The 6 Conversations That Defined H1 (And None of Them Were About AI)
The six CMO Office articles or podcasts that sparked the biggest conversations in the first half of 2026, and what they say about where marketing is going next.
Halfway through the year is a funny time for marketers.
Budget reviews are happening. H2 planning is underway. AI predictions are multiplying faster than anyone can keep up with. And somewhere in the middle of all that, most of us are so busy looking ahead that we forget to ask a simple question.
What have we actually learned?
One of the unexpected joys of writing The CMO Office each week is seeing which ideas spark the biggest conversations. Sometimes it’s the article you expected. Often it’s the one you nearly didn’t publish because you thought the topic was too niche or too technical.
Looking back across the first half of 2026, a pattern emerged.
The biggest conversations weren’t really about AI, MMM, media, or planning. They were about one underlying challenge: how marketers make better commercial decisions in an increasingly noisy world.
So, rather than simply counting clicks, I thought I’d look back at the six CMO Office articles and podcasts that generated the biggest response in H1 and, more importantly, what they might tell us about where marketing is heading next.
1. Google Search Is Not Dying. But Low-Intent Discovery Is
The article: The one that has stayed at the top all year. The argument: the useful question isn’t whether search is declining, but which search is declining. AI answers, feeds and marketplaces are absorbing generic, low-intent discovery, while what stays in Google is higher-intent, branded behaviour.
Why it landed: It turned a widespread anxiety into something actionable. Search doesn’t create demand so much as reveal it, which means the real work happens upstream.
The takeaway: Analytic Partners ROI Genome data shows paid search ROI declining over time in many categories as budgets scale. The clicks AI strips out were rarely driving incremental growth anyway.
2. The Diminishing Returns Trap
The article: A direct challenge to the finance-room instinct to cap spend the moment an ROI curve bends. Declining ROI does not automatically mean declining value, and most brands are nowhere near their ceiling.
Why it landed: It armed marketers for a conversation they keep losing. You don’t quit the gym the moment progress plateaus, because that’s when you start giving the gains back.
The takeaway: 98.7% of brands in Australia and New Zealand still have headroom before reaching diminishing returns on video. As Paul Sinkinson noted, YouTube ROI could decline by 42% and still remain the strongest performer in the mix.
3. Growth Isn’t a Media Problem. It’s a Decisioning Problem
The article: Possibly the most quietly subversive thing we published, because it argues most growth doesn’t come from marketing at all. The bigger forces, pricing, distribution, timing, sit outside the media plan entirely.
Why it landed: It moved the conversation from defending the media plan to engineering growth across the whole commercial system. A far stronger place for a CMO to stand.
The takeaway: Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome shows that marketing typically explains 10–50% of business outcomes, with the rest coming from pricing, distribution, timing and macro forces. The job isn’t to defend marketing’s slice. It’s to understand the whole pie.
4. Why Most Marketing Plans Fail the Moment They’re Written
The article: Adapted from my keynote at the Digital Marketing Summit in Seoul. The premise is simple. The world moves quickly, our plans do not, and the dashboards we track only show the tip of the iceberg. A campaign can look like it’s failing when the real issue is distribution, or look like a win when external demand did the heavy lifting.
Why it landed: Every marketer knows the gap between a plan built on last year’s assumptions and the market they’re actually in. This named it, and made the case for widening your field of vision to the full commercial system rather than the channels you can see.
The takeaway: Combining online and offline channels delivers significantly stronger results, with up to 50 percent greater efficiency compared to single-channel strategies. But those effects are invisible when channels are measured in isolation. Widen the lens and the gains show up.
5. Why Marketing Mix Modelling Is the Map for a Volatile World (Podcast
The Podcast: Paul Sinkinson returned to talk through how MMM is evolving from a tool that explains past performance into one that actively shapes future decisions. Less report card, more planning system.
Why it landed: Marketers are under pressure to commit to plans in a market that won’t sit still. The idea that you can pressure-test decisions in advance, rather than wait for the post-campaign read, struck a chord with anyone tired of finding out what worked only after the money’s gone.
The takeaway: The shift is from explanation to action. The real value now is scenario planning, modelling how the business responds to different conditions so you’ve already pressure-tested the call before you need to make it. That’s the difference between reacting to change and being ready for it.
6. Inside PRISM+’s Commercial Playbook with Frank Ng (Podcast
The podcast: A brilliant conversation with Frank Ng, VP Commercial at PRISM+, on how a Singapore-born electronics challenger grows profitably in a brutal category. The theme: growth rarely comes from one magic channel. It comes from curiosity, commercial discipline and better questions.
Why it landed: Frank talks like a marketer who also has to answer for margin. He treats measurement as something that guides decisions rather than justifies budgets, and thinks like a general manager, factoring in supply chain, stock and profitability. That’s the commercial muscle every marketer is now being asked to build.
The takeaway: Frank shared how a brand campaign, the kind performance purists love to question, helped PRISM+ reduce CPA by 50%. Proof that brand and performance aren’t competing line items. They multiply each other.
The Bottom Line
If there’s one thing these six conversations have reinforced for me, it’s this.
Marketers are still chasing trends and trying to figure things out. AI, new channels, new measurement, the noise isn’t going anywhere. But the reason we’re all doing it is the same: we’re trying to drive growth, defend budgets and defend our departments.
And to do that, we need to understand what our data is actually telling us. We need it to help us de-risk the decisions ahead and make genuinely commercial calls, not just report on the ones already made.
That’s the thread running through every piece on this list. Not the technology itself, but the commercial judgement underneath it.
As we head into H2, I suspect that question only gets louder. And if these six pieces tell us anything, it’s that the marketers who win won’t be the ones with the most data. They’ll be the ones who know how to turn it into better commercial decisions.
Thanks for reading, listening, commenting and challenging the ideas along the way. Here’s to the second half of the year. 🥂
🎧 Catch up on The CMO Office Podcast to hear the full stories, unfiltered advice and a fair bit of laughter along the way. Because sometimes the best way to sharpen your CMO skills is simply to listen to those who’ve already claimed their seat at the table.
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