by Andrea Ness, Media Strategy and Oversight Director, ddm marketing+communications
Minimalist art and music genres captured the cultural imagination in the middle of the 20th century. These days, a less-is-more mindset is taking hold again — now, among marketers re-assessing their paid media strategy.
The best paid media strategies for 2026? Don’t push all your chips into a paid media strategy.
Re-thinking the purpose of paid media.
Any marketing strategy requires a great deal of due diligence upfront. Think of it like car shopping: no rational consumer buys the first car they like at the first dealership they visit.
A multi-pronged ad campaign is similar. The bigger the spend, the more scrutiny every prong of the strategy deserves before launching into the market. The philosophy, and budget, behind any paid media strategy should exist in proportion to the other aspects of a brand’s media strategy.
Rather than the central focus of the strategy, the paid campaign should be an extension of the strategic groundwork already laid. A brand must establish trust among customers and clients before any paid media campaign can be a success. The purpose of paid media is to gain more customers or clients by building atop an established message.
Align your messaging.
To that end, think about what content your target customer needs to see before they arrive at your channels. Baseline surveys and A/B testing provide valuable quantitative feedback. Focus groups provide qualitative feedback such as key words, or visual images that can be useful to a paid campaign.
Above all, the imagery, verbiage, and tone of paid media content needs to be in alignment within your overall purpose as an organization. All of your elements in unpaid media can help bring in leads too, but if that messaging is out of alignment, it’s harder to reap the benefits of paid media (and drive them to other places in the learning phases of the customer journey) if other messaging doesn’t sink in first.
Paid campaigns are finite, other assets are not.
As a marketer, you decide when each paid campaign begins and ends. Other forms of content are less finite. Your website, a magazine interview with the CEO, a YouTube tutorial, or LinkedIn article, might live much longer online (or off) than some paid content. What story does that content tell in relation to the paid campaign you want to launch?
Compared to earlier eras, consumers can encounter a brand in 2026 in more places than ever (unpaid media, social media, etc.) without ever seeing a paid message. Ensuring consistency among all your external communications is essential. By being clear and consistent across all media, an audience can recall your brand better when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.
Conclusion.
It’s tempting to make direct appeals to your leads with a paid media strategy. The most successful paid media strategies will bear fruit after focusing on the upper funnel first. When treated as one prong of a holistic campaign that includes social and earned media, your paid media spend can be more efficient and effective in the end. The best differentiator in getting new leads via paid media, more than money, is by laying comprehensive groundwork before focusing on leads.
Andrea Ness provides leadership and oversight to ddm marketing + communications’ media team. With more than 22 years of experience in marketing and public relations, she has driven significant growth in building strong media, social, and digital teams for marketing agencies and organizations. Andrea enjoys building valuable relationships with people at all levels of an organization and using her skillset to advance both people and companies to the next level.
