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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were guilty by algorithm.

This Is Not a Drill.

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

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

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

The Numbers Don’t Lie

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

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

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

The Glitch That Stole Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

The Brands Going the Other Way

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

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

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

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

Don’t Get Swooshed

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

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

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

I read about Google’s Search Console data scandal and felt that very specific sensation familiar to anyone who has spent serious time in this industry: not shock, not outrage, but a kind of weary, knowing recognition. The feeling you get when something you suspected for years is finally confirmed in writing.

A 47-word changelog entry, buried on a data anomalies page that nobody reads, quietly admitted that Google had been over-reporting search impressions for every website on the planet for fifty consecutive weeks. No email. No announcement. No apology. The SEO community spotted it before Google said a word.

I’ve seen this before. We all have. The platforms that built empires on marketers’ trust have a long and distinguished history of grading their own homework, then handing it back with a gold star. We kept accepting the grade. We called it being data-driven. We put it in board presentations. We made hiring decisions based on it. Agencies were fired over it.

Which is precisely why, in our PR for Robots series — where we track the shift from traditional search to AI-powered visibility — we keep returning to the same point: the digital metrics religion has been asking you to worship a god with a well-documented habit of making things up.

What Actually Happened

Between May 13, 2025 and April 27, 2026 — fifty weeks — Google Search Console was systematically over-reporting impressions in its Performance report. Every website. Every market. The entire tool, broken, for nearly a year.

Clicks were unaffected. Impressions were inflated. Which means every CTR calculation your team produced during that period used a wrong denominator, making your click-through performance look worse than it was. Every visibility trend line showing “growing impressions” may have been measuring the growing bug, not growing reach. Every board report, every agency presentation, every strategy document built on Search Console impressions was, to some degree, built on fiction. And given that DemandScience’s research across 750 senior marketing leaders found that 25% of the average marketing budget is already being spent on efforts that look productive in metrics but don’t drive outcomes, the Google bug didn’t create the waste. It just added to it.

Google has since fixed the logging error going forward. What it will not do is reconstruct the historical data. Fifty weeks of corrupted numbers are now permanent. They are the foundation of decisions already made, budgets already spent, strategies already locked in.

The disclosure, in full: “A logging error is preventing Search Console from accurately reporting impressions from May 13, 2025 onward.” Forty-seven words. For eleven months of bad data affecting every marketer on earth. You’re welcome.

This Is Not An Isolated Incident

If you are tempted to treat this as a one-off technical embarrassment, consider what else has happened recently and quietly.

On January 26, 2026, Meta deprecated all 10-second video metrics, a benchmark thousands of brands and agencies had used for years to evaluate video performance, with no direct replacement announced. Years of comparative data, rendered useless overnight. Whatever your video strategy was benchmarked against no longer exists as a measuring stick.

Instagram, across 2025 and into 2026, switched its primary metric from Impressions to Views, redefining what the number on your dashboard actually counts. Historical comparisons are now broken by design. Every trend line you drew crosses a definitional cliff edge you may not have noticed.

And underneath all of it, a structural rot that never left: $63 billion in global digital ad spend was wasted last year on invalid traffic — bots, click farms, automated scraping and non-human interactions that will never become a customer. That figure comes from Lunio’s 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report, built on analysis of 2.7 billion paid clicks. If you think your website traffic at least tells you something real, NP Digital’s research across 602 tracked websites found that 51% of traffic came from bots and 21% were sessions too short to register anything meaningful. Sixteen percent, one in six visits, could be classified as genuinely engaged.

Your dashboard is full. Your funnel is largely empty.

The platforms are not being malicious. They are being something almost more dangerous: indifferent. Metrics change because products change. Errors get fixed when someone eventually notices. The marketing budgets built on top of those metrics are not their problem. They are yours.

“Data-Driven” Became A Religion. 

Here is the real indictment, and I say this as someone who has spent over four decades watching this industry evolve: we let the word “data-driven” do the work that thinking used to do.

It became a shield. It ended conversations. It silenced instinct and experience in rooms where instinct and experience were exactly what was needed. If the numbers said it, it was true. If the platform reported it, it was real. We outsourced our judgment to dashboards and called it rigor. Today, 75% of marketers say measurement is broken. That’s not a fringe view. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the industry trade organization that sets standards and best practices for digital advertising, included it in their State of Data 2026 report. And yet, 66% of senior marketing leaders simultaneously admit their campaigns frequently look successful in metrics while failing to drive revenue. We built a system sophisticated enough to produce the illusion of performance, and then we congratulated ourselves for reading it.

Nobody asked whose data it was, how it was counted, or what commercial incentive the platform had to make the numbers look healthy. Nobody asked because asking felt unscientific. Unmodern. The kind of thing someone who didn’t understand digital would say.

The Google bug didn’t create this problem. It just made it impossible to ignore for one more news cycle, before everyone updates their anomaly annotations in GA4 and moves on.

The Pivot That Changes Everything

There is, buried in all of this, something that resembles good news, if you’re positioned to see it.

AI search doesn’t care about your impression count. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and their expanding cohort don’t surface answers because your Search Console metrics looked healthy last quarter. They synthesize, they cite, they answer. The currency in AI search is authority, demonstrated expertise, genuine usefulness and earned trust — qualities that are considerably harder to inflate and considerably harder for a platform to accidentally break for fifty weeks without anyone noticing.

As we’ve been covering in PR for Robots, the brands that will win in AI search are the ones investing in being genuinely worth citing — not the ones optimizing for a metric that may or may not be accurately reported on any given Tuesday.

In a perverse way, the collapse of confidence in traditional digital measurement is the most compelling argument we have for taking AI search seriously now, before the same gaming, the same bot inflation and the same self-serving metric redefinitions arrive there too. Because they will. They always do.

What You Should Do This Week

Stop using impressions as a proxy for anything in a board conversation. They have been inflated, redefined and gamed too many times to carry the weight you’ve been placing on them.

Audit every performance target that was set using data from May 2025 to April 2026. You were measuring with a broken instrument. The targets need resetting.

Triangulate everything. Never rely on a single platform’s self-reported data. Cross-reference Search Console with Google Analytics 4, with third-party tools, with actual revenue. If the only source confirming your success is the platform you’re paying, that is not confirmation. That is a conflict of interest.

And start understanding AI search visibility now — before its measurement frameworks get captured, gamed and quietly disclosed in 47-word changelog entries too.

Finally

The platforms will keep changing their metrics, retiring benchmarks and disclosing year-long errors in language designed to be found by no one. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal. We just chose not to read it.

The marketers who survive the next decade won’t be the ones with the cleanest dashboards. They’ll be the ones who never confused the map for the territory — and who understood early that in AI search, the territory just changed completely.

