Connecting the Dots 2026: 5 Marketing Trends You Might Be Missing

The Connecting the dots 2026 report from GWI highlights critical, non-obvious marketing trends that are often overlooked in standard advertising plans. Drawing from a wealth of research, this report provides deep insights into fast-changing audiences and shifting consumer habits to help you sharpen your 2026 strategy.

This comprehensive study explores five key areas shaping the future of marketing:

  • AI and Insights: While many advertisers and marketers use AI professionally, relying on web-scraped data leads to generic, stereotypical results that lack depth.
  • The Intent-Behavior Gap: Consumers are increasingly contradictory, creating a significant opportunity for brands that can bridge the gap between expressed intent and actual buying behavior.
  • Social Media Dominance: Social media remains the dominant media form, with people spending massive amounts of time on social platforms and short videos each week.
  • World Cup Fandom: The audience for the upcoming tournament is rewriting the rules of engagement, with many fans identifying as avid gamers who view the event as a social ecosystem.
  • Defining Gen Alpha: As the oldest Alphas reach their teen years, it is essential to recognize them as a distinct generation rather than a simple continuation of Gen Z.

Download the full report to access the data-driven truth behind these trends and discover the opportunities your competitors might be missing.

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Connecting the Dots 2026: 5 Marketing Trends You Might Be Missing

The Connecting the dots 2026 report from GWI highlights critical, non-obvious marketing trends that are often overlooked in standard advertising plans. Drawing from a wealth of research, this report provides deep insights into fast-changing audiences and shifting consumer habits to help you sharpen your 2026 strategy.

This comprehensive study explores five key areas shaping the future of marketing:

  • AI and Insights: While many advertisers and marketers use AI professionally, relying on web-scraped data leads to generic, stereotypical results that lack depth.
  • The Intent-Behavior Gap: Consumers are increasingly contradictory, creating a significant opportunity for brands that can bridge the gap between expressed intent and actual buying behavior.
  • Social Media Dominance: Social media remains the dominant media form, with people spending massive amounts of time on social platforms and short videos each week.
  • World Cup Fandom: The audience for the upcoming tournament is rewriting the rules of engagement, with many fans identifying as avid gamers who view the event as a social ecosystem.
  • Defining Gen Alpha: As the oldest Alphas reach their teen years, it is essential to recognize them as a distinct generation rather than a simple continuation of Gen Z.

Download the full report to access the data-driven truth behind these trends and discover the opportunities your competitors might be missing.

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The Ultimate Shoppable Media Guide: Drive Sales & Maximize ROI

Traditional digital media drives clicks, but not always sales.

As retail media networks grow and DTC acquisition costs rise, brands are under pressure to prove real revenue impact from every campaign. Yet many teams still struggle with disconnected channels, limited attribution, and poor visibility into what actually drives purchases.

Inside the guide, you’ll learn how to:

  • Turn ads, video, social, CTV, and influencer content into direct paths to purchase
  • Let shoppers choose their preferred retailer without channel conflict
  • Measure true performance with retailer-level purchase intent and attribution
  • Optimize campaigns using first-party data instead of proxy metrics
  • Align brand, media, and eCommerce teams around revenue outcomes

Whether you’re launching new products, scaling retail partnerships, or trying to prove media ROI, this guide shows how leading brands are making every impression count.

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The Ultimate Shoppable Media Guide: Drive Sales & Maximize ROI

Traditional digital media drives clicks, but not always sales.

As retail media networks grow and DTC acquisition costs rise, brands are under pressure to prove real revenue impact from every campaign. Yet many teams still struggle with disconnected channels, limited attribution, and poor visibility into what actually drives purchases.

Inside the guide, you’ll learn how to:

  • Turn ads, video, social, CTV, and influencer content into direct paths to purchase
  • Let shoppers choose their preferred retailer without channel conflict
  • Measure true performance with retailer-level purchase intent and attribution
  • Optimize campaigns using first-party data instead of proxy metrics
  • Align brand, media, and eCommerce teams around revenue outcomes

Whether you’re launching new products, scaling retail partnerships, or trying to prove media ROI, this guide shows how leading brands are making every impression count.

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The Affiliate Growth Bundle: Playbook, Templates & Tools to Maximize ROI for Publishers & Affiliates

Scaling an affiliate network is not about adding more publishers or advertisers; it's more about making their campaigns more efficient and easier to manage and scale.

This bundle brings together proven strategies, operational checklists, and technical workflows to help networks, publishers, and advertisers increase their revenues, eliminate affiliate fraud, and lock in accurate attribution.

Inside, you’ll discover how to:

  • Build a single, centralized source of truth for partner attribution and payout accuracy
  • Protect your margins using automated quality gating and built-in fraud prevention
  • Maximize lead value with dynamic pricing and real-time bidding strategies
  • Simplify operations across onboarding, reporting, and SLA-driven payouts
  • Scale smarter by measuring long-term value (LTV) and optimizing for profitability, not just volume

Whether you manage an affiliate network, lead a partner program, or run a performance marketing stack, this guide gives you a tactical playbook to grow revenue, reduce wasted spend, and scale partner ROI, without the added overhead.

Download the guide and start driving higher partner ROI this quarter.

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The Ultimate Guide for Call Tracking & Conversation Intelligence

Inbound calls are still one of the most valuable and most underleveraged conversion channels. When prospects move from digital to voice, most businesses lose visibility, attribution, which can often put pressure on their ops and sales teams.

This guide shows you how modern call tracking and conversation intelligence deliver full-funnel attribution, richer customer insights, and better performance across your workflows. Ultimately, helping your team handle calls more efficiently, convert more opportunities, and drive more revenue from the calls you’re already getting.

