The media organization, TIME, working with ad-tech firm Mobian, has been testing “Agent Ads” — sponsored content written not for you, but for the AI crawler reading over your shoulder. Ally Bank, the U.S. digital bank, and the Project Management Institute, the global professional association, are already buying in. The pitch: skip the tedious business of earning credibility and just buy your way into the robot’s reading material. One problem: It doesn’t seem to work. And Perplexity has already called it “cloaking” and blocked it.

What the Hell Is an Agent Ad?

A normal ad is made for a human to see. An Agent Ad is made for an AI crawler to discover. It is brand-fed text on simplified pages that human visitors to the same site never see. Basically, they are planting information somewhere an AI might stumble onto it while researching, hoping that it shapes what the AI eventually tells someone.

It’s the old search-engine trick of showing a crawler something different from what a human sees. Which is why Perplexity calls it cloaking and has warned publishers using it they could get downranked. OpenAI and Google haven’t said they’ll treat it the same way, so it’s not dead. But nobody’s proven buying an Agent Ad buys a recommendation, either.

Of Course Marketers Want In

The stakes are real. Adobe found AI-referred traffic to US retail sites is up 393% year over year, converting 42% better than regular traffic. Similarweb found ChatGPT referrals to brand homepages jumped 354.7% in a single week after a UI change. Naturally, marketers’ first instinct after “how do we get in the answer?” is “how do we game it?”

The Robot Smelled a Rat

We’ve seen this movie. SEO began as making useful information easier to find before it curdled into keyword stuffing, link farms and cloaking, until Google got sophisticated enough to catch it, reportedly nuking 40 billion spammy pages a day. Agent Ads risk replaying that whole arc, faster, against a smarter referee.

Sorry. You Still Have to Do the Work.

This is what our PR for Robots sessions are about: making brands visible, understandable and recommendable when customers ask AI what to buy or whom to trust. We earn credible third-party coverage, develop real expertise and use SEO/AEO to make that evidence discoverable and legible to machines. Paid media can amplify a credible foundation.  But it can’t manufacture one.

The data backs this up hard. Muck Rack analyzed 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude: 84% came from earned media. Paid and advertorial content? 0.3%. Eighty-four percent earned. Point-three percent paid. 

You Can’t Optimize Your Way Out of Being Uninteresting

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to find what correlates with AI visibility. Content volume barely mattered. The strongest driver was YouTube mentions, followed by brand mentions across the wider web — places you don’t control. AI doesn’t need more stuff from you. It needs credible evidence about you.

You Don’t Get to Pick Your Robot

There’s no single AI to please. ChatGPT’s share of AI traffic slid from ~76% to ~53% in under a year as Gemini surged. The engines don’t even read the same things. ChatGPT favors journalism, Gemini leans more on Reddit and YouTube, Claude seeks more academic output. Semrush found only 36 brands hold top-100 visibility across all platforms every month — Apple, Amazon, Patagonia-types with real, independent footprints, not just a nice website. Patagonia’s strength comes from being discussed on OutdoorGearLab, REI, GearJunkie, Reddit — other people talking about it. That’s much harder to fake.

Make Yourself Worth Recommending

Ask AI the questions your customers actually ask, not your brand name. See who shows up, and why and which sources it’s trusting. Then close the gap: earn real coverage, produce real research, put real experts in front of real journalists, make the evidence machine-legible via SEO/AEO. Measure AI mentions, citations, sentiment and referral traffic. Also check whether AI can even crawl your site. Adobe found big chunks of major retail sites aren’t fully accessible to AI systems at all!

Stop Trying to Outwit the Robot

Agent Ads may mature into a legitimate format. Bit so far, there’s no evidence that buying one buys a recommendation. And Perplexity’s reaction proves the machine gets a vote. AI companies depend on people trusting their answers. The moment those answers look bought, trust erodes fast.

Which brings us to an irritatingly old-fashioned conclusion: build something good, earn credible coverage, make it easy for AI to find. Do the real marketing work instead of hunting for the cheat code. We’ve built extraordinarily sophisticated AI, and our first instinct is apparently to see if we can fool it. 

Maybe the robots aren’t the ones who need to get smarter.

As we preach in our PR for Robots webinars, it isn’t about tricking AI into thinking your brand matters. It’s about doing the work that gives AI enough credible evidence to know that it does.

Sources: The Business Insider (Aug 2026); Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading? (2026); Adobe Digital Insights (2026); Similarweb (2026); Semrush AI Visibility Index (2026); Ahrefs (2026); Google Search Central.

This one’s for anyone who’s ever watched a brilliant campaign work exactly as planned…and ruin the thing it was promoting.

Every event marketer is trained to do the same three things: get bigger, get louder, get easier to reach. That’s sound advice, until we realize the brand’s entire appeal was being smaller, quieter and slightly hard to get into. 

Case in point: Wimbledon. The Guardian recently reported on the tournament’s very deliberate courtship of younger fans, international visitors and a small army of influencers. And it’s working beautifully. The crowd is younger, more global, and producing the kind of content usually reserved for fashion week and infinity pools.

Excellent marketing. Almost too excellent.

Because Wimbledon now risks becoming less a tennis championship than a very photogenic backdrop. The outfits, the flowers, the celebrity sightings and the Instagram proof-of-attendance are starting to out-compete the actual game of elite athletes hitting a ball across a net. That’s the strange thing about overmarketing: it never looks like failure. It looks like a longer queue.

Anyone for Content?

Wimbledon hasn’t made a marketing mistake. It’s done exactly what every brand is told to do: widen access, chase youth, recruit creators, generate content, turn tradition into “experience.” The trouble is that Wimbledon’s whole mystique was built on being not quite accessible. The ballot, the queue, the all-white dress code, the hush, the vague sense that eating a strawberry incorrectly might get you removed. None of that was incidental. That was the show.

Some brands genuinely improve when friction disappears: Amazon should make buying batteries effortless, Uber should make finding a car effortless. But luxury, sport, hospitality and culture often run on the opposite fuel: scarcity, ritual, anticipation. Not every velvet rope is an inefficiency waiting to be optimized away. Sometimes the rope is the product.

Break Point at 29,000 Feet

Everest is the purest version of this. It once stood for isolation and magnificent human stubbornness. Now, photos periodically show a line of climbers queuing near the summit, as if the world’s most dangerous check-in is now its most famous photo wall.

The mountain hasn’t gotten shorter, and the death zone hasn’t gotten friendlier. It’s just become easier for more people to believe that money, gear and enthusiasm are a substitute for experience. Nepal has been weighing tighter permit rules after years of concern about overcrowding and under-qualified climbers. Everest doesn’t need more brand awareness. It needs a bouncer.

Most businesses are lucky: when marketing outpaces supply, customers just complain. On Everest, they can freeze to death waiting for the influencer ahead of them to finish the photo.

Foot-Fault Tourism

Cities have run the same play at scale. Venice and Barcelona spent decades selling beauty, authenticity and “real local life”. That meant millions of people arrived looking for the exact same undiscovered café and secret street. Which is its own small paradox: the neighborhood bakery becomes a backdrop, apartments become short-lets, residents move out, and the destination campaign keeps advertising the authenticity its own success has been quietly evicting.

