Heard the one about the brand that outsourced its own personality to AI?

I just read coverage on Tourism Malaysia’s Citrawarna 2026 promo — the one where a government tourism board generated an entire cultural festival with AI instead of pointing a camera at the real cultural assets all around it. AI dancers. AI wood carvers. An AI version of a public square that already exists and was, presumably, available for filming. They even managed to mirror-image their own national flag.

I read this the way you’d read about a restaurant hanging a stock photo of a steak on the wall instead of cooking one and taking a picture of it. It’s not that the photo looks bad. It’s that it looks inauthentic and people notice. (Yes, I know firsthand how much more difficult/expensive it is to take a great food shot than to use stock or AI.  But just go with me on this.)

Countries go to great lengths to preserve and promote their unique culture. It’s the most personal and authentic thing about them. So…WTF were they thinking?

Nobody Asked the Dancers

The clip went up on June 22, featuring the festival’s cuddly mascots, Wira and Manja, walking through an AI-rendered version of Dataran Merdeka, Malaysia’s storied, flag-raising Independence Square, alongside AI depictions of traditional dancers, communities in traditional dress and hand-stretched roti canai flatbread being made. It came down two days later. No statement, no explanation. Just gone, the way something disappears when the people who approved it would rather not discuss why.

One well-known Malaysian comedian put it plainly online: the country has actual cultural dancers, actual food, actual scenery and actual creative people who could have made this. What’s unsettling isn’t that a cost-saving call got made. It’s that someone looked at the AI cut and decided it was good enough to publish.

And as I always say: stock images create stock brands. (Ok. I don’t always say that. But it does sound like something I would say.) 

Nobody Rejected the Tool. They Rejected Being Cut from the Credit.

Here’s the part that should change how you think about this. Social-listening data on the backlash found that 84.6% of the negative sentiment was about authenticity — not opposition to AI as a technology. 

That distinction matters more than the outrage cycle around it. Audiences aren’t rejecting AI. They’re rejecting being told a fake thing is the real thing and rejecting brands that skip the people who’d have made it real.

This isn’t just a Malaysia problem. It’s a cautionary tale for us all.

• 87% of consumers say the best advertising still requires a human touch, and 70% say they can tell something’s missing from an AI ad, without being told why. Audiences don’t need a disclosure label. They just feel it.
• 71% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers now believe they’ve seen an ad made with AI, up from 54% just two years ago. That’s not a niche skill anymore. That’s most of your audience, watching closer than you think.
• Only 13% of consumers say they completely trust AI, full stop, meaning every AI-made campaign starts the relationship already in the red.

It Doesn’t Know Why the Real Dancer Matters

AI is genuinely good at the mechanical stuff like rendering, resizing, filling a brief exactly as written. What it can’t do is feel embarrassed that the dancer isn’t real or come close to understanding what it means to a culture to be represented by something that was never asked to show up. It executes. It doesn’t wince.

Two examples of the same failure in different outfits:

• Meta had to pull an Instagram AI feature within days of launch after it let users generate images from real people’s public photos without asking. Same root problem as Citrawarna: using someone’s likeness, or someone’s culture, without inviting them into the decision.
• Duolingo‘s CEO announced the company was going “AI-first” — cutting contractors, leaning harder on AI — and the backlash was swift: boycott threats, thousands of TikTok unfollows, growth slowing from 60% to 40% YoY. He later admitted he hadn’t explained what any of it meant for users. AI wasn’t new to Duolingo — they’d used it for years. What was new was announcing a decision about people’s future without a word to the people watching.

The technology isn’t the risk. The failure to understand that a brand is a relationship that has two very important and often distinct points of view, as well as the absence of a human raising their hand and asking “should we?” is the risk.

Consistency Is the Whole Point

Trust now shapes 92% of global buying decisions. And brands in the top trust quartile earn a 31% revenue premium over everyone else. Distinctiveness is what earns that trust — the specific, textured, unmistakably-you details that make a brand recognizable at a glance. That’s exactly what gets sanded off when AI fills in the gaps nobody double-checked.  In Tourism Malaysia‘s case, that was the foam on the tarik tea as its poured between two cups, or the woven-leaf texture of ketupat rice cakes steamed inside palm-leaf pouches. Small details. Whole brand identity made generic.

And this compounds, because most brands aren’t being honest about how often it’s happening. Distrust of AI content roughly doubled in twelve months, while only 20% of brands always disclose when they’ve used it. That gap between what audiences want to know and what brands actually tell them is where the damage sits and grows.

What This Actually Means for Your Brand

Strip away the anecdotes and here’s what’s left — the key questions worth asking before AI touches anything customer-facing:

• Does this replace a person we could have credited instead?
• Have we disclosed that this is AI-made, proactively, before someone asks?
• If this claims to represent real people or a real culture, were real people in the room making it and not just approving it after the fact?
• Who in the loop has zero stake in the campaign and gets to say “this feels off” before it goes live?
• Is AI accelerating a decision a human already made, or making the decision for us?
• What should AI never ever be allowed to touch?

Don’t Become a Stock Brand

A stock photo isn’t wrong. It’s technically fine but emotionally empty, and it says nothing about the actual thing it’s supposed to represent. That’s what’s on offer every time a brand lets AI fill in the details nobody bothered to check — a technically competent version of yourself that could belong to anyone.

AI will never be embarrassed on your behalf. That’s still your job. Don’t let it turn you into stock.

Sources: Marketing-Interactive, July 2026, Canva, State of Marketing & AI Report, 2026, IAB, The AI Ad Gap Widens, 2026, Klaviyo, AI Consumer Trends Report, 2026, PwC, Consumer Intelligence Series, 2026, Fractl, AI Search Consumer Trust Study, 2026, TechCrunch, July 2026, Forbes, November 2025

If you’re into stories about how AI messes things up for marketers, you’re gonna love this.  

I just read a Business Insider piece on how Meta’s AI ad tools keep tripping over their own synthetic feet. 

Picture this. A menswear brand’s model got replaced by someone’s grandmother. A shoe company’s model ended up with a leg bent in a direction human legs don’t bend. An e-bike ad started talking about trunk space, which is a feature bikes famously do not have. 

Oh sure, we’re all familiar with these AI image distortions.  But the difference here is that this stuff actually ran!

I read this the way you’d read a police report about your own house being redecorated while you were at work, by a contractor you never hired, who let themselves in through a window they insist was already open.

Here’s what I can’t get past. AI still can’t be trusted anywhere near creative judgment. It’s a tool, not a colleague, and nobody promoted it to art director while the rest of us were asleep. Meta doesn’t much care whose brand gets mangled in the process, as long as the ad spend clears, because it turns out refunds cost more than reputations, and Meta has done the math on which one it’s willing to pay for. 

And any agency letting these features run on autopilot without checking the output isn’t managing your account. They’re collecting the fee and hoping you don’t read Business Insider.

Nobody Asked, Nobody Told

Quick primer, for anyone who doesn’t live inside Ads Manager. When a brand runs an ad on Meta, they don’t just upload a picture and a headline and walk away. They can turn on a suite of tools called Advantage+, Meta’s AI system that’s supposed to automatically improve the ad while it’s running live: testing different crops, swapping headlines, adjusting who sees it, all in the name of performance. In theory, it’s a machine quietly optimizing your ad. In practice, for a growing number of advertisers, it’s a machine quietly remaking your ad, and not always for the better.

True Classic, a menswear brand that sells almost exclusively to men 30-45, found this out the hard way. They had a top-performing ad running with their usual model, a fit millennial guy in a matching fleece set, exactly who their customers want to see themselves as. Advantage+ decided it had a better idea and swapped him out for a smiling grandmother sitting in an armchair. Not a subtle A/B test. A total cast change, mid-campaign, with zero heads-up. It ran for days before customers started asking the brand what, exactly, was going on. True Classic hadn’t approved the change. They didn’t know it happened until their own customers told them.

It gets better, or worse, depending on your appetite for irony. The CEO of Flat Circle, an agency that manages roughly $100 million a year in Meta ad spend, says the platform’s auto-edit settings re-enable themselves after being manually turned off. Not once. Repeatedly. His team now checks the settings several times a week, permanently, like they’re monitoring a patient who keeps pulling out their own IV.

Who’s Actually Driving

The old chain of command was simple. Agency creates, client approves, platform delivers. Everyone knew their job, and nobody’s job was “surprise.”

The new chain of command is: platform edits, platform decides, and tells you afterward, if you’re lucky. The approval step didn’t get faster. It got skipped.

And this is happening at genuine scale. Global ad spend crosses $1 trillion in 2026 for the first time, with AI-generated creative now approaching 40% of all digital video ads, up from almost nothing two years ago.

Consistency Was the Whole Business Model

Consistency isn’t a design preference, it’s the entire business model. Brands like Rolex, LEGO and Coca-Cola haven’t changed their core visual identity in decades, because sameness is what makes them instantly recognizable at a glance, anywhere in the world. Nobody has to think twice about what they’re looking at. That’s not an accident, that’s decades of discipline.

Research from Lucidpress/Marq, a brand-management research firm, found companies with consistent brand presentation across channels average 10-20% revenue growth, with the most disciplined seeing up to 33%. That’s not a soft, feel-good branding stat. That’s real money, sitting on the table, waiting for a company to either earn it or let an algorithm give it away.

