Dear Clients, Friends, and Partners: As 2026 begins, so many of us have a mix of optimism, hope, and uncertainty. At EGC, we continue to lead with a growth mindset and are looking forward to what the new year brings. In that spirit, I wanted to share a brief, personal outlook on the year ahead and how we at EGC are evolving our capabilities in AI, media, and Performance PR to support the realities you are facing. The 2026 Marketing Environment With the new year off and running, leaders are operating in an economy defined by slow but resilient growth, persistent cost pressure, and an elevated expectation to do more with less. While forecasts point to steady global expansion rather than a recession, uncertainty around rates, trade, and geopolitics is keeping both boards and consumers cautious. Against this backdrop, marketing budgets are still moving, but every dollar is being asked to work harder, with AI investments, media choices, and brand activity all scrutinized through the lens of productivity, risk, and long‑term value. All the while, AI dominates every news cycle, yet many leaders fail to unlock its true value. How EGC is Evolving with AI EGC has spent the last few years not just “using AI,” but operationalizing it in ways that clients can feel in strategy, speed, and outcomes. For in‑house marketing teams, we now offer AI Marketing Advisory: collaborative programs that help you assess workflows, choose the right tools, and build governance and measurement so that AI improves performance rather than becoming another experiment. These engagements often include designing cross‑functional marketing workflows, creating role‑specific prompt banks for different tools, and building internal resource libraries so that teams may adopt AI confidently and consistently. Today, brands need to develop and create on-brand content efficiently. To that end, we have developed an AI Content Studio that blends human creative direction with AI-assisted production for copy, video, and social content—all of which are aligned with brand voice and performance data. A real-time feedback loop adjusts digital assets so that you will always serve the best-performing content. Our creative teams have vetted and invested in the best content creation platforms across video, photography, and campaign content, which in turn will make your budget go even further. Within EGC, our own AI assistant, CLAIRE, helps teams move faster on research, targeting, and reporting. CLAIRE is supported with best-in-class media research tools that include MRI Simmons, for example, to give your team faster market insights as well as better-performing media campaigns. The goal across all these initiatives is simple: to help your team do better work, faster, and with more evidence that ties activity to revenue and brand outcomes. Media, CTV, and Performance Media is another area where the ground is shifting. Connected television (CTV) is now one of the largest sources of new video ad inventory and spending, with forecasts showing a mid-$30 billion investment in 2025 and close to $47 billion by 2028. This means that CTV will outpace traditional TV for the first time in history. At the same time, political and retail media spending will make 2026 especially competitive, with billions of dollars flowing into CTV and local channels, thus further fragmenting the landscape. EGC has expanded its media capabilities to help brands navigate this fragmentation with more control and precision. These capabilities include a premium CTV buying option designed to pair high‑quality inventory and audience targeting with clearer measurement. This enables teams to understand how CTV contributes to both upper‑funnel reach and lower‑funnel performance. Across channels, our focus is on integrating media, creative, and analytics so that the same discipline applied to digital performance can be brought to emerging formats like CTV and retail media. Performance PR and Earned Media Alongside media and AI, earned influence is changing quickly. Chief marketing officers (CMOs) overwhelmingly believe that PR and brand equity matter, yet many report gaps in tying earned media to measurable business outcomes and in adapting to affiliate‑driven, performance‑oriented environments. At the same time, getting your brand into trusted editorial, influencer, and community spaces is increasingly important for both human decision‑making and how LLMs “see” and represent your brand. To address this, EGC launched Suade, a performance PR offering that connects traditional earned media relationships with affiliates, influencers, and analytics frameworks built to prove ROI. Suade focuses on helping brands show up in culture, search, and AI‑driven environments in ways that can be measured—linking coverage, content, and creator activity to traffic, revenue, and long‑term brand value. For leadership teams facing a “reputation and results” reckoning, the intent is to make PR both more accountable and more strategic. How EGC Hopes to Help in 2026 Whether you are revisiting your AI marketing strategy, rethinking media mix, needing more from your creative outcomes, or looking for more accountable PR—EGC is happy to listen, share what we are seeing across the market, and co‑create a plan that fits you. Schedule a session with us. Sincerely,Nicole PennCEO, EGC Group
