The 2020s were supposed to be a recovery decade. Instead, they became a relay race of crises each handing the baton to the next before the last could catch its breath. A pandemic collapses supply chains. A war in Europe disrupts energy markets. Droughts parch crops while floods drown cities. Inflation spikes, then AI shocks the job market. By 2026, the idea of a “normal year” feels almost quaint.
The term polycrisis , once academic, has become the defining condition of our age. The IMF, World Bank, and World Economic Forum now use it routinely to describe the interlocking shocks of geopolitics, climate, technology, and society. Every system is colliding with every other.
The key shift is psychological: crisis is no longer a temporary interruption; it’s the atmosphere we breathe. Governments and businesses can no longer wait for stability before planning. They must plan within instability. In this new reality, resilience isn’t about endurance it’s about adaptation speed. The ability to pivot, repurpose, and reimagine has become the ultimate survival skill.
Across sectors, you can see the mindset shift:
Companies are rewiring supply chains for resilience, not efficiency reshoring, automating, and diversifying suppliers.
Governments are embedding scenario planning into policy, preparing for cascading disruptions (from cyberattacks to climate migration).
Investors are re-evaluating “risk” as the new opportunity space, channeling billions into resilience tech, security, and local infrastructure.
In 2026, the smartest organizations will treat turbulence as a feature of the landscape, not a glitch in it. They will operate with permanent foresight dashboards, rapid response teams, and modular operations that can morph overnight.
The metaphor of the decade isn’t the fortress it’s the sailboat. The fortress resists the storm. The sailboat reads the wind.
And in a world where the seatbelt sign never turns off, those who can harness the turbulence , not just survive it, will define the future.
The new Chief Marketing Officer of America’s biggest brands doesn’t sit in Madison Avenue boardrooms. It sits in Washington. And it doesn’t care about brand love, market share, or cultural relevance. It cares about tariffs.
Marketers aren’t pretending otherwise. Nearly half say they’re cutting budgets outright. Others are shortening campaigns, pausing buys, or fleeing to performance-driven channels where every click can be measured.
The casualties over at the USA are obvious:
Linear TV spend: -14.4%.
Print, radio, OOH: -12.7%.
Meanwhile, social (+14.3%) and CTV (+11.4%) are the lifeboats.
It’s a forced pivot from storytelling to transaction. As one media buyer put it bluntly: “Forget brand equity. Just sell before the next tariff drops.”
Tariffs Don’t Just Tax Goods …They Tax Culture
For decades, marketers told us they were culture’s architects. They built myths, symbols, slogans. But if trade policy can erase billions in ad spend overnight, then culture isn’t designed in creative studios anymore. It’s dictated in tariff negotiations.
That Nike campaign about human potential? It now competes with headlines about price hikes. Apple’s latest innovation launch? Drowned out by quarterly earnings wrecked by tariffs.
Marketers don’t control the message when they’re busy firefighting margin losses. Politicians do.
The Quiet Extinction of Branding
This isn’t just a budget story. It’s the slow death of brand advertising itself.
With customer acquisition and repeat sales now the only goals that matter, campaigns have collapsed into endless “buy now” loops. The promise of brand-building has been traded for measurable clicks.
It’s not strategy. It’s survival. And survival stories don’t go viral. They go silent.
Who Really Runs Advertising Now?
The ad industry is bracing for more shocks in 2026. Social, CTV, and retail media will grow. Traditional media will shrink further. Marketers will keep demanding proof of ROI at every step.
But the bigger story is this: advertising has lost sovereignty. It no longer writes culture on its own terms. It rents its megaphone from politics.
In 2025, the Chief Marketing Officer of American brands isn’t a strategist, a creative, or even an algorithm.