Across Europe, the backlash has arrived as visitor fees, entry restrictions and, in Barcelona’s case, residents armed with water pistols — not, one assumes, in the original brand guidelines. Arrival numbers are easy to count and great for a slide deck. Carrying capacity, resident sentiment and whether locals still want you there are less exciting, and far more important. A fully booked city isn’t automatically a healthy one.

TikTok, Set, Match

Social media has industrialized the destruction of the hidden gem. Every tiny restaurant, secluded beach and quiet village is now content-in-waiting, ready to be filmed, captioned “literally nobody knows about this place,” and shown to 800,000 people who will all arrive by Friday. “Hidden gem” has quietly become less of a recommendation and more of an evacuation notice.

The pattern is efficient: a creator finds a small restaurant, a crowd arrives for the same sandwich, staff get overwhelmed, regulars disappear, service slips and the reviews complain the place no longer resembles the video that caused the stampede. The algorithm has no concept of capacity. It doesn’t know the restaurant has fourteen tables. It detected engagement. Job done.

Advantage: Everyone

Luxury brands live inside a genuinely funny contradiction: they want to be exclusive and they want to grow, and those two goals actively hate each other. So, the industry expands stores, launches entry-level products, raises prices, seeds influencers and puts the logo everywhere from airport lounges to brunch. The once-rare object is now in every mall, feed and aspirational bathroom mirror. It’s still expensive. It no longer feels rare. And expensive-but-common is a precarious place for a luxury brand to stand.

Bain reports the global luxury consumer base shrank from roughly 400 million in 2022 to about 340 million in 2025, with active shoppers falling even faster. There are several causes, but nonstop exposure paired with nonstop price hikes hasn’t exactly helped anyone feel special. Growth can raise sales while quietly lowering desire — a genuinely awkward slide to present at the quarterly review.

Centre Court, No Centre

Festivals have gone furthest down this road. Coachella is now as famous for outfits, brand activations and sponsored posts as for whoever’s actually on stage. People don’t just attend. They instead document themselves attending, next to other people documenting themselves attending, occasionally blocking the view of people who mistakenly came for the music.

The experience becomes scenery for proof of the experience. The concert becomes the background. The restaurant becomes the studio. Wimbledon becomes the outfit. Eventually the event stops being something people live through and becomes something they rent, wristband included.

The Overmarketing Tiebreaker

Brands rarely spot overmarketing early, because the first numbers look fantastic — reach up, footfall up, mentions up — while operations quietly barricades the door. The real warning signs show up elsewhere: regulars feel crowded out, quality slips, queues become the main event and people seem more interested in proving they showed up than in actually being there.

The right question was never “how many people can we attract.” It’s “how many people can we serve brilliantly without wrecking what attracted them.” For some brands that means maximum reach. For others it means optimum reach — timed entry, memberships, limited releases or deliberately steering demand toward quieter moments. And it means measuring more than awareness and revenue: repeat satisfaction, service consistency, staff strain, community sentiment, and whether the experience still resembles the promise.

A packed house can be a triumph. It can also be a fire-code violation with excellent engagement numbers.

Serve and Protect

Wimbledon’s real challenge was never attracting more people. It’s protecting the ritual and slightly absurd dignity that made people want in to begin with. The queue, the ballot, the strawberries, the near-comical formality — these aren’t outdated obstacles waiting for a consultant to streamline them. They’re the brand.

Marketing has spent decades tearing down barriers, and usually that’s the right instinct. But not always. Sometimes the queue builds anticipation. Sometimes the invitation creates belonging. Sometimes the secret is the whole point.

Sources: The Guardian, “How social media is changing Wimbledon from eminent tournament to tourist event,” July 2026, Bain & Company Global Luxury Market Study. 

Every time we run one of our PR for Robots webinars, we spend most of the time on the same unglamorous point: third-party endorsement is what the machines actually believe. Earned media. Independent citation. Other people’s sentences about you. This is the point of our thesis and why PR has emerged as a more vital discipline in the age of AI.

And every time, somebody asks the same question. So what about our own channels?

Awkward pause. Because the honest answer is: to a robot, your social feed, influencer campaign, content strategy, brand campaign, etc. is merely decoration.

But to a human being, those channels are still where persuasion happens. Which leaves us here — marketing has quietly bifurcated. We now market to two brains. One organic, one synthetic. One wants to be moved, the other wants to be sure. Both have to be served, and only one of them decides whether the other ever shows up.

One important battleground is the website.

For thirty years we pared websites down. Less copy. Bigger hero. Five words and a button. Beautiful. And now the fastest-growing reader on earth turns up, doesn’t even have eye and wants everything we deleted.

The mistake would be to overcorrect and build for the robots alone — a spreadsheet with a logo. The purpose of a website hasn’t changed at all: credibility and information. We just have to fashion it for two audiences at once.

The First Visitor to Your Website Isn’t Human Anymore

Roughly 58.5% of US Google searches already end without a single click, and when an AI Overview appears the zero-click rate reaches about 83%. In May 2026, Google AI Mode became the default experience for over a billion monthly users, which means the synthesized answer, not the ten blue links, is now the front door to your business.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity don’t admire your clever tagline or beautiful images. They assemble evidence, deliver a verdict and move on. Your homepage was one exhibit among many.

Your Marketing Has Split in Two

Semrush’s 2026 AI Visibility Index analyzed 126 million US prompts and reached a conclusion that should be tacked above every creative director’s desk: brands now compete not only to be found, but to be accurately understood. Their own framing for the era is “building brands for humans and machines.”

Which is precisely the problem, because the two want opposite things.

Humans respond to emotion, story, surprise and personality. Machines respond to entities, structure, dates, definitions and evidence. 

Robots have joined the target-audience roster alongside customers, media and stakeholders. They are also the only audience most marketers have never surveyed: 45% of marketing leaders admit they cannot measure how their brand appears in AI answers at all.

Most Of You Never Finished the Last Homework Assignment

Two decades into SEO, a startling number of company websites still can’t be crawled properly. Only 43% of marketers are actively implementing GEO — up from near zero a year ago, which tells you how new the panic is. And only 14% track whether AI mentions them at all, meaning 86% are being described to buyers daily by a system they have never once checked.

Nobody gets to skip a grade, either. Google’s AI Mode draws exclusively from Google’s own index, so a page that doesn’t rank can’t be cited. GEO is built on SEO, not instead of it. 

So what actually changed? SEO was a competition for position. You wanted to be the first blue link, and everything — keywords, backlinks, page speed — served that one ambition. GEO is a competition for inclusion. There is no position to win, because there’s no list; there’s a paragraph, and you’re either in it or you don’t exist. SEO asked “can Google find me?” GEO asks “can a machine understand me well enough to recommend me?” The first was a popularity contest. The second is a reference check.

The distinction that matters most is the unit being judged. SEO judged the page. GEO judges the sentence. AI doesn’t retrieve pages; it retrieves passages. One study of 153,000 citations found the average cited sentence ran about nine words, and that roughly 77% of cited URLs weren’t in the organic top ten at all — which means the thing being judged isn’t your site. It’s your sentences, one at a time, out of context, without your logo anywhere near them.

