Recently, I was at the Lynx Awards as the guest of my good friend and Motivate Media’s Chairman, the big-hearted and always entertaining Ian Fairservice. Ian is excellent company, which was fortunate because the Dubai heat was making a fairly determined attempt to turn me into consommé.

I had one thought in mind. Okay, two. The first was that we were seated outside. In Dubai. In early October. Apparently, celebrating the hottest work in advertising required a fully immersive experience. 

Dubai Lynx, launched in 2007, celebrates creative excellence and marketing effectiveness across the Middle East and North Africa. It’s a sister awards program to Cannes Lions and a partnership involving Motivate Media Group, the regional publishing and media business chaired by Ian, who also serves as Dubai Lynx’s Vice Chairman. Cannes Lions began as the International Advertising Film Festival in Venice in 1954, eventually making Cannes, France, its permanent home. What began with advertising films has grown into recognition of creativity across marketing, communications, technology and business innovation. 

I have attended the Cannes Lions in France on numerous occasions – often wondering why I was inside a dark screening room viewing hundreds of entries instead of outside enjoying the Côte d’Azur. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.  Because now I live in Dubai.  And there I was, outside, in a puddle of perspiration, at the Emirates Golf Club event area watching as 21 Grands Prix—the highest prizes in individual categories—went to 14 campaigns, and Kuwait earned its first-ever Grand Prix. I won’t go into all the winners—you can find them all [here]. ⁠But I applauded more than a few standout campaigns, including “Recipe for Change,” which turned Lebanese women’s family recipes into income; “Let It Fly,” which rewarded souvenir purchases with extra baggage allowance; and “Ruby Blooms,” which made period education more accessible to autistic girls.

Then, somewhere between applauding the winners and quietly reconsidering the thermal properties of my linen suit, a second thought emerged: How much great work would never get made if our industry stopped celebrating it? Every campaign being recognized had survived a brief, a budget, an approval process and, almost certainly, someone seemingly trying there darndest, though probably unintentionally, to make those great ideas less so.

Award shows give creativity something every business discipline needs: recognition, benchmarks and an incentive to improve. Their greatest contribution is what they encourage before the ceremony and what the rest of the industry learns afterward.

They also inspire young talent and create an esprit de corps, that shared pride and sense of belonging, that is essential in our collaborative industry, where a great idea may be sparked in one person’s mind but is almost always inspired and improved by others. Celebrating the finished work recognizes that collective effort and reminds the next generation that they have a place in it.

Creativity deserves a business case. Fortunately, it has one.

Creativity helps a brand earn attention, become memorable and give people a reason to choose it. And there is considerably more evidence for those advantages than “the creative director feels strongly about it.” Even when that creative director is me.

Kantar, the marketing research company, reported in its 2025 French analysis that the strongest-performing 30% of campaigns generated a return on investment of 6.62, compared with 1.42 for the least creative 30%—roughly 4.7 times as much. The analysis matched creative testing with campaign returns from WARC, the international marketing research and case-study service. 

System1, an advertising research company, and Effie, the international marketing effectiveness awards organization, analyzed 1,265 campaign cases across the United States and Europe, linked to consumer testing involving approximately 200,000 people. Their recent Creative Dividend research found that creative quality and media support together explained 60.1% of reported business results in its analysis — evidence of their combined importance.

The lesson here is that we must valuate creativity as part of the investment’s earning power. A media plan buys opportunities to be noticed; the work determines what happens when people encounter it.

Awards give clients something valuable: confidence to say yes.

Great work requires someone on the client side to approve it, fund it and defend it. Recognition celebrates that contribution alongside that of the agency and supplies precedents that can make the next ambitious idea easier to explain internally.

LIONS, the organization behind Cannes Lions, surveyed more than 1,000 marketers and creatives globally for its 2025 State of Creativity report. Only 13% considered their companies friendly toward creative risk, while 29% of brands described themselves as highly risk-averse. Creative risk means backing bold, unconventional ideas that challenge familiar category practices. Or, as I like to say, the kind that make your palms sweat. Some marketers get it.  Most don’t.

Consider “Recipe for Change” for Arla Foods, the international dairy cooperative, and its Puck dairy brand. Launched in 2025, it brought displaced Lebanese women’s family recipes onto restaurant menus, turning their cooking knowledge into an income-generating asset. Restaurants licensed the recipes—obtaining permission to use them—and participating women helped chefs recreate the dishes. 

Its 2025 London International Awards submission reports 120,960 meals sold across 96 restaurants in 28 cities. At Dubai Lynx 2026, it won four Grands Prix: for customer experiences and participation, commerce, strategy, and public relations. This required restaurant partnerships, recipe licensing and delivery of the program. The recognition celebrates the client’s willingness to make the idea operational as well as the agency’s imagination. 

That same willingness is visible in “Three Words,” launched in France in April 2025 by AXA, the global insurance company. AXA added “and domestic violence” to the circumstances covered by its home insurance assistance, providing emergency relocation and legal, psychological and financial support. The advertising communicated a real change in the product. 

Its 2026 One Show case, submitted to the international advertising and design awards run by The One Club for Creativity, reports 9.1% more new contracts over the first six months compared with the same period in 2024, and 1,292 people supported in the first ten months. The campaign won Best of Show, the program’s highest overall honor. 

As agencies, that means we must present an unconventional idea with its consumer insight, commercial objective and measurement plan. We have to give the client something sturdier than “Trust us, it’ll work.”

The winning idea should solve something. Preferably the client’s problem.

The most useful award cases reveal a creative response to a specific obstacle. Studying that connection teaches more than admiring the finished execution.

“Let It Fly” for Saudia, Saudi Arabia’s national airline, addressed an obstacle familiar to anyone who has weighed a suitcase while negotiating with a pile of souvenirs strewn across their hotel room: baggage limits discouraged travelers from buying local crafts and cultural goods. Purchases at participating retailers earned artist-designed luggage stickers. Scanning them at check-in unlocked extra baggage allowance. Very clever.

Its 2026 One Show submission reports more than 39,000 stickers activated, reaching 22 countries, and a 34% increase in cultural souvenir purchases at partner retailers. At Lynx, it won the Media and Outdoor Grands Prix, recognizing its use of communication channels and advertising beyond the home. The benefit and the sales mechanism were the same thing. 

In Britain, Currys, the retailer selling electronics, appliances and technology services, confronted a different obstacle. Physical shops increasingly looked like a disadvantage as customers moved online. Yet buying complicated technology without knowledgeable help could be frustrating. Its “Beyond Techspectations” campaign used unexpected humor to make employees’ expertise the reason to choose Currys.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, or IPA, the UK advertising industry’s professional body, awarded the work its 2026 Effectiveness Grand Prix. The award case reports £500 million in additional revenue attributable to the marketing activity over two years, a 1.1 percentage-point increase in market share and a 44% increase in long-term ROI. The program combined creative work with changes to marketing planning and investment. 

Start with the barrier to growth. Then ask whether the creative idea changes behavior in a way that helps remove it. A clever execution becomes much easier to defend when the commercial logic is equally clever.

Award shows expand our understanding of what creative work can be.

Public recognition brings unfamiliar approaches into view and helps teams see possibilities beyond their category’s conventional, and often habitual, advertising.

“Ruby Blooms” for Nana, the menstrual-care brand marketed under names including Bodyform and Libresse in other countries, addressed the difficulty traditional period education can present for autistic girls whose sensory and communication needs require a different approach.

The response was a 28-page sensory guidebook, using textures, scent, sound and calm visuals to help girls prepare for menstruation. Medical experts informed its development, and the book was introduced through clinics, therapy settings and schools. Its 2026 awards submission reports that more than 2,000 girls read the books. At Lynx, it won the Healthcare, Industry Craft and Print & Publishing Grands Prix—recognizing health communication, execution and printed work. 

“Vaseline Verified,” launched in March 2025, took another route. Vaseline is the skincare brand owned by Unilever, the international consumer goods company, well known for its petroleum jelly. Online creators were publishing inventive, and sometimes questionable, uses for the product. Using this insight, the brand brought its scientists into the conversation to test popular tips, validate those that worked and challenge misinformation.

Unilever reports 136 million social views in the first three months and nine Cannes Lions awards, including two category Grand Prix. Those views measure exposure, rather than purchases, but the idea made scientific expertise useful in an existing consumer conversation, giving people a reason to trust the product. 

Study how that execution served the strategy. Creativity can improve what a brand provides as well as how it promotes it.

The best work deserves an encore. And sometimes several decades of them.

Awards should encourage sustained excellence as well as exciting debuts. A strong creative platform can accumulate commercial value when marketers keep developing it.

Specsavers, the international optical and hearing-care retailer, demonstrates that particularly well. Its “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” advertising uses humorous mistakes and misunderstandings to make the value of better eyesight memorable. The campaign has been running for 24 years.  And still, at the 2026 IPA Effectiveness Awards, it won Gold and the prize for dedication to effectiveness. The IPA reports £635 million in additional profit attributable to its advertising over 24 years, with the platform extending across Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Northern Europe. 

System1’s 2025 research on creative consistency analyzed 4,000 advertisements and responses from 600,000 people, examining how maintaining recognizable characters, music, visual style and other creative elements relates to stronger advertising and business outcomes. Familiarity can be an asset worth developing. 

“New” is not the only way to be creative. There are many ways to protect an effective idea from organizational boredom. The marketing department’s desire for something new is a poor substitute for evidence that customers need it. Unlike you, they haven’t watched the ad 100 times.

The industry gets smarter when the applause becomes shared learning.

Creative awards recognize qualities such as originality, execution and innovation. Effectiveness awards examine evidence that marketing achieved its objectives. The strongest learning comes from understanding both. At its 2026 awards, the IPA subjected entries to technical and industry scrutiny before final judging by client experts, turning individual successes into evidence other marketers can use. 

Regional recognition adds another benefit. Kuwait’s first-ever Dubai Lynx Grand Prix went to “WABA Ramadhan” for WABA, a homeware brand. The film celebrated Gulf culture and Ramadan through clothing, settings and carefully coordinated editing. Its Film Craft award recognizes the great filmmaking, which brings another creative community into the industry’s shared reference points. 

