You ever just walk into a room and inhale, and smell that it's going to be a good night? Yeah. That's how I'm feeling 2026 is going to be. It’s going to be a good fucking year…

This is my favorite piece of content by far, and it’s always incredibly rewarding as I get to learn a little or a lot about bigger players in our space and what makes their business scale.

This year has some completely new faces from last, and they’re all major players in this space, whether you’ve seen them on stage or behind the scenes, making major media buying moves.

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We’re taking a noticeably different approach this year. The purely transactional performance marketing model is not going away overnight, but it is clearly weakening as a standalone strategy.

Every vertical we touch is flooded with supply. More buyers, more agencies, more affiliates, more capital, same traffic sources. When everyone is buying the same clicks and selling to the same end clients, the outcome is predictable. Margins compress. Scale gets harder. Differentiation disappears.

Last year, we leaned heavily into transactional execution because it was profitable and efficient. It still is. But we’re no longer pretending that it’s enough on its own.

This year, the strategy is layered. Profitable transactional campaigns still matter. They fund the business. But now those profits are being deliberately redeployed into brand building and product development. The goal is not just to make money this month, but to build assets that still matter a year from now.

That shift requires patience and restraint, which is uncomfortable for most performance marketers. But the alternative is staying trapped in a race to the bottom.

Owning the customer is the real dividing line between who survives the next few years and who slowly gets squeezed out while telling themselves it’s just a bad quarter.

If you don’t have a direct relationship with the user, you don’t have a business. You have a transaction. A moment of intent that you borrow from a platform and immediately hand off to someone else. That works when margins are wide and competition is light. It falls apart when everyone is doing the same thing.

Routing a phone call is not ownership. It’s a toll booth. You collect a fee for letting someone pass through, and the second the traffic pattern changes, you’re irrelevant. You don’t know the customer. You can’t follow up. You can’t educate. You can’t cross sell. You can’t build trust over time. You’re just hoping the call converts and the buyer keeps paying. That shit isnt helping you build a sellable business long term, its just a cash flow center. Nothing wrong with it but if you’re executing to build bigger, its not the way anymore.

Getting a form in front of someone is a simple example but it changes the entire dynamic. The moment you capture first party data, the leverage shifts. Now you can follow up. Now you can control timing. Now you can explain things in plain English instead of cramming everything into a sixty second phone call. Now you’re building an asset instead of praying the handoff works. Its not just the form thats the trick, think of it as the front door to your manor. You need to to get them in somehow…thats what he said?

Think about how ridiculous it would be if Amazon ran ads, took you straight to a phone call, and never collected your data. They would never do that because they understand that the relationship is more valuable than the single transaction. Yet in performance marketing, especially in legal and insurance, people still act like capturing the customer is optional.

In our space, this matters even more because most of what users are dealing with is confusing, emotional, and high friction. A car accident. A disability claim. Insurance eligibility. These are not impulse purchases. People want clarity, reassurance, and guidance. If all you offer is a generic page and a phone number, you’re leaving value on the table and pushing trust onto someone else.

This is where products and information layers come in. A simple explainer. A status tracker. A checklist. A short assessment that actually helps the user understand where they stand. These things do two jobs at once. They help the user, and they anchor the relationship to you instead of the end buyer.

What makes this moment especially important is how much easier it is now to build these layers. With vibe coding and modern tooling, you can actually build something functional without needing a full engineering team. You can ship a real product, not just a prettier landing page. That lowers the barrier, but it also raises the standard. The excuse of “we’re just marketers” doesn’t hold anymore.

We learned this the hard way. Last year, being purely transactional was profitable, but it was fragile. Every buyer change, every compliance shift, every platform tweak forced a reset. This year, the goal is durability. Transactional campaigns still matter, but they exist to fund brand building and product development that lets us own the customer and, in some cases, become the end client ourselves.

When you own the customer, you control optionality. You can route them today, monetize them differently tomorrow, or build something entirely new around the same audience next year. That’s the difference between running campaigns and building a business.

Motor vehicle accident marketing on non Google platforms is overheating, and Meta is the clearest example.

Competition has reached a point where audience overlap is extreme. The same users are seeing the same offers, the same angles, and increasingly aggressive messaging. When that happens, returns do not just flatten. Trust erodes.

Facebook used to be a strong education channel for MVA because users were problem aware but not solution aware. They knew they were in an accident, but they didn’t fully understand their options. Educational angles worked well in that environment.

That environment is gone.

Between massive advertisers and years of nonstop campaigns, users are now highly solution aware. They recognize the pitch. They’ve seen the ads. They understand the intent behind them. When everyone keeps pushing the same you could be owed money angle, it stops feeling informative and starts feeling predatory.

This does not mean Facebook is dead. It is still powerful. But its role is changing. I increasingly see it as an ancillary channel for MVA and, in many cases, a better mid funnel or remarketing lever than a pure top of funnel engine.

The brands that are still winning on Meta are the ones leaning into differentiation. Stronger creative. Clearer brand voice. Something people recognize instead of another white labeled page. Top Dog Law is a good example of using brand to change how the audience engages with the message.

For us, the current mix is still heavily Google and Facebook, with Connected TV next on the roadmap. Google continues to reign supreme for high intent, especially as it invests more into local demand generation. Meta still has a place, but it requires a fundamentally different approach than it did a few years ago.

Conferences are changing, and the way people extract value from them is changing just as fast. I fucking love going to conferences and seeing friends but how its happening now has definitely begun to evolve.

I’ve been attending conferences for about sixteen years, and one thing has always been true. The real value comes from social deal value, not exhibit hall deal value.

I’ve generated more tangible revenue and stronger partnerships by hosting a dinner than by scrolling an attendee list and forcing shallow 30 minute conversations. Those surface level meetings rarely lead to anything meaningful. Im not trying to hate on these types of meetings but im beginning to see that dwindle quite a bit and those 30 minute meetings only typically get stronger when theyre followed up with longer term, in person meetings.

What’s taking share now are masterminds. Smaller groups. Higher signal. More intentional conversations. More real relationship building. Groups like Geek Out are a good example of how these are evolving into small conferences while still preserving the social density people actually want.

They’re also comparable in cost, which changes the decision calculus. Instead of asking how visible you can be, the smarter question becomes where you actually learn something and meet people who matter.

That’s how I’m approaching conferences now, and I see more operators quietly making the same shift.

Let’s make 2026 a badass year for everyone but dont just look at your own business, look around and see if you can add value to someone elses business or life. I guarantee it’ll come back to you full circle, tenfold.

Do it.

~Love Tony 🥦

~PS, we just got some new PALO gear. Want some? Just send me your address and size. [email protected]