FADS Forward 2026

Key Marketing Predictions for the Year Ahead

If FADS has taught us anything, it’s that nothing truly disappears. It mutates, repositions, and finds a new justification. Hunger, intoxication, stimulation, validation. The ancient drives remain intact. What changes is the delivery system.

In 2018, I published FADS Marketing and included “Tonestradamus” predictions for what would happen next. (Apologies, sir.) The outcomes did not disappoint. Now I’m turning my lens on 2026, and here’s the lead: FADS trends won’t introduce new human instincts. It will introduce new leverage.

Some of what follows is already in motion. Some of it will accelerate. All of it follows incentive.

Food: Salt and the Return to Substance

For the past several years, we’ve ridden the flavor pendulum from sugar highs to sour theatrics. Pickle fries. Pickle beer. Pickle juice shots sold as hangover cures and athletic enhancers. Sour became spectacle because spectacle sells.

Indulgence escalates until it destabilizes. Simplicity regains status.

Salt is next.

Salt signals preservation, mineral density, seriousness. Sweet feels indulgent. Sour feels experimental. In uncertain cultural moments, consumers drift toward foods that feel sturdy and fundamental. Comforting.

Expect salt-forward snacks, broths, cured meats, mineral branding, and aggressive sodium confidence framed not as excess but as authenticity.

When consumers say they want something real, they usually mean something that feels less engineered. Whether it is or not is secondary.

The Retreat from Seed Oils

Health conversations rarely move in straight lines. They swing.

As keto, carnivore, and GLP-1 usage influence consumer behavior, seed oils such as peanut, corn, soybean, and canola will take on symbolic weight beyond chemistry. They’ll represent industrial processing rather than nourishment.

Butter, ghee, beef tallow, and traditional fats will rise not because they’re new, but because they feel older. Ancestral eating tells a comforting story. It suggests we strayed and can return.

I explored early on how food shifted from fuel to moral proxy once we understood that intake affected appearance and character. That dynamic has not disappeared. It’s modernized.

Seed oils are becoming shorthand for overprocessing. Simpler fats signal discipline.

Narrative will outrun nuance.

The Post–Fake Meat Phase

The alternative protein boom was inevitable. So is its recalibration.

Plant-based meat promised environmental virtue, technological innovation, and ethical clarity in one product. For a time, that alignment was enough. Then consumers began reading ingredient lists and price tags more carefully.

Ultra-processed products lose cultural momentum when they feel complicated and expensive.

This doesn’t mean “plant-based” disappears. Nothing disappears; it just normalizes.

Meanwhile, minimalist animal protein framed as clean, simple, and ancestral regains cultural traction. Steak clubs. Broth bars. Nose-to-tail dining. The carnivore aesthetic presented as discipline rather than indulgence.

The market isn’t choosing between vegan and carnivore. It’s choosing between complicated and simple.

Simple wins when anxiety rises.

Alcohol: The Softening of Drunk Culture

Alcohol has always been sold as social glue. Campaigns lean on camaraderie, nostalgia, gender cues, and the quiet fear of exclusion to keep glasses full. Drinking was rarely just about taste. It was about belonging.

What’s shifting is the definition of belonging itself.

For younger consumers, visible intoxication reads less like status and more like instability. Hangovers disrupt work, workouts, and content creation. Drunkenness is no longer fleeting. It’s documented, replayed, and archived. Control carries more prestige than excess.

As that perception settles in, volume softens. Beer margins tighten. Smaller brewers consolidate or close. The spectacle of overconsumption dulls.

I’m not calling this a sweeping move toward abstinence. Rather, it’s a recalibration toward moderation. The cultural reward goes to restraint.

The business response will mirror what we’ve already seen in soda. Smaller cans. Measured pours. Premium pricing on reduced volume. Less liquid, higher margin, cleaner optics.

Consumption narrows. Positioning sharpens. Profit adapts.

GLP-1 and the Recalibration of Desire

The most consequential shift reshaping food and alcohol isn’t cultural. It’s biochemical.

GLP-1 receptor agonists were developed to regulate blood sugar and slow gastric emptying. Their influence, however, extends beyond appetite. Emerging research suggests that these medications interact with dopamine pathways involved in reward and reinforcement. Patients report not only reduced hunger but also reduced preoccupation. “Food noise” has become common language for that quieting.

In many cases, alcohol desire diminishes alongside it.