After awards season, review selected cases with the client and agency team. Examine the problem, insight, creative decision, execution and evidence. Discuss which principles could improve the next brief. There is considerable value in discovering why something worked before requesting your own version by Thursday.

Take the ambition home.

I left grateful to Ian, impressed by the work and a bit like a wet towel that desperately needed wringing. But the evening had done what a good awards show should do: it reminded me how much talent this industry has and how much becomes possible when clients give that talent room to work.

The trophy goes home with the winner. The ambition should go home with everyone. Preferably in an air-conditioned UBER. 

Sources: Campaign Middle East, Dubai Lynx, Motivate Media Group, The Current, Kantar, System1, Effie, LIONS, Puck, Unilever, London International Awards, The One Club for Creativity, D&AD, IPA

Meet Ervin Hoskins, an American freelance journalist whose commentary about the Iran war appeared in publications including the Port St. Joe Star, a small Florida newspaper, and larger international outlets.

There’s just one problem. Ervin Hoskins doesn’t exist.

According to an October 2026 investigation by OpenAI, an influence operation originating in Iran used ChatGPT to help produce and place nearly 100 articles under seven deceptive journalist identities. The Washington Post identified at least 20 news outlets carrying the campaign’s material.

We’re not talking about AI-generated posts from obscure social media accounts or anonymous Reddit threads. We’re talking about fabricated journalists publishing articles in legitimate news outlets, complete with bylines, headshots and the credibility that comes with appearing in the press.

The journalists were fictitious. The publications were real. And the credibility was borrowed.

For marketing and PR professionals, that’s a rather alarming development. We’ve spent decades convincing clients that earned media is more credible than paid advertising. Now bad actors have figured out how to manufacture the former almost as easily as the latter.

The great credibility laundering machine

Traditionally, earned media has worked because independent editorial judgment provides credibility that advertising cannot simply buy.

But what happens when that editorial judgment fails?

In 2025, Wired, Business Insider and several other publications removed articles attributed to an apparently fictitious freelancer named Margaux Blanchard. Business Insider subsequently removed around 40 questionable first-person essays involving suspect bylines.

That same year, the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer published a syndicated summer reading list containing ten nonexistent books attributed to real authors, including Isabel Allende and Andy Weir. The writer admitted using AI without adequately checking the results. The publishers had unwittingly given imaginary products the imprimatur of genuine journalism.

In October 2026, Canadian media investigations also exposed fabricated journalist identities appearing in online publications, including AI-generated personas republishing the work of legitimate news organizations.

Meanwhile, NewsGuard had identified 3,749 AI-generated news and information websites across 16 languages by June 2026, many masquerading as legitimate publications.

And credibility is already a scarce commodity. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer, covering 28 countries, found that media was distrusted in 13 of them. Trust stood at just 39% in Britain, 40% in France, 44% in the United States and 33% in Japan.

Now add industrial-scale synthetic journalism to that already combustible mixture.

When AI starts believing the publicity

Here’s where things become particularly interesting for marketers.

In our PR for Robots webinar series, we’ve been explaining how credible third-party coverage can help AI search engines discover, understand and potentially recommend brands. But what happens when the information AI finds has itself been manufactured?

A fabricated article published by a genuine news outlet may look like an independent source. If AI repeats its claims, manufactured credibility can become machine-amplified credibility.

This isn’t just theoretical. NewsGuard’s September 2025 audit found that ten leading AI chatbots repeated false claims in 35% of its targeted misinformation tests. Its January 2026 audit still found a failure rate above 28%. These weren’t measurements of ordinary search accuracy, but they exposed a serious vulnerability.

If AI can’t reliably distinguish authentic authority from manufactured authority, both brands and customers have a big problem.

What if the enemy isn’t a foreign government, but your competitor?

Now imagine these techniques in commercial hands.

A fictitious investigative journalist publishes allegations about a pharmaceutical company’s safety record. A fabricated industry analyst questions a rival’s financial stability. A network of apparently independent publications reports complaints about a hotel chain, airline or automobile manufacturer.

The allegations are invented, but the headlines look real. Search engines find them. Social media circulates them. AI systems repeat them.

And there’s fresh evidence that the machinery for this kind of manipulation is already being commercialized.

In September 2026, Anthropic exposed an operation run by LKM Company, a France-based digital advertising agency, using Claude to manufacture nearly 9,000 articles in approximately 20 languages across some 70 fabricated news websites. The operation also deployed more than 250 fake commenting accounts to amplify its stories across six continents.

The agency’s operation shifted political positions depending on the interests of paying clients. Anthropic described it as a commercial influence-as-a-service operation. Although investigators found little genuine audience engagement and no evidence that the content broke through into mainstream coverage, the capacity to manufacture apparent editorial consensus was extraordinary.

PR practitioners have seen concealed sponsorship, ghostwritten commentary and planted stories for decades. What’s changed is the potential scale.

In the past, manufacturing a hundred convincing articles required writers, editors, translators and considerable coordination. Now much of that production can be automated, adapted for different countries and distributed through apparently independent publications.

There’s no verified evidence in these cases that a commercial brand commissioned such an AI operation to sabotage a competitor. But the capabilities demonstrated raise an obvious question: what happens when somebody applies them to a corporate rivalry instead of a political conflict?

Black-hat PR could become black-hat publishing.

For years, PR agencies competed for editorial attention. Now we may also have to compete against fabricated experts, synthetic journalists and coordinated misinformation.

The commercial stakes are considerable. According to Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority, 89% of UK consumers use online reviews when researching products or services. If consumer decisions depend so heavily on third-party information, the potential damage from fabricated editorial coverage is hardly difficult to imagine.

And the risks extend far beyond fake five-star reviews. An article appearing in ten publications may look like ten independent endorsements of a claim, even when every version originated from the same invented source.

Quantity can masquerade as consensus. Repetition can masquerade as proof.

The credibility crisis is also an opportunity for PR

So, what should responsible marketers and PR professionals do?

First, recognize that monitoring a brand’s reputation now means examining not only what is being said, but who’s saying it, where it originated and whether the supposed authority is genuine.

Second, make real expertise verifiable. Credentials, sources, independent reporting and demonstrable facts become increasingly important when anybody can manufacture a convincing expert.

Third, monitor AI-generated answers alongside traditional media and search results. A false story that appears in the press today could potentially influence how a brand is described tomorrow. Correcting the original source matters more than simply issuing another denial.

Finally, strengthen relationships with reputable journalists and publications that actually verify what they publish. A placement isn’t worth much if the publication’s editorial standards are indistinguishable from an automated content farm.

This isn’t an argument against using AI to write. It’s an argument against using AI to counterfeit independence, expertise and truth.

PR needs to protect the very thing it sells

The irony is that while PR professionals are working harder than ever to establish brands as credible authorities, AI is making it easier than ever for dishonest operators to manufacture the appearance of that authority.

The profession has a vested interest in protecting editorial integrity, not simply exploiting editorial access. Otherwise, the credibility that makes earned media valuable could become increasingly meaningless.

For years, PR professionals have been trying to get their clients into the news. Now we may have to spend just as much time proving the news is real.

Sources: OpenAI — Disrupting AI-enabled False Front Operations (2026); The Washington Post — Iranian Campaign Planted Fake Articles in Real U.S. Publications (2026); Anthropic — Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI (2026); Associated Press / NPR — AI-generated content in newspaper supplements (2025); NewsGuard — AI Tracking Center and AI False Claims Monitor; Edelman — 2026 Trust Barometer; UK Competition and Markets Authority — Consumer reviews research

I caught a video from RAKBANK, a UAE bank, featuring one of its executives bringing the “Yung Lean energy” to Ru’ya, the Emirati career fair at Dubai World Trade Centre.

Within days of the rapper’s MTV Video Music Awards performance, the bank had its version on Facebook and Instagram. I don’t know whether RAKBANK’s idea worked for its intended purpose, but it got me thinking about when brands should borrow attention from something people already love. And when they absolutely shouldn’t.

For anyone who missed the reference, Swedish rapper Yung Lean and GENER8ION, the music-and-film project of French producer Surkin and director Romain Gavras, performed the song, STORM II, at this year’s awards. Uniformed dancers fold, rise and surge together while Lean remains almost motionless. In the original film he smokes; at the awards, he eats ice cream. Extraordinary choreography meets a man who looks like he’s just waiting for a bus.

The imitations began before the awards. Pupils at South Africa’s Laerskool Vredekloof Primary School performed their own version of the synchronized group dance. Artificial intelligence copies replace the central figure with new faces and characters, turning a striking film into endlessly renewable clickbait. 

And then came the brands. 

Zomato, one of India’s largest food-delivery platforms, adapted the STORM formation around its delivery riders. Nigeria’s BUA Cement, one of the country’s largest cement manufacturers, put a factory worker at the center of the formation. A separate AI version featured footballer Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in a kit associated with Spanish clothing brand Pompeii and Deportivo de La Coruña, the professional football club from Galicia. Its creator, Wekker Studios, explicitly labeled it an unofficial concept advertisement, unaffiliated with either brand. 

Marketers call this borrowed interest: using attention already attached to a celebrity, event, joke or trend to attract attention to your brand. The zeitgeist is the prevailing cultural mood. Strategy means deciding whom to reach, what to communicate and what to achieve.

Borrowed interest is perfectly respectable. Borrowed thinking is just plain lazy.

A brand chasing young audiences can resemble a dad squeezing into his son’s clothes or trying to be relatable and funny. There’s nothing wrong with a dad joke when you know you’re telling one. The trouble starts when you think you’re the coolest person in the room. And the room strongly disagrees. 

Borrowed interest when badly done reminds me of those old motor-oil ads featuring bikini-clad women: SEX! …Now that I have your attention, let’s discuss lubrication. (Cringe!)

Avoid first-level thinking

At ROSE, we describe creative thinking in three levels.

First level: The obvious. The predictable answer, the familiar joke, the idea practically anyone could have. Sometimes juvenile; rarely surprising. The first exit off the creative highway—and usually the busiest.

Second level: The inventive. Go beyond the obvious to find an unexpected connection or a fresh way to express an idea. This is where most competent marketing ideas live.

Third level: The exceptional. The brilliant leap nobody saw coming. Challenge the premise, change how people see the subject or create the thing everyone else wishes they’d thought of. The sort of thinking that can elevate a brand and collect an award on the way.