So, when an algorithm swaps your model, twists a product photo or rewrites your headline, as happened to Kirruna, a European footwear brand whose Meta-generated ad showed a model’s leg bent the wrong way, it’s not just an ugly image. It’s actively working against the thing that makes a brand worth more than its product.

It Doesn’t Know Why the Rule Exists

AI is genuinely good at the mechanical stuff: resizing, translating, testing variants. It’s bad at knowing why a rule exists in the first place, because it was never told the rule was a rule. It just saw a pattern and decided to improve on it.

Same reporting, another case: Meta’s AI generated an ad for Lectric, an e-bike company, and rewrote the copy to describe a car’s trunk space instead of the bike. Nobody approved it. Nobody caught it until it was already live and doing damage.

The pitch for using AI was “less work.” The reality is a new job: someone now has to check every AI-touched asset before it airs, and again after, because sometimes the settings drift back to ON whether you asked them to or not.

What This Actually Means For You

Strip away the anecdotes and this is what’s left: a short list of hard rules and the questions you should be asking before you let any of this near your brand.

An opt-out that doesn’t stay opted out isn’t a bug. Verify it weekly or assume it’s by default, on. Every AI-altered asset that airs unchecked is a small withdrawal from your brand’s recognition account. Before any AI tool touches customer-facing content, ask who’s accountable if it’s wrong in public, and if nobody can answer that in one sentence, you don’t have a policy. If a tool needs a full-time human minder, that’s a headcount cost. 

Here are six questions worth asking before you trust it:

• Which of our tools can alter creative without a human sign-off?
• Who’s personally accountable for approving what AI generates?
• Have we actually confirmed our opt-outs are still on this week?
• Do we audit outputs on a schedule or only after a complaint?
• Who makes the final creative call, a person or a settings menu?
• What should AI never be allowed to touch?

Who’s Watching the Software

For two years the fear was AI replacing creative people. Wrong worry. The real one: who’s watching the software when it starts making decisions?

Sources: Business Insider, July 2026; Crypto Briefing, July 2026; Lucidpress/Marq State of Brand Consistency Report; Dentsu Global Ad Spend Forecast 2026

The UK recently put M&M’s on trial. The popular candy-coated chocolate maker just learned that Britain’s new restrictions on advertising foods high in fat, salt and sugar that came into force on 5 January 2026 has teeth. Before that, the rulings under it have been rare enough that marketers were still waiting to see how far the law would reach. Now they know.

Mars ran a paid Instagram ad for M&M’s. No bag of candy in sight. No bite, no crunch, no product shot. Just two cartoon characters, a round green one and an oval yellow one, standing next to the words “For a truly unique event” and a link to the M&M’s website. Mars called this brand advertising, the kind explicitly exempted from the HFSS rules because it promotes an identity rather than a specific product.

Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority disagreed. Funny enough, the green character survived. The ASA ruled it represents a whole range of M&M’s flavors and colors, not one specific product. The yellow one did not. Its oval shape, the regulator found, identifies Peanut M&M’s specifically, a distinct HFSS product in its own right. Same ad, same campaign, same brand. One mascot cleared, one convicted. 

Read that twice. A cartoon character with a face and arms just got treated as a proxy for a product ingredient list. Brand assets are becoming the product in the eyes of regulators, and this is not confined to confectionery. Similar arguments are already surfacing around alcohol, gambling and vaping, categories where the mascot, the color palette or the typeface can carry as much regulatory weight as the thing it is selling.

A Peanut Walks Into A Courtroom.

The complaint came from Bite Back, the food campaign group founded to push for tighter marketing rules on unhealthy products aimed at children. That is the enforcement model now. Advocacy groups file complaints, regulators adjudicate, and the resulting rulings become precedent that reaches well past the original brand. Consumer groups, environmental organizations and health advocates play the same role in Australia, Europe and North America. The complaint is the trigger. The ruling is the weapon.

Mars was not the only brand in the crosshairs of this particular round of rulings. Morley’s Woking, a London chicken chain, got the same treatment for an Instagram meal deal ad showing burgers, wings and fries. Uber Eats, by contrast, walked away clean on ads featuring Burger King, KFC, Domino’s and Papa Johns, because the ASA decided the food shown was not visually tied to one specific HFSS product. The line between promoting a brand and promoting a product now runs through individual pixels, and it moves case by case.

There is something almost absurd about a cartoon candy having its shape cross-examined by a regulator. Highly stylized characters with arms, legs and personalities, deployed on merchandise, clothing and partnerships that have nothing to do with food, being read as product depictions anyway. Absurd, and also entirely real. Creative symbolism has become regulatory evidence, and the brands that dismiss this as a quirky one-off are the ones most likely to be next.

The Writing’s On The Wrapper.

The UK is not moving alone. Chile restricts cartoon characters on unhealthy food packaging and advertising. Mexico has front-of-pack warning labels and advertising reform. Quebec has banned commercial advertising directed at children for decades. Australia is cracking down on greenwashing claims. The US Federal Trade Commission continues to pursue deceptive influencer marketing. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have both tightened rules on influencer disclosure, health claims and misleading advertising. The EU keeps pushing digital advertising transparency and platform accountability further.

Different legal systems, different politics, different starting points, same direction of travel: health claims, environmental claims, influencer marketing, advertising to children, financial promotions, misleading advertising. All converging toward the same demand, that a brand be able to prove what it says and defend what it shows.

The scale of what is driving this is not small. More than one billion people worldwide now live with obesity, according to the WHO and the Lancet’s 2024 global analysis, a milestone reached faster than the World Health Organization’s own projections anticipated. When the underlying public health numbers move like that, advertising law moves with them, and it does not move back.

More Than A Mouthful.

Marketers used to build for three audiences. Consumers, competitors, media. That list now runs longer: regulators, advocacy organizations, politicians, activists, courts, platforms. Every one of them can read a campaign and reach a different verdict than the one your creative team intended.

Reputation and compliance are no longer separate departments. The global influencer marketing industry is now worth more than $32 billion a year, per Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 figures, a channel built almost entirely on personal trust and light-touch disclosure. Regulatory scrutiny of environmental claims keeps climbing across Europe, Australia and North America. Enforcement actions involving influencers, greenwashing and undisclosed endorsements keep landing.

AI Has Turned Up the Heat.

The old enforcement model ran on complaints. Someone had to notice, someone had to care, someone had to file. That is changing. AI is increasing the scale and speed of advertising monitoring, which means regulators depend less on the public showing up with pitchforks and more on systems that scan everything, all the time. That does not necessarily mean more regulations. It means more routine investigations under the regulations already on the books, faster identification of misleading claims, undisclosed influencers, inconsistent messaging across markets and cross-border violations that used to slip through because nobody was watching every jurisdiction at once.

Read The Label Before You Print It.

Legal and compliance review needs to happen earlier, not as a final checkpoint before launch but as part of the creative process itself. Brand assets, symbols, implied claims and disclosures all deserve the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the product claims themselves. Before a campaign ships, four questions are worth asking every time.

1. Could a regulator interpret this differently than we intend. 
2. Could another market reach a different conclusion than this one. 
3. Could a brand asset itself become the product, the way an oval yellow candy just did.
4. Could this campaign become tomorrow’s precedent, the case study some other brand’s compliance team cites two years from now.

The M&M’s ruling joins a growing pile of reminders. Greenwashing investigations keep hitting major global brands. Influencer campaigns across the GCC and beyond face rising scrutiny over disclosure. None of these started as headline news. They started as one ad, one complaint, one ruling that nobody outside the legal team read closely enough at the time.

The Sweetest Lesson Of All.

Treat the M&M’s ruling as an early indicator, not an isolated curiosity. The global regulatory environment is tightening steadily, with legal scrutiny of brands rising across industries and jurisdictions, and with different political and legal systems converging, oddly, on the same stricter standards.

The M&M ruling is not really about candy. It is an early warning that marketers everywhere are entering a more heavily regulated era in which distinctive brand assets, once considered marketing strengths, are increasingly becoming legal liabilities.

For over forty years I get paid to find the words that make a product sound irresistible. Biggest, smallest, fastest, new & improved. Also: light, diet, low-fat, sugar-free, natural, organic. And now: sustainable, carbon-neutral, and, currently trending, AI-powered. Every generation of marketers invents its own magic words because every generation of customers falls for different bait. There’s nothing sinister in that. It’s just the business.

What’s changed is that nobody’s treating those words as just marketing anymore. They’re treating them as evidence. And evidence, unlike copy, has to hold up in court.

Recycled, Reused, Re-Litigated

In June 2026 the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned ads from Adidas, Calvin Klein and Uniqlo for using the word “recycled” in ways they couldn’t back up. 

Adidas advertised a “recycled shoe range” it turned out didn’t exist. Uniqlo’s fleece was recycled in the parts you could see and not recycled in the parts you couldn’t. Calvin Klein got dinged for implying an entire collection was made from preferred materials when the real number ranged from 20% to 100%. 

Six months earlier the same regulator had done the exact same thing to Nike, Lacoste and Superdry. Six brands. Two rulings. One word. The lesson isn’t about fashion. It’s about the word “recycled” no longer surviving close contact with a lawyer.

The Robot Reads the Fine Print Now

Here’s the part that really changed the game. The ASA didn’t catch any of this from a customer complaint. It caught it with an AI system called Active Ad Monitoring, which scanned nearly 60 million ads in 2025 alone and now accounts for close to half the regulator’s total workload. That intelligence helped resolve more than 40,000 complaints covering over 25,000 ads, resulting in more than 22,000 amendments or withdrawals. 