Sources: Google Search Console Data Anomalies Page, confirmed April 3, 2026; Search Engine Land, May 5, 2026l Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report; DemandScience: The 2026 State of Performance Marketing, 750 senior leaders, October 2025; IAB State of Data 2026; NP Digital website traffic analysis, 602 properties, 2026; Meta Business Help Centre, January 26, 2026

I was three sips into my morning Cappuccino last week when a video clip appeared in my feed that made me put my cup down.

There was Ryan Cohen, founder of Chewy, the online pet food retailer he built from scratch and sold to PetSmart for $3.35 billion, and now CEO of GameStop, the struggling video game retail chain kept alive largely by meme-stock enthusiasm,sitting across from CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Squawk Box, fielding what should have been the most predictable question of his week: How exactly does GameStop, a company worth around $11 billion, intend to buy eBay, the global online marketplace, for $56 billion?

Cohen had just made an unsolicited bid for eBay. He’d issued a press release. He’d apparently thought quite long and hard about this. And yet when Sorkin laid out the simple arithmetic, $9 billion in cash, $11 billion in stock, a highly confident but not yet locked $20 billion financing letter from TD Securities, all of it still roughly $16 billion short. Cohen’s answer was: “Yeah, we’ll see what happens.”

Sorkin tried again. Co-anchor Becky Quick jumped in with a laugh that was part incredulity, part pity: “Ryan, that’s a pretty straightforward question.” Cohen’s response? “I don’t understand your question.”

Then he suggested people check the website.

GameStop’s stock dropped over 10% that day. By Tuesday, the investor who had backed Cohen’s vision of GameStop as a disciplined capital allocator, Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager made famous by his prescient bet against the US housing market in 2008, had sold his entire position. Six minutes of television. Ten percent of the company’s market value. Gone.

I watched the clip twice. Here was a genuinely intelligent man walking into one of the most telegraphed interviews in recent financial history without a single coherent answer prepared for the one question every anchor, analyst, and algorithm in the world was waiting to ask.

And I thought: there it is again. The arrogance tax. Paid live on national television.

Of course, my second thought was: where the f&%k were his PR team?

THE FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING

There is a belief, widespread, stubbornly persistent and entirely wrong, that intelligence is a substitute for preparation when it comes to media. That if you’re smart enough to run a company, you’re smart enough to explain it on camera. That natural confidence will carry you through. That the journalists asking the questions aren’t as sharp as you are, so you’ll be fine.

This belief is responsible for a remarkable amount of expensive embarrassment.

Running a company and performing under a camera with a prepared interviewer are two entirely different skills. One, you’ve been doing for years. The other requires specific, practiced discipline. And the gap between them is precisely where careers come to be publicly dismantled. 

It’s worth knowing that roughly 86% of corporate executives believe poor communication is a major cause of workplace failures, which raises the rather obvious question of why so few of them do anything about their own. The answer, typically, is that they assume the problem lives somewhere below them on the org chart.

It doesn’t. It sits in the green room, waiting.

The media landscape has made this more urgent, not less. News spreads instantly now. Social media platforms amplify a single misstep to a global audience in the time it takes a PR team to draft a holding statement. For C-suite executives, one careless comment can go viral and inflict reputational damage that no subsequent press release can fully undo. Media training has evolved, as a result, from a nice-to-have skill into a critical necessity for anyone leading any size business. And yet, the most senior people in most organizations remain the least likely to have done it recently, or at all.

THE HALL OF THE UNPREPARED

In February 2024, Brad Banducci, CEO of Woolworths Group, Australia’s largest supermarket chain, sat down with reporter Angus Grigg for a taped interview on Four Corners, the ABC’s flagship investigative program. The subject was whether Woolworths had been pricing unfairly during a sustained cost-of-living crisis. Not exactly a surprise topic for a supermarket chief in 2024.

The interview had one obvious question at its center: was Woolworths exploiting its dominant market position? Banducci had no clean answer for it. When Grigg pressed him on the point, Banducci stumbled, said something he immediately regretted, asked for it to be removed from the record, and, when told it couldn’t be, stood up and said: “I think I’m done, guys.” And walked out.

He returned a few minutes later, reportedly after talking with his PR team, and finished the interview. Reporter Grigg called the walkout “pretty startling,” adding: “I think it shows you that there you have the boss of the largest supermarket chain in the country really unwilling to face too many questions.” Days later, Banducci announced his resignation. Eight-and-a-half years as CEO, over.

He walked in knowing the hard question was coming and had no answer he could deliver calmly, on the record, on camera. That is not bad luck. That is a preparation failure. And the market knew it before the segment even aired.

This is the part where the numbers become uncomfortable. Research analyzing 725 CEO-related media events across major US news outlets found that negative CEO coverage, specifically stories involving scandal or misconduct, translates to an immediate stock market loss of more than $500 million on average. Not over a quarter. Not over a year. Immediately. For privately held companies, the damage doesn’t show up on a ticker, but it shows up just as fast: in a client who quietly pulls out, a deal that stalls, a talent conversation that goes cold. The words that come out of a leader’s mouth in a six-minute interview are a financial instrument, and they should be treated as one.

Pat Gelsinger learned this the slow way. When he returned to Intel, the American semiconductor giant he had originally joined as a teenager, as CEO in 2021, he was heralded as a turnaround architect. Credentialed, passionate, technically native. And he spent the next three years in interview after interview making commitments the company couldn’t keep. In earnings calls and press appearances, he repeatedly assured analysts and journalists that Intel’s new AI chip line, Gaudi, was on the verge of competing meaningfully with Nvidia’s dominant GPUs. He reportedly offended TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer Intel depended on, by publicly calling out Taiwan’s precarious relations with China, which led to Intel losing important discounts from the chip fabricator.

No single interview ended his tenure. But a sustained pattern of overpromising publicly, of not having a prepared, disciplined answer for the gap between aspiration and current reality, eroded analyst and investor confidence quarter by quarter. In December 2024, the board gave him a choice: retire or be removed. He retired.

The lesson is not that executives should be pessimistic in public. It is that every media appearance that promises something specific creates a record against which you will be measured. Prepare your language accordingly, or the gap between your words and your results becomes the story.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM

Not every executive who sits down with a camera ends up on a highlight reel for the wrong reasons. Some of them are so good at this that it becomes a competitive advantage, a form of brand capital that compounds quietly over time and pays off loudly when it’s needed.