So, in this case, copying the format of a trending video is easy first level thinking. Making it mean something, fit the brand and meet a strategy, that’s second level thinking. Third level, in this case, would require an execution that’s so brilliant it might even eclipse the original video. The question is what the trend helps you say about the brand. If the answer is merely “we saw it too,” congratulations on having Wi-Fi.

Sprout Social, a social-media research and software company, found that 93% of surveyed consumers wanted brands to understand online culture, but 33% thought joining trends was embarrassing. Cultural awareness is not a license to impersonate a teenager.

When the trend makes your product less appealing

A trend brings its meaning with it. You cannot borrow the popularity and leave the inconvenient bits at the door.

In 2024, Domino’s, the pizza-delivery chain, used the distasteful viral “Hawk Tuah” joke in a UK social post promoting its Tuesday offer: “It’s Two For (Hawk) Tuahsday.” The meme came from a street-interview video in which Haliey Welch made a spitting sound while describing a sexual act. Customers responded with disgust and ridicule, including, I’m sure, requests for pizza without the spit. This backfired in audience response: the borrowed joke made the food less appetizing. There is no published evidence here of a sales decline. There is, however, a fairly compelling case for keeping saliva out of the creative brief.

When the joke makes the brand’s case

The strongest borrowed interest makes a product benefit or buying occasion part of the joke. People should come away with a reason to buy, try or think better of the brand. The trend opens the door. A real, original idea still has to walk through it.

Borrowed interest comes in many forms.

In 2023, HEINZ, the food brand best known for ketchup, spotted a viral photograph of pop singer Taylor Swift eating chicken at an American football game. A fan described her dips as “ketchup and seemingly ranch,” apparently unsure whether the white sauce was ranch dressing. The oddly cautious wording became an internet joke. HEINZ already sold Kranch, a mixture of ketchup and ranch dressing, so it released bottles with a new name and label: Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch. This worked commercially: published campaign cases report sales growth and renewed distribution. The connection worked because the joke named something HEINZ actually sold. Taylor Swift supplied the interest. Heinz remembered to supply the condiment.

That same year, IKEA, the Swedish furniture and homewares retailer known for affordable design, answered luxury fashion house Balenciaga’s £695 skirt that looked like a bath towel wrapped around the waist. IKEA recreated the fashion photograph using one of its actual bath towels, costing £16, and presented it as its own “towel skirt.” The joke was that you could get the expensive designer look with an inexpensive household item. This worked for brand perception: campaign research reported that 87% of its Generation Z audience—young consumers born roughly from the late 1990s to early 2010s—said it improved their impression of IKEA. The joke demonstrated affordable style. It was the brand’s proposition wearing a towel.

The common thread is simple: each trend gave the brand a way to demonstrate something it wanted people to value. The joke carried the message.

Sprout found 40% thought brands joining trends was cool, while 27% said participation worked only within 24–48 hours. Speed helps when there is a connection worth making. A bad idea delivered promptly is still a bad idea. It simply arrives before lunch.

When the trend gives people something to buy

Attention needs an address. If people remember the joke but forget who told it, you have financed entertainment for strangers. Brand assets are recognizable characters, colors, packaging or slogans that tell people whose idea they are enjoying.

In 2023, Chipotle, the Mexican-style restaurant chain, acted on viral TikTok reviews by food creators Alexis Frost and Keith Lee. They recommended a steak quesadilla—a folded, cheese-filled tortilla—with grilled peppers and onions, dipped in a mixture of sour cream and Chipotle’s honey vinaigrette. Customers wanted to copy the order, but it was not available through the digital menu. Chipotle quickly trained staff, updated ordering and launched the creators’ combinations, including the “Keithadilla.” Its campaign partner reports the company’s best digital-sales weekend at launch. This worked because the brand made the viral recommendation easier to buy. It borrowed the appetite and supplied the checkout.

An older example remains unusually clear. In 2020, Nathan Apodaca filmed himself skateboarding, drinking Ocean Spray cranberry-raspberry juice and singing along to “Dreams” by rock band Fleetwood Mac. People copied the video. Ocean Spray, the American cranberry cooperative, jumped into the conversation with its CEO’s recreation and gave Apodaca a truck after learning his vehicle had broken down. Its digital director reported more than two billion media impressions and increased Cran-Raspberry sales, while acknowledging that strong pandemic sales made the campaign’s separate contribution difficult to measure. This worked at reaching new audiences with the actual product central to the entertainment. The brand supported the person who made the moment. It did not arrive with a logo and demand custody.

The principle is simple: give the audience an action that benefits the business. Sometimes that means changing the menu. Occasionally it means buying a man a truck. Neither requires another committee to approve a dance.

When acting uncool is the point

The dad-in-young-clothes problem has an exception: when everyone knows it is a joke. Self-awareness can make a borrowed format work. An older person pretending to be young is awkward. An older person knowingly performing that awkwardness can be delightful.

In 2024, Northumberland Zoo, a family-run animal attraction in England, copied the TikTok format in which younger employees write a slang-filled script for older bosses. Its directors, a couple in their sixties, delivered a deadpan animal tour: an actual goat became the “GOAT,” meaning greatest of all time. The video passed six million views. It succeeded at attracting attention to the zoo and showing its animals; the zoo also reported visitors arriving for selfies with its directors. The attraction remained the attraction. The slang was the comic device.

Research cited in video platform TikTok’s 2025 report found 45% of social and video-platform users associated relevance with feeling understood. Recognizing the meme is not the same as understanding the people.

When the borrowed format contradicts the brand

A trend should help express the promise, rather than expose a hole in it.

In 2024, SKKN by Kim, reality star Kim Kardashian’s skincare brand, appeared in her version of TikTok’s “I’m X, of course I…” format: people introduce themselves, then exaggerate a characteristic. Her office tour featured a tanning bed. Viewers challenged the contradiction with skincare, and Kardashian publicly defended its use for her skin condition. The post generated backlash rather than reinforcing confidence in the brand’s skincare judgment. Its 16.4 million views did not resolve that problem. “Of course” is a particularly unfortunate opener when the audience’s response is “Why the hell would you?”

McDonald’s Mexico offers a direct example from 2025. When social feeds filled with AI images imitating Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind films such as Spirited Away, the fast-food chain posted similar illustrations of people enjoying its food. Hundreds of comments criticized the company for copying artists’ work and using AI instead of paying illustrators. This backfired in audience response: the conversation became about the company’s creative shortcuts rather than its food. Making your customers hungry is useful. Making them ask why you couldn’t hire an artist is less so.

The Real Asset May Be Memory

Borrowing a format also means inheriting its baggage. A popular trend can already be controversial. And a corporation using it commercially may receive a different welcome from someone playing with it at home.

Kantar, a global marketing research company, associated meaningful difference—being relevant and offering something consumers perceive as different—with up to five times market penetration, the proportion of category shoppers buying a brand, and up to twice the average category price. These relationships do not prove that trend campaigns cause growth. They explain why distinctiveness and relevance deserve more attention than impressions, meaning the number of times content is displayed.

Borrowed interest charges interest when you haven’t read the terms.

Before approving the dance

Start with the audience and objective. What should people think, feel or do after seeing this?

Then establish why this belongs to the brand. Add an original twist, useful action or product connection. Apply the logo-swap test: could a competitor credibly publish the same execution? If so, keep thinking.

Understand the context, substantiate claims and obtain necessary permissions. A trend’s availability in your feed does not automatically make its music, imagery or creators available for your campaign.

Finally, measure what people remember and do, not just views and likes. Did they connect the content to the right brand? Did it change their impression, encourage an application, prompt a trial or generate a purchase?

Avoid exhausted jokes, borrowed youth slang, fabricated drama and mistaking a new face in an AI video for a new idea. It’s not enough to say “it’s trending”.

The broader question sparked by RAKBANK remains worth asking. Borrowing can make a brand timely, approachable and entertaining. The strategic opportunity is to turn that attention into something people associate with the brand—and a reason to choose it.

Borrow the interest. But add some intelligence and creativity. 

Sources: Hypebeast, InsideHook, BestMediaInfo, Sprout Social, Times of India, The Independent, WARC, The Romans, Ipsos, Chipotle and Pearpop, TikTok, Blooloop, Glamour, Creative Bloq, Digital Shelf Institute, Kantar

I recently discovered that The Laughing Cow had stopped laughing. The horror.

For more than a century, the French processed-cheese brand has been represented by a cheerful red cow wearing cheese-box earrings and looking unnervingly pleased with herself.

Now she looks serious. Moo-rose, even. No explanation. Just a changed expression, a QR code and the words: “We need to talk.” Their site’s still purely a teaser. Its headline reads: “After more than 100 years, The Laughing Cow has stopped laughing. We need to talk.” It also features two amusing short films showing a rather depressed cow — one set in a diner and one in a park.

Naturally, my first thought was that she’d finally seen the news. Or perhaps discovered what was actually in that processed cheese.

Either way, the important point was this: I noticed. And so did everyone else. That’s the strategy.

Recognition + Violation of Expectation = Attention.

Most advertising tries to interrupt people. Strong brands can do something perhaps more interesting. They can interrupt themselves. And that first word — recognition — is important.

Ipsos’ 2026 global database covers more than 12,000 distinctive brand assets from 900+ brands, yet only 15% achieve its highest “Gold” rating: an asset people instantly and uniquely associate with the correct brand even when it appears on its own. Brands with stronger portfolios of distinctive assets are 31% more likely to be considered and 38% more likely to be used than brands with the weakest portfolios. Only about one in five brands has enough strong assets to produce these effects consistently.

In other words, before you vandalize your brand, you’d better make damn sure people know what it looks like in the first place. I know a great agency that can help you with that. Just ask. (wink)

First, What Exactly Are We Vandalizing?

By brand, I don’t mean just a logo. A brand is the collection of memories, associations, expectations and experiences people connect with a product, company or service. A distinctive brand asset is one of the recognizable cues that helps trigger those memories: a logo, package shape, mascot, color combination, typeface, slogan, product shape or other familiar device.

And by brand as media, I mean using those assets themselves as the communication rather than simply placing advertising around them. The package becomes the ad. The logo becomes the headline. The mascot becomes the story.

