is harder to build than it sounds, and it takes longer than most organizations want to allow, but constraints clarify. When you can’t outspend the competition, you have to outthink them. That means going deep on consumer understanding, concentrating resources where they’ll have the most impact, and building the kind of organizational coherence that lets you move fast when an unanticipated opportunity opens up. When a product team treats marketing as more than a post-launch promotion, the audience and market dynamics that shape the roadmap must come early on in order to influence it.

In a world where audiences encounter brands nonlinearly and AI continues to reshape discovery, leaders who will build durable marketing organizations won’t be the ones with the deepest channel expertise. Instead, they’ll be the ones who understand how functions connect, where integration creates value and what it costs when it doesn’t.

I didn’t build an integrated team because it was an elegant solution. I built it to maximize our impact and amplify our efforts. In a category where trust is the primary purchase driver, coherence is not optional. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how beneficial and durable that architecture would prove to be as the environment shifted around it.

For leaders inheriting organizations where silos are already established, the path is harder but not different. The question isn’t whether to integrate, it’s whether you understand clearly enough what you’re working toward. Companies that deliberately break through in this environment won’t be the ones with the most channels.

The org chart, it turns out, is the strategy.

Sponsored content

By Sitecore

A campaign can look coordinated on a planning calendar and still feel disconnected to a customer. An email promises one benefit, the landing page emphasizes another and the app shows information that has not caught up with the latest update.

Multichannel optimization depends in part on how well the content behind those experiences works together. Marketing teams need approved messages they can reuse, the flexibility to adapt them to different contexts and a practical way to learn from performance.

Your content management system plays an important role in that work. It shapes how content is created, governed, delivered and improved. These five questions can help your team identify where your current approach supports a connected experience and where friction gets in the way.

Can you reuse content and adapt it to each channel

A product description, campaign message or customer story may appear in several experiences. Reusable content components can help teams carry approved information into new contexts while adapting the format and presentation to suit each audience.

Follow one campaign message from its original brief to a website, app or another connected destination. Can teams find the approved version and understand what they can change? Look for places where manual copying creates competing versions. Shared content should help preserve accurate information while giving each experience the detail and format it needs.

Can teams keep updates coordinated

Content reuse works best when people know who owns an update, who approves it and where it needs to appear. Shared workflows, visual editing tools and clear permissions can help marketers, developers and regional teams work together.

Think about the last time a product detail or campaign message changed. How did the team identify the affected content, route changes for approval and check the published result? Central governance should clarify which elements must remain consistent and where local teams have flexibility. Those everyday decisions shape how reliably a brand shows up across touchpoints.

Can AI support the work within clear boundaries

Creating variations for different audiences and markets can put pressure on content teams. AI can support tasks such as drafting, tagging and translation, using shared context that includes brand guidelines and approved information.

Start with one repetitive task. What context would AI need to produce a useful result? Who would review it, and who could authorize publication? Clear permissions, source visibility and approval steps help keep people accountable as automation expands. Connecting AI to the team's existing workflow also helps reviewers assess new content against the same standards used elsewhere.

Can content reach the experiences customers use

As customers encounter your brand through more touchpoints, your CMS needs to work with the tools and delivery systems behind those experiences. Flexible delivery options and open integrations can help approved content reach websites, apps and other connected destinations.

AI discovery adds another consideration. Understanding where your brand is mentioned or cited can reveal opportunities to make content clearer and more useful. Ask how those findings would become content updates. Marketing and IT should also discuss which connections already work, where workarounds are multiplying and what support is needed to maintain them as channels evolve.

Can insights lead to a better experience

The experience after a click should help people continue the journey that brought them there. Site speed, content performance and customer behavior can reveal where that journey needs attention. Personalization and experimentation can help teams explore what works for different audiences.

Choose one path, such as an email leading to a resource page. Does the page fulfill the message's promise? Can people find what they expected and complete their next step? Agree on a measure of success, test a focused change and review the result. Use what you learn to inform the next content improvement.

Start with one campaign and bring its content owners together to discuss these questions. A shared view of the gaps can help teams prioritize improvements across the experiences they manage.

Explore Sitecore's CMS Buyer's Guide for a closer look at the nine capabilities that support connected content and digital experiences, with practical evaluation tables to help you assess your needs.

Get the CMS Buyer's Guide

Digital advertising revenue grew 13.9% year over year to a record $294.6 billion in 2025 despite economic headwinds and a lack of cyclical events such as the Olympics, according to the latest annual report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC.