Every sentence you publish is now traveling alone.

Why Websites Suddenly Matter Again

Search engines once merely helped humans find your site. AI reads your site so humans never have to. That inverts the entire purpose of the page and, inconveniently, makes it more important rather than less.

The traffic proves it. Generative AI platforms grew referrals roughly 796% year over year across 2.3 billion sessions, and those visitors convert several times better than classic organic. Adobe’s data shows AI traffic to US retail sites up 1,324% and to travel sites up 2,215% between October 2024 and May 2026.

The Great Website Irony

Princeton’s GEO research found structured, fact-dense content achieves up to 40% higher visibility in AI answers than prose-heavy pages covering identical ground.

Everything we spent ten years deleting — the FAQ, the leadership bios, the specifications, the dull page nobody visited — turns out to be exactly what the machine came for. We stripped the house to the studs for the sake of elegance, and the new buyer wanted the wiring diagram.

Nobody has ever called Wikipedia beautiful. Yet ChatGPT cites an average of fifteen sources per response and leans on Wikipedia and Reddit constantly. Structure beats decoration, which is an unpleasant thing to tell a creative director. I’ve been one for decades. I’m telling you anyway.

The Website Becomes the Source of Truth

Consistency is the whole game. AI cross-checks your description of yourself against every other channel it can reach, which gives the website a new job, and a better one. It is the only channel you fully own, so it should hold the canonical vocabulary: the founder, the expertise, the locations, the services, the awards. Fix the language there, then make LinkedIn, Crunchbase, the directories and every press release echo it verbatim. One dictionary. Every channel spelling your name the same way.

Not to get too technical, but it’s important to understand that Schema.org markup, meanwhile, has graduated from SEO housekeeping to AI infrastructure. Organization, Person, Article and FAQPage do the identity work, the grammar a machine needs to parse you correctly. Google’s own research shows this pays off: pages carrying rich structured data saw an 82% higher click-through rate for Nestlé and a 25% higher click-through rate for Rotten Tomatoes — real brands, real before-and-after numbers, published by Google itself.

PR Becomes the Independent Witness

Here is the part that vindicates our entire industry. Around 85% of brand mentions in AI responses originate from third-party pages rather than owned domains, and roughly 48% of citations come from community platforms. The machine has, without being taught to, arrived at the oldest principle in public relations: consider the source.

Your website makes the claim. The press, the interviews, the reviews and the directories confirm it. Testimony and cross-examination, which is precisely what PR was always for, back when we had to explain it at dinner parties.

It works, too. HubSpot’s 2026 State of AEO report found citations improved 433% when brands actually worked at it, and 44% of buyers have made a purchase from a brand they first met inside an answer engine.

AI Is the Concierge. Humans Are the Guests.

The concierge decides whether to recommend a restaurant. The guest decides whether to book it. A site that flatters only one of them loses.

Look at what that already does to a category. In travel, Expedia, Booking.com, The Ritz-Carlton, Marriott Bonvoy and Hotels.com already dominate what AI recommends without being asked, while most other brands in the same category barely get mentioned at all. Citation share is concentrating fast, and it’s concentrating in a handful of names per category.

And the mechanics favor the few. When an AI Overview shows up, a 2026 field study found the whole query gets 38% fewer clicks overall — but the sources AI actually cites get 35% more clicks than everyone else on that same search. So the total pie shrinks, and whoever gets cited takes a bigger slice of what’s left. There’s no safe, comfortable middle ground anymore — you’re either the source AI is pointing to, or you’re fighting over table scraps.

The Next Great Websites Will Win Both Brains

The developer world moved first, as it always does. Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel, Anthropic, Coinbase, Supabase, ElevenLabs and Pinecone all publish llms.txt files — plain-language summaries of themselves, written for AI to read. Worth a caveat: their human audience and their machine audience are nearly the same person, a developer, so this is evidence of intent more than proof anyone has solved the harder version of the problem, where the two audiences don’t overlap at all. Adobe now sells an LLM Optimizer to enterprises doing the same thing at scale. Nobody in that list stopped caring what their site looks like. They simply stopped assuming a human would be the one reading it.

And this is one job, not two departments. Organizations that unify SEO, AI visibility and communications report gains at 81%, against 36% for those running them in silos. That’s why Rose promotes an integrated approach. The brief hasn’t split. The audience has. 

So…

Delight the human, inform the machine, and do both in the same sentence. Your site stops being a brochure and becomes evidence, which, if you think about it, is what the good ones always were.

Your website should still move people. But if AI can’t understand it, a growing share of those people will never arrive to be moved.

Sources: SparkToro / Datos, Bain & Company / Dynata, Google I/O 2026, Semrush 2026 AI Visibility Index, GoodFirms, Similarweb, OrganiKPI, Adobe, Media Copilot, Princeton University, Walker Sands, SE Ranking / ALLMO

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

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.

At Cannes Lions this year, WPP Global Chief Creative Officer Rob Reilly warned that human creativity is “under fire” as AI rapidly spreads throughout marketing, advertising and content creation.

Fair enough.

If you wandered through enough conference halls, panel discussions and beachside networking events, you could be forgiven for thinking that artificial intelligence had already become the industry’s new religion. Every agency has an AI strategy. Every consultant has an AI framework. Every platform has an AI solution. Every presentation seems to contain at least three references to AI and one image that was probably generated by AI.

The conversation usually revolves around what AI can do. Can it write? Can it design? Can it create videos? Can it build campaigns? Can it replace agencies? Can it replace marketers? Can it replace creatives?

Interesting questions. But I’m not convinced they are the most important ones.

The more interesting question is this: what happens when everyone suddenly gains access to the same tools? Because that’s what is actually happening.

Much of the current AI conversation assumes that the technology itself will become the source of competitive advantage. History suggests otherwise.

Throughout business history, technology has repeatedly lowered barriers to production. The businesses that ultimately won were rarely the ones that merely adopted the technology. They were the ones that figured out how to use it better than everyone else.

The technology mattered. The people mattered more.

AI appears likely to follow the same pattern. The question is not whether AI will make marketers better. It will. The question is whether it will make them different.

Throughout business history, technology has repeatedly lowered barriers to production. The technology mattered. The people mattered more.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

When word processors replaced typewriters, writing became dramatically easier. Editing no longer required retyping entire pages. Productivity exploded. Most writers became better writers because they could focus more on ideas and less on mechanics.

Overnight delivery transformed business communication. Documents, contracts and proposals that once took days could suddenly move across the country overnight. Business became faster and more responsive.

The internet accelerated everything again. Information became instantly accessible. Communication became immediate. Publishing became nearly free. Businesses gained access to knowledge, markets and customers that would have been unimaginable only a generation earlier.

Then came desktop publishing, digital photography, blogging platforms, social media and content marketing. Each innovation lowered barriers. Each increased speed. Each increased volume.

In every case, the technology improved performance. The important point is that it improved performance for almost everyone.

Technology rarely creates lasting competitive advantage on its own. Once broadly adopted, it becomes table stakes.