The old model was: someone gets annoyed, someone complains, someone investigates. The new model is: the machine reads every ad on the internet before breakfast and flags the liars. For decades marketers worried about focus groups. Now we should be worrying about a bot with better reading comprehension than all compliance departments put together.

Every Brand Should Take Notice

Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, Etihad and Virgin Atlantic have all had ads banned for implying that flying with them was somehow kinder to the planet than flying with anyone else. None of these airlines were faking their sustainability investments. Sustainable aviation fuel is real, offset programs are real. What wasn’t real was the insinuation that any of it added up to guilt-free air travel. Progress is not the same thing as permission to round up.

Healthcare Suffers the Same Scrutiny, with Sharper Teeth. In early 2026 the FDA sent Novo Nordisk two separate warning letters in the space of a month for misleading ads by Ozempic and Wegovy, their diabetes and chronic weight management drugs. One of them literally implied superiority over other GLP-1 drugs with no data to support it. Weeks later the agency issued warning letters to 30 telehealth companies for misleading marketing of compounded GLP-1 products, part of a six-month enforcement wave that produced more warning letters than the entire previous decade combined. Meanwhile in France, regulators fined Novo Nordisk close to €1.8 million and Eli Lilly over six figures for “disease awareness” campaigns that never named a drug but, according to the regulator, didn’t need to. Everyone in the room already knew which drug they meant.

Even the Category Name Is a Claim Now

Just to prove the trend has no borders and no mercy, India’s food safety regulator recently issued notices to Red Bull, Sting, Monster and several other brands for calling themselves “energy drinks” (a category that, as it turns out, doesn’t officially exist under Indian food law). Marketers get so comfortable with category language that we stop noticing it’s actually a claim. Apparently regulators noticed for us.

Patriotism, Audited

The FTC launched a “Made in the USA” enforcement sweep in April 2026, settling with sellers of flags, entertainment systems, and footwear for claiming products were American-made when they were partly stitched together in the Dominican Republic and Brazil. One company advertised boots as “handcrafted 100%” domestically while sourcing components from two other countries. “Made in,” “Built in,” and “Designed in” sound interchangeable in a brainstorm. They are not interchangeable to a federal regulator with a customs manifest.

The Cancel Button Is Also Copy

And it’s not just the ad anymore. The FTC’s $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon ($1 billion in penalties, $1.5 billion back to roughly 35 million affected customers) was about Prime enrollment and cancellation flows, not a single banner ad. The checkout screen, the “are you sure?” pop-up, the maze between “cancel” and “confirm cancel,” all of it is now marketing communication, and all of it is now litigable.

The AI Doesn’t Forget What You Deleted

Then there’s the part that actually raises the stakes. BCG found that shopping-related generative AI use grew 35% between February and November 2025. Capgemini found that a quarter of consumers already used generative AI shopping tools in 2025, with another 31% planning to. That matters because an AI assistant doesn’t just repeat your tagline back to you: it cross-references it. It notices when your sustainability page says one thing and your annual report says another. It remembers the claim you quietly walked back last year. Marketing used to compete for attention. It’s now competing for something much harder to fake: consistency across every document you’ve ever published.

Trust Is the New Adjective

Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer puts it plainly: 88% of consumers say trust is an important factor in deciding whether to buy from a brand. That’s not new information: trust has mattered since the first merchant sold the first not so fresh fish. What’s new is how fast it can now be tested, by a regulator, a journalist, a competitor or a chatbot, often within the same week the campaign launches.

What This Actually Means for the Work

The job hasn’t gotten smaller. It’s gotten more interesting. The old question was “how can we make this sound better?” The new question is “how can we make this true enough that nobody, not a regulator, not a rival, not an algorithm, can take it apart?” That’s a harder brief. It’s also, frankly, the brief we should have been writing to all along.

What Marketers Should Actually Do About It

• Treat every claim as something that will eventually be read by a regulator, a competitor, a journalist, and an AI model, because it will.
• Replace the adjective with the number. “Sustainable” is an opinion. “40% recycled polyester, independently certified” is a fact.
• Assume nothing about a fashionable word’s meaning. “Recycled,” “natural,” and “AI-powered” all mean whatever a regulator decides they mean this year.
• Remember that the checkout page, the cancellation flow, and the subscription terms are marketing copy too, and they get read in court.
• Build the proof before you write the headline, not after someone asks for it.
• Get legal and compliance into the room during the creative process, not after the campaign’s already shot.
• Write claims that will still be true in five years, not just until the next sales meeting.
• Stop asking how good your copy sounds. Start asking how fast someone else could prove it wrong.

Sources: European Commission, Green Claims / greenwashing study; UK Competition & Markets Authority; UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA/CAP), including the ASA and CAP Annual Report 2025 and Active Ad Monitoring briefing; U.S. Federal Trade Commission; U.S. Food & Drug Administration; France ANSM (Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé); India FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India); Boston Consulting Group (BCG); Capgemini Research Institute; Edelman Trust Barometer

I was reading a Fast Company article about Pirate’s Booty, the puffed rice-and-corn snack with the wonderfully ridiculous name, and its new rebrand. It reminded me that marketers never seem to learn one basic lesson: a successful brand can become sacred to the people who buy it. Maybe there were too many young mateys in the brand meeting and not enough weathered pirates who knew which treasure not to bury.

Pirate’s Booty, now part of The Hershey Co., was created in 1987 by entrepreneur Robert Ehrlich as a healthier alternative to other kids’ snacks.  It’s one of those brands whose charm has always lived partly in its own silliness. It is a cheesy puffed snack with a pirate, a treasure-chest and a name that sounds as if it was approved by a seven-year-old.

The original pirate had an expression that seemed to say, “Hi! I’m not wearing pants,” while the parrot had an expression that seemed to say, “Hi! He’s definitely not wearing pants.” That was part of the charm. Nobody was looking to Pirate’s Booty for maritime trouser compliance.

Now the artwork has moved from a flatter, more hand-drawn 2D style to a more dimensional, animated-looking 3D world. Yes, the new pirate is clearly wearing pants, in case you were wondering. But what I really want to know is why no one is talking about the fact that his eye patch appears to have changed sides? To me, that should be the major controversy. This poor man has somehow suffered the misfortune of gaining eyesight back in one eye while losing it in the other. Or worse, maybe he never had an eye problem in the first place, and the brand has been living with this lie all along.

My point is that the old packaging had a scruffy, lunchbox, treasure-map quality. The pirate felt like he belonged on a snack bag, not on a brand strategy slide. Then came the redesign: cleaner, smoother, neater, more modern, more polished and more professionally behaved. In other words, exactly the sort of thing that can sometimes make a brand worse while making every individual element look “better.”

When Better Looks Worse

This is where many companies get into trouble. They confuse modernization with cosmetic surgery. They take something familiar, loved and a little odd, send it away for expensive work, then act surprised when it comes back looking younger, tighter and somehow less itself.

A bad rebrand is a lot like the backlash a beloved actress gets after a nip and tuck. The public reaction is rarely, “What marvelous structural refinement.” It’s usually, “What happened to her?” That’s because people don’t fall in love with symmetry. They fall in love with expression, character and familiarity.

Brands work the same way. You can simplify a logo, polish a mascot, update the packaging, refine the colors and improve every visible element, yet still damage the thing people actually liked. The brand comes back from surgery looking more contemporary, but less familiar. Customers notice, even if they don’t describe it in the language of brand equity. They never say, “You damaged a distinctive memory structure.” They say something much more useful: “Why did you ruin it?”

The Customer Owns the Feeling

Marketers should listen to that, because a successful brand is the love child of a company and a customer. The company creates the name, logo, package, mascot, color palette, tone and promise. But customers add the memory. They add the recognition, ritual, habit, trust, nostalgia, loyalty and emotional meaning. The company may own the trademark, but the customer owns the feeling.

That’s why changing a brand isn’t just a design decision. Its relationship surgery. And when companies operate without understanding what customers are emotionally attached to, they shouldn’t be shocked when the patient wakes up angry.

Inside companies, familiar brand assets often start to feel tired. The brand team has seen the logo too many times. The agency wants to make its mark. The new CMO wants proof of momentum. The board wants modernization. Someone says the current identity is not “digital-first,” and before anyone can say “distinctive assets,” a beloved mascot is being quietly made to walk the plank.

But customers aren’t in those meetings. They’re not tired of the brand in the same way the brand team is tired of the brand. They see it for a few seconds on a shelf, sign, app icon, aircraft tail, streaming screen or restaurant wall. Familiarity is not boredom to them. Familiarity is usefulness. This is where companies get dangerously stupid. They look at a familiar symbol and see age. Customers look at the same symbol and see home.

Clean Can Become Empty

Cracker Barrel learned that lesson the hard way. When the company removed the familiar old man from its logo, it may have thought it was simplifying. Many customers saw something else. They saw a brand removing one of the cues that made it feel like Cracker Barrel.

The old man wasn’t elegant. He wasn’t sleek. Exactly. He was rocking chairs, biscuits, road trips, country-store clutter, fake old-timey comfort and the promise that nothing inside would be too surprising. He wasn’t decoration. He was a shortcut to the whole experience.