The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveyed 32,000 people across 28 countries, found that when executive management communicates openly and with transparency, employee trust follows directly. When it doesn’t, only 25% of employees say they trust their CEO. That trust, built through consistent and credible public performance, functions as a buffer when the inevitable bad news cycle eventually arrives. You don’t build it in the interview itself. You build it in all the preparation that came before.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of the American chip designer whose graphics processing units now power the global AI boom, has become one of the most watched business figures on earth. As of May 2026, Nvidia had a market cap of approximately $5.2 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company. In that position, Huang does an enormous number of high-stakes interviews. He is consistently excellent. Not because he’s effortlessly charismatic, but because he is obsessively prepared.

Watch him field a tough question about US chip export restrictions to China, or about competition from rivals AMD and Qualcomm, or about whether Nvidia’s dominance can last. Every time, the answer is structured, direct, and lands clear key messages without sounding scripted. He can explain extraordinarily complex technical and geopolitical subjects in plain language because he has thought about how to explain them before the camera turns on. That preparation shows up as fluency, which is exactly what unprepared executives mistake for talent.

When Elon Musk publicly claimed in 2023 that Microsoft, where Satya Nadella has been CEO since 2014, “very strongly controls” OpenAI, the AI research company Microsoft has heavily invested in, it was an aggressive, newsworthy provocation designed to put Nadella on the back foot. Nadella didn’t get defensive. He delivered his message clearly: “OpenAI is very grounded in their mission of being controlled by a nonprofit board. We have a noncontrolling interest in it, we have a great commercial partnership in it.” Clean. Calm. Factual. Done.

That is what prepared composure looks like under fire. Not stonewalling, not combativeness, not the silence that comes when you haven’t thought about how to answer the aggressive version of the question. A clean, pre-thought response that closes the topic and moves on. Nadella had clearly war-gamed that question. You could hear it in the smoothness of the answer, the absence of any searching, any hedging, any “well, what I’d say is…”

THE ARROGANCE TAX, DEFINED

Let’s be precise about what’s happening when a genuinely capable executive implodes on camera, because it isn’t stupidity.

Ryan Cohen built Chewy from scratch and sold it for $3.35 billion. Brad Banducci ran one of Australia’s largest retailers for eight years. These aren’t fools. They are paying the arrogance tax, the cost levied on leaders who believe their track record makes preparation unnecessary. The implicit reasoning goes: I have done harder things than this interview. I know this business better than anyone in that studio. I’ll be fine. It is precisely this reasoning that produces the eye-rolls, the “I don’t understand your question,” the walkout.

Here is what the research actually shows about what happens in that room. Communication is overwhelmingly nonverbal – body language and tone of voice. Not just the actual words spoken. Body language under pressure doesn’t lie. And you can’t control it without preparation, because pressure is the precise condition that strips away the veneer and leaves you with your instincts. Instincts are only useful if you’ve trained them. An actor doesn’t walk onto a stage having thought about their lines. A surgeon doesn’t open a patient having roughly rehearsed the procedure. And yet executives routinely walk into material, high-stakes media appearances having done neither.

WHAT A PREPARED EXECUTIVE ACTUALLY DOES

This is not mysterious. It is not a personality type. It is a set of disciplines any executive can learn, and that the best ones treat as non-negotiable before any significant public appearance.

1. Know your three core messages before you walk in the room. Not ten, not twenty. Three. If you can’t explain your position in plain language to a prepared journalist, you don’t understand it clearly enough to defend it publicly. Cohen apparently had one answer — “half cash, half stock” — with no architecture around it. When Sorkin pushed on the architecture, there was nothing there. Three messages, properly prepared, would have given him somewhere to go.
2. Prepare specifically for the hardest question. Whatever the obvious weakness in your story is, the financing gap, the delivery miss, the allegation that’s been in the press for six months, the journalist has already found it. They were briefed on it. It is the first thing they planned to ask. Prepare a specific, direct answer you’ve said aloud at least a dozen times before the camera turns on or prepare to have it become the headline.
3. Learn to bridge-over. Bridging — acknowledging a reporter’s question and transitioning to the message you want to deliver — is a trained skill, not an instinct. It’s what allows an executive to maintain control of a conversation without appearing to dodge. The difference between Cohen saying “Yeah, we’ll see what happens” and an answer that acknowledges the financing gap while pivoting to the strategic rationale is entirely a preparation difference. One sounds like a non-answer. The other sounds like a leader.
4. Brief your body language. Sit up. Make eye contact. Don’t sigh, don’t roll your eyes, don’t look at your PR team for rescue. A confident CEO interview can stabilize a share price, reassure staff during uncertainty, and build credibility with regulators and policymakers. A poor one can spark reputational crises that last months. The stakes are material. Perform accordingly.

And refresh your training. The media landscape changes. Your messaging changes. Your vulnerabilities change. A session you did three years ago does not prepare you for the questions being asked today. Eighty-eight percent of communication experts say executive communication is a key skill, which is precisely why it requires ongoing investment, not a one-time box-tick. In fact, the most astute top executives sit in media training refreshers before every important interview. 

THE MEME STOCK EXCEPTION (NOT!)

In the interests of intellectual honesty, it’s worth noting that some observers — including a communications expert at UVA’s Darden School of Business — have floated the theory that Cohen’s Squawk Box performance wasn’t preparation failure but deliberate chaos: that a man known as the “Meme King” may have been courting retail investor noise rather than institutional confidence, and that his performance was designed for the Reddit thread rather than the analyst note.

It’s a fun theory. The problem with it is that Michael Burry sold his entire position after the interview, stating the debt required was incompatible with his vision for the company. A single-day 10%+ stock drop is difficult to reframe as a strategic communications win by any conventional metric. You can choose your audience. You cannot fully choose your consequences.

A CLOSING THOUGHT

The executives who handle this well don’t look like they’re trying. They look natural, confident, in command. That’s the whole point — preparation is precisely what produces the appearance of effortlessness. The leather jacket stays on; the nerves don’t show; the answer lands.

After completing proper media training, leaders should be confident, effective communicators who can deliver their organization’s messages clearly and concisely while projecting credibility. It happens before the sit down. It happens in the prep room, the mock interview, the uncomfortable session where someone asks you the ugly question and you have to find an answer that doesn’t sound like you’re avoiding it.

Ryan Cohen is not a stupid man. He has done remarkable things. But last Monday on Squawk Box, he didn’t look like the smartest person in the room. He looked like a very smart person who had decided that being smart was enough.

It wasn’t. It never is.

