The real story in McKinsey’s State of Marketing 2026 is not the charts. It is the confession. Europe’s marketing engines were built for a world that no longer exists.
Budgets rise yet impact stalls. Data grows yet decision quality lags. AI expands yet teams operate with twentieth century structures.
The winners share one pattern. They stop treating marketing as a function and start running it as an adaptive system. • Cross functional squads instead of siloed departments • Always on experimentation instead of quarterly bursts • First party data as an asset not a compliance chore • Creative bravery tied directly to commercial impact
This shift is not cosmetic. It is existential. The report shows that firms who redesign around this model create disproportionate growth even in flat markets. Europe’s marketers face a simple question. Keep optimising the old machine or build the one that fits reality.
If your organisation feels stuck, this is the moment to redesign not repackage. The companies that act now will define the next decade of European marketing.
If you want communication that earns belief, not just attention, start a conversation with me.
Why collapsing trust is about to reshape power, economics and the future of knowledge
We always assumed the internet would make us smarter. Instead, it made us doubt everything. The breaking point wasn’t when people fell for fake news; it was when they stopped believing even the fake news they once trusted. The very floor beneath our information ecosystem has cracked.
When a system loses credibility, it doesn’t collapse slowly. It collapses overnight.
The internet is entering that moment.
For years, platforms optimized for attention over accuracy. Noise outperformed knowledge. Outrage outperformed expertise. Every incentive pointed downward. The result is the world we live in now: abundant information, vanishing certainty.
People no longer ask, “Is this true?” They ask, “Who wants me to think this?”
The shift is subtle but historic. When the public loses faith in the public’s own knowledge, the entire digital model wobbles. We’re seeing the early tremors of an epistemic recession: the rapid decline of the internet as a source of objective truth.
AI accelerates the crisis. Its power is extraordinary; its weakness is lethal.
AI doesn’t understand. It predicts. It assembles patterns of words that often look right but occasionally miss by just enough to erode trust completely.
One technologist put it bluntly: “When I already know something and check it with AI, it’s maybe 85% accurate. That 15% is a cliff, and that cliff is growing. Because AI trains on human writing, it inherits our confusion. It scales our errors. When the collective mind is foggy, AI becomes a fog machine.
The irony is brutal: the more impressive AI becomes, the less we trust what we read.
The coming rise of actual experts
Paradoxically, this collapse of digital certainty strengthens something older and more elemental: human expertise.
When filters fail, people start searching for faces, not feeds. They want names, not usernames. They want individuals whose competence is visible and whose reputation is earned, not algorithmic.
In a world where any answer can be fabricated, the rare people who truly know things become valuable again.
The economic shift is already visible:
• the era of influencers is aging • the era of experts is returning • authority becomes local, not algorithmic • knowledge becomes embodied, not aggregated
We’re moving from the era of “content creators” to the era of “credibility creators.”
The next few years won’t bring a post-truth world. They’ll bring a splintered one.
Instead of a single, global information sphere, we’ll live inside micro-networks of trust. Communities built around people, not platforms. Truth becomes relational. Believability becomes a currency.
The future looks less like Silicon Valley and more like ancient Athens: reputational, communal, human.
The lesson is uncomfortable but clarifying.
The internet is no longer the source of trust. People are.
The institutions that survive will be the ones that rebuild credibility at the human level, not the algorithmic one. The leaders who thrive will be the ones who understand that in a collapsing information economy, clarity is a form of power.
The prediction is simple: The future belongs to those who can be believed.