The backlash became political, cultural and emotional almost immediately, but underneath the noise was a very simple marketing lesson. Customers had decided that the old man belonged to the brand. When the company removed him, customers behaved as if something had been taken from them. Eventually, the company reversed course. That is the thing about brand symbols: from the inside they often look decorative, but from the outside they may be foundational.

Recognition Is Not Decoration

The same mistake can happen with packaging. Tropicana famously replaced its familiar orange-with-a-straw image with a cleaner, more premium-looking carton. In a design presentation, it probably looked fresh. On a supermarket shelf, it became harder to find. The orange wasn’t just a picture. It was a shopping shortcut. It said, “Here I am. I am the one you already know and love” When Tropicana removed it, the brand didn’t simply lose a visual device. It damaged recognition at the exact moment recognition mattered most.

This is why distinctive brand assets matter so much. Logos, colors, mascots, slogans, package shapes and product cues are not merely aesthetic choices. They are commercial infrastructure. They help people recognize, choose and trust a brand without having to think too much about it. One study of brand codes found that only about 15% of tested assets were truly distinctive. That should terrify marketers. If your brand is lucky enough to own something people recognize, why casually sand it down until it looks like everything else?

The lesson isn’t that old is always better. Sometimes old is just old. Sometimes a logo really does need to be improved, a package really does need to be simplified, and a brand really does need to evolve. But there is a difference between removing clutter and removing character. There is a difference between modernizing a brand and making it anonymous.

The Meaning Test Beats the Taste Test

Coca-Cola learned an even bigger version of this lesson all those years ago with New Coke. The company thought it had a product problem. Pepsi was winning taste-test battles. A sweeter formula tested well. So, Coca-Cola changed the formula. On paper, it was rational. In real life, it was madness.

People weren’t just drinking a fizzy brown liquid. They were drinking memory, Americana, habit, family refrigerators, gas stations, ballgames and one of the most loaded pieces of commercial symbolism on earth. Coca-Cola won the taste test and lost the meaning test.

That’s one of the great traps in research. (There’s more than one, but don’t get me started!) It can tell you what people prefer in isolation, but not always what they are emotionally unwilling to lose. When testing a rebrand, companies should not only ask which design looks better. They should ask which design still feels like us, what customers would miss if it disappeared, what people will think we are trying to say, and what meaning we may be accidentally killing.

Even Temporary Changes Touch Memory

Poor Spotify. Its temporary 20th-anniversary app icon was glittery and disco-ball-like. It was not meant to be permanent. It was a campaign flourish. But plenty of users hated it anyway and wanted the familiar green icon back.

That reaction matters precisely because the change was temporary. If people can get irritated by a short-lived icon change, imagine what happens when a company permanently removes a symbol customers use every day to find, trust or emotionally decode a brand.

Global Brands Still Need Roots

British Airways once tried to replace its Union Flag-style tailfins with more international “World Tails” designs. Strategically, the logic was understandable. Airlines are global. Customers are global. Britain itself was changing. The company wanted to look more cosmopolitan. But many customers and critics saw a British airline removing one of the clearest visual signs of Britishness from its aircraft. The lesson isn’t that national symbols are always sacred. The lesson is that rootedness matters. A global brand doesn’t become more global by becoming less itself.

The Backlash Is Now Part of the Launch

The stakes are higher now because trust has become more personal and backlash has become more immediate. Roughly 80% of people say they trust brands they personally use. That’s not abstract corporate goodwill. That’s intimate, practical trust. It’s the trust of “I know this,” “I buy this,” “this has never disappointed me,” “my family uses this,” and “this is part of my life.” So, when a company changes familiar brand symbols, customers can experience it as more than a visual update. The company thinks it changed a logo. The customer thinks it changed the deal.

What’s more, a rebrand no longer launches quietly. Screenshots spread instantly. Critics pounce. Customers mock. AI search summarizes the outrage. Investors notice. Employees cringe. The launch video with the earnest voiceover suddenly looks like evidence at a trial. A rebrand is no longer a controlled announcement. It is an open audition for public ridicule.

The Real Sin Is Disrespect

None of this means brands should never change. Of course they should change. Markets change. Customers change. Channels change. Technology changes. Taste changes. A brand that never evolves eventually becomes a museum piece with a sales target. But smart change makes a brand more itself. Bad change makes a brand more generic. Bad change behaves as if the trademark certificate is the whole relationship.

That’s the arrogance at the heart of so many failed rebrands: believing that because the company owns the mark, it owns the relationship. A successful brand is the love child of a company and a customer. And nobody likes watching one parent give the child a facelift without permission.

What Marketers Should Learn

Before changing a familiar brand asset, marketers should ask what job it actually does. Does it help people recognize you faster? Does it signal trust? Does it carry heritage? Does it make you distinctive? Does it create affection? Does it make customers feel that you are still the brand they chose? If the answer is yes, treat it carefully.

Don’t start with what the brand team is tired of. Start with what customers would miss. Don’t mistake a cleaner logo for a stronger brand. Don’t assume “digital-first” means “personality-last.” Don’t let the strategy deck murder the mascot. And above all, don’t surgically remove the weird little thing people love just because it looks old in a conference room.

Maybe Pirate’s Booty will be fine. Maybe the new pirate will settle in. Maybe kids won’t care. But this lesson is bigger than one pantsless, eyepatch swapping pirate.

When customers love a brand, they don’t only love the product. They love the accumulated meaning around it: the oddness, the shortcuts, the signs, the rituals and the emotional furniture. Change those things carelessly and people may react as if something has been stolen from them. Because, in a way, it has.

Sources: Fast Company — Pirate’s Booty rebrand and packaging update, Reuters — Cracker Barrel logo reversal after backlash, Ipsos / Jones Knowles Ritchie — Distinctive brand assets research, Edelman — 2025 Brand Trust report.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably (definitely) say it again: Most bad marketing is perfectly executed against a terrible brief. 

Before AI, the terrible brief tended to be a small, sad creature. Two pages. Half a thought. “Drive awareness.” “Target everyone.” “Do something disruptive.” It arrived like a hungover intern: late, smelly and not especially helpful.

Now the bad brief has had a glow-up.

It arrives looking as though its author has just completed an executive education program…but didn’t exactly finish at the top of their class. Ten pages. Fifteen pages. Beautifully structured. Impressively thorough. Full of frameworks, tone ladders, audience matrices, strategic pillars, channel considerations, measurable outcomes and sentences that sound as if they were polished by a committee of consultants.

But then we start to read it.

Somewhere around page two, after the fifth objective, the third target audience and the second mention of being both “premium and accessible,” you realize nobody in the room actually knows what the brief is asking for. Not really. Not the person who pretended to draft it. Not the person who approved it.  Not the people circulating it. 

That’s the new problem. The companies distributing these briefs often do not fully know what they really say. But they sound, as we say in my hometown of Boston: smaaaaat. And in modern corporate life, sounding smart can be alarmingly close to being mistaken for thinking.

AI didn’t create that instinct. It just turned it into a production system. Adobe’s 2025 research found that 96% of marketers have seen content demand at least double in the last two years, 62% say it has increased fivefold or more and 71% expect it to grow by more than five times again by 2027. Under that kind of pressure, the temptation to generate something polished, comprehensive and allegedly strategic becomes irresistible.  Why not let AI write the brief?  We let it write everything else.

So yes, the brief is still the problem. AI just made it worse.

We didn’t fix the brief. We industrialized it.

The old problem was absence. Now the problem is excess. Every audience segment included. Every objective listed. Every deliverable requested. Every KPI promised. All neatly packaged, not always aligned and often not fully interrogated.

The workplace is already drowning in this sort of performance. Asana’s 2025 Anatomy of Work research says knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on “work about work” rather than skilled or strategic work. That is a fantastic phrase because it captures exactly what many briefs have become: work about strategy, rather than actual strategy.

You can see what clarity looks like by contrast in how Unilever has been actively simplifying its brand portfolio and cutting complexity to improve marketing effectiveness, which is not about writing better briefs but about making fewer, sharper decisions before the brief is written.

The irony is that better work still tends to start with fewer, sharper choices. The Canadian and American industry briefing guide, The Client Brief, puts it in blunt terms: “rubbish in equals rubbish out”, and stresses the need to define the current brand status, the market context, the key problem and the overall business objective. It should not include every dream objective the client has ever had since “Gangnam Style” was #1 in the charts.

AI writes what you ask. Not what you need.

AI is very good at producing what looks like a complete brief. It is less effective at judgment, trade-offs and saying no. It will happily produce a document that asks you to be premium and mass, disruptive but safe, global but deeply local, emotionally resonant but universally scalable, youth-oriented but reassuring to legacy customers, conversion-driven but brand-building and somehow faster, cheaper and more distinctive at the same time.

In other words, it gives form to indecision.

That is dangerous because indecision dressed as sophistication is much harder to challenge than the old bad brief. The old one was obviously lazy. The new one looks industrious. The old one limped into the room. The new one glides.

You can see the opposite discipline in how Amazon uses narrative memos internally, which are designed to force decisions rather than accumulate options, highlighting exactly what AI-generated briefs tend to avoid.

And yet the market is getting less forgiving, not more. McKinsey noted in 2024 that in developed markets over a third of consumers have tried different brands, about 40% have switched or added retailers to their regular rhythm and 60% think private label products are as good as or better than branded ones. That is not a market that rewards fuzzy thinking. 