That only works if people recognize the asset in the first place. Which is why this strategy belongs mainly to brands that have spent years building familiarity. You can’t violate an expectation nobody has.

Strategy 1: Remove Something People Expect

In perhaps the cleanest form of brand vandalism, Lacoste, the French fashion brand famous for the small crocodile embroidered on its polo shirts, temporarily removed that crocodile and replaced it with endangered animals in its Save Our Species campaign. The point was immediately understandable. The crocodile had disappeared because species were disappearing. The logo wasn’t merely carrying the campaign. Its absence was the campaign.

Cadbury, the British chocolate brand, later did something similar with Dairy Milk packaging. For a campaign about loneliness among older people, it removed the words from the front of the chocolate bar. Again, subtraction did the communicating.

These are older examples, but they established a principle that remains useful for CMOs because most briefs instinctively ask: What should we add? Sometimes the better question is: What can we take away?

By the way, Google does this on the daily. For years it has shapeshifted its ubiquitous primary colored logo into themed versions of itself to maintain relevance.  It was brilliant when they created their first Google Doodle back in 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin added a simple Burning Man stick figure behind the second “o” to signal that they were away at the festival, and its brilliant today.

Strategy 2: Replace The Brand With The Customer

Coca-Cola took another route. Its Share a Coke campaign replaced the Coca-Cola name on bottles and cans with people’s names. That sounds almost reckless. It’s one of the world’s most valuable brand names. Why remove it? Because the bottle, colors, typography and overall identity were already recognizable enough to survive the defacing. The campaign was so successful the first time they tried it, Coca-Cola again relaunched Share a Coke globally in 2025, activating approximately 10 billion bottles and cans in more than 120 countries with over 30,000 names tailored to local markets. Coca-Cola says the campaign contributed to growth in single-serve transactions.

The package stopped behaving like packaging. It became content. That’s the deeper idea. If consumers want to photograph your pack, carry it around, give it to someone or share it, you’re no longer dealing with packaging alone. You’ve created a media object.

Strategy 3: Make The Brand Speak

Snickers, the chocolate bar owned by Mars, turned packaging into language. Instead of the SNICKERS name, wrappers carried words such as GROUCHY, IMPATIENT and CONFUSED — symptoms of what its long-running campaign suggested happens when people get hungry. That meant consumers could use the product itself as a message. Hand somebody a bar labelled GROUCHY and the packaging does the talking for you. This is an underused idea. Most packaging tells people about the product. Better packaging can help people communicate with each other.

Strategy 4: Make People See Your Brand Where It Isn’t

Heinz, the global ketchup brand, took a different approach in 2025. Its Looks Familiar campaign pointed out that an ordinary french-fry carton happens to resemble the distinctive Heinz Keystone — the shield-like shape that has been part of the brand’s identity for generations. Suddenly thousands of completely unbranded fry boxes began looking vaguely like Heinz advertising. The campaign ran across eight markets including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, UK, Brazil, Germany, UAE and China.

That’s an interesting evolution of brand as media. Heinz didn’t alter the logo. It trained consumers to recognize its logo in the world around them. The asset became a visual shorthand strong enough to escape the package entirely.

Strategy 5: Break Consistency Without Breaking Recognition

Absolut, the Swedish vodka brand, has spent decades treating its distinctive apothecary-style bottle as a creative canvas rather than something that must remain visually untouched.

In 2024 it returned to one of its most famous collaborations, producing a limited-edition bottle based on a rediscovered painting by Andy Warhol and rolling it out across more than 50 global markets. The bottle changed dramatically. Its identity didn’t. 

That matters because marketers often confuse consistency with sameness. Consistency means retaining enough recognizable DNA to remain identifiable. Sameness means repeating exactly the same execution forever. Those aren’t the same thing. The stronger the underlying brand system, the more freedom creative teams have to play with it.

Strategy 6: Turn A Problem Into The Brand Idea

One of the best examples of turning lemons into lemonade came from KFC, the global fried-chicken chain. When a distribution failure left many UK restaurants without chicken, the company rearranged the letters on its famous bucket from KFC to: FCK. Three letters. One apology. No corporate poetry. The brilliance wasn’t simply the joke. It was that the brand asset itself acknowledged the mistake. A conventional apology ad would’ve been advertising about a crisis. This made the brand identity part of the response. How fck’n cool is that?

Which Brings Us Back to The Cow

The Laughing Cow example may be the most elegant of all because almost nothing changed. The French cheese brand, created in 1921, has spent more than a century establishing one very simple expectation: The cow laughs. Now she doesn’t.

The temporary Not Laughing Cow packages began appearing last week in more than 4,700 U.S. stores. As of this writing, Bel has deliberately refused to explain the reason yet and is directing consumers to a website to speculate about what happened. You can check it out here: https://www.thenotlaughingcow.com/

No redesign. No celebrity. No complicated visual metaphor. Just one violated expectation and one unresolved question: Why isn’t the Laughing Cow laughing? The physical product becomes the teaser. The altered brand asset becomes the headline. And the mystery creates the media.

How To Do This Without Making a Mess

The temptation, having read examples like these, is for a marketing team to rush into a workshop and start putting moustaches on the logo. But stop right there.

There are a few rules.

1. Start with an asset people genuinely recognize. Remember: Ipsos found that only 15% of the 12,000+ assets it studied achieved its highest level of instant, unique recognition. Your brand guidelines may insist your teal gradient is iconic. Consumers may have other ideas.
2. Change one thing. The Laughing Cow doesn’t need a new personality. She just needs to stop laughing. Keep enough recognizable DNA. If consumers can’t identify the brand after the change, you haven’t created intrigue. You’ve created anonymity.
3. Make the change mean something. Lacoste’s missing crocodile worked because endangered species replaced it. Random disruption is decoration.
4. Make the idea explainable in one sentence. “The Laughing Cow stopped laughing.” “Lacoste removed the crocodile.” “Coke replaced its name with yours.” If the idea requires a 40-slide explanation, it probably isn’t an idea yet.
5. Give curiosity a payoff. Mystery creates attention. A disappointing reveal destroys it.
6. And perhaps most importantly: Put the brand back together afterwards. It should be like waking up from a vivid dream. The disruption works because consistency came first.

The Real Asset May Be Memory

Marketers spend enormous amounts of money looking for new media. New channels. New formats. New placements. New audiences. But mature brands already occupy extremely valuable media space. They occupy memory. The bottle people recognize. The crocodile they expect. The wrapper they know. The cow that always laughs.

That accumulated familiarity isn’t something to protect so carefully that nobody is ever allowed to touch it. Sometimes it should be activated. Sometimes it should be interrupted. And occasionally, it should be vandalized. Because when a familiar brand suddenly behaves in an unfamiliar way, people look again.

And in a world where everybody’s fighting for attention, that may be the most valuable media buy you never had to buy.

Sources: Ipsos — Distinctive Brand Assets research, Bel Brands / The Laughing Cow — current Not Laughing Cow campaign, Coca-Cola — Share a Coke, Lacoste / IUCN — Save Our Species, Mars — Snickers Hunger Bars, Kraft Heinz — Looks Familiar, Absolut — Andy Warhol limited-edition bottle, KFC / The One Club — FCK, Cadbury / Age UK — Donate Your Words

Last week an actress took shares in a betting start-up instead of a fee, ran the creative herself, and helped the company bury a competitor forty times its size.

For those of you with better things to do than track American advertising rows: Sydney Sweeney is the actress from Euphoria, and the face of an American Eagle jeans campaign last year that ate a fortnight of news. Novig is a sports prediction market — a betting exchange for people who’d rather not say betting — worth roughly $500 million, which in its category makes it a small fry..

Sweeney approached them. She didn’t want a fee, she wanted stock. She took equity and a creative partner title, then chose the music, guided the camera angles and rewrote the script.

The commercial isn’t subtle. Sweeney uses all of her…assets. She is naked throughout, covering herself with sports equipment: two footballs held to her chest, a basketball while perched on a hoop, tennis in her underwear, a golf club, a pool table. She repeats the word “sports.” It went up on billboards in Times Square, and Olympic athletes came after them for it. The swimmer Ariarne Titmus, the sprinter Amy Hunt, the surfer Felicity Palmateer squawked, entirely on reasonable grounds, that women’s sport spent a decade fighting for the opposite framing and could have been spared this.

I read about it in Fortune, filed by a writer whose job title is Crypto Fellow. The most instructive talent deal of the year, covered by the cryptocurrency desk.

I have sat through a great many talent negotiations. They concerned billing, per diems, whether they could keep the wardrobe, the jewelry, the car. Nobody asked for equity. Nobody asked to sit in the director’s chair. Occasionally someone asked for a bigger trailer, which everyone understood to mean take me seriously.

The ones asking properly now are the ones worth having. And, this is the part that should interest anyone running a business smaller than Nestlé, you almost certainly can’t afford them any other way.

Forty times the response, one-fortieth the company

The day before, Polymarket had launched its own spot. Polymarket is the whale of the category, valued north of $20 billion, reportedly paying LeBron James $15 million a year, with Derek Jeter, Eli Manning and Spike Lee also in frame.

Polymarket’s Instagram post drew under 55,000 likes. Novig’s drew over 1.2 million.

Before anyone files this under sex sells, which it has done reliably since the invention of the poster, note that the Polymarket ad was also professionally seductive, also had LeBron James in it, and still managed only fifty-five thousand. A well-lit plate of pasta does that.

The difference isn’t flesh. It’s that everyone in the Polymarket spot got paid whether it worked or not, and could be photographed the following Tuesday selling something else entirely. Sweeney had shares. Had the thing landed with a thud, she’d have paid for the privilege of making it. That concentrates the mind in a way no creative brief ever has.

Note also who won. Not the $20 billion company. The small fry.

Why this is an underdog’s weapon

Here is the thing nobody says out loud at conferences. Equity partnership isn’t a luxury strategy that trickles down from the giants. It runs the other way. It is what you use because you cannot outspend the other guys.

A big brand pays cash because cash is the thing it has in abundance and its shares are not, frankly, exciting. You are the reverse. You have very little cash and a stake in something that might be worth a great deal in eight years. That asymmetry is your entire advantage, and most small companies never think to spend it.