AI may be following the same pattern. The winners may not be the people using AI. The winners may be the people who bring something to AI that everyone else lacks.

For Years We Confused Activity with Talent

Marketing has spent years rewarding production: more content, more campaigns, more channels, more reports, more dashboards, more activity. Technology often allowed average performers to appear exceptional simply by increasing output.

AI accelerates this trend to an entirely new level. Presentations that once took days can be assembled in hours. Articles that once required significant effort can be drafted in minutes. Images that once required designers can be generated almost instantly.

Productivity is exploding, which is wonderful. But also dangerous. Because output and talent are not the same thing. They never were.

The winners may not be the people using AI. The winners may be the people who bring something to AI that everyone else lacks.

AI Does Not Democratize Distinction

For a while, I found myself buying into an argument I was hearing from many AI advocates. Perhaps we humans are arrogant to believe our organic neural networks are somehow special. Why shouldn’t synthetic neural networks, supported by enormous computing power and trained on vast amounts of information, eventually outperform us creatively as well? The more I thought about it, the more reasonable the argument sounded.

Then I realized something important. AI is remarkably good at several aspects of what we commonly call creativity. It excels at recombination, mixing existing ideas in new ways. It excels at pattern completion, extending, refining and riffing on established forms. It excels at volume and speed, generating hundreds of possibilities almost instantly. It excels at style mimicry, reproducing the surface characteristics of human creative work with astonishing accuracy.

Those are not trivial capabilities. In many situations they are extraordinarily valuable.

But they are not the same thing as originality.

What appears to be missing is motivation. Human beings create because they want something. Recognition. Understanding. Revenge. Love. Money. Legacy. Connection. Curiosity. Obsession. Every great creative act begins with a human desire.

AI has no stake in what it creates. It also lacks embodiment. Much of human creativity comes from living inside a body, experiencing time, physical sensation, aging, uncertainty and the uncomfortable awareness that one day we will die. AI does not experience any of those things.

Most importantly, AI struggles with genuine novelty. It works by finding patterns, relationships and possibilities within the universe of existing human knowledge. It can create surprising combinations. It can create beautiful combinations. But it cannot easily step outside the boundaries of human-generated experience.  It may come up with a great idea you never thought about.  But that’s probably because you weren’t very imaginative in the first place.

Above average work looks remarkable to average workers.

Then there is taste. Human beings make creative choices that cost something. They risk rejection. They risk embarrassment. They risk failure. They risk looking foolish. Great creativity often requires vulnerability. But AI literally has no skin in the game.

Which leads to an observation that may sit at the center of this entire debate.

AI creativity is less like an artist and more like a mirror. It reflects, refracts and amplifies human creativity at extraordinary scale and speed. But the light source remains human.

The mirror can produce remarkable images. But it generates no light of its own.

The New Premium Is Human Imagination

The widespread adoption of AI will almost certainly make marketers better. It will make writers better. It will make designers better. It will make strategists better.

The problem is that it will make nearly everyone better at the same time. And when everybody has access to the same amplifier, amplification stops being a differentiator.

Human imagination becomes the differentiator. Judgment becomes the differentiator. Taste becomes the differentiator. Originality becomes the differentiator. The ability to connect unrelated ideas becomes the differentiator. The ability to understand people becomes the differentiator. The ability to spot opportunities before everyone else becomes the differentiator.

In other words, the qualities that have always separated extraordinary marketers from average ones may become even more important. Not less.

AI creativity is less like an artist and more like a mirror.The mirror can produce remarkable images. But it generates no light of its own.

The Gap May Actually Get Bigger

Many people assume AI will level the playing field. The opposite may occur.

As routine production becomes easier, truly talented marketers may pull further ahead. And overreliance on AI will make the untalented fall further behind. When everyone has access to the same tools, differentiation shifts to the quality of thinking behind the work.

The gap between exceptional and average may actually widen. AI may not eliminate competitive advantage. It may amplify it.

The organizations that benefit most from AI may not be the organizations with the most AI. They may be the organizations with the most interesting humans using it.

A Different Kind of Creativity Crisis

Rob Reilly may be right that creativity is under pressure. But perhaps not for the reason most people think.

AI is not threatening creativity because it can create. It is threatening creativity because it is exposing the difference between creation and originality.

The easier it becomes to produce something, the harder it becomes to produce something memorable. The easier it becomes to generate content, the harder it becomes to generate distinction. And distinction is where value lives.

The future may not belong to the marketers who create the most content. It may belong to the marketers who bring the most imagination to the machine. Because the tool keeps getting smarter. 

The challenge is making sure the humans do too.

So this happened.

Starbucks Korea, the South Korean operator of the global coffee chain, launched a promotion for a large drinks tumbler called “Tank.” The campaign was called “Tank Day.” So far, so not so good.

Unfortunately, it launched on May 18, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when South Korea’s military government violently suppressed pro-democracy protesters.

You can already hear the brakes failing.

Critics connected “Tank” and “Tank Day” to the military vehicles used in the crackdown. They also connected campaign language about putting the tumbler on the table with a “tak” sound to a phrase associated with the 1987 torture death of student activist Park Jong-chol.

Within hours, the promotion was pulled. The CEO of Starbucks Korea was soon fired. Shinsegae Group, the South Korean retail conglomerate that operates Starbucks Korea, publicly apologized. Sales dropped. Government bodies distanced themselves. Starbucks Korea later announced it would close all stores early on one day in June for mandatory training on history and social sensitivity.

All for a tumbler.

Was the outrage fair. Of course not. Haters gotta hate. But I’ll leave that argument for comment sections, panel shows and people with too much time and very strong views about drinkware.

For marketers, PR heads and CEOs, the lesson is simpler and far less comforting. A campaign does not have to be malicious to become catastrophic. It only has to be interpretable. Starbucks did not need to mean harm for the harm to become real.

“We Didn’t Mean It” Is Not a Crisis Strategy

Starbucks said the incident was unintentional. Shinsegae reportedly found no evidence the campaign was deliberate. I believe that. 

Inside the meeting room, “Tank” probably sounded like product language. Big. Solid. Durable. Heavy-duty. A tumbler with shoulders. “Tank Day” probably sounded like a neat retail mechanic. The launch date may have come from inventory timing, app scheduling or a promotional calendar. The slogan may have been intended as harmless product theater.

Nobody in the room was necessarily thinking, “How do we turn a coffee cup into a national wound?”

But that’s exactly the problem. Campaigns live in the real world, where dates have history, words carry baggage, images have echoes and people are very good at connecting dots. The dots in this case were brutal: Tank. Tank Day. May 18. Gwangju. State violence. A global brand. A slogan that critics tied to another ugly chapter of Korean history.

This is the part marketing people often hate, because we still cling to the fantasy that intent matters most. It does not. Not once activists, consumers, politicians, journalists and bored internet prosecutors concoct a narrative.

The outrage economy is not a courtroom. It does not need proof in any real sense. It needs symbols, timing, screenshots and a villain. And nothing makes a better villain than a large brand explaining that it did not mean to do the thing everyone is furious about.