Sources: Yahoo Finance, PC Gamer, Kotaku, Benzinga, Mediaite, UVA Darden School of Business Report — GameStop/Ryan Cohen CNBC interview, May 2026, Pedestrian.TV, 1News NZ, The Star/AAP, Epoch Times — Woolworths/Brad Banducci ABC Four Corners walkout, February 2024, TechCrunch, CNBC — Intel/Pat Gelsinger retirement, December 2024, Stratechery, CTO Magazine, Fortune — Nvidia/Jensen Huang, 2024–2026, PR Daily, C Suite Content — Microsoft/Satya Nadella, Springer Nature, Marketing Letters — “Breaking the news: how does CEO media coverage influence consumer and investor evaluations?”, 2024, FTI Consulting — “Essential Communication Skills”, November 2024, Apollo Technical — “43 Remarkable Workplace Communication Statistics”, 2026, Electroiq — “Communication Statistics”, Leverage with Media — “CEO Media Training: The Ultimate Guide for Leaders”, Comms Manoeuvres — “Media Interview Mastery for CEOs”, Coast Communications — “The Importance of Media Training for Leaders and Executives”

I was cruising down Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai last week in the back of an Uber when a billboard popped up over the horizon. The billboard was for Shake Shack’s Big Shack burger. Three buns. Two patties. Secret sauce. I stared at it the way you stare at someone wearing your favorite jacket. You know that jacket. You love that jacket. You know where they got that jacket. But, damn, they look great in that jacket.

And then it hit me. “Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.” I just recited that from memory without thinking. Maybe you did too. That’s what decades of McDonald’s media spend promoting the world’s most famous burger does to a human brain — it’s not advertising, it’s installation. And Shake Shack just borrowed the whole program for free.

I’m a Shake Shack loyalist from way back. They were a client. I know these people. I respect these people. And as I passed the billboard, I found myself genuinely admiring the move. Someone should check whether the Hamburglar was in the room when Shake Shack’s product development team held that meeting. Because the Big Shack is, brilliantly, a Big Mac that grew up in a better neighborhood.

The Tactic Everyone Uses and Nobody Talks About

What Shake Shack pulled off has a name in marketing circles: borrowed interest. The art of building something new on top of someone else’s cultural foundation — and letting the work speak for itself.

It’s not imitation. It’s not plagiarism. It’s a sophisticated creative and strategic decision that the smartest brands in the world make regularly, deliberately.

Consider the numbers. Approximately 59% of consumers prefer purchasing new products from brands they are already familiar with. The insight buried in that statistic is this: the familiarity doesn’t have to be yours. It just has to exist. Shake Shack didn’t need consumers to learn about one more fancy burger — they needed consumers to know the shape of what they were offering. McDonald’s spent fifty years and billions of dollars creating that shape. Shake Shack showed up and used it. That’s not a knock on Shake Shack. That’s genius. 

This is different from Burger King’s gleeful McDonald’s trolling, which is loud, proud, and brilliant in its own right. BK names the enemy. BK geofences McDonald’s locations to steal customers mid-craving. Shake Shack did something more elegant — they borrowed the architecture without ever mentioning the address.

The Six-Week Runway

Zara doesn’t go to fashion week to take notes. They go to take photographs. Within six weeks of a Chanel jacket or a Prada silhouette appearing on a Paris or Milan runway, a version of it is hanging in 2,000 Zara stores across 96 countries. No acknowledgement. No attribution. Just the look, the feel, and a price point that makes it accessible to everyone.

It is the most industrialized, most efficient, and arguably most audacious borrowed interest operation ever built. Inditex, Zara’s parent company, reported revenues of €35.9 billion in 2023. A significant portion of that is built on the cultural authority of designers who never see a cent of it. The consumer picks up the jacket, thinks of the runway, feels the connection, and buys. The designer’s equity does the selling. Zara takes the margin.

The genius — and it is genius — is that nobody is pretending otherwise. The consumer knows. The designer knows. And yet the transaction completes, every single time.

The Phone Everyone Recognized

When Samsung launched the Galaxy S in 2010, consumers picked it up and immediately thought of one thing. The grid of icons. The touch gestures. The rounded rectangle. The premium retail experience. The unboxing. All of it borrowed, with extraordinary precision, from a product that had launched three years earlier and rewritten the rules of an entire industry.

Apple sued. The legal battle became one of the most complex intellectual property cases in history, eventually resulting in Samsung paying over $500 million in damages. And yet the Galaxy continued to sell in its hundreds of millions, building Samsung into the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer by volume. Every consumer who’d ever held an iPhone knew exactly what a Galaxy was and how to use it the moment they picked one up.

Our brains are pattern-matching machines. When we encounter a familiar structure in a new context, we experience something between comfort and curiosity — the neurological equivalent of a jazz cover of a song you know. Same chord progression. Better band.

The psychological engine behind all of this is straightforward. 86% of consumers consider authenticity a crucial factor when selecting brands to support. Borrowed interest works precisely because familiar structures feel authentic — they arrive pre-loaded with trust, cultural resonance and emotional memory that would otherwise take decades and extraordinary media budgets to build. Originality can sometimes be overrated.  

The Biggest Borrowers in the World

Red Bull is the gold standard of transnational borrowed interest. Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz encountered Krating Daeng, a Thai working-class tonic, adapted it for Western palates, and built a global empire. He didn’t invent the energy drink. He repackaged it, repositioned it, and sold it back to the world at a premium. The category Red Bull created from someone else’s formula is now worth tens of billions. Krating Daeng still exists, costs a fraction of Red Bull, and almost nobody outside Southeast Asia has heard of it.

Dyson did something equally audacious. James Dyson borrowed the entire visual and emotional language of luxury goods — precision engineering, sculptural design, premium retail environments — and applied it to product categories nobody had ever considered aspirational. A vacuum cleaner. A hand dryer. A fan with no blades. Dyson didn’t invent the underlying technology. He borrowed the aesthetic codes of luxury and attached them to objects people had only ever bought on price. Today Dyson is a global multi-billion dollar brand and people genuinely feel good about owning one.

The global fast casual restaurant market reached $211.52 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.5% through 2034 — a sector built almost entirely on the borrowed architecture of fast food, dressed up in better ingredients and higher margins. Every brand in that space is playing some version of the same game Shake Shack played on Sheikh Zayed Road. 

When Everyone Knows Exactly What You’re Not Saying

Aldi has turned borrowed interest into a science. Walk into any Aldi store in Europe, Australia, or the United States and the shelves are a masterclass in precise, deliberate recognition. The triangular chocolate bar that isn’t Toblerone. The stackable crisps in a tube that aren’t Pringles. The energy drink that isn’t Red Bull. Each product engineered to trigger instant recognition of the original while being entirely, legally its own thing. Aldi operates over 11,000 stores in more than 20 countries. The borrowed recognition doesn’t just drive trial — it short-circuits the entire consideration process. The consumer already knows what the product is, how it tastes, and whether they like it. Aldi simply removed the brand tax.

And then there is Beats by Dre. When Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine launched Beats headphones in 2008, the audio market was dominated by utilitarian products bought on specification. Beats borrowed the visual language, cultural weight, and status signaling of luxury fashion accessories and attached it to a pair of headphones. Consumers weren’t buying audio equipment. They were buying a $300 object that looked like it belonged in a Versace campaign. Apple eventually agreed, acquiring Beats in 2014 for $3 billion. The borrowed fashion equity was worth more than the technology.