The rise of the impressive but unusable brief

A lot of AI-generated briefs now suffer from a very specific disease: they are polished enough to survive internal review and vague enough to fail in the real world.

This is where the problem stops being theoretical. The brief becomes a kind of ceremonial object. Nobody wants to admit they don’t understand parts of it. Nobody wants to ask which objective matters most because that might reveal that no such decision was made. Nobody wants to say, “This is contradictory nonsense in a tasteful font.”

And then it lands on the agency’s desk. That’s where the real damage begins.

Because once the brief has been circulated, it becomes politically difficult to change, operationally difficult to challenge and creatively difficult to reinterpret. Suddenly the agency is not solving a problem. It is obeying a document, which is exactly how organizations like HSBC end up repeatedly repositioning globally when central clarity is missing.

Fixed audiences. Fixed messages. Fixed deliverables. Fixed timelines. Then the client says, “We really want the agency to bring bold thinking.” That’s not a brief. That’s a set of instructions with a creativity rider.

The UK’s IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) says it plainly: a written brief is important, but not sufficient, and the briefing meeting matters. World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) recommendations on the pitch-process goes further, recommending initial chemistry meetings before a creative or media pitch to compare working styles and ethos. In other words, the grown-ups have been trying to tell us for years that the document alone is not the job.

What good looks like is already happening — just maybe not in your brief

I’m not sure what the briefs looked like for any of these campaigns, or if there was even a formal brief at all, or where the agency came into the process. But there must have been some level of clarity and freedom to think. Work like this doesn’t come out of convoluted, over-engineered documents.

Take Nike’s “Nothing Beats a Londoner.” It wasn’t built on a long list of deliverables or messaging layers. It worked because it captured a simple, sharply defined truth about youth identity in London. You don’t land that with a bloated brief, you land it when the problem is clear enough to inspire.

McDonalds’s “Raise Your Arches” campaign stripped branding back to its most minimal signal, the golden arches themselves, because the brand role was already understood. That level of confidence doesn’t come from over-specifying the work. It comes from clarity about what matters and what doesn’t.

When Tourism Australia launched “Come and Say G’Day,” it leaned into distinctive national personality rather than generic destination marketing. That only works when the brief, or the thinking behind it, defines what makes the place unique instead of listing everything it offers.

Heinz’s “Draw Ketchup” campaign where people instinctively sketched the Heinz bottle worked because the brand’s distinctiveness was already clear. You don’t brief that by listing features. You brief it by trusting what people already know.

Even more functional categories follow the same pattern. Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” platform is built on a single, obvious product truth. Volvo’s long-standing focus on safety continues to drive its communications globally. 

Different sectors, different markets, different objectives but the same underlying condition: There is a clear problem. There is a clear idea. And there is enough space for the agency to do something with it.

Which is exactly what most modern briefs, especially AI-generated ones, are starting to destroy. They try to answer everything upfront. They remove ambiguity instead of shaping it. They confuse completeness with clarity. And in doing so, they leave no room for the very thing they are supposed to enable: thinking.

Why this matters even more now

Because audiences are not sitting politely still while marketing departments workshop their strategic prose.

PwC’s 2025 Middle East consumer findings show that 47% of regional consumers have used local retailers in the past year versus 45% globally, and 38% prefer local retailers for daily and weekly shopping versus 34% globally. In the same report, 44% said price was among their top food-selection factors, 36% prioritized taste and 34% brand trust. That is not a simple audience.

You can see brands responding intelligently to that nuance in how McDonald’s adapts menus and messaging across markets such as India and the Middle East, reinforcing the point that real-world complexity cannot be handled by generic briefs.

Edelman’s 2024 Brands and Politics report found that 60% of people buy, choose or avoid brands based on politics, and 78% say they will not buy foreign brands because of the country the brand is headquartered in. That is a brutally specific constraint that generic global briefs routinely ignore.

Kantar’s Media Reactions research adds another useful warning. In 2024, only 48% of people said humor made them most receptive to advertising, with music at 47% and story at 42%. That means format matters. Tone matters. Context matters. These are not afterthoughts to be added in slide twelve.

DeepL’s localization research found 96% of respondents reported positive ROI from localization and 65% reported ROI of 3x or greater. That is the market telling you, politely but firmly, that one-size-fits-all briefs are not efficient. They are expensive.

The solution is still the same. It just matters more now.

Get the agency involved before the brief is finalized. Not after. Before.

That is still the top tip because it was always the top tip. The difference is that AI has now made it even easier for internal teams to lock in bad assumptions inside beautifully formatted documents. By the time the agency sees it, half the strategic mistakes have already been laminated.

If you want great work, stop treating agencies like vendors who receive instructions and start treating them like partners who can help define the problem.

There should be a meeting with the agency in advance of the brief for input. If it is a pitch, there should be a meeting with each agency separately, not all together, because that inhibits the very questions you most need them to ask. Then there should be another meeting once the first draft of the brief exists, to clarify points, answer questions and remove contradictions before work begins.

Don’t be arrogant. Don’t waste agency time. These are your partners, not your vendors — that is…if you want great work.

A few more tips, because some of this is fixable

Keep the brief short enough that a busy intelligent person can actually read it and remember it.

Choose one primary objective and maybe one secondary one.

Describe the decision you need to influence, not just the message you want to say.

State the real constraints only.

Say what the audience currently believes and what you need them to believe.

If you are using AI, use it to structure and challenge, not decide.

What an ideal marketing brief actually looks like

Of course, every brief should be different because every brand challenge is different and terminology varies across markets and companies.  But there is a basic framework. 

• the business problem — the core issue you are trying to solve, in plain business terms
• the commercial objective — the specific outcome you need to achieve (revenue, growth, share, etc.)
• the audience — the precise group of people who must change behaviour
• what they believe now — the current perception or behaviour that is holding you back
• what you need them to believe or do — the shift in perception or action required
• the proposition — the single, clear idea or promise you are putting forward
• the proof — the evidence, product truths or reasons to believe the proposition
• the constraints — the real limitations (budget, timing, legal, mandatory elements)
• the markets — where this applies and how markets differ if relevant
• the measures of success — the one or two metrics that define success
• the unanswered questions — what is still unclear and needs discussion before proceeding

A better AI prompt for generating a brief to a marketing agency

Most AI-generated briefs today don’t fail because they lack information. They fail because they lack judgment. The prompt below is designed to fix that. It forces clarity, prioritization and, critically, creates space for the agency to think, challenge and contribute before being handed a fully locked set of instructions masquerading as strategy. Just fill in the blanks for a workable first draft.

“Act as a senior marketing strategist preparing a first-draft brief for a [creative / integrated / PR / media / branding / digital / experiential] agency. Your job is to create a concise, decision-focused agency brief that helps the agency think, not just execute.

Company: [insert company name]
What we do: [insert plain-English description]
Category: [insert category]
Markets in scope: [insert markets]
Business problem: [insert real problem]
Commercial objective: [one primary, one secondary max]
Audience: [specific description]
Current belief: [what they think now]
Desired belief: [what we need them to think or do]
Proof: [why they should believe us]
Brand guardrails: [what must stay true]
Cultural nuances: [specific realities]
Mandatory elements: [must include]
Constraints: [real limitations]
Success metrics: [1–2 only]
Unknowns: [what needs discussion]

Instructions:
keep under 2 pages
force prioritization
identify contradictions
separate strategy from deliverables
flag where agency input is needed
end with five questions the agency should ask

One final brief point

The brief should be where creativity is born. Increasingly, it is where creativity is smothered. The good news is that the cure is not mysterious. Decide more. Write less. Involve the agency earlier. Because the best briefs do not impress. They inspire.

Sources: Adobe for Business, Asana, McKinsey, PwC, Edelman, Kantar, DeepL, IPA, ACA, Campaign Middle East, Agoda press materials, World Federation of Advertisers

For years, the brief was predictable: we need more content. More articles, more posts, more thought leadership, more everything. And for a long time, I agreed. Content was the answer. Then smarter content. Then “always-on content,” which sounds impressive until you realize it mostly means feeding a machine that doesn’t care. What changed wasn’t the volume. It was the outcome.

The brands that are winning aren’t the ones producing the most. They are the ones being talked about in the right places. Mentioned, cited, linked to, included. Not just present, but present in environments that carry weight.

When AI showed up it made the whole situation brutally obvious. Because AI doesn’t read everything. It prioritizes what it trusts. It leans on authoritative sources, credible media, consistent signals. It ignores the vast majority of brand-produced content unless it’s validated elsewhere. Which means PR, real PR that earns coverage, citations and authority, isn’t just relevant again. It’s central.

The problem isn’t content. It’s credibility.

Most Content Doesn’t Fail. It Never Had a Chance.

Here’s the blunt reality: 90.63% of pages get zero organic traffic (Ahrefs). At the same time, 70% of marketers are investing in content marketing (HubSpot). 

So, we’ve built a global system where everyone is producing and almost none of it is seen. That’s messed up! Most marketing teams don’t have a content problem. They have a misallocation problem. And credibility doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built, placed and amplified properly.

Search Doesn’t Reward Volume. It Rewards Authority.

Backlinko’s analysis shows the #1 Google result has ~3.8x more backlinks than positions #2–#10—one of the clearest indicators that authority still drives visibility. Google itself has consistently confirmed backlinks remain a top-ranking factor.