Video, creator content and performance media were three pillars of growth while artificial intelligence reshaped discovery, creative production and monetization. Creator advertising grew at a faster clip than the overall ad market last year while search saw its rate of growth cool.

The research, now in its 30th year, noted that many of the same trends that are driving momentum for digital advertising are leading to further consolidation among leading global platforms as marketers require scale, richer first-party data and integrated commerce capabilities for success. 

The IAB’s latest assessment of the internet ad economy finds social and creator-led marketing continuing a steady ascent and becoming more institutionalized within marketing organizations following a period that saw many large advertisers shift more budgets toward those areas. 

Social media advertising was up 32.6% YoY to $117.7 billion in 2025, representing a rate of growth roughly in line with the year prior. The channel, which now commands the largest share of the total digital market at 40%, is tipping the balance of power among the leading platforms. 

Instagram owner Meta is expected to surpass Google — the longstanding top player in digital — in terms of both U.S. and global ad revenue for the first time in 2026, according to a recent Emarketer forecast. Search, the bedrock channel of Google’s ads business, is on the wane, with its rate of growth declining nearly five percentage points compared to 2024. Search’s overall share of the pie is still sizable at $114.2 billion in annual revenue, but the AI takeover is rapidly altering both user habits and monetization strategy.

Creator content, meanwhile, has become enshrined as a “core media channel” for advertisers versus an add-on, the IAB said. The creator economy generated $37 billion in spending in 2025 and is on track to hit $44 billion in 2026 as brands shift from one-off campaign partnerships to an always-on approach that weds micro, affiliate and performance-focused creators.

“Brands are embedding creators into the foundations of their media strategies, operational workflows and even product development,” the IAB said in the report, later noting that ad agencies are also developing more well-rounded creator capabilities.        

Creators are seeing a bump in value for a few reasons beyond follower counts. More creators are tapping into commerce media to drive transactions, tying brand and awareness building more closely to performance. Commerce media on the whole rose 18% in 2025 to $63.4 billion, though its rate of growth was down five percentage points from 2024. 

Additionally, more consumers are attracted to the human qualities of creators as feeds are flooded with low-quality, AI-generated content, also known as “slop.” AI is causing other problems for marketers, with over 50% of global web traffic now estimated to stem from bot activity, according to the IAB. The trade group used the AI transparency crisis as a call for more industry measurement and interoperability standards, including through its recently unveiled Project Eidos initiative. 

Other noteworthy trends identified by the IAB include video — a category that includes connected TV, social video and online video — increasing revenue 25.4% YoY to $78 billion in 2025, an acceleration in growth over the year prior. Video game and esports revenue also saw a massive bump in growth, at 22%, over 2024 due to more robust in-game advertising formats, higher demand and greater measurement sophistication.   

Even as some of the sector’s underlying dynamics shift in significant ways, digital advertising does not appear primed for a major shakeup. After brands diversified some of their media spending to midsize firms in 2024, power again is consolidating among established heavyweights. The top 10 global media platforms increased their share of digital ad revenue by 3.4% in 2025, commanding 84.1% of the total market, while spending allotted to smaller and mid-sized platforms shrunk.

Get ready, marketers, there’s a new industry model in town, and it’s built for the age of extreme media fragmentation, cultural noise and artificial intelligence. 

Connected content is an emerging “creative paradigm” that is “multi-layered and multi-dimensional where an integrated ecosystem of signals, reactions, adaptations and responses continually shapes how a brand is experienced over time,” as laid out by Omnicom Media Intelligence, the agency’s research arm, in a July 2026 report.

Put simply, connected content is a model to better integrate fragmented media, commerce, creator marketing and other channels into content creation and development for more effective campaigns, according to Omnicom Media Group Chief Intelligence Officer Joanna O’Connell.

“It’s understanding all of the complexity and how consumer behavior underpins everything we do, because that’s the world that brands are operating in,” O’Connell said.

“We’re kidding ourselves if we think that, as marketers, we’re controlling all of the signals,” Omnicom Production North America CEO Alissa Hansen said. “Before, we had a fairly designed user journey, fairly defined channels. We could set the agenda, the strategy, the creative, the platform, and we could learn from it. Now consumers are putting as many signals out there as we are.”

Connecting the dots

A challenge for marketers trying to navigate the connected content landscape is that many of the signals they’re seeing point to consumers who are fatigued by non-engaging and non-relevant advertising. Per Omnicom’s research, 80% of consumers said a bad ad is worse than no ad at all.