The pattern is consistent: find a cultural structure that consumers already trust, inhabit it more convincingly than anyone else, and let familiarity do the heavy lifting.

Tips for Marketers Who Want to Play This Game

1. Map the equity before you borrow it. Know precisely what trigger you’re pulling — nostalgia, format, ritual, flavor memory. Zara doesn’t borrow “fashion” — it borrows a specific look from a specific runway and delivers it in six weeks. That precision is everything.

2. Upgrade the signal, not just the ingredients. The premium version must pay off the implicit promise. Better beef, real tomatoes, fresh onions — or a $300 object that looks like a fashion accessory, or a vacuum cleaner that that makes people proud to own one. Your borrowed equity gets you in the door. A genuinely better product keeps you there.

3. The reference is the strategy. Treat it like one. Not naming the reference is a creative decision, not an oversight. Build your communication around that conspicuous absence. Let the consumer connect the dots and they’ll feel ownership of the idea. That’s worth more than any campaign. And it may keep you out of court.

4. The borrowed icon must be aspirational to your target customer. Shake Shack borrows upward from McDonald’s. Zara borrows downward from Chanel. Both work because the reference point is aspirational to the buyer standing in front of the product. Beats borrowed from fashion because their customer wanted to look like they belonged in that world. The direction isn’t the point. The aspiration is.

5. Time it when the icon is ubiquitous but slightly tired. The Big Mac is culturally immortal but not exactly zeitgeist. That’s the sweet spot. You want the recognition without the freshness. The reference should feel like a comfortable old sofa — immediately recognizable, slightly past its prime, ripe for reinvention.

6. Leave room for the consumer’s aha moment. The unspoken recognition is the entire point. Over-explain and you kill it stone dead. The audience needs to feel clever for noticing. Zara never says “this is the Chanel jacket you couldn’t afford.” They just hang it on the rail and let you arrive at the conclusion yourself.

The One Thing Worth Watching

Apple borrowed the graphical user interface from Xerox PARC in the early 1980s — and built the most valuable consumer technology company in history. Samsung subsequently borrowed so comprehensively from Apple that the resulting legal battle became one of the most expensive intellectual property cases ever filed. Both brands continue to dominate global consumer electronics. Borrowing, it turns out, is a renewable resource — right up until it becomes a courtroom.

The structural consideration is this: brands perceived as unique can increase their revenue by 10% more than non-differentiated competitors. Used consistently and deliberately, borrowed interest reinforces your positioning. Used lazily or too often, it can blur it. The Big Shack works precisely because it’s a one-time, knowing nod — not a new direction. Know the difference. 

The other thing worth watching is your audience. Social media consumers are sharp, engaged, and they enjoy spotting the reference. The internet noticed the Big Shack immediately — and the reaction was admiration and amusement in equal measure. That’s exactly where you want to be.

The Bottom Line

The best borrowed interest makes the consumer feel smart for spotting it. Done right, you inherit decades of cultural conditioning, redirect an established craving, and walk away with the equity, the revenue, and your premium positioning entirely intact.

Zara built a €35.9 billion empire on someone else’s runway. Samsung built the world’s largest smartphone business on someone else’s product. Beats turned borrowed fashion equity into a $3 billion acquisition. And Shake Shack renovated a Big Mac and called it innovation.

How is your brand using familiar cultural structures to carry unfamiliar ideas? That’s the question worth sitting with.

Sources: Expert Market Research, Linearity.io, Inditex Annual Report 2023, The Verge, Forbes, Apple Newsroom, Smithsonian Magazine, The Spirits Business, Into The Minds

I recently came across a company called Mercor, and for once my reaction to an AI story wasn’t excitement, panic, or the mild existential dread I’ve started taking with my morning coffee. It was anger.

If you haven’t heard of it, Mercor is a marketplace that pays “experts” to train AI to replicate professional work — law, finance, consulting and, yes, marketing. Humans review outputs, define what’s good and bad, create problem sets and feed judgment back into the machine so it improves. It’s a company built by founders in their twenties who haven’t actually done any of the jobs they’re now trying to replicate. Or any job, frankly.

Silicon Valley has been confidently building things it doesn’t understand since before most of its founders were born. That’s practically the business model.

What stopped me wasn’t the audacity. It was the question hiding inside it.

The Question Nobody’s Actually Asking

The job descriptions sound credible enough. Experts analyze branding, consumer behavior, marketing performance. They evaluate AI outputs, provide structured feedback. The listed qualifications look solid — MBA, PhD, five-plus years in digital or growth marketing.

And then it hit me. Who the f#%k are these experts?

Not as an insult. As a genuinely serious question. Because if AI is being trained to think like marketers, someone is deciding what “thinking like a marketer” actually means. And that decision will shape more work than any creative brief ever written.

To be fair, this isn’t just Mercor. LinkedIn is already testing similar AI training marketplaces. An entire category is forming around “human-in-the-loop” systems — pay people to refine outputs, inject judgment, teach the machine what good looks like. Mercor claims millions of vetted experts and millions paid out daily. LinkedIn is reportedly offering up to $150 an hour for the privilege.

We’ve stopped experimenting with how AI learns. We’re industrializing it.

Competence Is Not Brilliance. And We’re Confusing the Two.

Here’s the problem. Marketing doesn’t work the way these systems assume.

The qualifications Mercor uses as entry criteria — MBAs, PhDs, five years of experience — aren’t signals of greatness in this business. They’re signals of competence. And competence and brilliance are not the same thing, however loudly we pretend otherwise on LinkedIn.

Marketing is one of the few professions where the real value isn’t credentialled. There’s no licensing body for taste. No exam for cultural instinct. No certification for knowing when something is technically correct and completely wrong. (If there were, half the ads running right now would fail it.)

So, we default to what we can measure. Degrees. Job titles. Years in the industry. All fine proxies for showing up. Terrible proxies for being brilliant. And now we’re using those proxies to train the machine.

The Numbers Tell a Story. It’s Not a Flattering One.

McKinsey’s latest data puts AI adoption at 88% of organizations using it in at least one business function — up from 78% just a year earlier. McKinsey & Company is consistently among the most active areas. Generative AI use has surged even faster, now deployed regularly by 79% of organizations. This is not a niche experiment on the fringes. It’s already shaping output at scale.

The IAB found that 83% of ad executives say their company has now deployed AI in the creative process, up from 60% just two years ago. And — here’s the bit that should make you put down your coffee — 82% of those executives believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positively about AI-generated ads. Only 45% of consumers actually do.  