You can see this play out in how companies become visible. When Stripe, a global payments platform, publishes its annual “Stripe Sessions” content and economic reports, it’s picked up and cited by major outlets like the Financial Times and Bloomberg—creating authoritative backlinks and reinforcing its dominance in search around payments infrastructure.

Similarly, Property Finder, a UAE-based real estate marketplace and property portal, releases regular market reports that are cited by outlets like The National and Gulf News, generating backlinks and search visibility around real estate trends.

None of this comes from publishing more blog posts. It comes from being cited, covered and linked to by sources that search engines already trust.

Most of what brands create isn’t useless, it’s just undiscovered. The role of PR-led, credibility-driven content is to create the entry point. The signal that gets picked up, cited, linked to and surfaced. Once that happens, everything else benefits. Traffic doesn’t just go to the article that got coverage, it flows across the entire ecosystem. Your site, your deeper content, your product pages.

Think of it like a rock band. A few credible “hits” get the audience in. The coverage, the mentions, the visibility. Then people go deeper. They explore the deeper cuts. The earlier work. The overlooked pieces. Without those hits, the rest of the music just sits there.

This is where many companies fall down. They produce content. They run social. They buy media. But they do it in silos, and none of it compounds because no one is orchestrating credibility across channels. That’s not a content problem. That’s not a social problem. That’s a marketing leadership problem.

Buyers Trust Everyone Except You.

According to Edelman, earned media is trusted more than brand-owned content. And Gartner shows buyers spend just 17% of their time with suppliers. So when Notion, a productivity and collaboration platform, grew globally, it wasn’t by flooding content channels, it was through organic advocacy, media mentions and creator ecosystems that others trusted and referenced. The implication is uncomfortable: you don’t control your reputation. Other people do. And managing that isn’t about publishing more. It’s about aligning content, social, SEO and paid behind a single credibility strategy—led by PR, not separated from it.

Regional Reality: Credibility Travels Faster Than Content.

In the Middle East, Bayut, a UAE property portal and part of Dubizzle Group, has built consistent visibility by publishing quarterly and annual real estate market reports on prices, rents and transaction trends that are regularly picked up by outlets like Gulf News, Khaleej Times and Arabian Business. The content is structured for citation, not just consumption.

Similarly, YallaCompare, a UAE comparison platform for insurance, banking and personal finance products, publishes consumer finance insights on insurance pricing, credit behavior and cost-of-living that are frequently referenced by regional media, reinforcing its authority in personal finance.

In Europe, Raisin, a Germany-based fintech platform for savings and deposit products, releases data on savings rates and cross-border deposits that is cited by financial media, strengthening its visibility in a crowded category.

And in Asia, iPrice Group, a Southeast Asian ecommerce data and price comparison platform, built recognition through ecommerce trend reports that have been widely covered across regional publications, generating backlinks and sustained search visibility.

You don’t just publish content. You create content that others need so that they reference it, cite it and distribute it for you. And when that happens, the impact doesn’t stop with the article. It flows across your entire ecosystem—your site, your deeper content, your commercial pages—because authority has been established externally. That’s what integrated PR actually looks like in practice.

Reviews Help. But They Don’t Carry You.

Yes, reviews matter. Hugely. But they’re baseline. Tripadvisor has over 1 billion reviews and Booking.com has hundreds of millions. Which means everyone has reviews. What separates brands is where else they show up. For example, Rove Hotels consistently appears in international “best value” lists and travel media, extending its visibility far beyond review platforms. Getting into those lists is not an SEO trick. It’s not a content calendar. It’s PR coordinated with search, social and distribution so it actually drives visibility.

Platforms Are Quietly Killing Your Content Strategy.

Organic reach on Facebook sits around ~5% or less, So even if you produce more content, fewer people see it. Meanwhile, Google emphasizes E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), a framework that prioritizes credibility signals over output. Translation: you don’t need more posts. You need more proof. And proof doesn’t come from one team. It comes from aligned signals across media, search and social—again, coordinated, not fragmented.

AI Has Removed Any Remaining Illusion.

AI systems don’t reward effort. They reward validated presence. If your brand appears across credible sources, you show up. If not, you don’t. This is exactly what we broke down in our PR for Robots session about how PR, SEO, social and paid must work together to influence what machines surface and what people trust. The point was simple: PR leads because AI trusts authority. SEO makes sure it’s found. Social and paid amplify it. Content feeds it. Run them separately and you disappear.

So What Actually Works?

Not more content. Better signals: coverage in authoritative media, backlinks from credible domains, citations in trusted contexts, structured presence across platforms. And, most important, integration led by PR. Because PR is the only discipline designed to shape narrative, secure third-party validation and place stories where authority is built. Everything else should support that instead of operating independently.

Stop asking: “How much content are we producing?” Start asking: “Where are we being referenced and by whom?” Because the system has already decided: content is expected, credibility is scarce, scarcity wins. You don’t need more content. You need content that someone else is willing to reference.

Sources: Ahrefs: “90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google”, Backlinko: Google ranking factors study, Edelman Trust Barometer, Gartner B2B Buying Journey research, HubSpot State of Marketing Report, Hootsuite Social Media Benchmarks, Google Search Central (E-E-A-T guidance), Tripadvisor company reporting, Booking.com company reporting

I remember seeing an ad years ago—print, probably in a magazine or buried in one of those junk mail stacks in my mailbox. It stopped me cold because it didn’t even pretend to be clever. Just a hot girl and one word in oversized type: “SEX.” Then, in smaller print beneath it, almost sheepishly: “Now that we have your attention…” before proceeding to make its pitch. There’s an old adage that “Sex sells”. But this company was taking the suggestion literally.

If memory serves, it was selling auto parts. Or something equally unsexy. I wouldn’t swear to the category, but I would swear to the tactic. Because that line—or versions of it—popped up all over the place for a while. Subway, the sandwich makers, used exactly the same headline on billboards just a few years ago.  Different companies, different industries, same blunt-force approach. Grab attention by any means possible, then pivot into whatever you’re actually trying to sell.

At the time, I used it often as an example—half admiring, half critical. It was undeniably effective as an attention device. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. You noticed it. You read it. You might even have responded to it. But it also revealed something uncomfortable. It did very little for the brand. In fact, you could argue it worked against the brand over time. It trained people to remember the trick, not the company. The interruption, not the message.

And the punchline still holds: I remember the ad perfectly. I have no idea who ran it.

We’re watching the same dynamic play out again—just dressed differently, distributed faster and optimized by machines.

Yap Yap Yap.

Today’s equivalent isn’t a single word in bold type. It’s a person talking—and taking their time doing it. The modern version shows up across platforms like TikTok, Meta and YouTube. A creator leans into the camera and starts explaining. There’s usually a hook, but it’s soft. The point arrives late. The product reveal is delayed just enough to keep you from swiping.

These are what we now refer to as “yapper ads.” Low production, conversational tone, often indistinguishable from organic content. Sometimes engaging, often a bit exhausting. But calling them a format misses the bigger point. Yapper ads aren’t a creative trend. They’re a system outcome.

They exist because the environment rewards them. Platforms reward time, not meaning. Brands reward conversion, not memory. Tools reward speed, not craft. And this is the critical shift: they hack the algorithm, not the audience. TikTok has reported that 67% of users say ads that feel native perform better, which is a polite way of saying that if your ad blends in, it gets more time to work.

You can see this clearly in Temu, a fast-growing online marketplace known for ultra-low-priced goods, where ads often stretch a simple product demo into a drawn-out explanation designed to keep you watching. Or Shein, a Chinese fashion brand that rapidly produces and sells inexpensive clothing driven by social media trends, where influencer “haul” videos feel more like casual conversations than structured selling. In both cases, the goal is not elegance. It’s duration. Nielsen reinforces the incentive: ads with higher attention scores drive stronger sales lift. So attention—by any means—wins.

They Don’t Persuade. They Sort.

What’s changed most isn’t how these ads look. It’s what they’re trying to do. Traditional advertising tried to change your mind. Yapper ads are trying to figure out whether your mind is already half made up.

Google and YouTube research shows that longer video formats can increase purchase intent when viewers actively choose to keep watching. That choice becomes the signal. If you’re still there after 20 or 30 seconds, you’ve effectively qualified yourself.

Brands lean into this behavior. HelloFresh, a subscription service that delivers pre-portioned ingredients and recipes to customers’ homes, uses relaxed, testimonial-style ads where someone casually explains how the service fits into their life. The pacing is unhurried, almost conversational. It doesn’t feel like a pitch. It feels like you chose to listen. AG1, a premium daily greens powder marketed as an all-in-one health supplement, does something similar in audio, with long host-read segments that rely on trust and familiarity rather than brevity.

This aligns with broader consumer behavior. Stackla found that 79% of consumers say user-generated content influences purchasing decisions. So brands don’t just use UGC—they recreate its tone and rhythm. Sometimes well, sometimes badly. Either way, the mechanism is the same. This isn’t about convincing everyone. It’s about identifying the ones who were already close. [This is that broader shift from targeting audiences to reading behavior signals I explored in last week’s article, After Personas: The Next Evolution of Targeting.]

Why They Scale (and Why Everyone Copies Them)

The real shift isn’t creative. It’s economic. The old “SEX” tactic was limited by media cost. You couldn’t run endless variations. Now you can. Yapper ads are cheap to produce, easy to adapt and built for constant testing.

