The Personalization Playbook is your go-to guide for proven, high-impact omnichannel marketing tactics that drive engagement, conversions, and customer loyalty. Packed with challenge-led use cases and detailed, AI-infused automation workflows, this Playbook helps you take the guesswork out of execution and build high-performing campaigns.

What’s inside:

Tackle your use cases head-on! This Playbook gives you step-by-step guidance for orchestrating data-driven campaigns and applying AI to hyper-personalize each touchpoint along the customer journey.

Meta has recently released its 34-page 2026 holiday marketing guide titled “Winning Hearts and Boosting Carts”. and it makes one core argument: brands that wait until November to plan their holiday push are already behind. The guide lays out where holiday shoppers spend their time, why creators have become central to driving purchase decisions, and a quarter-by-quarter timeline for building campaigns months ahead of peak season.

We surveyed thousands of festive shoppers from 18 countries to better understand how people are discovering products, weighing purchase decisions and how they move from browsing to buying. Every festive season, marketers face the same core questions: where do shoppers discover, compare and decide? How do they progress from “I need ideas” to “I’m ready to buy”?

This year, the answers are shifting. Social commerce is accelerating. AI is changing how shoppers search. Creators have become trusted shopping advisors. The habits that seemed settled a year ago look different now.

Summer is the best time to kick off holiday planning. To help you put your best foot forward, we asked consumers in early January to break down how much they actually spent during the 2025 holiday season —while it was still fresh.​ We covered top spending categories, timing, how they used AI, the in-store versus online breakdown and the impact of cost increases on shopping decisions. With this inside look, your holiday marketing strategy will be even more precise.​

As AI increasingly influences how consumers discover, evaluate and choose brands, the rules of marketing are being rewritten. Word of Mouth, Word of Machine explores what this shift means for brand builders and argues that success in the AI era requires more than visibility alone. Brands must be both machine-readable and human-referenceable.

The report introduces five principles for future-fit growth: brand clarity, machine readability, creative consistency, human referenceability and authority. Together, they provide a practical framework for ensuring brands are understood by AI systems while remaining meaningful to people.

Why the brands that win this holiday season won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones that adapt the fastest. Success was measured by how accurately brands forecast demand, how early they secured media and how effectively they executed against a calendar built around predictable shopping moments. If your holiday strategy was finalized before the leaves changed color, you were ahead of the competition.

The influencer marketing landscape is changing, with both its importance and its scope expanding. As influencer marketing investments rise, what was once an experimental tactic has become a sophisticated, highly funded go-to-market framework. But marketing teams face growing pressure from leadership to demonstrate measurable ROI. Millions of dollars are wasted on partnerships that look strong on paper but fail to convert, driven by a misalignment between brands and creators and an over-reliance on traditional, follower-first sourcing playbooks.

Curious about how your team’s email marketing efforts compare to others in the media industry? Each quarter, Omeda releases aggregated, anonymized data from client emails sent from our platform so you can understand how your emails are performing. In Q2 2026, Omeda delivered over 1.96 billion emails on behalf of clients from our platform.

Covered in this report:

Email benchmarks for media industry emails sent in Q2 2026