It gets worse. That gap between advertiser perception and consumer sentiment has actually widened — from 32 points in 2024 to 37 points now. 

The people building and training these systems are already misreading the audience they’re trying to influence. Now they’re encoding that misunderstanding into the models themselves. We are, with great efficiency and considerable funding, teaching AI to be confidently wrong.

Among Gen Z, the backlash runs even deeper: 30% describe brands that use AI for ads as “inauthentic,” 26% say “disconnected,” and 24% say “unethical.”  These aren’t fringe opinions. They’re your next generation of customers telling you exactly how they feel — and the industry is moving in the opposite direction.

Smartly’s research confirmed that only 13% of consumers trust ads created entirely by AI, while 48% trust ads co-created by a person with AI support. People can feel the absence of judgment, even when they can’t articulate it. That instinct has a name. We used to call it taste.

So, if we can’t agree on what good looks like now, what exactly are we teaching the machine? The answer — and I say this with affection for the industry I’ve spent my career in — is the average. AI doesn’t invent mediocrity. It scales it.

What “Good” Actually Looks Like

You can see this clearly in the work. When AI is used well, it’s almost never the source of the idea. It’s the amplifier.

Heinz used AI to generate ketchup imagery, and the outputs consistently looked like Heinz. The technology proved a brand truth that already existed. Cadbury used AI to let small businesses create ads featuring Shah Rukh Khan (India’s biggest Bollywood star and the face of Cadbury for decades), scaling a strong human idea across thousands of executions. Virgin Voyages built a personalized AI invitation system around Jennifer Lopez — concept first, execution second.

When AI replaces judgment instead of supporting it, the cracks appear fast. Coca-Cola’s AI-driven holiday creative was technically polished and emotionally hollow. Mango, the Spanish fast-fashion retailer, rolled out AI campaigns across dozens of markets that were efficient, scalable, and utterly indistinguishable from everything else in the category.

AI doesn’t kill creativity. It exposes whether there was any to begin with. Which, for a significant portion of the industry, is uncomfortable news.

The Availability Problem

Now go back to Mercor. Tens of thousands of contractors. Millions paid out daily. A global network of experts feeding judgment into machines.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality. The best marketers aren’t doing this work. They’re not sitting at home grading AI responses for $100 an hour. They’re running brands, making decisions, killing bad ideas, and taking the kinds of risks that machines — trained on consensus — would never recommend.

So, who is doing it? People who are smart, capable and — crucially — available.

Availability is not authority. But in a system like this, it becomes the selection criteria. The machine isn’t being trained on excellence. It’s being trained on whoever showed up. That’s how you get mediocrity as a dataset.

The Holding Groups Figured This Out

The large holding groups already understand this risk — and they’re moving accordingly.

WPP’s Agent Hub, built into its WPP Open platform, codifies roughly 30 years of proprietary Brand Asset Valuator data — the world’s largest and longest-running study of brand equity — alongside behavioral science frameworks and what WPP calls a “Creative Brain” drawing on 150 years of accumulated creative intelligence. They’re not crowdsourcing judgment. They’re working to protect it.

Omnicom, WPP and Havas each unveiled AI operating systems at CES 2026, all converging on the same idea: agencies as managed ecosystems of AI agents, built on proprietary data, wrapped in compliance, plugged into end-to-end marketing execution.  

The common thread isn’t technology. It’s whose knowledge is doing the training. Because once you dilute standards at this scale, you don’t quietly get them back.

The Wrong Question Is the One Everyone Keeps Asking

Everyone wants to know whether AI will replace marketers.

Wrong question.

The right question is: who is teaching AI what marketing is?

If the answer is “a large pool of reasonably qualified, currently available people,” we’re not building better marketing. We’re building faster average. And average, at scale, is a very expensive way to disappear.

Where does the judgment in your organization live — and are you protecting it?  I’d genuinely like to hear what you think.

Sources: McKinsey & Company, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), IAB / Sonata Insights, Smartly, WPP, Storyboard18 

As I was scrolling through my usual morning feeds, I landed on a piece in The Hollywood Reporter about online personalities and comedians overtaking traditional media as primary news sources.

Not shocking. But provocative.

What struck me wasn’t some dramatic collapse of journalism. It was something more subtle and more interesting. The article confirmed what most of us already sense: news hasn’t lost relevance, but it has lost its monopoly on how it’s delivered and who gets to interpret it. The mechanics of reporting are intact. The authority of interpretation is not.

The story still breaks in familiar places—newsrooms, wires, verified outlets. But belief forms somewhere else, shaped in real time by people who weren’t in the room when it was written. And increasingly, that “somewhere else” looks less like a newsroom and more like a personality with an audience, a point of view and a format people actually choose to engage with.

The Line Between News and Entertainment Is Gone

Late-night talk shows, cable formats and podcasts turned political commentary into global consumption long before TikTok made it obvious. They didn’t replace journalism. They reframed it—making it more digestible, more opinionated and more shareable.

That same blend now sits inside platforms like Netflix, where figures like Trevor Noah deliver commentary consumed as both entertainment and interpretation. In the UK, Have I Got News for You has long blurred satire and journalism, proving this isn’t new—it’s just scaled.

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, 66% of global audiences now consume short-form news video weekly, with younger audiences leaning toward personality-led formats. In India, creators like Ranveer Allahbadia—a YouTuber known for long-form conversations—reach millions who are not reading traditional outlets at all.

News hasn’t been replaced. It’s been absorbed into more entertaining formats people choose—and delivered by people they follow.

Distribution Has Fragmented. Interpretation Has Exploded

Distribution didn’t just shift. It fractured into layers operating simultaneously.

Reuters 2024 shows more than 40% of under-35s globally now use social media as a primary news source, while Pew Research finds about 20% of U.S. adults regularly get news from influencers.

Personalities like HasanAbi don’t just report what happened. They react to it, challenge it and let audiences process it in real time. News becomes something you watch being interpreted.

Platforms are investing accordingly. Spotify’s reported $200M+ investment in Joe Rogan isn’t about content—it’s about owning a voice that millions rely on to make sense of events.

In Europe, Reuters highlights messaging platforms like WhatsApp as a major layer of private news circulation. And figures like Piers Morgan show how a single clip can travel further than the broadcast it came from.

Brands are moving into this layer as well. Zomato engages with cultural moments in real time using a tone that mirrors the personalities shaping those conversations.

The story is no longer what’s published. It’s what gets explained, clipped and reshaped.

Trust Has Shifted from Institutions to Individuals

Trust didn’t disappear. It moved.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 shows “people like me” are now trusted more than institutions in most countries, while IPSOS data places trust in traditional media below 50% in many markets.

