👋 Today, we're looking at why Q2 budget anxiety might be the best thing to happen to your sponsorship pipeline all year.

Nervous CMOs aside, let's dive in! 🚀

Sell Into the Wobble

Q2 opened with a wobble. According to surveys, it’s latest tariff (not Iran) that are bothering CMOs and sending brand marketers back to their spreadsheets.

The IAB surveyed 200+ ad buyers in early 2026 and found nine in ten were "concerned about the negative impact of tariffs on ad spend." Not a fringe worry. A near-universal one.

The instinct, when you see that headline, is to brace yourself. Wait for deals to slow. Maybe soften your rates. Give prospects more time. Don't.

🥅 What budget anxiety actually looks like

The IAB data is more nuanced than the headline. The percentage of buyers who actually cut ad spend due to tariffs dropped from 45% in 2025 to 30% in 2026. Concern is up. Cuts are down. Make that make sense.

What's actually happening? Brands are moving money, not shelving it. Ad Age spoke to leaders across 19 agencies in March and found a consistent pattern: marketers are rotating OUT of long-cycle, hard-to-measure channels and INTO performance-focused ones where they can see results quickly and pause if needed.

TV. Big upfront commitments. High-CPM branding stuff with murky attribution? See ya later. They're slow to spin up, slow to measure, and nearly impossible to pause mid-campaign.

Newsletters? Influencers? Creator Partnerships? The opposite. Yes please.

🎯 The flight to controllable media

At Moroch, a full-service agency, CEO Matt Powell told Ad Age he expects one or two "very conservative" clients to cut media spend by 5-10%, while others take a wait-and-see approach.

Here's the thing about "wait and see" brands: they still want presence. Still want to show up in front of their audience. They just don't want to commit to a $200k upfront TV buy when tariff policy could shift their margins in 90 days.

Enter, YOU. A $5-10k sponsorship in a relevant niche publication is low commitment, fast to launch, and easy to measure (mostly). If a brand needs to pause, they can (if you’re nice). If it performs, they scale it. It asks for almost none of the things that make nervous marketers hesitate (big time and $ commitments).

This is the Q2 pitch. Not "here's why you should advertise." It's "here's why this format is right for the moment you're in."

🔧 How to frame it

You're not pitching a newsletter. You're pitching control.

When you reach out to a brand in Q2, lead with flexibility. "Our campaigns run on 1-month cycles, so you're never locked in. Most partners start with a two-placement test before committing to a big splash."

Give them an easy on-ramp and an obvious off-ramp. Remove the perceived risk.

Then make it measurable from day one. Agree upfront on what success looks like: unique link clicks, promo code redemptions, sign-ups. Brands in "wait and see" mode are not in the mood for vague brand awareness metrics. They want a number to point to.

Understanding a brands goals is always important, but even more important, if CMOs are nervy.

🔎 Does macro actually matter

This isn't the first time macro uncertainty has redirected ad budgets toward nimbler, more measurable channels. Google Search became dominant in part because of its ability to tie spend to immediate performance.

New media is now part of that story.

After digging into this topic, what stood out to me is:

• The headline is ‘Macro factors make marketers nervous’,

• but dig slightly deeper,and the facts are ‘marketers continue to spend more’.

Keeping up to date with macro news and trends is useful, but paying too much attention will just cause unnecessary nervousness about nothing.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps new media companies do just that.