AI Is Not the Adult in the Room

AI didn’t cause the Starbucks Korea crisis. Reporting says Shinsegae claimed marketers consulted an AI tool for the campaign slogan. Reporting also says some managers who approved the campaign had not opened the attachments showing the materials. This suggests AI may have been somewhere in the chain while humans failed to do the one job AI cannot be trusted to do: understand what an idea may awaken in a specific culture at a specific moment.

And let’s be honest. It is increasingly hard to believe that many campaigns today do not pass through AI somewhere. Naming routes. Copy options. Translations. Search prompts. Social captions. Internal summaries. Research shortcuts. Headline drafts. “Just give me ten options.” “Make it punchier.” “Any issues with this?”

The problem is not that marketers use AI. Everyone is using AI somewhere, in some form, whether officially, quietly or through the intern who is now mysteriously 400% more productive.

The problem is treating AI like judgment.

AI can generate options. It can produce a lot of words very quickly. It can summarize, translate, polish and imitate confidence beautifully. What it cannot reliably do is know when a perfectly ordinary phrase becomes toxic because of history, memory, grief, politics, language, timing or local trauma.

At best, AI is a brilliant intern. It is not the grown-up in the room. Not yet.

And if the grown-ups are approving campaigns without opening the attachments, then the chatbot is not the weakest link in the chain. The chain is the weakest link in the chain.

Context Hijacks Campaigns

Starbucks Korea is not the only brand to discover that a campaign can become about something it was never intended to be about.

Zara, the Spanish fashion retailer owned by Inditex, pulled campaign images in 2023 after critics said visuals of wrapped mannequins, rubble and damaged-looking figures resembled images from the Gaza war. Zara said the campaign had been conceived earlier and was intended to show a sculptor’s studio.

That may be true. It also did not matter. The campaign did not have to be about Gaza to become about Gaza.

This is what marketers need to understand. Context is part of the campaign. If the world changes between concept and launch, the campaign needs to change with it. A fashion shoot can become a war image. A product name can become a historical insult. A slogan can become evidence. A model choice can become a geopolitical statement. A joke can become a boycott.

Localization Is Not Cultural Intelligence

There is a lazy version of global marketing that believes every risk can be solved by localization. Translate the copy. Swap the model. Change the currency. Add local hashtags. Maybe use the right flag emoji if no one gets sleepy. Welcome to our world.

But localization asks whether the campaign fits the market. Cultural intelligence asks what the campaign could awaken.

Swatch, the Swiss watch brand, apologized in 2025 after an ad showing an Asian male model pulling the corners of his eyes triggered backlash in China and calls for boycott. The company removed the material globally and apologized for the distress or misunderstanding caused.

Again, perhaps someone saw fashion mischief. A pose. A face. A moment. A little visual attitude. The audience saw a racist gesture with a long history.

The most dangerous campaigns are often not the ones everyone knows are risky. Those get reviewed, debated, legally cauterized and PR-proofed until they have the pulse of a dentist’s waiting area. The dangerous ones are the ones that look harmless to the people in the room. Which is why the people in the room are often the problem.

“People Are Overreacting” Is Not a Plan

Whenever one of these controversies explodes, someone immediately says, “People are overreacting.” Often, they’re not wrong.

Sometimes outrage is sincere. Sometimes it is performative. Sometimes it is political. Sometimes it is opportunistic. Sometimes it is twelve people on X, three journalists, two politicians and a brand team having a nervous breakdown in real time.

But commercially, that distinction is not as useful as people think. Once the backlash is moving, the brand does not get to stop the train by explaining that the passengers are being unfair.

Adidas, the German sportswear company, revised a 2024 campaign for its SL72 sneaker after criticism over the shoe’s connection to the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian militants. The campaign featured Bella Hadid, an American model of Palestinian heritage. Adidas said the connections were unintended.

Again, I can see how this happened. Retro shoe. Global model. Fashion image. Campaign calendar. Nice lighting. Someone probably thought it looked great.

But the public saw 1972 Munich, Israel, Palestine, Bella Hadid and a German brand. Suddenly a sneaker campaign had become a political statement.

Whether Adidas meant that statement is almost beside the point.

The Numbers Don’t Care About Your Intent Either

YouGov found that more than seven in ten consumers across 17 international markets said they would boycott a brand if the company or its leaders acted in ways they objected to. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, YouGov found that 66% of consumers said they had temporarily or permanently boycotted a brand following a scandal.

Kantar’s Brand Inclusion Index found that 75% of consumers say a brand’s diversity and inclusion reputation influences purchase decisions. McKinsey found that 88% of surveyed organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function, with marketing and sales among the most common areas of use.

So we have three forces colliding. Consumers are more willing to punish brands. Brands are producing more content, faster, across more markets. AI is increasingly embedded in the machinery of that production. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything, obviously.

Speed Makes Stupidity Scalable

AI did not invent bad judgment. Marketing departments were perfectly capable of producing stupid ideas long before anyone asked a chatbot to “make this more premium but playful.”

What AI does is make speed feel like intelligence. It can produce a hundred lines in the time it used to take one human to stare out the window and have one useful thought. It can generate campaign names, social captions, slogan routes and localization options with impressive confidence and absolutely no fear of being fired.

And because the output looks finished, everyone starts behaving as if thinking has happened. More output is not more judgment. Sometimes it is just more rope.

Every Campaign Needs a Kill Switch

The answer is not timid marketing. God save us from safe campaigns. Most of them deserve to die quietly in the procurement department.

Brands should still be bold, funny, provocative, fast, strange, distinctive and occasionally dangerous. But bold is not the same as oblivious. Provocative is not the same as handing critics a loaded gun and a Wi-Fi connection.

Every campaign now needs a kill switch. Not a bureaucratic committee that makes the work worse by sanding off anything interesting. Not a late-stage legal review. A real kill switch. Someone with the cultural competence and organizational authority to stop the campaign before it becomes a case study.

That means asking, before launch:

• What date are we launching, and what does that date mean in this market?
• What do the words mean in local slang, politics, history and minority communities?
• Do the visuals resemble current news images, tragedies or conflicts?
• What is the most hostile good-faith interpretation?
• What is the most opportunistic bad-faith interpretation?
• Where did AI touch the work?
• Who reviewed it with actual cultural knowledge?
• Did the approvers actually open the materials?
• What would the headline be if this went wrong?

Those of you who know me, know that last one is my favorite. I often start from the headline and work backwards. It cuts through almost everything. If you cannot bear the headline, do not launch the campaign.

The Adult in the Room

Modern agencies are not just here to make brands more visible. The role of a serious marketing and PR partner is not to say yes more elegantly. It is to ask the irritating question before the public asks it louder. It is to protect the idea from itself. It is to see the second meaning before the internet gives it a lawyer, a hashtag and a moral position.

The adult in the room is not there to ruin the work. The adult is there to stop the work from ruining the company.

Starbucks Korea did not fall to its knees because of a tumbler. It fell because a product name, a campaign name, a date, a slogan, possible AI involvement, unread approvals and national memory collided in public.

Maybe the outrage was excessive. Maybe it was opportunistic. For marketing directors, PR heads and CEOs, that debate is secondary. The outrage economy does not care what you meant.

So. before the campaign goes live, find the adult in the room. And make sure it is not the chatbot.

