Every year, the debate about advertising effectiveness gets louder and less resolved. Channels multiply. Budgets follow. And the strategies built to justify that spend multiply right along with them, all while the industry agrees less and less on what's working.
At DISQO, we've spent the last few years measuring advertising's full impact across every screen and the entire funnel, which gives us the advantage of stepping back from that debate and looking at the data.
Today, we released our 2026 Benchmarks Trends Report, and after comparing where benchmarks stood in 2025 to where they stand in 2026, one thing is clear: Advertising is working in more places and in more ways than most people give it credit for.
Advertising's effect is fragmented by nature: it shows up as a shift in attitude here, a search there, a site visit somewhere else entirely, often across channels and across the full funnel, in moments far removed from the one that first reached someone.
Captured in isolation, attitudinal research and behavioral data each tell half the story, with that effect going under-reported or missed altogether because it's difficult to fully capture across channels and the full funnel.
This report exists to close that gap. It's built entirely from measured campaign outcomes, capturing perception and behavior together across channels and the full funnel.
That view makes it possible to see where advertising creates value. A meaningfully different vantage point than most industry commentary, and it's why this report is worth a close read, whether you're setting the media plan, buying against it, or reporting back on how it performed.
The report is built around five trends, each pairing benchmark data with a key takeaway and DISQO's perspective on what to watch next.
Here's what's behind each one.
Mid-funnel is where advertising is proving itself. Search and site visitation are rising faster than any other stage of the funnel, and that gain holds across the full campaign set rather than concentrating in a handful of standout campaigns. Brand search lift alone is up 72% year over year. The actions people take after seeing an ad, searching for a brand, visiting a site, are becoming one of the clearest and earliest signals that a campaign is working, often before a sales report would show it.
Brand memory is moving faster than it used to. Familiarity has always been one of the slowest KPIs to move, requiring sustained exposure over time. That's exactly why this year's numbers stand out: familiarity lift is accelerating across nearly every channel we measure, up 62% for display year over year alone. Brand building is turning into a whole-media-mix outcome, not a premium reserved for a handful of high-attention formats.
The channel hierarchy doesn't hold anymore. The long-standing assumption was that Linear TV sets the ceiling for purchase intent and awareness, and digital channels chase it. Our 2026 benchmarks tell a different story: several digital channels now post higher purchase-intent lift than Linear TV, with Social outperforming it by as much as 22%. That doesn't mean TV has weakened; it means the hierarchy underneath it has changed, and planning against the old order is planning against data that no longer holds.
Every channel has become a search signal. Category search lift, a sign that someone has moved from passive exposure to active consideration in the category, is rising across every single medium in our benchmark set, up 66% for video year over year. Channels historically planned around reach and brand-building alone are now producing measurable, downstream search behavior. The old line between "brand channel" and "performance channel" is eroding.
A brand's advertising lifts the whole category. Advertising's effect doesn't stop at the advertiser's own brand. Category-level engagement is climbing across considered-purchase categories, up 150% for vehicles year over year alone, in some cases well beyond what a single campaign flight could produce on its own. For brands whose media is doing long-horizon awareness work, this is the more useful lens: it's not just whether a campaign moved intent in isolation, it's whether your advertising is helping shape demand for the category as a whole, and whether you're positioned to capture it.
Read together, these five trends tell one consistent story: advertising's job hasn't changed, but where and how well it's doing that job has.
DISQO's normative benchmarks are drawn from our Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift products, part of our full-funnel outcomes platform. Millions of consumers have opted in to share their opinions and online experiences with DISQO, which allows for deterministic measurement of advertising's effect on both attitudes and digital behavior.
The data The 1H 2025 benchmark reflects all campaigns measured from March 2021 through December 2024 (1,650 campaigns). The 1H 2026 benchmark reflects all campaigns measured from March 2021 through December 2025 (3,266 campaigns). The later snapshot contains the earlier one, plus roughly 1,600 additional campaigns measured over the past year.
The calculation Incremental lift for each metric is calculated by subtracting the response of a matched, unexposed control group from the response of the exposed group, isolating the effect of the advertising itself. We use the median, not the mean, to prevent a handful of unusually large or unusually extreme campaigns from disproportionately swinging the benchmark.
The full report breaks down all five trends in detail, with charts, data, and DISQO's take on what marketers should watch next.
Download the full 2026 Benchmarks Trends Report.
Want to see how your own campaigns compare against these benchmarks? Reach out to your DISQO customer success representative, or contact us at hello@disqo.com.