“Most consumers — nearly everybody — aim to ignore ads. And they’re quite successful at tuning ads out,” Pamela Marsh, managing director for primary research at Omnicom Media, said. “For the consumers who are noticing the ads, there are so many formats that are annoying to them, and there are some formats that can turn that annoyance into [active] avoidance.”

Yet, relevant advertising and contextual connections can have a positive business impact: 84% of consumers connect with ads they believe are relatable to their personal experiences. Seventy-six percent are drawn to ads that seem relevant to the content they are consuming and 78% report feeling connected to ads that appear at the right moment. Perhaps most importantly, 30% of consumers believe a better-quality ad experience increases their likelihood of purchasing products.

In that context, an ad that runs during a mass sporting event like the World Cup should naturally look different from one that might run during a Netflix binge-watch, Hansen explained.

“[A sporting event] is a great way to capture people’s attention and their emotional availability in a shared experience. And that’s a moment where you go big,” Hansen said. “But that’s not the same moment as when they’re leaning back watching ‘Bridgerton’ and they get a shoppable ad for something that’s reflective of the wardrobe style of one of their favorite characters.”

The approach is less “spray and pray” and more “catch and release,” Hansen said. In the case of connected content, the marketer is catching signals across four dimensions — consumer, commerce, culture and category — and releasing relevant content that’s “attuned to that opportunity,” she added.

Embracing fluidity

While that may seem like a spiral to endless versioning, what’s really required is a shift in thinking about how creative is developed and deployed. The current model of campaign development is still built for legacy systems. There is a central idea that is usually expressed in an anthem or hero commercial, and then it is broken down into smaller bits and pieces to run in other channels. 

“It’s simply taking an expression of the overarching asset and atomizing it into tiny little pieces that can go on TikTok or that can go in Amazon or some retail environment,” O’Connell said.

However, pulling from just one dimension can be limiting.

“You need to consider all of them to deliver on the [promise] to fit the purpose and feel right in the moment, every moment,” O’Connell noted.

Taking a different approach will require some rethinking and retooling from the industry. The current model views creative development as an endpoint. Once the elements in support of the big idea have been created, they’re passed over to media for execution, and then results are reported back through. In a connected content model, the process is much more fluid and aided by systems that are constantly learning and improving, including AI.

“It’s almost more like a living, breathing, constantly adapting and evolving model based on how consumers in the world actually behave,” O’Connell said. “It’s a move from single agents doing single, siloed things to connected agentic systems across different dimensional layers … like a starburst.”

That approach can’t be managed entirely by humans and requires technological investment and learning to bring the model to life. 

“Moving to a system of continuous learning, change and adaptation — you cannot do that without these technologies,” O’Connell said.

Still, large movements begin with tiny steps, and some changes are simple. For instance, marketers could begin looking at creative and media as co-equal partners that are briefed at the same time and encouraged to work together throughout the development process, O’Connell explained. Undertaking a simple audit can be another move in the right direction.

“Understand where there are gaps in your current creative production process, where it breaks down, where it might be siloed,” O’Connell said. “Seeing those gaps is how you identify areas of opportunity, and that’s when you can build a roadmap of what [a connected content model] could look like.”

These adaptations need to be made sooner rather than later, because the tools to enable connected content are already available, and they’re only going to get better. 

“Culture moves too fast. People move too fast. Second-screening is real,” O’Connell said. “You can’t just rely on basic consistency if your goal is to be right in the moment, every moment.”

The first half of 2026 has been one of significant changes for marketers. Artificial intelligence continues to demand substantial investment, leading to increasing pressure on CMOs to produce results and reduce costs. While AI shakes things up, sports and social media remain relevant and effective consumer touchpoints. 

Below, Marketing Dive has brought together some of the most impactful and pertinent data for marketers collected in the first half of 2026.

Budgets in 2026 make up an average of 7.8% of company revenue, down from 11% in 2020. (Gartner)

While budgets remain relatively stable, rising costs means marketers are still expected to do more with less. Paid media spending has grown 12.5% in the last two years alone, with 31.4% of budgets now being spent on media. (Gartner) 

Labor spending by marketers has increased year over year, with 24.5% of budgets being allocated toward personnel, up from 21.9% in 2025. Fifty-six percent of marketers plan to increase spending on consumption-based martech models, despite their contributions to financial turbulence. However, martech’s budget allocation overall dropped from 22.4% in 2025 to 19.4% in 2026. Agencies spending has also fallen from 20.7% in 2025 to 19.2% in 2026. (Gartner)