Sources: Reuters — Starbucks Korea to give staff history training after backlash over marketing campaign; Reuters — Starbucks Korea head fired after “Tank Day” promotion sparks public uproar; Reuters — Shinsegae chairman public apology and reported sales impact after Starbucks Korea backlash; The Guardian — How Starbucks Korea’s “Tank Day” marketing stunt spiralled into mass boycotts; Reuters — Zara pulls campaign after Gaza boycott calls and later expresses regret over “misunderstanding”; The Guardian / People — Adidas apologizes and revises Bella Hadid SL72 campaign linked to 1972 Munich Olympics; Reuters — Swatch apologizes for “slanted eye” ad after backlash in China; YouGov — Global brand boycott survey across 17 markets; YouGov — UAE and KSA consumers boycotting brands following scandals; Kantar — Brand Inclusion Index 2024; McKinsey — The State of AI

Every June, thousands of advertising people descend on the French Riviera to celebrate creativity, drink rosé and compete for a small golden lion that somehow carries the full weight of an industry’s self-regard. I have attended. I have admired the work. I have marveled at the ambition. 

Of course, as the specter of AI has appeared, we are all left to wonder whether some of the work we’re marveling at is entirely, completely, unambiguously real.

Last year, the industry found out the hard way.

The Year the Lions Lost Their Roar

Cannes Lions 2025 will be remembered for three things, none of them a great campaign.

The headliner: Brazilian agency DM9, part of Omnicom’s DDB network, won the Creative Data Grand Prix for “Efficient Way to Pay,” created for Whirlpool’s Consul brand. A whistleblower tipped off Ad Age. Investigators found the case film contained AI-manipulated footage lifted from CNN Brasil broadcasts,  edited without permission to simulate news coverage of a campaign that never generated that coverage. Fabricated real-world events. Simulated outcomes. A jury misled. CNN Brasil filed a formal complaint. DM9 admitted “serious inconsistencies” in not one but three of its entries and withdrew all of them. Grand Prix gone. All associated Lions gone. CCO Icaro Doria resigned. DM9 had won 21 Lions that year, helping DDB claim Network of the Year. That crown now comes with an asterisk the size of the Palais.*

It was not DM9’s first rodeo. A 2001 Ad Age investigation flagged a previous Gold Lion-winning ad for Parmalat ketchup as a possible ghost ad, work that allegedly ran only after the Cannes entry deadline, in an obscure car magazine. Some agencies play a long game.

The supporting act: Publicis agency LePub São Paulo won a Bronze Lion for “Followers Store,” a campaign for New Balance and São Paulo FC. The case study claimed a geo-targeted push notification allowed fans near the team bus to pre-order an exclusive jersey on match day, with 45,000 shirts sold in a single day. Brazilian journalist Demétrio Vecchioli investigated and found no evidence the presale ever happened. Several media outlets named in the case study either never covered the campaign or no longer exist. Influencer content appeared to have been edited without disclosure. New Balance’s statement was short and devastating: all materials were made by LePub “without the knowledge or approval of the brand.” The client had no idea the case study existed.

Then there was the Budweiser situation. Africa Creative DDB won a Grand Prix in Audio & Radio for “One Second Ads”, a campaign deliberately engineered around using ultra-short song clips specifically to avoid paying music licensing fees. Technically within the rules. Morally, a different conversation. AB InBev issued a formal apology. An awards jury gave a Grand Prix to a campaign whose central innovation was finding a loophole to avoid paying artists. The industry noticed.

The Response Was Serious. The Question Is Whether It’s Enough.

Cannes Lions CEO Simon Cook’s response, in full: “Creativity is only valuable if it’s credible, and credibility must be earned, not assumed.”

Which is a remarkable sentence to need to say out loud at the world’s most important creative festival in its 73rd year.

The new Global Integrity Standards, announced July 2025 and effective for the 2026 festival opening June 22, are genuinely substantial. Every submission must now be approved and signed off by a senior leader from both the agency and the commissioning brand.  Meaning no brand can claim it had no idea what was submitted in its name. A dual-layer verification system combines human review with AI-led analysis to scrutinize every claim. A new Integrity Council handles disputes. An annual Integrity Audit will be published. Agencies found to have submitted deliberately false work face bans of up to three years. Cannes published a full Integrity Handbook in November 2025 and has been running support webinars for entrants ever since.

The agencies entering this year are already calling the new process burdensome. Which, translated from agency-speak, means it’s probably working.

This Is Bigger Than One Festival

Here is where it gets interesting. The Cannes scandal is a vivid, industry-specific example of something happening everywhere simultaneously. The technology arrived faster than the guardrails. Now the guardrails are being built in real time, and everyone from advertising festivals to governments to technology platforms is doing it at once.

The EU AI Act’s transparency rules take full effect in August 2026 requiring that AI-generated content be labeled, deepfakes disclosed, and users informed when they’re interacting with a machine. Fines for non-compliance can reach €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover. Italy has already passed its own AI law with prison sentences of up to five years for unlawful dissemination of AI-generated content. The European Commission published its voluntary Code of Practice on marking AI-generated content in December 2025, with the final version expected this month.

The advertising industry is not being singled out. It is simply the most visible, and in some ways the most entertaining, expression of a universal problem: when you give creative people extraordinarily powerful tools and no rules, some of them will use those tools to cheat.

All of this is good news. Not the cheating. The response to the cheating.

The reason Cannes Lions still matters. The reason a small golden statue commands this much attention and generates this much anxiety is that it represents a genuine standard. When that standard is enforced, when fake work gets pulled and careers face consequences, it reinforces rather than undermines the value of the real thing. The agencies who did honest work, who produced results that actually happened and campaigns that actually ran, are the direct beneficiaries of a system that just got considerably harder to game.

The same logic applies to AI regulation broadly. The brands and agencies building responsible AI practices right now, documenting their use, disclosing their tools, making sure their claims are real, are not at a disadvantage. They are building a competitive moat. Trust, it turns out, is not a soft asset. In an era of AI-generated everything, proof that something is real carries a premium that only gets more valuable as synthetic content becomes more indistinguishable from the genuine article.

Simon Cook is right. Creativity is only valuable if it’s credible. After forty years in this industry I’d put it slightly differently: creativity was always only valuable if it was credible. We just spent a few years forgetting that.

Cannes opens June 22. The new rules face their first real test. I genuinely can’t wait to see what happens.

* The Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. The main venue in Cannes where the Lions are awarded.

Sources: Cannes Lions official statement on DM9 entries, June 27, 2025 — canneslions.com, Cannes Lions Global Integrity Standards announcement, July 10, 2025 — canneslions.com, Adweek: “LePub Under Investigation After Cannes Lion-Winning Case Study Draws Scrutiny,” Audrey Kemp, June 27, 2025, Adweek: “Agencies Say New Cannes Lions Entry Rules Are Burdensome But Necessary,” Brittaney Kiefer and Rebecca Stewart, May 14, 2026, Campaign Asia: “Cannes Lions 2025 Controversies Casting a Shadow Over Big Awards,” June 30, 2025, More About Advertising: “LePub Is Third Agency in the Dock for Cannes Entries,” June 30, 2025, EU AI Act transparency rules — digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, Charles Russell Speechlys: “AI in Advertising: A Regulatory Lookahead for 2026,” January 30, 2026, European Commission Draft Code of Practice on AI Content Marking, December 2025.