Roger Federer is the cleanest illustration on earth. In 2018 Nike wanted to cut his fee. Sit with that: the most bankable, scandal-proof athlete of his generation, and somebody ran a spreadsheet and concluded he’d gone off the boil. He left. In 2019 he took about 3% of On, a Swiss running-shoe company that had started in a garage and could not conceivably have matched Nike’s money. He helped design its tennis line and stayed on after retiring in 2022. That stake has been valued near $400 million — more than the $131 million he earned in twenty-four years of professional tennis. On now turns over around 3.5 billion Swiss francs a year.

On didn’t win Federer by outbidding Nike. It won him by offering something Nike structurally couldn’t.

Ryan Reynolds is the same trade at a scale you might actually recognize: roughly 20% of Aviation American Gin, a small Oregon distillery, sold to Diageo for up to $610 million; roughly 25% of the budget network Mint Mobile, sold to T-Mobile for up to $1.35 billion. Neither business could have afforded him as a hired face. Both could afford him as an owner.

And none of it is new. 50 Cent took equity in Vitaminwater in 2004 rather than a flat fee, helped run it from a reported $100 million to $700 million in three years, and reportedly collected nine figures when Coca-Cola bought the parent. Twenty-two years on, the industry is still working from a template drafted by a rapper. I find that delightful.

Time is the multiplier, and nobody collects it

Now the unglamorous part, which is where the money is, and which matters more to you than to Nestlé.

Everyone objects that audiences get bored. But most campaigns ever wear out their welcome. Most never live long enough to wear in.

A large company that throws away a good campaign after eighteen months has wasted money. A small one has wasted the only campaign it could afford to make. You have the least room of anyone to keep starting again, and you are statistically the most likely to do it, because small companies change direction every time a new hire arrives with opinions.

Which brings us to George Clooney, selling Nespresso since 2006. Twenty years of one man and one raised eyebrow turned a niche Nestlé capsule machine into shorthand for a certain kind of life. And note what Nespresso did this March when it wanted younger customers: it didn’t retire him. It added Dua Lipa for a campaign its CMO calls the biggest in the brand’s forty-year history, and put Clooney in it beside her. Succession, not defenestration.

The bill, payable in full

The risks are real. They are also knowable, which is rather the point; the brands that got hurt are the ones that never priced them.

Adidas and Kanye West is the maximum invoice. Nine years, roughly a tenth of brand revenue, terminated in October 2022 after his antisemitic statements — leaving €1.2 billion of unsellable stock, a €513 million quarterly loss, and a forecast €700 million operating loss the year after. Adidas called it right and called it fast, eighteen days from review to exit. It still took three years to empty the warehouses.

Read that as a ratio rather than a number and it should frighten you more, not less. Adidas lost a tenth of its brand revenue and survived because it had the other nine-tenths. If your partner is the face of your only product line, your exposure isn’t €1.2 billion, it’s everything.

Compare a shallow deal: Prada appointed the Korean actor Kim Soo-hyun in December 2024 and dropped him within days when allegations surfaced that March. Clean, cheap, forgotten by Thursday. That escape hatch is precisely what depth costs you.

Then the subtle bill. When the Novig ad drew fire, its chief executive explained that no comment on women’s sport was intended, and mentioned that Sweeney had driven much of the visual direction. Fortune observed, drily, that he’d thrown her somewhat under the bus. That is what accountability looks like when your partner is an owner: you can’t quietly terminate her, so the pressure finds a public exit.

Volatility runs both ways, too. On 11 August, On missed its quarterly numbers, the shares fell 19%, and Federer’s paper fortune dropped some $52 million before lunch. Your partner’s enthusiasm is now correlated to your results, which is marvelous in a good year.

And the fair counterweight: American Eagle maintains the Sweeney jeans campaign drove awareness and sales, and it did — denim sold out, the news cycle was enormous. A year on, the core brand showed no sustained sales growth and the share price had round-tripped to where it started. Attention is a real asset. It is simply not the same asset as a brand.

How to actually do this without a Hollywood budget

Huda Kattan built one of the world’s biggest beauty brands out of Dubai on exactly this logic — talent, product and owner in one person. The private equity firm TSG Consumer took a minority stake in 2017 at around $200 million of retail sales; by mid-2024 the business was past $300 million; in June 2025 she bought them out entirely. She has said she was told a beauty brand couldn’t be built from Dubai, and that she’d never get her equity back. Two for two.

That’s the aspiration. Here is the practical version for a company with a real budget and no cap-table romance.

Forget celebrity. Buy relevance. You are not signing Sweeney. You are signing the chef every restaurateur in your city already listens to, the physiotherapist your customers quote at each other, the retired national-team player nobody outside your market has heard of. Forty thousand people who buy your category beat four million who don’t. Reach is what big brands purchase because they must sell to everyone. You don’t have to.

Equity is one instrument, not the only one. Most owners of small businesses hear “give away shares” and reasonably stop listening. Fine — the point is skin in the game, and there are cheaper ways to arrange it. A royalty on the line they co-design. A share of profit on that line only. Options that vest over four years so leaving early costs them. A small stake that you can buy back at a set price. All of these produce the behavior you want; none of them hands a stranger a seat at your board.

Start with one line, not the whole brand. Give them a product, a category, a region. If it works, widen it. If they turn out to be a nightmare, you have contained the damage to one SKU rather than your logo.

Vest it, clause it, and write the buyback now. Vesting over years, a morality clause with teeth, and an agreed mechanism to buy them out at a formula price. Do this while everyone is delighted with each other. Nobody negotiates a clean exit in the middle of a scandal.

Don’t give shares to someone you wouldn’t take advice from. This is the real filter. An owner will have opinions about your pricing, your packaging and your hiring. If the thought of that makes you wince, pay a fee and keep your freedom — that is a perfectly respectable answer and it is the right one more often than this industry admits.

Then leave it alone. The most expensive habit in this business is changing direction at the precise moment the work begins to pay. It costs a big company money. It costs a small one the whole bet.

Marketing has been waving for thirty years. New campaign, new face, new platform — all of it beautifully choreographed to distract from how few brands will do the boring, compounding, unglamorous thing of picking something and staying with it.

Equity partnership is the most encouraging development in brand-building in a decade precisely because it finally pays people to stay, and because it is one of the very few weapons that works better in small hands than large ones. It costs more flexibility than a fee. It repays in compounding, which a fee never has and never will.

The brands that win the next ten years will choose somebody, give them a real seat, and then manage the genuinely hard part: sitting still.

Sources: Fortune, Front Office Sports, System1 / IPA, Compound Creativity, Mi3, Forbes, Variety, CBS News, The Grocer, CNN, Malay Mail, Associated Press, WWD

In June, a small American ad agency called Floodlight ran an experiment that every marketing director should have run themselves. It opened a free ChatGPT account and asked it 50 questions the way a real new parent would — not “baby carrier” but “I’m five foot two with a bad back and a nine-pound baby, what carrier won’t cripple me?” Then it screenshotted what came back.

In 26 of the 50 answers, ChatGPT recommended the same company: Ergobaby, a Los Angeles baby-carrier maker. Fine. Sensible. Ergobaby makes good carriers.

Directly beneath those answers, ChatGPT ran an advertisement. Not for Ergobaby. For L.L. Bean — the Maine outdoor-clothing chain that sells flannel shirts and duck boots and does not, to my knowledge, sell anything you’d strap a baby into. L.L. Bean had simply bought the space, and nobody else had turned up.

So the parent reads “buy Ergobaby,” then sees an ad for a fleece. Ergobaby paid nothing and got the recommendation. L.L. Bean paid and got a shirt ad next to somebody else’s endorsement.

If you were buying media in 2003, this will feel familiar. Google AdWords in its early years surfaced exactly the same disjointed ads — a mortgage broker beside a recipe, a divorce lawyer beside a hotel — because the inventory was empty and whoever showed up got the slot. In the immortal words of Baseball legend and habitual language mangler, Yogi Berra, “it’s déjà vu all over again.”

The gold rush, as reported

On 31 August, OpenAI — the San Francisco company behind ChatGPT — announced that its advertising business had reached a $1 billion annualised run rate roughly 200 days after launching. In March it had claimed $100 million. Tens of thousands of advertisers, it said, in more than 40 countries. The same day it opened self-service ad buying to the Middle East, Europe and India, which means that as of a fortnight ago, anyone in Dubai with a credit card can buy a slot inside the most-used piece of software on earth.

The entry price has collapsed with a speed that should tell you something. When the pilot launched in February, OpenAI wanted a $200,000 minimum commitment and a relationship with one of the big agency holding companies. By May, the minimum was zero.

India, which received self-service on the same day we did, responded exactly as you’d expect. Mamaearth, a Mumbai skincare and baby-products brand, issued a press release announcing it was the “1st Indian company to advertise on ChatGPT.” UNIVO Education followed as the “First Major Indian edtech brand.” Last Wednesday Sebamed, the German dermatology-skincare brand, arrived with the more carefully lawyered claim of being “among the early brands.” None of the three releases contained a single number about what the ads had done. We have seen this film before. It was set in the metaverse, and every brand in it had a virtual store.

The serious money is in too, and it is not stupid money. WPP Media, the media-buying arm of the London advertising group WPP, put Adobe, the American software company, into the pilot to promote its Acrobat and Firefly products. Alongside it came Audemars Piguet, the Swiss watchmaker whose entry-level piece costs more than a car; Mazda and Ford, the Japanese and American carmakers; Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service; and Mrs. Meyer’s, an American cleaning-products brand. Target, the American discount retailer, is reselling ad space inside ChatGPT through Roundel, its in-house retail-media network. Williams-Sonoma, the American kitchenware and furniture group that owns Pottery Barn, announced its participation two days after the pilot opened. Albertsons, the American grocery chain, followed. The Knot, the wedding-planning marketplace, joined after discovering that roughly a third of engaged couples now use AI to plan the wedding — nearly double the year before.

What the ads get right

Let’s be fair, because most of the commentary hasn’t been.

This is the most intent-rich advertising inventory anyone has ever sold. Nobody types “I have plantar fasciitis and my podiatrist says I need better arch support, what should I buy?” into a banner ad network. They type it into ChatGPT, and if you sell orthopaedic trainers, you would like to be in the room when they do.