This isn’t a temperance movement. It’s a neurological recalibration. When the reward loop softens, the impulse to repeat a behavior weakens. Early studies are exploring GLP-1 medications as potential treatments for alcohol use disorder because appetite and addiction share circuitry.

Alcohol has always depended on repetition. Habit layered onto social ritual, reinforced chemically. If reinforcement dulls, ritual loses some of its pull. Drinking does not disappear. It narrows.

The implications extend beyond the bar.

When appetite contracts, restaurants notice smaller orders. Grocery baskets change composition. Fried and heavily processed foods lose appeal for some users. Delivery frequency declines. Portion sizes become more deliberate.

If millions of consumers reduce intake even modestly, aggregate volume shifts. When volume shifts, margins compress unless the price per unit rises. Companies adjust formats. Premiumization intensifies. Efficiency replaces excess.

Insurance models eventually incorporate improved metabolic markers. Employers evaluate long-term healthcare costs. Financial projections stretch around extended health spans.

GLP-1 does not eliminate desire. It redistributes it.

Marketing can amplify existing appetite. It struggles to manufacture appetite indefinitely. When cravings quiet at scale, entire supply chains reorganize around reduced intensity.

This isn’t a niche diet effect.

It’s demand contraction across food, alcohol, and potentially other reward-based categories.

And when desire recalibrates, markets follow.

Drugs: Cannabis Moves Mainstream

When I examined pharmaceutical marketing, I traced the progression clearly: first comes awareness, then normalization, then demand expansion. A condition is named. A solution is introduced. Over time, the boundary between treatment and optimization blurs.

Cannabis is moving along a comparable arc.

The early phase was rebellion. Illicit, countercultural, oppositional. The second phase was medical framing. Relief, treatment, compassion. The phase now emerging is professionalization. As rescheduling efforts reduce federal stigma, research funding increases. Institutional capital enters. Lab testing, dosage precision, and standardized branding replace improvisation.

When science enters the room, marketing matures.

Distribution follows regulation. Multi-state operators stabilize supply chains. Packaging becomes restrained. Language shifts from intoxication to wellness, recovery, relaxation, sleep support. The edges soften. The tone grows clinical.

It’s plausible that sometime in 2026, a cannabis-adjacent company sponsors a major professional sports franchise. The framing won’t center on getting high but on recovery, performance, or stress management. The partnership will appear measured, almost cautious. That is how normalization advances.

Infrastructure always precedes visibility. Fertilizer companies quietly become grow-supply giants. Grow-supply giants accumulate capital. Capital seeks mainstream legitimacy. Legitimacy arrives through sponsorship, partnership, and institutional alignment.

Meanwhile, generational substitution continues. For many younger consumers, alcohol feels blunt and metabolically punishing. Cannabis feels adjustable. Gummies, drops, beverages, and micro-dosed formats offer incremental control. The experience can be calibrated rather than endured.

Whether that perception of gentleness holds over decades is an open question. What matters in the near term is perception itself.

Adoption accelerates when a substance appears softer, cleaner, and more customizable. Longitudinal health data moves slowly. Cultural positioning moves quickly.

Cannabis is no longer asking for tolerance. It’s asking for integration. And when substances normalize, bodies become the next frontier for optimization.

Sex, Body Image, and the Confidence Economy

Sex marketing has always understood rejection anxiety. The fear of not being chosen is among the oldest human motivators. Hygiene products, enhancement pills, cosmetic procedures, gym memberships, fragrances, and grooming kits. Entire industries exist to reduce the perceived risk of exclusion.

The formula is consistent. Identify insecurity. Name it. Offer correction.

GLP-1 introduces a new accelerant into that formula.

When large numbers of people experience visible body transformation in compressed timeframes, confidence does not rise quietly. It reorganizes social dynamics. Weight loss alters posture, wardrobe, dating behavior, and perceived desirability. Social circles formed around shared indulgence often weaken. Relationships built on mutual self-consciousness can strain. Others strengthen under shared reinvention.

For celebrities, it requires a messaging strategy.

Body change is rarely just physical. It is relational.

As appearance shifts, signaling shifts with it. The colloquial phrase “Ozempic penis” illustrates the mechanism clearly. Reduced fat around the groin makes existing anatomy more visible. The anatomical change is incremental. The perceived change is magnified. Confidence amplifies the effect further.

Marketing has always known that perception outperforms measurement.