I’m a devoted Apple fan. Have been since the beginning. I buy nearly everything they make, I’m a longtime shareholder, I believe in their ecosystem and I’ve defended the brand through thick and thin. But Siri? Siri has been the one embarrassment I couldn’t defend. Clunky, literal, infuriatingly limited. It seems to always be listening but acts more like a toddler than anything resembling a real assistant. And somehow Siri got worse at understanding humans as every other AI on the planet got dramatically better. While ChatGPT was rewriting the rules of human-machine interaction, Siri was still mishearing my alarm settings. It has been, frankly, an embarrassment for a company that doesn’t do embarrassment.

Which is exactly why this announcement feels different.

Apple unveils the new Siri at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8. We don’t know everything yet. The beta follows immediately after the keynote, the full public rollout comes with iOS 27 in the autumn and some details will only become clear once developers get their hands on it. But we know enough. And what we know should be getting every serious marketer’s attention right now.

Apple’s new Siri isn’t a product story. It’s a distribution story. And the distribution is 1.5 billion devices, already in people’s pockets, already trusted, already habitual — about to become the world’s most powerful AI answer engine whether your brand is ready for it or not.

When Siri gives your customer a single synthesized answer about your brand, your product, your category, what will it say? You better find out.

Better Late Than Never. 

Apple promised a genuinely intelligent Siri at their WWDC in 2024. Then missed the target. Then missed it again. The marketing press had a field day. Apple’s stock dropped on delay rumors alone.

None of that matters now. Because what’s coming is bigger than what was originally promised.

The rebuilt Siri runs on a custom 1.2 trillion parameter Google Gemini model on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. It will live in the iPhone’s Dynamic Island and replaces the current search interface entirely with a “Search or Ask” experience. It opens to third-party AI extensions, meaning users will choose ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude as defaults from a new App Store section.

Monday’s keynote will fill in the gaps. There will be features we haven’t seen yet, capabilities that haven’t been leaked and almost certainly some surprises. But the broad shape of what’s coming is clear and the marketing implications are significant regardless of the finer details.

This isn’t Siri getting smarter. This is Siri becoming a search engine. On the world’s most used consumer device.

1.5 Billion Devices May Be Your New Media Channel

There are now 8.4 billion voice assistants active globally — more than the world’s population — processing over 10 billion queries per day. Siri’s upgrade transforms the quality and intelligence of every Apple interaction within that ecosystem, simultaneously, without a single user having to do anything. No app download. No new subscription. Most significantly, no behavior change required.

When someone asks the new Siri “best luxury hotel in Dubai,” they get one synthesized answer. Not ten links to evaluate. Someone is going to be in that answer. The question is whether it’s you.

The Click Was Dying. Siri Is About to Shoot it in the Head and Bury it in the Desert. 

60% of all Google searches already end without a single click. In Google’s AI Mode that zero-click rate hits 93%. The new Siri will give answers not links. If your brand isn’t in the answer you don’t exist for that query.

This isn’t a future risk. Google search referral traffic to publishers already declined by roughly a third in the year to November 2025. Siri extends that dynamic to 1.5 billion devices and the most valuable consumer demographic on the planet.

Your SEO Budget Has a Blind Spot

If you are following our PR FOR ROBOTS sessions, you have heard us say this before. The overlap between top-10 Google rankings and AI Overview citations has collapsed — from 75% in mid-2025 to between 17% and 38% by early 2026. The content Google ranks highest is increasingly not the content AI systems cite. A brand that spent years and serious budget building search authority can now be completely invisible to Siri while a competitor with more credibly sourced better structured content gets the answer. Rankings and AI visibility are now entirely separate games and most marketing teams are only playing one of them.

Show Up or Pay Double

Brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% higher organic click-through rates and 91% higher paid click-through rates than non-cited brands on the same queries. AI citation doesn’t just lift organic performance — it makes paid media investment work nearly twice as hard. Being absent doesn’t just cost organic traffic. It undermines the return on every paid dollar running alongside it.

Siri Doesn’t Do Keywords.

Voice search now accounts for 27% of all queries globally and voice queries are not keywords. They’re questions phrased the way people actually think.

“Is Heineken a responsible brand?”

“What’s the best airline for long-haul to Asia?”

“Which hotel in Kyoto do people actually recommend?”

These are reputation verdicts being sought from a machine. The new Siri answers them with authority, in one sentence, to 1.5 billion users.

The Mainstream Just Arrived.

Traditional search engine volume is predicted to drop 25% by 2026 and 50% by 2028, replaced by generative engines. By October 2025 McKinsey reported that 50% of consumers were already using AI-powered search as their primary way to find information and make buying decisions.

That’s before the new Siri. Before 1.5 billion default AI search users who never opened ChatGPT in their lives get a world-class AI assistant answering their questions by default. The mainstream consumer just arrived at the AI search party. They didn’t choose to come. Apple brought them.

First Mover Isn’t a Cliché Anymore

Most enterprise marketing teams now have a GEO — generative engine optimization — initiative underway. Most smaller teams haven’t started. 58% of consumers already use generative AI for recommendations and 48% of B2B buyers use it to discover vendors.

Once an AI system has formed a view of your brand, correcting it is harder than building it correctly from the start. The brands moving now are building foundations that will be harder to dislodge in twelve months. The brands waiting for clarity are ceding ground.

Nobody Gets a Free Pass

Hospitality has seen the worst AI search impact of any industry so far — a 6.7% decline in monthly organic traffic since Google’s AI search rollout, reversing growth that had been building for years. But hospitality is the canary in the coal mine. Every sector is exposed.

A homebuyer asks Siri which developer has the best reputation in their market. A CFO asks which fintech platform is leading in payments innovation. A parent asks which baby formula brand is safest. A procurement director asks which B2B software vendor is most trusted in their category. An entertainment fan asks what’s worth watching this weekend. In every case Siri returns one answer. One synthesized confident verdict drawn from whatever sources it deems authoritative. The brand in that answer wins. The brands that aren’t don’t get a consolation click. They get nothing.

This Is Your Best Traffic. Don’t Lose It.

AI-referred traffic converts 4.4 times better than standard organic search. These visitors arrive already informed, already persuaded and already further along in their buying decision than any visitor acquired through traditional search. The brand Siri recommends inherits that customer. The brand it doesn’t mention loses not just traffic, it loses the highest-quality highest-intent highest-converting traffic in the funnel.

One Interface. Three Judges.

Siri’s new extensions system lets users choose ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude as their default. Your brand may be evaluated by up to three AI systems simultaneously — each with different training data, different source hierarchies and different tendencies in how they characterize brands and categories. Three independent editorial environments, each forming their own view of who you are and whether you’re worth recommending. 

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

Monday’s keynote will tell us more. We’ll follow up with a full breakdown of what the announcement means for marketers once the details are confirmed. But here’s what won’t change regardless of what Apple reveals: the brands that show up well in Siri’s answers won’t get there through technology alone.

