Omnicom’s CES 2026 Wrap Report highlights evolving marketing strategies

Omnicom’s CES 2026 Wrap Report presents this year’s Consumer Electronics Show as a decisive moment for marketing and brand-building. Rather than focusing on individual product launches or emerging gadgets, the report captures a broader shift underway across media, commerce, and technology: brands have never been more present in consumers’ lives, yet influencing real decisions has never been more complex.

Throughout the report, Omnicom returns to a recurring tension observed across conversations, panels, and partnerships at CES, namely, the presence without influence. The technologies showcased were not fighting for attention in conventional ways. Instead, they were designed to anticipate needs, interpret context, and act before consumers explicitly asked. In doing so, they revealed how far marketing has moved from awareness-building toward decision-shaping.

The report notes that consumer behaviour has fundamentally changed. The research and consideration phases, which once unfolded over days or weeks, are increasingly compressed into moments. Discovery, evaluation, and purchase now often happen simultaneously, triggered by AI assistants, algorithmic recommendations, or creators surfacing the right product at the right time. Brand loyalty, once built steadily over years, can now form (or fracture) through a single interaction.

A key insight from the CES 2026 Wrap Report is the growing irrelevance of linear funnel models. Omnicom argues that frameworks separating awareness, consideration, and conversion no longer reflect how people actually experience brands. Consumers are no longer navigating journeys; they are inhabiting environments that navigate on their behalf.

These environments, spanning search, social, commerce, entertainment, and even physical spaces, are increasingly mediated by intelligent systems. Algorithms and agents decide what surfaces, when it surfaces, and in what context. In this landscape, being visible everywhere does not guarantee impact. As the report puts it, brands can be omnipresent and still be “nowhere that matters”.

This shift underpins how Omnicom positions itself in the report. The CES 2026 Wrap repeatedly stresses that scale only creates advantage when it is connected. Assets such as Acxiom Real ID (resolving identity across 2.6 billion people globally), $70 billion in media buying power, and extensive commerce and transaction data are framed not as separate strengths, but as parts of a single operating system.

Omnicom leadership describes this approach as essential for operating at platform speed. In a world where platforms intermediate most consumer interactions, brands need infrastructure that links identity, intelligence, creativity, media, and commerce. Optimising individual channels or tactics in isolation is no longer sufficient.

The report is explicit that recent strategic decisions, including large-scale integrations, are not about size for its own sake. They are about building the capability to influence decisions inside complex ecosystems where control is increasingly shared with platforms, creators, and machines.

One of the most striking themes emerging from CES 2026, as outlined in the report, is the move from connected systems to conscious environments. Intelligence is no longer something consumers actively access. It is becoming ambient, continuous, and largely invisible.

Homes adjust automatically. Vehicles respond to the driver's state and surroundings. Retail environments adapt to movement and demand. For brands, this changes the nature of experience design. Perception is shaped less by discrete messages and more by how products and services behave: how seamlessly they respond, how reliably they adapt, and how intuitively they anticipate needs. In these environments, friction is not just inconvenient; it signals irrelevance.

The CES 2026 Wrap Report also highlights the growing centrality of creators in driving influence. Omnicom cites data showing that nearly three-quarters of consumers trust what people say about brands more than what brands say about themselves. Creator content frequently outperforms traditional brand assets, not just in engagement but in driving spontaneous, unplanned purchases.

This context frames Omnicom’s CES partnership announcements with platforms including Google, Walmart, Meta, Amazon, Roku, and Pinterest. These collaborations are presented as efforts to move beyond proxy metrics like reach or follower counts, and toward understanding real intent, real behaviour, and real business outcomes. Influence, the report suggests, must be earned and measured, not assumed.

While AI is central to almost every theme in the report, Omnicom avoids positioning it as a substitute for human judgment. AI velocity is accelerating faster than expected, but the report repeatedly stresses the importance of oversight, context, and responsibility.

Crucially, the CES 2026 Wrap introduces the idea of a “human premium.” As machines take on more functional decision-making, emotional value (trust, cultural relevance, and integrity) becomes more important, not less. Research cited in the report suggests people process brands using the same neural pathways they use to judge other people. In an era of automated presence at scale, authenticity becomes the hardest advantage to replicate.

Omnicom’s CES 2026 Wrap Report ultimately argues that the industry is entering a new phase. This is not a moment of incremental change, but a structural shift in how growth is created. Brands can be everywhere, all the time, and still fail to matter.

The brands that succeed, the report concludes, will be those that build systems capable of earning trust consistently, across platforms, through creators, and within AI-mediated environments. In today’s marketing ecosystem, influence is no longer a by-product of presence. It is the strategy itself.