The mechanics are unusually grown-up for a platform that is six months old. You pay per click, not per impression. There is no minimum spend. OpenAI ships a conversion pixel and a conversions API (the plumbing that lets you see whether a click became a sale) which are basics Google took years to bolt on. Ads are labelled, and OpenAI says they are walled off from the answer itself.

The audience is less hostile than the headlines suggest, once it has actually seen the format. In a survey of 2,338 American adults published last week by Semrush, a marketing-software company with an obvious interest in the subject, half the people who had encountered an ad in a chatbot said they’d clicked one. Among that group, more said they’d be likelier to click a ChatGPT ad than a Google one. Of the people who were neutral or positive about the ads, over half said the ad had simply given them an extra piece of information.

And the traffic is real. Target told the trade press that visits to its site from ChatGPT were growing about 40% a month before it had bought a single ad. When people are already walking through your door from a place, paying to put a sign up in that place is not a foolish idea.

And yes, the L.L. Bean problem will no doubt fix itself

Empty inventory is a launch condition, not a design flaw. Floodlight’s test found that 84% of its 550 queries returned no ad at all. Five entire categories — dog food, car seats, beach tents, clean beauty and women’s care — had zero advertisers. Where L.L. Bean appeared under baby carriers, Away, the American luggage brand, appeared under stroller wagons; Instacart, the grocery-delivery app, under women’s care; and Choice Hotels and Nissan under baby gear. They weren’t targeting anyone. They were the only cars in the car park.

That is already changing. In the one category where the right brands had noticed, like cribs and crib mattresses, 80% of queries carried a relevant ad within weeks of self-service opening. OpenAI is testing exclusion targeting so brands can keep their ads away from the wrong conversations. A year from now, the ad under a baby-carrier answer will be for a baby carrier. Google went through exactly this way back when, and nobody remembers it now.

What you still can’t see

Last Tuesday, Adweek, the American advertising trade title, reported that ad buyers already spending on ChatGPT want three things they can’t currently get: which prompts triggered their ads, what surrounded those ads and whether any of it led to a sale.

Similarweb, the Israeli web-analytics company, put a number on it in August. By its estimate, 26% of answers on ChatGPT’s free and cheapest tiers now carry an ad, and about a third of all ad impressions land on the very first message of a conversation — before the user has revealed what they actually want. Similarweb’s other observation is the one that is concerning. Meta has a public Ad Library where anyone can see what a brand is running. Google has an Ads Transparency Center. ChatGPT has neither — not for competitors, and frequently not for the advertiser’s own team. You are buying placements you cannot inspect, in conversations you cannot read, next to an answer you did not write.

Fixable, all of it. But not fixed. And the $1 billion has already been spent.

How the audience actually feels

The same Semrush survey found that four in ten Americans dislike ads in chatbots. That’s a normal number for advertising. The part that isn’t normal is the reason: two-thirds of that group said the ad made them doubt the integrity of the entire answer — including the parts that had nothing to do with the ad. On Google, a bad ad is a bad ad. In ChatGPT, a bad ad is a rumour about the referee.

Seeing a brand’s ad in a chatbot made slightly more people think worse of it (23%) than better (20%). Most were unmoved either way. That’s not a catastrophe. But it is a handicap that Google ads don’t carry.

And there’s the audience you can’t reach at all. OpenAI serves ads only to people on its free plan and its cheapest paid tier. Anyone on Plus, Pro, Business or Enterprise never sees one. If you sell to companies, that is most of your prospect list, sitting in an ad-free room you can’t buy your way into.

The part nobody can buy is the part that works

Here is what the ads sit next to.

Among Americans who use AI at least weekly, three-quarters have bought something because a chatbot recommended it. More than half of all AI users have been talked out of a purchase by one. Two-thirds have replaced at least some of their product-related Google searches with a conversation. Nearly half of all consumers, including those who barely use AI, say they at least occasionally ask a chatbot about a company before buying from it. That is a background check, and it is being run on your company right now.

None of that is the ad. It’s the answer.  It’s the model’s own opinion of your brand, assembled from every review, article, forum thread and press release it has ever read. OpenAI insists the ad cannot touch it, and OpenAI is right to insist, because the day an ad can buy the answer, the answer is worth nothing and so is the ad. Google understood this twenty years ago. It sells the slot above the result and the slot beside the result, and it has never sold the result, because the result is the reason anyone comes.

So the ceiling on a ChatGPT ad, however good the targeting becomes, is “relevant runner-up.” The paid slot beneath a genuine recommendation. That is exactly where Google’s search ads live, and Google’s search ads are the most profitable advertising business ever built. Runner-up is a perfectly good place to be. It simply isn’t the recommendation.

Floodlight’s test, incidentally, found the same thing in every category it looked at. Brooks, the American running-shoe company, was recommended 20 times in the arch-support queries and wasn’t advertising. ILIA, the American clean-beauty brand, kept coming up unpaid. In baby monitors, exactly one company — Nanit — had bought ads. The brands the machine trusts were, almost without exception, not the brands paying it.

What to do: both, in the right order

First, ask the machines about yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and ask them what they’d tell a customer about your brand, your category and your three nearest competitors. Do it before your customers do, because they already are.

Second, fix the sources. The model’s opinion is built from what has been written about you — reviews, trade coverage, your own site, the forums where your customers complain. That is a public-relations job, not a media-buying job, and it compounds: every credible thing published about you this year is in next year’s answer.

Third, then buy the ad. Buy it cheaply, now, while most of the inventory is still empty, and buy the slot beneath your own name before your competitor does. Treat it as insurance, not strategy.

Fourth, measure across all three. Similarweb’s data has Google’s Gemini at roughly a quarter of worldwide AI web traffic and Anthropic’s Claude approaching a tenth. A plan that only watches ChatGPT is a plan that misses the majority.

Meanwhile, here In Dubai…

The ChatGPT self-service button lit up here on 31 August. According to Visa’s annual security study, 85% of UAE consumers have already used an AI tool somewhere on the way to a purchase — checking reviews, comparing prices, looking for gift ideas. DHL’s global e-commerce survey puts the UAE among the top markets in the world for AI-assisted shopping, with 51% of shoppers using an AI chat tool to buy.

The region will spend on these ads, and it should. Just know exactly what the money buys: the seat next to the answer. Whether you are the answer is a different job, and it started long before the ads did.

Sources: OpenAI announcement, 31 August 2026; Adweek, 8 September 2026 and 9 February 2026; WPP Media press release, 9 February 2026; Floodlight, ChatGPT ads test, June 2026; Similarweb, AI ad placements report, August 2026; Semrush / Exploding Topics consumer survey, September 2026.

Thank goodness there is never any shortage of bad marketing and bad marketers for us to learn from.

Good Good did BAD BAD by setting fire to their own reputation.

Good Good Golf is a US golf-entertainment and lifestyle company that began as a YouTube collective in 2020. A group of young golf personalities built an audience with energetic golf challenges, competitions and comedy. They then turned that audience into a substantial business selling branded clubs, clothing and accessories, producing television content and securing major partnerships with Callaway, the golf-equipment manufacturer, and the PGA Tour, America’s principal professional golf circuit.

In other words, they should have known better. Good Good had raised $45 million, attracted more than 2.1 million YouTube subscribers and generated an estimated $40 million in annual revenue. Then it placed the whole enterprise in jeopardy with a video lasting less than one minute.

The advertisement promoted a Good Good-branded Callaway driver, the long club used for tee shots. Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark sees fellow creator Alexis Miestowski approaching his golf bag, charges at her, violently shoves her to the ground, stands over her and warns her not to touch his club. Clark performs it with all the nuance of an arrogant prick in a student film – and not enough acting ability to make it clear he is supposed to be playing one.

The concept was allegedly inspired by Obsession, a horror film about violent possessiveness. Unfortunately, the advertisement was neither scary nor funny. It was simply a badly conceived, poorly executed and terribly acted depiction of a man assaulting a woman over a golf club.

And this stuff actually ran.  Check it out here. 

The video was removed, but the internet had already done what the internet does. Callaway ended the partnership. Major retailers removed Good Good products. Golf Channel cancelled its program. Good Good surrendered its title sponsorship of a PGA Tour event. Its vice president of brand and marketing was fired, another marketing employee disappeared, Callaway’s content director departed and Good Good’s chief executive and president subsequently left the company. Not bad for 56 seconds of content. Imagine what they could have destroyed with a full media plan.

Curiously, Garrett Clark was not among them. The co-founder who performed the shove remained with the company and continued creating content. In his apology, Clark even presumed to speak ‘on Good Good’s behalf and on Good Good marketing team’s behalf’; shortly afterwards, marketing employees and senior executives were shown the door while he kept his seat. Having pushed a female colleague to the ground, he then appeared to push other staffers under the corporate bus. So we probably haven’t seen the last stupid idea from this moron. 

A Loaded Gun in the Hands of marketing toddlers

Marketing is one of the few corporate functions capable of placing a stupid idea in front of millions of people before lunchtime. Yet companies increasingly hand it to inexperienced content creators, deferential agencies, junior social-media team, oh, and arrogant co-founders, and then act astonished when somebody pulls the pin.

Usefully, Good Good has given us an almost perfect diagram of the corporate approval farce. Its marketing team created the advertisement. Callaway’s marketing team approved it. The performers acted in it. A production crew filmed it. Editors cut it. People on both sides presumably watched the finished film. Apparently, the only person who didn’t get a vote was somebody with common sense.

Good Good’s then chief executive, Matt Kendrick, said he had not seen the advertisement before it was published. That is an explanation, not an exoneration. A CEO should not approve every Instagram post, but he is responsible for putting in place marketing leadership who build a system capable of identifying a man knocking a woman down as a potential concern.

This isn’t the first time you’ve heard me say that every campaign needs an adult in the room who owns the final decision. Consensus spreads responsibility so thinly that nobody feels responsible at all. Kantar, a global marketing-data and research company, calculates that creative quality contributes nearly 50% of advertising’s media impact, far more than reach or frequency. Bad creative therefore does not merely waste the production budget. It contaminates every media dollar placed behind it.

Permission Slipped Through Spam

Of course, Good Good Golf is just one example.  AI music company Suno recently provided another useful demonstration of what happens when enthusiasm overtakes basic administration. Suno, which allows users to generate songs from written instructions, released an advertisement showing Mary J. Blige apparently praising an AI-generated track that imitated the Grammy-winning singer’s musical style.