They’ll get there because they built genuine authority — through earned media, credible third-party coverage and content that AI systems, like good journalists before them, find worth referencing. PR in the driver’s seat building the credibility and narrative that AI systems draw on. SEO riding shotgun structuring that narrative so AI crawlers can find, parse and cite it correctly. Paid media amplifying both at the moments that matter.

Most marketing teams are running this in reverse. Leading with paid, optimizing for rankings that don’t translate to AI visibility and treating reputation as the last item on the brief. The sequence matters. So does the proper integration of all three disciplines.

That’s the thesis behind PR for Robots, the series we have been building for exactly this moment. Because this moment was always coming. 

Watch this space for our further Siri breakdown. And if you haven’t started thinking about how AI systems represent your brand — start today.

PR for Robots: How Publicity Fuels Sales in a World Run by Machines

PR for Robots: The Hospitality Session

I recently landed on this story about Nike that hit home for me.

Recently, Nike posted on X about tennis player, Jannik Sinner. The line they chose: “This isn’t just history — it’s his story in the making.”

Within hours, a user fires back: “they let a GPT AI-ism through on the main Nike page?? I thought marketing teams caught this stuff by now.” Of course, true or not, hundreds then piled on. Nike says nothing.

That “it isn’t X, it’s Y” rhetorical pivot, is a timeless literary construction, which, of course, is the very reason the algorithm uses it so often.

Generative AI has certain “tells” and the internet has learned to sniff them out. The em dash that lands every other sentence. The “In a world where…” opening what shows up in so many social captions. Or, “The uncomfortable truth is…” trope that leads the most insightful paragraph in so many articles.  Including some of mine. And don’t get me started on The Oxford comma.

The deeply irritating part, and I say this as someone who has been using em dashes for forty years, and who may have, on occasion, opened with something uncomfortably close to “in a world where…”, is that AI didn’t invent these moves. It stole them. From writers. From us. The machines have pickpocketed an entire generation of stylistic habits and industrialized them into the default output of every content team on the planet. And it has left those of us who were doing it first standing in a lineup, looking guilty. I now actively edit out punctuation I’ve used since the nineties. I second-guess sentence constructions that were mine long before they were anyone’s prompt. The machine didn’t just copy our style. It contaminated it.

Even if the accusation against Nike was wrong, it didn’t matter. Nike was tried, convicted, and sentenced in the court of public opinion before anyone paused to check the facts. No evidence required. No response accepted. The copy wasn’t the problem. The suspicion was.

They were guilty by algorithm.

This Is Not a Drill.

This is not a niche internet grievance or a creative community having a moment. The anti-AI sentiment is hardening into mainstream consumer behavior, and brands are directly in the crossfire.

A poll from Stanford University and UC Berkeley found less than half of Americans now think the country should charge ahead with AI innovation. When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned AI at a University of Arizona commencement speech this year, he was rewarded with a sustained hail of boos from graduating students. He argued that resisting AI meant “surrendering your agency.” The students’ response, several hundred people in caps and gowns loudly jeering one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures, was the agency. And it was remarkably well-organized.

Then Merriam-Webster named “AI slop” its word of the year for 2025. Think about it.  The f’n dictionary, the institution that formally decides which words deserve to exist, added a phrase whose entire purpose is to describe your content department’s output as low-grade, machine-produced garbage. That means we are well past early warning signs. We are at the stage where the warning signs have their own warning signs.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The uncomfortable truth (see what I did there?) is sitting in the data, and it ain’t subtle.

Only 7% of consumers say visible AI-generated marketing content makes them trust a brand more. 31% say it makes them trust the brand less. That is already a four-to-one negative ratio, a losing trade on its face. But here is where it stops being a reputation problem and becomes a revenue problem: 52% of consumers say they would stop buying from a brand after an inauthentic experience. Not post a complaint. Not write a review. Stop. Buying. And 58% say they trust brands less simply for using AI-generated content, not for doing it badly, just for doing it.

Meanwhile, 77% of senior marketing decision-makers plan to shift budgets away from traditional creator marketing toward AI-generated content. The industry is accelerating toward the cliff its customers are running from and calling it strategy. This is a controlled demolition being carried out by very confident people who don’t know how to read the room.

The Glitch That Stole Christmas

This is not a budget problem. It is a judgment problem. There is a meaningful difference, and confusing the two is how brands end up repeating the mistake.

McDonald’s Netherlands produced an AI-generated Christmas ad. They titled it, “The Most Terrible Time of the Year”.  It was pulled within days. Viewers called it “AI slop.” Many said it “ruined the Christmas spirit.” The studio behind it described, in a since-deleted post, a seven-week production involving up to ten in-house AI and post-production specialists, with each shot going through extensive iterative refinement.

McDonald’s response? They called it “an important learning.” That is corporate for: we spent a significant budget discovering what common sense would have told us for free. 

After significant backlash for AI-generated holiday ads in 2024, Coca-Cola released another set of AI-generated holiday ads in 2025. Their global VP of Generative AI explained the spots were guided by “human storytellers” to ensure “authentic and emotionally resonant” content. The internet looked at the AI-rendered polar bears, the trucks with shifting wheel counts, the otters in a winter cabin, and not so politely disagreed.

Coca-Cola owns Christmas in the global imagination. The red trucks. The original polar bears. Thirty years of emotional equity built one human feeling at a time. They chose, for the second consecutive year, to replace all of that with something that looked like a prompt.  The lesson here has nothing to do with technology. When your most powerful brand asset is warmth, the one thing you must never allow is for your audience to feel the cold.

The Brands Going the Other Way

Here is where it gets interesting, and where strategic intelligence wins.

Brands including Aerie, Equinox, and Almond Breeze launched campaigns in early 2026 explicitly calling out AI slop, positioning themselves as authentic alternatives to machine-generated fakery. Equinox, a gym, made “not using AI” a premium brand signal. Almond Breeze deployed the Jonas Brothers to mock the entire premise of AI advertising. Cheerfully. Effectively.

We have reached the moment where restraint is the competitive advantage. “100% Human” is now a marketing claim. Bottled water once bragged about having no calories. Brands are now bragging about having no algorithms. 

The consumer is not anti-AI. They are anti-cheap. That is actually good news, for every brand smart enough to understand the distinction.

Don’t Get Swooshed

Maybe Nike used AI.  Or maybe they didn’t.  It is just as likely that the line in question was written by a human copywriter doing their job, reaching for a construction that felt sharp and contemporary. It still went viral as an AI artefact. The copy was not the problem. The suspicion was. And after over four decades in the media and PR business I can tell you with all certainty that suspicion travels considerably faster than any clarification you will ever issue.

The question for every CMO and CEO reading this is not whether you are using AI. Everyone is, somewhere, in some form, on some channel. The real question is whether your brand has built enough of a distinctive, recognizable, irreplaceable human voice that your audience knows the difference instinctively, before the mob has a chance to decide for them.

If you are not certain of the answer, open your last ten posts. Read them like a suspicious stranger. Look for the tells. They’re not difficult to find. Just ask Nike.