CEOs are also expecting more out of the marketing department, with 94% of CMOs saying expectations have risen considerably in the past two years, largely driven by increased demands around artificial intelligence. (BCG)

As consumers increasingly utilize and become comfortable with AI, marketers need to ensure they are setting themselves up for success in a changing search and discovery environment. The majority of LLM visibility is supported by long-term brand building while marketing spending drives only 22% of visibility. (WARC) 

AI is changing how the marketing industry works. Nearly 100% of CMOs in 2026 say AI is transforming their jobs and 42% admit to using generative AI to assist with human tasks. Just 8% report running campaigns with multiple autonomous agents. (BCG) 

An average of 15.3% of marketing budgets is being directed toward AI, with 70% of CMOs saying the technology is a top priority. (Gartner)
 

Influencers remain a source of product discovery for many consumers in 2026. The number of consumers who have made a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation rises to 73% for millennials and 81% for Gen Z. (Sprout Social)

One-third of consumers find a new product through a creator at least once a month and 22% discover new products weekly. (Sprout Social)

When it comes to who social media users follow, only 17% check a profile’s follower count prior to deciding if they are going to follow them. Subject matter is a top consideration for 47% of users while brand partnerships are a top consideration for 29%. (Sprout Social)

Consumers are more likely to go to a smaller influencer for product discovery, with 36% saying it's a primary reason they follow the account, versus the 32% who follow high-profile influencers with a large following for product discovery. (Sprout Social)

Expanded broadcast and digital options have led to viewership growth this year across sports such as auto racing (44%), basketball (27%) and golf (12%). (Nielsen)

NHL regular season viewership is up 25% year over year, averaging 540,000 viewers per game. The league’s TikTok following also grew 83% over the course of the 2025-2026 season. The Professional Women’s Hockey League’s first nationally televised game on March 28, 2026, saw an approximate viewership of 133,000, with 45% of those being women over the age of 18. (Nielsen)

Hockey has largely been boosted by cultural relevance. Both the men's and women’s teams won gold at the 2026 Olympics, contributing to hockey’s relevancy. Additionally, hockey-centric shows such as HBO’s “Heated Rivalry" and Prime Video’s “Off Campus” have both seen significant viewership success, further driving interest in the sport.

While CTV commanded the largest share of ad spending in the first quarter of 2026, web was close behind with 42.3% while mobile trailed in distant third with 8.2%. (ANA)

Heading into 2026, ad-supported TV accounted for 63.8% of viewing time for consumers ages 18 to 49. Of the time spent with ad-supported TV, 66.7% of it was streaming, of which 81.1% was on ad-supported tiers of platforms such as YouTube, Amazon Prime and Paramount+. The remaining time spent on ad-supported streaming was spent on free ad-supported TV platforms such as Tubi. (Nielsen)

Linear TV accounted for 33.4% of ad-supported TV time for the 18 to 49 demographic, largely due to live sports and the news. Cable dramas and movies were also key sources of linear TV viewing. (Nielsen)
 

Google is updating its marketing mix model Meridian with new agentic artificial intelligence capabilities, among other changes to its measurements suite, according to a September 2026 blog post. Meridian’s agentic enhancements are designed to help marketers better audit the quality of their data, more easily resolve errors and guide model building in real time. Google is also souping up Meridian on the back end to increase speed and efficiency. 

In addition, marketers can now factor more brand-building signals directly into Meridian, providing a clearer window into the performance of upper-funnel channels like TV and out of home. Google says the changes support its efforts to turn measurement interfaces from a “reactive report card” into something more dynamic. 

Google’s agentic makeover for its advertising products is extending to Meridian, its open-source MMM for gauging the impact of media by channel. Like many AI-powered upgrades, the Meridian changes are focused on delivering better outcomes and efficiency for brands, including through what the blog post described as “significant updates” on the back end. 

At the same time, Google is expanding Meridian’s scope to be able to analyze more upper-funnel brand-building activities, including TV and OOH billboard campaigns, which are typically harder to measure than traditional digital marketing.     

The search giant also said it is making Meridian GeoX, a publisher-agnostic incrementality solution for geographically-based measurement experiments, available globally following a beta test. Incorporating Meridian GeoX insights can boost the overall accuracy of MMM results, according to Google. 

The announcements follow Meridian partnering with Circana’s Liquid Mix, a self-serve AI MMM platform, in September 2026. Around its Marketing Live event in May 2026, Google outlined a vision for making its measurement products more unified and AI-ready.  