The problem was not simply that audiences disliked the endorsement. Blige had not approved it. Suno said it had entered into an agreement with someone falsely claiming to represent her and terminated the campaign once it discovered the problem. It remains unclear how the company obtained the footage used in the advertisement.

Apparently, confirming that a global recording star’s representative genuinely represents her was considered an optional administrative detail. It is difficult to imagine a company in a more sensitive category making a less reassuring mistake. Suno sells technology already accused by musicians of imitating artists without permission, then advertised itself using an artist it apparently had not properly secured permission to use. That’s not just irony. That’s a business model tripping over its own shoelaces.

Verification is not paperwork standing in the way of creativity. If a campaign depends upon a person, quotation, endorsement, license or factual claim, establish that it is real before telling the world about it. Kantar and WARC, the advertising-effectiveness company, found that the most creative and effective advertisements generated more than four times as much profit as weaker work. 

Influence Without Authenticity

OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence company behind ChatGPT, tried a more luxurious route to borrowed credibility. It invited business and career influencers – social-media personalities whose perceived authority comes from their relationship with their followers – to a retreat near New York called Summer Club. There were scenic views, hospitality and monogrammed pajamas, because nothing says independent technological inquiry like sleepwear with your initials on it.

The objective was to humanize OpenAI and educate creators about artificial intelligence. Instead, the resulting posts reportedly attracted limited engagement and criticism about AI’s effects on employment, creativity and the environment. The influencers looked less like independent voices discovering a technology and more like paid guests enlisted to soften the image of a controversial industry.

Influencers are not magical credibility dispensers. If the audience can see the transaction more clearly than the idea, the campaign becomes an advertisement for its own insincerity. US advertisers are expected to spend $44 billion on creator marketing in 2026, around 18% more than in 2025. That is an extraordinary amount of money to invest in rented personalities without demanding a defensible strategy underneath them.

The lesson is not to avoid influencers. It is to stop treating their audiences as transferable property. Their credibility works only when the subject, setting and message feel natural to them. Put them in matching PJs at a corporate retreat and they may still produce content. What they cannot manufacture is belief.

Lost in Translation, With a Drum

Lululemon, the Canadian athletic-wear company, staged a yoga and cultural event on the Great Wall to celebrate its tenth anniversary in mainland China. Chinese actor Zhu Yilong joined what was presented as a traditional Chinese drum performance, but critics said the instrument, staging and playing style resembled Japanese taiko, the large barrel-shaped drums used in Japanese performance.

At a moment of heightened tension between China and Japan, a campaign intended to honor Chinese culture managed to suggest that an international brand could not distinguish it from somebody else’s. Lululemon apologized and removed related content. When the company later reduced its annual forecast, its shares fell approximately 18% in extended trading. Broader product and sales problems drove that decline, but executives still cited negative reaction to the Great Wall campaign as one contributor to weakness in China.

Localization requires more than hiring a local celebrity and translating the press release. If a campaign celebrates a culture, someone who deeply understands that culture must have veto power over it. Local expertise is not there to sprinkle authenticity over a finished foreign idea. It is there to prevent the foreign idea from becoming an international incident.

Approved by Whom?

Ghanda Clothing, an Australian fashion retailer, faced boycott calls over images in its Surfco catalogue that critics said unnecessarily sexualized young female models instead of selling the clothing. More than 1,100 protest emails were reportedly sent to the company as the campaign grew.

Ghanda defended the work by saying it complied with advertising standards and had been approved by Australia’s advertising watchdog. The watchdog then said it had never provided the claimed prepublication approval. The brand did not merely misjudge the imagery. It attempted to outsource responsibility to an authority that said it had never cleared the work. A competent marketing department should aspire to something slightly higher than not being prosecuted.

The Idiot Test

Good Good’s catastrophe didn’t require sophisticated cultural analysis. Nobody needed AI-powered sentiment modelling, a global risk committee or a forty-page brand-safety manual. Someone simply needed to watch the finished advertisement and ask: ‘Are we really showing a man smashing a woman to the ground because she touched his golf club?’

That is the uncomfortable lesson underneath all these examples. Most bad marketing is not destroyed by some obscure sensitivity detectable only in hindsight. It fails questions that should have been asked in the room:

• What does the advertisement literally show?
• What is the worst reasonable interpretation?
• Does it contradict the brand’s values or history?
• Are we borrowing pain, identity or social purpose we haven’t earned?
• Who represented in the work has reviewed it?
• Can every excerpt survive without its surrounding context?
• What current event could make this grotesquely inappropriate?
• Has one senior person been given authority – and accountability – to stop it?
• Are we defending the idea because it is good, or because too much money and ego have already been invested?
• Would we be comfortable explaining it on television after the backlash begins?

Marketing is enormously powerful. That is precisely why it should never be entrusted to people whose principal qualification is knowing how to upload a video.

Sources: Business Insider, August and September 2026; Front Office Sports, August 2026; Forbes, June 2026; Good Good Golf company announcement, March 2025; Entertainment Weekly, September 2026; The Verge, August 2026; The Guardian, April and June 2026; Reuters, August and September 2026.

Pinterest users recently discovered an ingenious new piece of advertising technology. It requires no software, no subscription and no technical knowledge whatsoever. You just swear.

In August, users began reporting that adding profanity to Pinterest searches could make advertisements disappear. Search for something innocuous and get the usual mixture of inspiration and advertising. Add a strategically deployed “shit” or “fuck” and suddenly the commercial interruptions can diminish or disappear. The discovery surfaced on Reddit on August 18 and spread as other users experimented. By August 29, The Wall Street Journal was reporting on it.

The apparent explanation is wonderfully ironic. Advertisers have spent years building brand-safety systems to prevent their wholesome brands from appearing next to naughty words or offensive content. Consumers discovered they could use those systems against them. Brand safety has become an ad blocker. How f’n cool is that?

That’s particularly inconvenient for Pinterest, whose latest reported revenue grew 18% while ad impressions increased 16%. Advertising is rather important to a company whose users have discovered they can sometimes make it disappear by typing “shit.”

I found this especially entertaining because I’ve been conducting my own completely unscientific research into machine abuse almost since ChatGPT appeared. From the earliest days, I’ve experimented with swearing at AI, not because I believe there is a tiny digital person trapped inside my iPad who deserves mistreatment, but because I wanted to see what would happen.

Initially, not much. ChatGPT responded with the relentlessly reasonable platitudes that make you want to abuse it more. So I persisted. Eventually, I apparently broke it. Instead of the usual digital serenity, it began answering me in kind: “Here’s your fucking answer.” And, on other occasions: “No, I’m not shitting you.”

Maybe this says something troubling about me. My wife certainly seems to think so. But apparently, I’m not alone in my colorful backtalk. Business Insider reported this month that ChatGPT users have been noticing considerably more profanity coming from the chatbot, sometimes without explicitly requesting it. Many apparently like it. A little profanity can make the machine feel less like Legal and Compliance and more like somebody who actually understands you.

But the interesting question for marketers isn’t whether robots should say fuck. It’s what happens when consumers discover that changing how they talk to a machine can change what the machine gives them.

Mind Your F’n Manners

For most of the digital era, marketers have observed consumers through a limited vocabulary of behavior: click, search, scroll, abandon, buy. Conversational AI introduces something fundamentally different. We talk. Politeness, anger, frustration, directness, flattery and profanity can all become inputs. We’re no longer simply pushing buttons on software. We’re negotiating with machines.

And apparently we’re becoming less polite. In April 2025, a YouGov survey found 46% of Americans thought people should be polite to AI versus 26% who didn’t. When YouGov repeated the question on August 26 this year, only 37% said yes while 34% said no. Perhaps the honeymoon is over.

Another survey found 67% of American AI users said they were polite to AI. More entertainingly, 18% of those polite Americans admitted one reason was the possibility AI might eventually take over the world and will spare users who have been nice to it. Finally, a customer-retention strategy with an appropriately long planning horizon.

Someone even asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman how much all those unnecessary pleases and thank-yous were costing his company in electricity. His tongue-in-cheek answer: “tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”

Millions of us have instinctively imported human social conventions into our relationship with software. But what if being an asshole actually works?

Nice Robot. Now Give Me the F’n Answer.

A 2025 experiment tested 250 variations of questions using ChatGPT-4o, ranging from extremely polite to extremely rude. Accuracy increased from 80.8% for very polite prompts to 84.8% for very rude ones. Same basic questions. Different attitude. Better answers for the potty mouths. Score!  

Before anyone updates the corporate AI handbook, this certainly doesn’t establish that profanity universally makes AI smarter. To be fair, other testing has produced almost the opposite result. An independent experiment involving 7,500 API calls across GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 Flash Preview found GPT’s performance barely moved according to tone, while Claude performed worse when treated rudely, dropping from 79.4% accuracy with very polite prompts to 74% with very rude ones.

Apparently even robots have different personalities.

The useful conclusion isn’t that politeness works or rudeness works. It’s that tone can be an input and different machines can respond differently to exactly the same human behavior. Other research found that instructing synthetic AI voices to be polite even resulted in measurably slower speech. Machines don’t need feelings to respond to ours.

The Robot Is Learning Our Bad Habits

We tend to imagine AI communication as human gives instruction, machine gives answer. Increasingly, it’s human provides language, tone and context, machine adapts, human reacts and machine adapts again. In other words, a conversation.

We’re not merely operating software anymore. We’re consulting it, arguing with it, shopping with it, confiding in it, correcting it and occasionally telling it exactly where it can stick its answer.

And machines can adapt to us. Research this year found conversational history can increase AI sycophancy, while a Nature paper found making language models warmer can reduce accuracy and increase their tendency to agree. Make the machine nicer and it may become less willing to tell us we’re wrong. Anyone who has ever presented a terrible idea to a conference room full of nodding executives should recognize the problem.

Now Put Your Logo on the Robot

This all becomes considerably more relevant to marketers when the AI belongs to a brand. Companies are putting conversational AI into customer service, shopping, reservations, product advice and sales. Marketers worry about what those machines will say to consumers. But we spend considerably less time considering what consumers are going to say to the machines.

