Q4 2026 Marketing Outlook
By Foxwell Founders & Northbeam
How agencies and brands are planning, budgeting, and feeling about the biggest quarter of the year — straight from the marketers managing the spend.
Q4 benchmarking is nearly impossible. So we asked the people doing it.
Ads in AI interfaces. Meta’s Andromeda update. An unsettled economy. Heading into the 2026 holiday season, the variables have never been more tangled.
This report pulls together survey responses from agency and brand founders, marketing leaders, and operators — the vast majority members of the Foxwell Founders community — split roughly 60/40 between the agency side and in-house brand teams. Together, they reveal how the people closest to the spend are approaching what promises to be an unpredictable Q4.
Find out where you stand
- Which channel do marketers expect to grow fastest after Meta?
- What month do most teams start scaling holiday spend?
- How many agencies are counting on Q4 to make up for a soft first half?
- Is Meta’s Andromeda rollout simplifying creative testing — or complicating it?
- Which metrics are teams watching every single day during peak season?
- Are marketers moving away from “sale” messaging? And what’s replacing it?
About Foxwell Founders
We are a growing community of over 500 of the world’s best marketers, including agency and brand founders, CMOs, media buyers, creative strategists, and more. We are all about help, mentorship, and support for our community members, whether online or in one of our beloved in-person events. B.S., ego, and anything that violates the safety of our community is never tolerated.
We have a 99% retention rate and an NPS score of 88.5 from our members, who have access to:
- a thriving Slack community
- a proprietary GPS with a giant archive of our multi-media training materials
- weekly workshops, calls, and strategy sessions with topics experts
- monthly ad account audits
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Learn more about our community or apply to join here.