Gymshark built early momentum by working with large numbers of creators producing simple, talk-to-camera content. Not one perfect ad—many iterations. Wish took this logic even further, flooding feeds with variations at scale.

Meta’s own data shows that increasing the number of creative variations improves performance outcomes. So the strategy becomes obvious: don’t refine one message, multiply many and let the algorithm decide.

Why They Feel Off (Even When They Work)

For all their effectiveness, yapper ads create a deeper issue. They are, almost by design, anti-brand. They prioritize watch time over clarity, volume over craft and conversion over memory.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown that brands grow by building mental availability—being easily recognized and recalled in buying situations. That requires consistent assets, clear positioning and repetition with purpose. Yapper ads often strip those away in favor of looking “native,” which makes them blend in rather than stand out.

That matters because, as McKinsey reports, over 70% of consumers consider multiple brands before purchasing. If your advertising doesn’t leave a distinct impression, you become interchangeable. At the same time, Microsoft research suggesting the average attention span is around 8 seconds has led marketers to chase attention more aggressively. Ironically, that often results in longer, less focused content rather than sharper communication.

The Performance Trap

Yes, yapper ads work. They drive clicks. They convert. They show up nicely on dashboards. That’s why they’ve spread so quickly.

The danger is not in using them. The danger is in relying on them exclusively. Binet and Field’s research shows that brands over-investing in short-term activation at the expense of long-term brand building tend to see weaker profit growth over time. Short-term gains are visible. Long-term erosion is not. So the system keeps reinforcing itself—more ads, more yapping, more testing, less differentiation.

What Smart Marketers Do Instead

The answer isn’t to reject the format. It’s to discipline it. The most useful principle is simple. Yapper ads fail when they stretch a weak idea. They work when every second carries meaning.

You can see the difference in how stronger brands operate. Apple communicates complex ideas with clarity and restraint, even in short formats. Nike relies on visual storytelling and emotion rather than explanation. Mattress brand, Purple, uses longer formats effectively because they are structured around clear proof, not filler. And Coca-Cola ensures that even informal content reinforces recognizable cues that build memory over time.

The difference isn’t length. It’s intention. It’s knowing what to say, saying it well and not overstaying your welcome.

“SEX! Now that we have your attention…”  Still works as an attention device. So do Yapper ads. But both rely on the same underlying tradeoff. They capture attention and sometimes drive action, but they don’t necessarily build anything that lasts.

And in the long run, the brands that win aren’t the ones that talk the most. They’re the ones you remember when it matters.

Sources: TikTok Marketing Science reports (2023–2024), Google/YouTube Video and Intent Research, Nielsen Attention and Sales Lift Studies, Stackla Consumer Content Report, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research on mental availability, Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey reports, Microsoft Attention Span Study, Meta Advertising Insights on creative testing and performance.

I’ve watched budgets move before. Print to cable. Cable to search. Search to social. Each shift came wrapped in theory — targeting, intent, engagement, community. We built narratives to justify the reallocation because the outcomes were still a bit fuzzy. We were buying influence and hoping for sales.

But Retail Media is all about the math. When a CFO can see the ad, the click and the sale tied together in one dashboard, It’s hard to get them to listen to arguments about brand value. Marketing stops being a debate about storytelling and becomes a discussion about contribution margin. That’s why this shift feels different. Previous migrations were persuasive. This one is provable.

Retail Media Is No Longer a Test Budget

Retail media is defined simply: advertising inside retailer environments powered by first-party shopper data with closed-loop attribution to sales. When a brand buys a sponsored listing on Amazon, that placement can be measured against actual transactions. That’s not just modeled awareness. That’s measurable revenue.

The scale tells the story. Global retail media spend is forecast to reach $174.2 billion in 2025, surpassing global TV advertising for the first time according to WPP Media as reported by the Wall Street Journal. That alone explains why budget conversations have changed tone.

In the United States, retail media is now the third-largest digital advertising channel behind search and social. Amazon Ads generated more than $45 billion in advertising revenue in its most recent annual reporting, growing faster than many legacy media companies. Walmart Connect has reported sustained double-digit growth as brands chase grocery and mass retail purchase data tied to real baskets. The channel has gone from incremental spending to massive budget reallocation in less than a decade.

Why CFOs Are Driving the Shift

Retail media thrives because it collapses the distance between marketing and revenue. McKinsey has estimated that retail media networks can deliver two to three times the return on ad spend compared to traditional digital display. In an era of shrinking cookies and weaker open-web targeting, that clarity is irresistible.

Deloitte’s latest CMO Survey shows performance marketing continuing to claim a growing share of total marketing spend while traditional channels decline. Retail media sits squarely inside that performance allocation, but with a critical twist: it controls placement at the moment of purchase.

When sponsored listings dominate the top of search results on Amazon, the shelf itself becomes paid real estate. Trade spend and media spend merge. That is not a small shift in terminology. It is a structural change in power.

AI Will Push Retail Media Even Closer to the Transaction

AI search and AI shopping agents will intensify this shift, not dilute it. As consumers increasingly rely on AI tools to compare products, summarize reviews and narrow choices, browsing compresses and discovery moves upstream. But the transaction still executes inside a retailer environment. That means sponsored placement, pricing strategy, ratings and product data become even more critical because they feed the algorithm that recommends the final choice. Retail media does not disappear in an AI world. It becomes embedded in the decision logic itself, making control of the digital shelf even more commercially decisive.

This Is a Global Phenomenon

More than 80% of global retail media ad spend is concentrated in the United States and China according to eMarketer’s latest projections, reflecting the dominance of large ecommerce ecosystems.

In China, Alibaba and JD.com have long integrated advertising into their marketplaces. Retail media there operates inside fully developed commerce ecosystems where payments, logistics and live commerce converge. Conversion rates for in-platform ads routinely outperform open web benchmarks because the consumer is already in buying mode.

Europe is accelerating. Carrefour and Tesco have both scaled retail media offerings leveraging loyalty card data. IAB Europe reports retail media as one of the fastest-growing digital segments across the region, driven by retailer data monetization and measurable performance.

In Latin America, Mercado Libre has identified advertising as one of its fastest-growing revenue lines in recent investor disclosures. In India, Flipcart continues expanding sponsored listings as ecommerce penetration rises. 

In the Middle East, Noon is building its advertising capabilities alongside rapid ecommerce growth in the Gulf.

The pattern repeats across markets: retailers are becoming media owners because margins on advertising significantly exceed margins on physical goods. Company earnings disclosures consistently show advertising carrying materially higher profitability than retail operations.

The Hidden Cost: Fragmentation and Creative Compression

There are now more than 200 retail media networks globally according to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates. That means global brands must manage dozens of retailer dashboards, attribution models and creative specifications.

Retail media ads are inherently product-centric. They optimize for conversion, not narrative. Product-led ads outperform brand-led ads inside retail environments because the consumer is already shopping. That performance bias subtly shifts creative strategy toward immediacy and price.

The danger is not that retail media is ineffective. It is that it becomes over-weighted. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the UK-based professional body for advertising agencies has repeatedly shown that sustained brand investment drives long-term profit growth beyond short-term activation. Retail media excels at the bottom of the funnel. It does not replace upper-funnel demand creation.

Budgets are shifting because they work. But balance still matters.

What Smart Marketers Are Doing 

This is where it gets interesting.

First, the smartest brands treat retail media as a data engine, not just a sales lever. They mine retailer search term reports to uncover unmet demand signals, then feed those insights into product development and pricing strategy. Retail media becomes market research in real time.

Second, they negotiate data access aggressively. Retailers want ad dollars. Brands should demand granular audience insights in return. Shopper-level behavioral data can inform media outside the retailer environment, even if activation remains privacy-compliant.

Third, they align trade and media teams structurally. Historically, trade marketing negotiated shelf space while media bought impressions. Retail media collapses those silos. The marketing genius move is integrating those teams so budget allocation optimizes total commercial impact, not departmental KPIs.

Fourth, they use retail media to test pricing elasticity. Because campaigns can be tied directly to SKU-level sales, brands can run controlled experiments on pricing tiers, bundle offers and promotional depth with immediate feedback.

Fifth, they protect brand equity. That means ring-fencing brand-building budgets rather than allowing performance success to cannibalize long-term investment. Retail media should capture demand, not become the sole creator of it.

Finally, they diversify intelligently. While Amazon dominates in the US and Alibaba leads in China, regional players like Mercado Libre, Flipkart and Noon offer growth opportunities where competition is less saturated and cost-per-click dynamics can be more favorable.

Retail media is not just a channel. It is a commercial negotiation layer sitting between brand and buyer. The marketers who win will be those who understand both its power and its limits.

Retail media is reshaping marketing budgets because it sits closest to revenue. The question is not whether to participate. The question is whether you control it — or it controls you.

Sources: WPP Media global advertising forecast 2025, Wall Street Journal reporting on retail media surpassing TV, Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, JD.com, Mercado Libre, Carrefour, Tesco earnings reports 2024–2025, eMarketer global retail media market projections 2024–2025, McKinsey retail media ROAS analysis, Deloitte CMO Survey 2024–2025, IAB and IAB Europe retail media reports, IPA Effectiveness research on brand investment.

Go Google your own company. But you must be incognito. Trench coat, hat and sunglasses optional. 