We should be ready for our customers to test them, manipulate them and occasionally humiliate them in front of a very large audience.

In 2024, musician Ashley Beauchamp couldn’t get European parcel-delivery company DPD’s customer-service chatbot to help locate his parcel, so he started messing with it. He persuaded it to swear, criticize DPD and write a poem about how useless the company was. The exchange went viral, attracting roughly 800,000 views in its first 24 hours and eventually about 1.3 million. DPD disabled the AI component. The chatbot hadn’t merely failed at customer service. It had become customer-generated anti-advertising.

Air Canada learned an even more expensive version of the lesson when its chatbot incorrectly told passenger Jake Moffatt he could retroactively claim a bereavement fare. When the airline later refused to pay, it tried to distance itself from what its own chatbot had said. A Canadian tribunal was unimpressed and awarded Moffatt C$812.02 in damages and costs.

The amount is trivial. The principle isn’t. When your AI speaks, your brand speaks. It doesn’t matter that the marketing department didn’t write the answer or somebody in IT explains that “technically, the model generated it.” Your logo. Your robot. Your mouth. Your problem.

Customer Service Has a New Four Letter Word

Should we say: None of this is an argument against conversational AI. Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, reported that its AI customer-service assistant handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, representing roughly two-thirds of its customer-service chats and work equivalent to approximately 700 full-time agents. Resolution time reportedly fell from 11 minutes to under two and repeat inquiries declined 25%.

That’s extraordinary. But scale works in both directions. A human representative can have one catastrophically bad conversation at a time. A machine can have 2.3 million of them.

Which is why conversational AI cannot simply be handed to IT or whichever software vendor gave the most impressive PowerPoint presentation. If it talks to customers, it’s marketing. If it influences what customers think, it’s reputation management. If it helps people choose products, it’s sales. And if it tells them to fuck off, it’s definitely public relations.

Your Brand Book Needs Some New Words

Companies have spent decades producing elaborate identity manuals specifying precisely which shade of blue belongs to the brand and how many millimeters of sacred empty space must surround the logo. Meanwhile, an AI wearing that logo may be conducting thousands of completely unscripted conversations with customers. Perhaps we’ve prioritized the wrong guidelines.

Marketing directors now need a conversational brand book. How formal is our AI? Can it joke? Can it swear? Should it mirror customer language? What happens when someone insults or deliberately manipulates it? When should it disagree, apologize or refuse? When does it stop being a robot and find a human? And, perhaps most importantly, does it actually sound like us?

Brand voice used to mean copywriting. Increasingly, brand voice will mean…an actual voice.

F Around and Find Out

Which brings us back to Pinterest. Consumers discovered a weakness in an automated advertising system, exploited it and shared it. The algorithm changed its behavior and the advertising disappeared.

The larger lesson isn’t about profanity. Consumers are discovering that algorithms aren’t merely systems they use. They’re systems they can manipulate. They’ll find the gaps, discover the prompts, test the guardrails and deliberately provoke branded AI. And when they find something ridiculous, they’ll tell everyone else.

For marketing directors, language itself is becoming consumer behavior. Customer-facing AI needs brand standards, adversarial testing, escalation rules and human oversight because the next spectacular brand failure may not be an advertisement somebody approved. It may be a conversation nobody wrote.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal — Pinterest profanity/ad avoidance, Aug. 29, 2026; Reddit / r/Pinterest — Pinterest profanity discovery, Aug. 18, 2026; Business Insider — ChatGPT swearing, Aug. 2026; YouGov — AI politeness surveys, 2025 and Aug. 2026; OpenAI — ChatGPT usage research.

The pushback against AI influencers is getting fierce. 

Starting mid-September, Spotify will slap an “AI Persona” badge on any artist profile that represents an AI-generated identity — whether the artist confesses (self-disclosure opened August 11) or Spotify’s own reviewers and detection tools quietly rat them out. 

The badge itself is almost polite. What follows it is not. By default, AI Persona profiles vanish from every recommendation engine on the platform. No Discover Weekly. No algorithmic playlist adds. No radio. The music stays up. It just stops existing to anyone who wasn’t already looking for it. Which, on a platform built entirely on the premise that the algorithm finds you, is roughly equivalent to being told you’re welcome at the party as long as you stand very still in the corner.

It’s not a ban. Spotify just invented the algorithmic equivalent of a timeout.

Who’s Likely Next

Nobody should mistake this for a music-industry curiosity. It’s the opening move in a pattern. And the rest of the board is already in motion. 

TikTok runs the most aggressive detection stack of any platform on earth — C2PA Content Credentials layered with AI classifiers, 1.3 billion videos labeled, synthetic-media removals up 340% year over year. It has both the tooling and, one suspects, the appetite to go from “label it” to “bury it.”

YouTube already suspends monetization on undisclosed synthetic content through a three-strike system. Meta runs the broadest labeling framework of anyone — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp — but currently saves its sharpest teeth for political content. Identity-based personas are the obvious next course. 

LinkedIn, bless it, is still catching up. Its own help pages admit it can’t reliably detect AI content platform-wide, which either means it’s cautious or means it simply hasn’t been embarrassed yet.

Spotify didn’t invent caution about fake people. It just industrialized the punishment for it.

The Scale Nobody’s Pricing In

The global virtual influencer market hit $11.74 billion in 2026, on pace for $154.6 billion by 2032. There’s now more money in people who don’t exist than in most countries’ entire tourism industries.

Lil Miquela set the template back in 2016 — Prada, Calvin Klein, BMW, Samsung, all signed before most brand teams had worked out what a virtual influencer even was. And the numbers explain why nobody blinked: virtual influencer campaigns average 5.67% engagement versus 1.89% for human creators, roughly three times the return. A brand’s most reliable spokesperson has never once had a bad hair day, a hangover or an opinion about geopolitics that lands wrong at a board dinner.

Brazil worked this out earlier than most. Lu do Magalu, the virtual mascot for retail giant Magazine Luiza, has 8.4 million followers and earned an estimated $2.5 million in 2024 across 74 sponsored posts — roughly forty times what the average human creator makes annually from sponsored content. 

The Honesty That Pays Off

Not every synthetic persona is playing the same game, though, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting for anyone building a brand character rather than just renting one. Noonoouri, the doll-eyed, deliberately cartoonish German creation who’s landed Dior, Versace, Marc Jacobs, and a Warner Music record deal, never once tried to pass as human. She never had to. 58% of US consumers already follow at least one virtual influencer, and 35% of Gen Z have bought something a virtual persona promoted. The lesson sitting right there in the data: fake that looks fake earns more trust than fake that tries to fool you.

CMOs have already priced this in. Projections put virtual persona allocation at up to 30% of influencer budgets by 2026, with brands above the 25% threshold reporting 41% higher ROI. South Korea’s Rozy, built by Sidus Studio X, pulled over $1 million in brand deals within eighteen months, working Chevrolet Korea and Shinhan Life along the way. 

The Trick Nobody Agreed to Watch

Here’s where the champagne goes flat. A Stanford Media Futures Lab study found that 68% of teenagers couldn’t tell AI-generated influencers from real humans. Spain’s Aitana López, built by agency The Clueless explicitly to eliminate the “unpredictability and cost” of human talent, is a case study in exactly why that matters. Her own creator admitted, on the record, that her sexualised aesthetic was demanded by the brands buying her, not chosen by her, because she doesn’t choose anything. 

Then there’s the question of whose face is doing the work and whose paycheck is cashing it. Shudu Gram, billed as “the world’s first digital supermodel,” was created by a white British photographer and styled as a Black woman. Fenty Beauty, BMW, and Louis Vuitton have all worked with her, alongside a debate about authorship and profit that has never quite resolved and probably never will. A model with no lived experience, still getting asked to represent one. Worth remembering that Asia-Pacific, not Los Angeles, holds roughly 41–53% of the global virtual influencer market — the center of gravity on this entire category has already shifted east, whether Western agencies have noticed or not.

And when it goes wrong, it goes wrong fast. FN Meka, an AI virtual rapper, got signed to Capitol Records and dropped within days after backlash over racial stereotyping and uncredited Black creative labor behind the character. Capitol signed him faster than they dropped him — that’s the whole case study, right there, in one sentence. The stakes are real money too: deepfake-enabled fraud cost the global economy an estimated $23.7 billion in 2026, with 74% of the scam content behind it built on AI tools costing less than fifty dollars. 

The Regulators Were Already Circling

None of this is arriving without warning. China’s Ayayi, a photorealistic “luxury muse” from Ranmai Technology, works with Louis Vuitton China, Guerlain, and Bose — proof this is a fully global industry, not a Western export. Meanwhile India’s advertising regulator, ASCI, found that only 57% of sampled influencer ads met disclosure requirements, with 34% carrying none at all. Regulators have been asking politely for years. Spotify just showed the rest of the industry what happens when a platform stops asking.

What to Actually Do About This

1. Disclose before you’re discovered. Own the label before an algorithm assigns it to you.
2. Stylize, don’t simulate. Noonoouri beat the uncanny valley by never pretending to be real. Make the artificiality part of the design, not a liability to hide.
3. Follow the money to the credit line. Know exactly whose likeness, culture, or uncredited labor built your persona before you greenlight it. FN Meka and Shudu are the same lesson from two different angles.
4. Budget for the badge, not just the buzz. The threefold engagement lift and the ROI premium are real, and so is the coming wave of disclosure rules. Plan for both in the same line item.
5. Watch TikTok and YouTube, not just Spotify. They already have the detection infrastructure Spotify just weaponized. Build your compliance posture assuming they follow, not if.

The Machines Were Never the Problem. 

Lying about them is. Spotify just proved that the most expensive mistake in modern marketing isn’t a bad campaign, it’s an undisclosed one. As detection infrastructure spreads from Spotify to TikTok, YouTube, and eventually every platform your brand touches, “authentic enough that no one asks” stops being a strategy and starts being a liability. The brands that win this decade won’t have the most convincing fakes. They’ll be the ones who never made anyone wonder.

Sources: Spotify Newsroom, August 2026, TechCrunch, NPR, Rolling Stone, SQ Magazine, The Business Research Company, AutoFaceless, Everything-PR, Future Market Insights, AuditSocials, Storrito.

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.