The 2026 Reset - Rethinking The Year Ahead
Happy New Year, readers. Hope you feel rested and are ready to go. If you are reading this in Vegas, you should really be questioning your life choices right now (joking, of course). While compiling a new Spotify playlist of 2-minute songs, FPC has been ruminating on the past 12 months and looking forward to the year ahead.
The word of 2025 was very much “meh” for many. 2025 was a mix of tepid growth, monopolists getting stronger, macroeconomic headwinds and false tech dawns.
If this sounds downcast and depressing, it’s not supposed to be. The above really is an opportunity to reset and rethink how we all approach 2026.
We operate in a $1 trillion media market and a $5 trillion marketing market, so the opportunity to build great scaled businesses remains infinite.
The following is a sample of what we are looking forward to. This is not a list of predictions, just a quick overview of where FPC will be focusing its time and (LP) money.
Love OOH
Last year, we saw several billion in M&A in the category. OOH has huge potential, especially as consumer behaviour upends traditional marketing. The lower funnel gets disrupted for everyone. But who captures all the value? Sam? Sundar?
While the “bleeding edge” of ad tech pushes the idea of bot-to-bot marketing (which is just affiliate marketing by another name), the mid-to-upper funnel takes on even more importance for brand equity, as brands look to stimulate prompt activity from real-life humans.
For all the AI in the world, it’s going to be impossible to disrupt physical screens and billboards. Real-world branding (data-driven, of course) will become critical as the digital world drowns in SLOP.
We LOVE closed OOH ad nets with proprietary data and O&O inventory - and so do strategic buyers. We are investing in at least 2 OOH ad nets this year. We will also look at OOH measurement and targeting solutions. Some might call it an AI hedge; FPC calls it common sense investing.
Omnichannel Or Die (Maybe)
Omnichannel will be top of the marketer’s wish list. Media fragmentation is becoming more pronounced. Scale becomes trickier - and buying open channels becomes impossible. Nobody can just buy Google and Meta, though.
If you are a signal-focused vendor, having a signal that works across open web, OOH, in-app, TV/CTV, audio, retail media and the multitude of walled gardens will be a requisite for differentiation. How many solutions can do that? Very few.
FPC has a number of omnichannel signal vendors in its portfolio, but Lumen stands out. It is 100% the leader in omnichannel attention. Nobody can do what it does. It’s pretty easy when you own data and technology - and can build a “run anywhere” signal.
Omnichannel is the winner in 2026.
Holistic TV Buying
In 2026, we are going to see a greater industry adoption of holistic TV buying - especially from agency buyers.
The TV landscape continues to be a fragmented mess - and it’s only getting more complicated. Instagram Reels (and possibly TikTok) is launching a TV app. There will be a bunch of new walled gardens to factor into TV planning.
Linear is in decline, but not yet in an existential freefall. Chunky budgets are still being allocated there - even as YouTube and CTV grow. You cannot plan in isolation for TV, randomly allocating ad budgets across disparate pots of long-form and short-form content.
We will see a bigger conversation about TV planning and execution. LightBoxTV is the only vendor outside the US building a holistic platform - and continues to lead the charge in helping buyers navigate the mayhem of TV.
2026 is very much a less CTV-solves-for-everything year, and more HTV-is-the-reality.
AI: Rules-Based Solutions Break New Ground
It’s very fashionable right now to go negative on AI. We live in such a feckless media environment. Regardless, ad tech has very much gone all in on it. Old-timer ad tech stalwarts, bankers, and armchair pundits are pushing the narrative HARD. Froth can be measured by the number of AI-specific marketing events that are popping up. Let’s just say it is getting frothy out there.
FPC can’t help but think that this is all still way too early in the AI tech cycle. The landscape is dominated by ANWAWs (ad-nets-with-a-wrapper). That’s ok. We love a good ad net. But is ad mediation the sweet spot? And will anyone want to buy these companies? The jury is still out.
We are placing a few AI-related bets on rules-based platforms that solve specific problems - very boring problems. No agentics. No bot-to-bot marketing; just mind-numbingly boring solutions that can scale. Because we love boring, it makes money.
We think there is a broader application for AI in marketing beyond automated planning, optimisation and bot-powered buying. AI will break new ground in ad tech.
Signal & Data Architecture
We continue to believe strongly in the “signal’ narrative. First-party data is the key differentiator in an LLM-first world. SSAs (Super Signal Aggregators) will need to acquire more signals to stay relevant in a competitive space.
We have some of the best signal-based companies in the industry, and we are reasonably confident that a few of them will be acquired in the coming 12 months.
Data architecture will also remain crucial. From data management and activation to permissioning to understanding data provenance/quality, these solutions will have no shortage of demand. Throughout the year, we will be investing heavily in this segment.
2026: Action Packed
2026 is the year FPC rolls out a bunch of new incubated businesses from FirstPartyStudio, some of the areas of focus we discussed above.
FPC expects to do more bespoke ad tech projects and builds with our strategic investment partners, centred on our portfolio companies. Yet another reason to consider an investment in our fund.
We will also announce a major global partnership for FirstPartyFinance (Q1), and launch a reseller solution for our portfolio companies (Q2). So it’s going to be a busy one.
We look forward to the year ahead. Thanks for reading. And see you next time.