The 2026 PPC Benchmarks Are Out. Here's What Festival Marketers Should Actually Care About.

Every year the industry publishes its benchmark report, and every year the same conversation happens: marketers circulate the stats, clients ask what they mean, and most of the commentary stays at 30,000 feet.

We'd rather get specific.

We work exclusively in festival and live event marketing, which means we read industry data through a pretty narrow lens. Not "what does this mean for e-commerce" or "how does this affect lead gen." Just: what does this mean for selling tickets to a specific event, in a specific market, to an audience that has dozens of other ways to spend their summer weekend.

Here's what stood out.

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ROI Measurement Is Still the Industry's Biggest Failure Point

The report flagged measurement as the top driver of client dissatisfaction across the entire PPC industry. We weren't surprised. Attribution has always been messy in live events, and as platforms continue pulling back on transparent reporting in favor of automation, it's getting harder, not easier, to draw a clear line from ad spend to ticket sales.

Our position is simple: if your marketing partner can't show you how your budget connects to your outcomes, that's not a data problem. That's an accountability problem.

The Google and Meta Duopoly Isn't Going Anywhere

89% of global digital ad spend still flows to Google and Meta. For festival marketing, where you're targeting a defined geography and an audience actively searching for things to do, this concentration makes sense. The platforms with the most data win the targeting game, and right now those are still the same two platforms they've been for a decade.

We're not anti-diversification. But chasing emerging channels at the expense of your highest-converting placements is a mistake we see more often than we'd like.

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CTV Is Worth Watching

Connected TV jumped to 14% adoption this year, up from essentially nothing two years ago. For events targeting regional audiences, CTV offers something traditional digital doesn't: living room reach with precision targeting. It's a channel we're actively evaluating for the right campaigns. Not every festival budget justifies it yet, but the trajectory is hard to ignore.This shift suggests that festival budgets traditionally allocated to standard local TV buys should be re-evaluated for transition into highly targetable CTV placements.

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The More Interesting Question Is What Comes Next

AI tools are saving the average PPC professional five hours a week. The gap between agencies that are building new capabilities and those that are coasting on the same playbook is getting wider faster than most people realize.

For live event marketers specifically, the next few years are going to reward the ones who treat their marketing infrastructure as a competitive advantage, not a line item.

That's what we're building toward. And it's what we think about every time we open a benchmark report.

Grayscale Entertainment Marketing specializes in festival and live event marketing. If you want to talk through what any of this means for your campaigns, we're easy to reach.