Google introduced Meridian in 2024 when third-party cookie deprecation was underway, with the MMM positioned as a more privacy-minded, durable measurement solution. Even as the cookie debate has faded — Google nixed plans to kill off the targeting tactic not long after Meridian’s announcement — marketers are still investing in alternative approaches, and Meridian has remained in the conversation amid renewed interest in MMMs.     

Some brands, including Alaska Airlines, have attested to the power of Meridian in uncovering new revenue opportunities. Still, the offering has stoked the usual concerns of Google effectively grading its own homework. 

Beyond Meridian, Google is making other tweaks to its measurement suite, including by directly integrating Data Manager into Google Analytics and Display & Video 360. GA and DV360 are also getting an enhanced conversions feature aimed at bolstering ad relevance while securing matching customer data. The company in addition is debuting a Data Strength Uplift Metric in Google Ads that calculates the conversions recovered by a marketer’s first-party data setup.

There is little question about the importance of social media to the marketing playbook. Not only does it allow brands to reach consumers where they are, it also provides marketers with a wealth of consumer insights, such as opinions about certain products and brand decisions.

Using social media as a data collection tool, or social intelligence, is considered an important factor for growth by 93% of industry professionals, but just 36% use it regularly to inform business decisions outside of marketing, leading to data silos that prevent important insights from reaching the right department, according to research from Sprout Social. 

“The big thing to remember is that consumer conversations are happening in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and so most organizations are still processing that information very slowly,” said Brittany Hennessy, vice president of social intelligence evangelism, Sprout Social. "That's really the pain social teams are feeling. They have seen something on social media, they have a recommendation, but they can't get the insight out of their team to the department that might need it.”

Sprout Social’s “The Intelligence Gap” is based on responses from 705 social media professionals based in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. The data was collected by research firm Panoplai between Feb. 20 and March 16, 2026.

Finding a needle in a haystack

While social media can be a treasure trove of consumer data, figuring out how to collect, use and apply that data can prove difficult. Shifting through the sheer volume of information and figuring out what is of actual value can be an arduous and imprecise task. On social media, a few negative comments from a small group of people can overshadow everything else and skew brand perceptions. This is where something like artificial intelligence can be useful to sort through the noise.

“Especially when you are in the middle of a crisis with a brand, you tend to respond to things in a very general way,” said Hennessy. “And sometimes you can make it worse…the best course of action might be no action at all.”

Not using data appropriately can create pitfalls for marketers, with 33% of survey respondents saying their organization didn’t react to or completely missed cultural shifts in the past 12-24 months due to the misuse of consumer insights. Thirty-one percent of respondents said they missed early signals of changing consumers preferences, 26% said they escalated customer issues that could have been solved earlier, 24% said they delayed product or messaging changes and 21% lost market share to a competitor. 

Despite missing signals, social intelligence could prove faster than traditional research methods, with 74% of respondents indicating they receive insights faster via social media. 

However, there is a lack of confidence among professionals. Just 17% of respondents feel "extremely confident” that their organizations are using social intelligence to its full potential. While that number jumps to 43% when looking at the owner or founder, it falls to just 10% for individual contributors. A quarter of respondents at the director level and above and 13% of managers feel confident their organization is making the most of social data. Additionally, 23% of respondents say social media is viewed by their organization as a communications channel, not a data collection tool. 

Whose job is it anyway?

Measurement ownership and data transparency continues to be a key point of focus for the marketing industry. Incorporating social intelligence into the picture could only further complicate things, with 13% of respondents saying organizational silos between departments keeps data collected via social media from being used in strategic decisions.  

There is also the question of who the job of social intelligence falls to. The largest percentage of organizations, 29%, said it was the responsibility of the social media team. Other departments listed include data and analytics (17%), the wider marketing team (15%), communications (10%), insights and research (10%), corporate strategy (9%) and the product team (5%), with only 6% saying it was a shared responsibility.

Usage of social data drops off outside of marketing departments, according to the study. Sixty-two percent of marketing departments and 41% of customer experience departments actively use data collected via social media. Over a quarter, 29%, of corporate strategy teams also use the data, along with product teams (28%), research and development (18%) and investor relations (15%).

“I don't think we have a measurement crisis. I think we have a translation issue,” said Hennessy. “Here's all this information, but what am I supposed to do with it? I have this metric, but what does that mean? And who else in my org is supposed to care? And so I think that's the issue, because without that, you don't have context around the data.”