The same pattern follows for women. Rapid, significant weight loss may produce excess skin, volume shifts, and structural changes. Cosmetic procedures don’t arise purely out of vanity but a desire for coherence. When internal identity evolves, the exterior is expected to align. Skin tightening, body contouring, and genital aesthetics become extensions of transformation rather than departures from it.

What changes in 2026 is scale.

Body positivity messaging of the past decade emphasized acceptance, inclusivity, and resistance to narrow beauty standards. That movement reshaped brand language and advertising imagery. But widespread GLP-1 adoption introduces tension. If thinness becomes pharmacologically accessible, status may quietly reattach to smaller bodies.

Cultural extremes rarely hold their position for long. Idealization swings. Backlash follows. Negotiation settles somewhere in between.

The question for marketers isn’t whether thinness returns as a dominant aesthetic. It’s how aggressively they attach status to it without triggering fatigue or resistance.

Sex has always been about selection.

When bodies change at scale, the selection marketplace adjusts with them.

AI and the Sex Education Gap

Sex has always been commercialized. It has rarely been taught well.

For decades, formal sex education has eroded. What remains is inconsistent, politicized, or absent altogether. In its place, pornography has become the default curriculum. Young people learn mechanics without context. Adults experiment without guidance. Parents feel outpaced by the content their children already consume.

Pornography teaches performance, not communication, safety, anatomy, aging, or emotional nuance.

Now for the good news: this vacuum of information and instruction won’t remain empty for long because artificial intelligence is positioned to fill it.

I expect a rise in AI-enabled sex education platforms that sit deliberately between abstinence pamphlets and adult entertainment sites. Apps that explain anatomy without embarrassment. Platforms that guide couples through communication before experimentation. Tools that answer questions about toys, performance anxiety, orientation, aging, and post-weight-loss intimacy, without redirecting users to explicit content.

The demand comes from three distinct groups: adolescents without access to comprehensive sex education, parents who don’t know how to begin or have ongoing conversations, and adults who are intimacy-curious but reluctant to seek guidance publicly.

The elderly, too, are underserved. Sexual health doesn’t disappear with age, but the internet offers little between raunch and silence.

Just like we see with Google searches, AI lowers the barrier to asking embarrassing questions. It removes the human witness, offering the feeling of privacy.

The result will not be a moral renaissance, but a usability upgrade. When information becomes safer to access, experimentation becomes more deliberate. When guidance replaces guesswork, product categories from toys to enhancement to cosmetic procedures expand under the banner of education rather than titillation.

If GLP-1 reshapes bodies, AI will reshape instruction. The result will be more sophisticated and diverse intimacy markets. Which is great for anyone eager to explore new ways to get their freak on.

The Throughline

In the process of compiling this piece, I’ve already seen movement on a lot of my predictions. There’s a lot more to come this year, so here’s a quick take on what to watch:

• Watch for salt and broth moving from novelty to baseline, for “seed oil free” becoming cultural shorthand rather than fringe language, and for simplified animal protein framed as discipline rather than indulgence. If masculinity-coded protein marketing intensifies, the pattern will be unmistakable.
• Look for continued decline in heavy drinking among younger consumers, expansion of smaller formats, and moderation marketed as control rather than compromise.
• In GLP-1 adoption, pay attention to public earnings calls referencing reduced volume, to portion compression becoming normalized, and to expanded clinical exploration into addiction treatment. If insurers and employers begin recalibrating risk models, the ripple effects have moved beyond diet culture.
• Watch for AI-enabled sex education platforms occupying the space between pornography and silence. As AI integrates into companionship and learning, intimacy instruction becomes the next logical layer.
• Regulatory softening and a major sports sponsorship would mark full normalization of cannabis. Growth in modular, controlled-dose formats and language centered on recovery and optimization would confirm integration.
• The rising demand for post-weight-loss aesthetic alignment and visible tension between body-positivity rhetoric.

Hunger recalibrates. Intoxication moderates. Cannabis integrates into the mainstream. Bodies transform, and confidence reorganizes around new baselines.

Marketing fads have never been about novelty. They’re about leverage. Ancient drives operating through modern infrastructure, amplified by capital and technology.

When desire intensifies, industries expand. When desire quiets, industries compress. When identity shifts, branding follows.

None of these shifts are isolated. They’re coordinated responses to a change in reward. What I’m watching isn’t a passing cycle, but a recalibration of appetite unfolding across multiple industries at the same time. When underlying desire adjusts, volume adjusts with it.

When appetite — for anything — is renegotiated, markets will reorganize around it.