I asked six HubSpot colleagues who are experts in their respective arena what their hopes and dreams are for 2026. From “just make AI and spreadsheets work” to tracking emotional momentum, here‘s what we’re looking forward to next year.

I spent the last week asking HubSpot marketers to get really honest about what actually worked for them in 2025 — and what they let go of.

Lingering Questions is one of my favorite parts of the Masters in Marketing newsletter, because it’s an opportunity for marketers to talk directly to one another.

This pains me greatly to say, but: That typo in your last campaign may have made your audience more engaged.

You might know him as the author of YA bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars, but John Green's most recent book is a nonfiction defense of its own title: In Everything is Tuberculosis, he argues that tuberculosis has shaped everything around us.

It’s a marketer’s dream: Hosting a sold-out event for 10k attendees. That brands are begging to be a part of. Oh, and that was headlined this year by none other than Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, and Jennifer Hudson.

At my last job I was tasked with launching a newsletter, and was suddenly faced with a bunch of unfamiliar acronyms: DKIM, DMARC, SPF. (Apparently that last one is not related to sun protection?)

I am “just threw out my back while turning to adjust my seatbelt” years old, so I was especially excited to talk to Jayde Powell, who’s made a name for herself as a bit of a Gen Z whisperer.

When I spoke to this week’s master in marketing, I was surprised at how seamlessly she had combined her two professional loves, digital marketing and life coaching. I’ll admit to having been skeptical about life coaching in the past, but this conversation changed my mind. As a life coach, she developed a framework she calls the Three See’s — more on that below — that can help any marketer up their game.

I’ve recently been using Substack to find new music to listen to. That’s probably not quite what its founders had in mind, but it has a ton of newsletters written by people who just really love music. It’s less professional music criticism and more “hey, this album was great, give it a listen.”

I love talking to creative people because they always notice details that I don’t. Like today’s master in marketing, who saw a boost in impressions from one tiny, seemingly insignificant detail: when their photo model bent their knee.

Running a marketing agency used to mean juggling a small army of freelancers, risking missed deadlines, and spending more time managing people than creating content and building strategies.

Read this line from one of my favorite authors: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

I’ve helped build marketing plans at startups where the entire “team” was just me and a Google Doc. Other times, I worked side-by-side with CMOs and VPs of marketing to launch new products, shift positioning, or scale growth. No matter the stage, the goal was the same: make a plan that actually gets used, not one that collects dust.