Joe Rogan reaches millions through long-form conversations that feel direct and unfiltered. In the Middle East, Abu Fella has mobilized millions around humanitarian causes based on perceived authenticity, not institutional backing.

Brands have noticed. Prime Video working with MrBeast reflects a move toward distributing through personalities that already hold trust.

At the same time, some brands are building their own voices. Duolingo behaves more like a creator than a company—reacting, participating and showing up consistently in culture.

Authority used to come from the masthead. Now it comes from familiarity, consistency and voice. Which is uncomfortable news for anyone whose career was built on knowing the right editors.

News Happens Fast. Credibility Builds Slow

News still originates somewhere. That hasn’t changed.

Outlets like BBC and Reuters continue to anchor verification globally. But Reuters 2024 also shows 39% of audiences now sometimes avoid the news, citing overload and distrust.

So people don’t stop consuming information. They filter it.

Ukraine President and former television actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy communicates directly via video messages that shape global perception. Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore, does the same for policy communication through official social channels.

And when brands create moments, they rely on this same amplification dynamic. Red Bull saw its Stratos jump with Felix Baumgartner become global news not just because it happened, but because people and personalities amplified it.

Speed creates awareness. People create belief.

Editorial and News-Driven PR Still Matter—Just Not in the Same Way

News-driven PR gets you into the conversation while it’s forming. Editorial PR shapes how you’re understood after the fact.

Nike’s work with Colin Kaepernick is worth understanding mechanically, not just referencing. The campaign broke as news instantly—but Nike had minimal control over what happened next. Athletes, politicians and commentators immediately took public positions. Nike’s stock dropped in the first 48 hours as one interpretation spread, then recovered as a counter-narrative took hold, driven not by Nike’s communications but by the public figures who chose to defend or attack it. The meaning of the campaign wasn’t set at launch. It was determined by months of ongoing cultural debate that Nike neither planned nor controlled—and which ultimately worked in their favor because the core idea was strong enough to survive being pulled in multiple directions at once. None of that was in the brief.

Reuters and Pew data consistently show the same pattern: initial exposure happens on platforms, while validation often follows elsewhere.

The mistake isn’t choosing one. It’s misunderstanding when each one does its job.

What Needs to Change

Stories can’t just be written for publication anymore. They have to survive interpretation. They must work when clipped, debated, reframed and occasionally misunderstood—because that’s exactly what will happen within minutes of release.

That requires a different kind of structural discipline—not just tighter writing, but engineering meaning so it holds under pressure. Every headline, data point and quote should be able to stand alone when stripped of context, because they will be. Test your story by imagining its worst possible clip. If that clip misrepresents you, the problem isn’t the person who made it—it’s the structure that made it possible. Build in the correction before you publish.

Planning for personalities means more than adding influencer outreach to a media list. It means mapping the interpretive layer before you launch—understanding specifically who your story will pass through, how they typically frame issues like yours, what they’ve said before and what incentive they have to engage. Some personalities will amplify your story straight. Others will use it as raw material for their own argument. Know which is which, and build the version of your story that can withstand both.

Designing for circulation means treating a piece of coverage as a starting point rather than an endpoint. Ask whether your story can move across formats—from a long article to a 30-second clip to a tweet to a WhatsApp forward—without losing the thing that matters most. If the meaning collapses at any of those compression points, it needs to be rebuilt into the original before it leaves your hands.

And accepting a degree of loss of control isn’t resignation—it’s strategy. The goal isn’t to keep your story intact. It’s to make the core idea so clear and so durable that even a hostile interpretation leaves the important part standing. Brands that panic when a story is reframed often make it worse. Those that build for reframing in the first place rarely need to.

The harder truth—the one most agencies won’t say out loud to a client—is that the standard PR model wasn’t built for any of this. It was built to generate coverage, and coverage was the proxy for influence. That proxy has broken down. Billing structures, reporting templates and success metrics designed around column inches and broadcast mentions aren’t just outdated. They actively discourage the kind of thinking this environment demands. Adapting to this shift isn’t a workflow problem. It’s a business model problem.

If no one wants to repeat your story, it’s not going anywhere.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, Pew Research Center, Edelman Trust Barometer 2024, IPSOS

As I write this, I’m in Dubai in the middle of a tenuous cease-fire involving Iran, US and Israel. I’m not going to get into the politics, just the impact of the war.

For businesses here, particularly in hospitality, it was immediate and brutal. Tourism paused almost overnight in an economy that depends on it. And the reflex is exactly what you’d expect: discounting. Hotels knocking down prices, in some cases making them fully redeemable against food and beverage; restaurants and other services impacted by the slowdown layering on offers, anything to generate movement.

It’s desperate. And it usually doesn’t work. Or at least, it doesn’t sustain itself. The places where it appears to work probably would have filled seats anyway because they have a loyal following. Others slash prices and still can’t get people through the door.

When demand suddenly softens, there are no good solutions. Keeping people employed and generating some volume—even at the expense of margin—is the natural reaction. Live to fight another day. Fair enough.

But if you believe you’ll survive the crisis, you also have to think about how you recover. And that becomes a lot harder when you’ve blown up your margins and muddied your brand with promotions that feel off-brand and reactive.

I’ve spent a good part of my career trying to stop companies from doing the one thing they instinctively do the moment things get shaky: slash prices. As if panic were a pricing strategy. I’ve sat in too many boardrooms watching otherwise rational executives turn into clearance rack managers overnight, trading brand equity for short-term cash, attracting bargain hunters who vanish the moment prices normalize, and creating those lovely peaks and valleys in sales that make forecasting feel like astrology.

My argument has always been simple: discounting is not evil. But undisciplined discounting is. And in a crisis, the difference between the two is the difference between protecting demand… and training your customers to wait you out.

I saw this play out in real time a few weeks ago. A restaurant I’d been to a few times offered 50% off brunch. That was enough to pull a group of us in one Saturday. It was excellent—lively, generous, great food, free-flowing drinks. We all said the same thing: it was worth every dirham at full price. At 50% off, it felt like a real bargain. A rare feeling in Dubai.  We said we’d come back.

A few weeks later, they ran another offer. This time, 25% off. And something strange happened. It didn’t feel like a deal. It felt expensive.

That’s the anchoring effect. The first price you experience becomes the reference point. Everything that follows is judged against it. By showing 50%, they didn’t just drive traffic. They reset the perceived value of the experience. At 25%, they weren’t offering a discount. They were asking us to accept a loss. That’s the problem with discounting. You’re not just changing price. You’re rewriting value. And in a crisis, that’s where most brands get it wrong.

Crisis doesn’t justify discounting. It demands precision pricing strategy. The smartest brands don’t ask, “How much should we cut?” They ask, “What behavior are we trying to trigger and what’s the least destructive way to do it?”