Open a new tab…ideally on a stranger’s device that doesn’t know your search history. Maybe try a hotel business center or drop by an Apple Store and use a display model. Type your company name and look at what shows up. Force yourself to look at it as if you were a prospect with no loyalty and no patience.

That is exactly what I do from time to time…with clients and even with my own agency. I want to see what a skeptical prospect would see, the kind of executive who has ten tabs open, three agencies shortlisted and zero tolerance for hype. So, I type our name into Google and force myself to look at the screen as if I had never heard of us.

A few years ago, I would see our company site and a page of content, announcements, reviews, etc. But now, up comes our description, reviews, phone number, location, FAQs, a Google Business profile, “People also ask,” and an AI-generated summary that stitched together who we are and what we do in neat, confident prose. It’s clean, efficient and strangely complete. And I don’t even have to click my own website. If I don’t need to click to understand us, why would anyone else?

If you haven’t Googled your company recently, you may find it clarifying. Marketing is losing the right to be the final step. The old funnel assumption is breaking

Welcome to the world of zero-click search.

For two decades, marketers operated on a comfortable assumption: discovery leads to traffic, traffic leads to conversion and conversion happens on your website. The website was the stage. Search was the usher. Social was the invitation. Paid media was the spotlight. Now the customer often makes the decision before the website ever loads, and the shift is measurable, global and accelerating.

This shift is called zero-click search. It simply means someone types something into Google and gets their answer directly on the results page without clicking through to any website. According to SparkToro, nearly 60% of Google searches in the United States and the European Union now end without a click, and a growing share of remaining clicks go to Google-owned properties. That means most searches do not produce traffic for independent websites.

At the same time, GroupM’s 2025 forecast projects global advertising revenue to exceed $1.15 trillion, and digital advertising alone accounts for an estimated $720 billion globally in 2025 according to eMarketer projections. The industry is investing aggressively in attention even as measurable clicks decline. Money is up. Clicks are down.

Why Google is keeping the customer on Google

To understand why this is happening, you have to look at how search itself has changed — and how Google actually makes money.

Google does not earn revenue when someone clicks an organic search result. It earns revenue when someone clicks a paid ad. Alphabet’s advertising revenue is expected to exceed $255 billion globally, with search advertising remaining the dominant contributor. Google’s business is not distributing traffic to websites. It is capturing intent and monetizing it.

Google has introduced Featured Snippets, which display a summarized answer at the top of the page, Knowledge Panels, which show company profiles on the right-hand side and AI Overviews, which use artificial intelligence to generate a summary from multiple sources. These features keep users inside Google longer, increase engagement with the results page and protect Google from losing users to TikTok, Amazon, YouTube or ChatGPT.

An AI Overview is a Google-generated answer that combines information from different websites into a single summary displayed directly in search results.

If your insight feeds that answer but the user never visits your site, your content is consumed without traffic. From Google’s perspective, the user was satisfied, remained on the platform and is more likely to perform another search — possibly a commercial one with paid ads attached.

Most zero-click searches are informational and were never the most lucrative queries. High-intent commercial searches — “buy,” “best,” “near me” — still carry paid placements. Google can afford to answer informational queries directly because the real monetization engine is commercial intent.

Reuters and The Wall Street Journal have reported that Google’s AI Overviews are reducing referral traffic for certain publishers. At the same time, AI summaries function as a defensive strategy. If users get fast, coherent answers inside Google, they are less likely to defect to external AI tools.

When you Googled your company, did you notice how much of your story was already told before anyone clicked? If the customer forms an opinion from that summary, your website becomes optional — and from Google’s perspective, that is the system working exactly as designed.

Search is splintering: people are searching on TikTok and Instagram

Search behavior is also fragmenting across platforms. Google executives acknowledged that roughly 40% of young users turn to TikTok or Instagram for search-style queries such as restaurant recommendations. TikTok is estimated to exceed 1.6 billion monthly active users globally. YouTube reports over 2.7 billion monthly logged-in users worldwide.

Apple’s Services segment is projected to exceed $90 billion in annual revenue for fiscal 2025, reflecting the continued monetization of App Store and in-platform search.

Deloitte’s 2025 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that social media influences more than half of Gen Z purchase decisions worldwide. If someone searches “best coffee in Dubai” inside TikTok, YouTube or Instagram, they watch videos, read comments and decide. Discovery, evaluation and validation all occur inside the app. No website is required and no Google Analytics session is recorded.

If your category is being searched inside TikTok, YouTube or Instagram, have you looked at what appears there under your brand name?

Amazon and retail media: the funnel collapses inside the store

Ecommerce platforms have quietly gone even further. Amazon is projected by analysts to exceed $650 billion in revenue for 2025, and accounts for roughly 40% of ecommerce sales in the United States.

On Amazon, discovery, reviews, comparison, pricing and transaction all happen inside the platform. Brands invest heavily in Amazon advertising and search optimization because consumers rarely leave the platform to visit brand websites.

Retail media — advertising inside ecommerce platforms using shopper data — is one of the fastest-growing segments of global advertising because it places marketing directly at the point of purchase. Global retail media spend is projected to surpass $170 billion, according to eMarketer estimates.

If you sell on Amazon, your Amazon listing is your brand and the click to your own website is largely irrelevant if the sale happens inside the platform. Have you searched your product inside Amazon the way a customer would?

Social commerce: inspiration and purchase now live in the same place

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reported over 4 billion monthly active users across its family of apps and is projected to continue modest user growth. Instagram Shopping allows users to discover and purchase products directly within the app, and Shopify reports that social commerce continues to grow rapidly for many merchants globally.

The traditional funnel separated inspiration and transaction into different steps and different places. Social platforms have fused them.

When someone discovers you on Instagram, can they buy without ever leaving? If they can, your website may not matter. If they cannot, you may be forcing a click that feels unnecessary.

AI answers compress the journey even more

Artificial intelligence is adding another layer of compression. ChatGPT reached 100 million users within two months of launch and now handles billions of prompts. OpenAI is projected to exceed 150 million weekly active users. Microsoft integrated AI into Bing and Google embedded AI Overviews directly into search.

When someone asks an AI tool, “What are the best marketing agencies in Dubai?” the answer may be a summarized list compiled from multiple sources. The user may form an opinion without ever visiting a single website.

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging unauthorized use of its content and Axel Springer signed a licensing deal with OpenAI, both reactions to a world in which consumption is shifting from page views to AI-generated answers. Have you asked an AI tool what it says about your company? 

A preview of the future: super-apps

A super-app is a platform that combines messaging, payments, shopping and services in one ecosystem. In China, WeChat has over 1.3 billion monthly active users and continues to grow modestly into 2025 according to Tencent projections, and brands operate mini-programs inside WeChat where users can browse, pay and access customer service without leaving the app.

In that model, the website is optional because the platform owns the entire journey from awareness to transaction to loyalty. The Western web is not fully there yet, but the direction of travel is obvious.

What marketers should do now

So what should marketers actually do in response, beyond panicking about traffic reports?

First, stop equating traffic with relevance. If more than half of searches end without a click, declining sessions do not automatically mean declining demand. They may mean resolution happened upstream.

Second, treat search results as prime advertising real estate. Your Google Business Profile, reviews, structured data and FAQs should be curated with the same care as your homepage. Structured data is a standardized format that helps search engines understand and display information about your business.

BrightLocal’s 2025 Consumer Review Survey found that 87% of consumers read online reviews before choosing a business, and many of those reviews are visible directly in search results. If you Googled your company, what would those reviews communicate before anyone clicked?

Third, design content that survives compression. Clear definitions, credible data and concise positioning increase the likelihood that AI summaries and featured snippets represent you accurately.

Fourth, build platform-native strength. If your audience searches on TikTok, invest in TikTok search optimization. If your product sells on Amazon, master Amazon ranking and retail media. If Instagram drives discovery, design for in-app purchase journeys.

Budgets should move closer to the decision surface. That means shifting investment from driving clicks to strengthening presence where the decision is formed. More into retail media if the sale happens inside Amazon. More into review acquisition and reputation management if the choice is made on Google’s results page. More into platform-native content if discovery happens on TikTok or Instagram. More into brand clarity if AI summaries are shaping perception before interaction.

It also means reallocating some performance spend into influence infrastructure. That includes structured data, first-party data systems, creative that is built for compression and measurable brand lift studies. If clicks are no longer the reliable proxy for intent, then capital must follow influence, not sessions.

Fifth, measure influence, not just clicks. McKinsey’s 2025 consumer research confirms that more than 70% of consumers engage in omnichannel journeys, meaning they interact across multiple platforms before purchasing. Brand lift studies, share of search and platform-specific conversion metrics provide a more realistic picture of impact than raw sessions.

Finally, sharpen your positioning. When the decision happens inside a search result, a TikTok video or an AI answer, your value proposition must be unmistakable.

If you haven’t Googled your own company recently, do it. Then ask yourself a simple question: Would you click?

Sources: SparkToro Zero-Click Search Update 2025, GroupM This Year Next Year Global Advertising Forecast 2025, eMarketer Global Digital & Retail Media Forecast 2025, Alphabet 2025 Analyst Revenue Projections, Amazon 2025 Revenue Projections (Consensus Estimates), Meta 2025 Earnings Guidance, OpenAI 2025 Usage Disclosures, Tencent 2025 Projections, Deloitte Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey 2025, BrightLocal Consumer Review Survey 2025, McKinsey Global Consumer Research 2025