Inside, you'll get a practical roadmap to tracking every call, uncovering what drives high conversions, and using smart tools to improve performance across every touchpoint.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

  • Use dynamic number insertion (DNI) to precisely track which ads, pages, or campaigns triggered every inbound call
  • Measure campaign performance in real time with advanced call analytics and actionable reporting
  • Improve every caller’s experience through intelligent IVRs and dynamic call routing
  • Unlock deeper customer insights by analyzing conversations for intent, objections, and buying signals
  • Protect your budget by identifying and blocking low-quality or fraudulent calls before they reach your sales team

Whether you manage high-volume call campaigns or want to optimize a single call channel, this guide will help you harness the full power of call tracking and conversation intelligence to drive better targeting, higher-quality call leads, and stronger returns.

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The Power of Consolidation: Maximizing Efficiency in Lead & Call Management

Managing and distributing leads and calls through separate platforms creates data silos, slows decisions, and increases operational costs. This whitepaper explains why consolidating lead and call management into a single unified platform delivers clearer attribution, faster reporting, and measurable ROI for publishers and affiliate networks.

Inside the whitepaper, you’ll learn how to:

  • Assess readiness for call and lead platform consolidation and define key objectives (security, integrations, and scalability).
  • Choose a platform with the right integration, reporting, and automation capabilities.
  • Consolidate your multiple call and lead management platforms with white-glove onboarding, testing, and go-live planning.
  • Measure impact: increase conversions, reduce fraud, and cut marketing overhead.

Case studies in the whitepaper show consolidated customers achieving double-digit conversion gains, clearer campaign visibility, and significant operational cost reductions—real results you can replicate.

Get Whitepaper

Modernizing Data Platforms for AI/ML and Gen AI

Organizations everywhere are hitting a critical inflection point — traditional Hadoop environments can’t keep up with the demands of AI, ML, and GenAI. Fragmented architectures, rising costs, and complex maintenance cycles are slowing innovation.

It’s time to modernize.

In this new white paper, Modernizing Data Platforms for AI/ML and Gen AI, you’ll discover:

  • Why Hadoop requires up to 20x more CPU resources and 10–15x more energy than modern alternatives.
  • How Teradata Vantage unifies data and analytics into one platform—reducing staffing needs by up to 90%.
  • The roadmap to migrate from Hadoop to a scalable, AI-ready analytics ecosystem.

  • How integrated ClearScape Analytics® brings advanced AI and ML capabilities directly into your data platform.

Modernization isn’t just about performance — it’s about positioning your business for the AI-driven future.

Get Whitepaper

Modernizing Data Platforms for AI/ML and Gen AI

Organizations everywhere are hitting a critical inflection point — traditional Hadoop environments can’t keep up with the demands of AI, ML, and GenAI. Fragmented architectures, rising costs, and complex maintenance cycles are slowing innovation.

It’s time to modernize.

In this new white paper, Modernizing Data Platforms for AI/ML and Gen AI, you’ll discover:

  • Why Hadoop requires up to 20x more CPU resources and 10–15x more energy than modern alternatives.
  • How Teradata Vantage unifies data and analytics into one platform—reducing staffing needs by up to 90%.
  • The roadmap to migrate from Hadoop to a scalable, AI-ready analytics ecosystem.

  • How integrated ClearScape Analytics® brings advanced AI and ML capabilities directly into your data platform.

Modernization isn’t just about performance — it’s about positioning your business for the AI-driven future.

Get Whitepaper

Does Your DEM Strategy Connect All the Dots?

Comprehensive DEM

Imagine a world where digital experiences are always on, performing flawlessly and able to handle any business situation. That world is in reach with a more comprehensive DEM that’s able to capture and integrate critical data from across your tech stack, identify where and why issues are happening, and help you fix them before they impact the relationships you’ve worked so hard to build with your users.

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AI-Powered DEM: Bring Greater Intelligence to Every Digital Experience

Propel your business forward with AI-powered DEM

The most successful businesses are using AI-powered digital experience monitoring (DEM) capabilities to revolutionize how they manage their digital ecosystems. This leads to improved customer experiences from: Faster onboarding, efficient incident management, continuous optimization and everything in between.

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AI Unwrapped 2025 Impact Report

Shipping code is only half the battle.

Without robust observability (the comprehensive logs, metrics, and traces that reveal precisely how systems are behaving in real-time), even the most brilliant applications become opaque, unreliable black boxes at scale. As artificial intelligence moves from speculative promise to foundational technology, we’re seeing the same critical lesson emerge.

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The Evolution of the Automotive Aftermarket Outlook

The global automotive aftermarket is in a transformative era, driven by disruptive vehicle technologies, shifting consumer behaviors, new business models, and increased vehicles in operation (VIO). Frost & Sullivan’s research has identified the top transformations currently facing businesses in this market; these can serve as both challenges and new growth opportunities. Our new VBook empowers you with actionable strategies to help your business thrive and lead the way forward in the aftermarket industry.

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Data at the Core of the Aftermarket

The automotive aftermarket thrives on data, driving precision, speed, and customer satisfaction. Manufacturers, parts distributors, and service dealerships need advanced data-centric tools for profitable operations and great customer experiences.

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ERP Meets Last-Mile Logistics: Key Features for Building Bigger Profits

Today’s supply chains are increasingly complex. From the time someone places an order to product delivery to payment, there are numerous steps for logistics and finance teams. Integrating enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with specialized last-mile logistics system can streamline this complicated process. While ERP systems are the foundation for business operations, a last-mile logistics system provides the tools you need for real-time tracking, route optimization, proof of delivery, returns management, and more. An automated and streamlined workflow manages much of the work and ensures your data is always up-to-date. Integration creates a unified system that improves customer satisfaction, creates significant efficiencies, and produces demonstrable bottom-line savings.

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