The Margin Grenade Problem: When Discounts Destroy More Than They Save

Most executives think discounting is a volume lever. In reality, it’s a margin trade-off that behaves exponentially, not linearly. Small cuts in price create disproportionately large gaps in profitability, which then require unrealistic increases in volume to recover. In a crisis, when demand is already fragile, that math becomes even more punishing—and yet it’s almost always ignored in the rush to “do something.”Deep discounts don’t just reduce revenue. They disproportionately crush profit. A 20% price cut can require a 50%+ increase in volume to recover the same profit depending on margins. That’s not a promotion. That’s a gamble.
According to McKinsey & Company, poorly managed discounting is one of the largest drivers of profit leakage across retail and consumer sectors. And yet, it’s still the first lever pulled in a crisis because it’s easy, visible and immediate. But easy doesn’t mean smart.
US fashion retailer J. Crew is the cautionary tale. Years of relentless promotions didn’t just move inventory. They trained customers to expect discounts. Full price became theoretical. Margins eroded. Brand perception followed.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, many luxury hotels in Dubai and Abu Dhabi learned the same lesson post-COVID. Properties that held rates, even at lower occupancy, recovered faster than those that flooded the market with deep discounts and had to claw their way back up.
The math is simple. The consequences are not. The moment discounting becomes expected, it stops being a tactic and becomes your business model.
Too Big = Desperation. Too Small = Insult
Discount size is not just a financial decision. It’s a signal. Customers don’t see percentages. They interpret meaning. Too large, and you look distressed. Too small, and you look disingenuous. In both cases, you lose control of the narrative and hand it over to the market. A 50% discount signals distress. A 5% discount signals irrelevance. Both damage perception.
Research from Nielsen shows that over-discounting reduces perceived quality, particularly in premium and luxury categories. Price, whether we like it or not, is a proxy for value.
That’s why Burberry at one time chose to destroy unsold inventory rather than dump it into the discount market. Extreme? Yes. But it protected the one thing that matters in luxury: perception.
Contrast that with Target, which uses structured, progressive markdowns tied to inventory cycles. Not emotional. Not reactive. Systematic.
Even in hospitality, you see the difference. Jumeirah Group has historically leaned more on value-added packages—dining credits, experiences—rather than aggressive rate cuts. The signal is clear: value is being enhanced, not eroded.
Discounts communicate. If you don’t control the message, the market will.

Always Have a Reason or Don’t Discount at All

Pricing without context creates confusion. Confusion erodes trust. In uncertain times, customers are already questioning value, stability and intent. Random discounts only amplify that skepticism. A price cut without a clear rationale doesn’t feel generous. It feels suspicious. Discounts without a story feel arbitrary. Arbitrary pricing destroys trust.

PwC has found that price transparency and fairness are critical drivers of consumer trust, especially during uncertain times. If a customer can’t understand why they’re getting a deal, they start questioning the original price.

Airbnb gets this right with long-stay discounts. The logic is obvious: commit longer, pay less per night. That’s not desperation. That’s behavioral economics.

Amazon does the same with Prime Day. It’s not random discounting. It’s an event. A moment. A reason to act now.

In the region, Emirates has historically used tactical fare promotions tied to seasonality or route launches, not blanket price cuts. Again, a reason.

If you can’t explain the discount in one clean sentence, don’t offer it.

The Smarter Move: Give More, Don’t Charge Less

There are only two ways to make an offer more attractive: reduce the price or increase the value. One weakens your position. The other strengthens it. The difference isn’t just financial. It’s psychological. Customers don’t evaluate price in isolation. They evaluate what they get for it. This is the hill I will die on.

Price cuts reduce perceived value. Added value increases it. Research from Deloitte shows that bundling and value-add promotions outperform straight discounts in driving both conversion and loyalty. Why? Because they preserve the integrity of the price while enhancing the experience.

Apple understands this instinctively. They rarely discount core products. Instead, they offer gift cards, services or bundles. The price remains sacred.

McDonald’s built an empire on this with Extra Value Meals. Not cheaper burgers, more perceived value. 

Spotify uses extended trials to lower the barrier to entry without touching the subscription price.

Even in luxury hospitality, value-add wins. Atlantis Dubai packages rooms with waterpark access, dining or experiences. The guest feels like they’re getting a deal, even when they’re not paying less.

A customer who gets more feels smarter. A customer who pays less feels lucky. Only one of those builds loyalty.

Behavioral Discounts Beat Blanket Discounts

Not all demand is equal, and not all customers should be treated the same. Blanket discounting assumes a homogeneous market. Real markets aren’t. They’re fragmented, behavioral and highly responsive to context. The smarter move is not to discount broadly, but to intervene precisely.

Not all customers are equal. Your pricing shouldn’t be either. Boston Consulting Group ighlights that targeted promotions can be 2–3x more effective than blanket discounting because they’re tied to specific behaviors.

Uber is a masterclass in this. Discounts appear when demand needs stimulation—off-peak hours, new user acquisition—not as a constant.

Sephora rewards its best customers with tiered benefits, not universal price cuts.

In the Gulf, Noon uses flash sales, app-only deals and targeted offers to drive urgency and behavior without permanently resetting price expectations.

Discounting everyone is lazy. Incentivizing the right behavior is strategy.

Crisis Promotions That Actually Worked (Because They Were Smart)

Pressure reveals strategy. Weak brands react. Strong brands adapt. The difference is rarely resources. It’s discipline. The brands that come out stronger aren’t the ones that avoided the crisis. They’re the ones that avoided the instinct to panic.

Each of these proves a different point, not just that they discounted, but how and why.

Nike leaned into member-exclusive digital promotions during COVID, protecting margins while accelerating direct relationships with customers. LVMH largely avoided discounting entirely, reinforcing the idea that scarcity often beats desperation. Peloton used financing to reduce friction without reducing price—a subtle but powerful distinction. IKEA pushed bundles and room solutions, increasing basket size instead of shrinking price. Starbucks doubled down on loyalty-driven, personalized offers rather than blanket promotions. Accenture found that companies maintaining pricing discipline during downturns recover margins faster. That’s not theory. That’s pattern recognition.

The winners didn’t avoid pressure. They avoided panic.

The Real Risk: You’re Reprogramming Your Customer

This is the silent killer. KPMG reports that promotion-heavy environments increase price sensitivity and reduce long-term brand loyalty. Discounting doesn’t just drive short-term demand. It rewires behavior. Customers start to wait. They compare more. They hesitate at full price because you’ve taught them not to trust it.

Macy’s has lived this reality for years where promotions became so frequent that full price lost its credibility. You see the same pattern across travel platforms. Constant “limited-time deals” that are never really limited create skepticism. Urgency stops working when everything is urgent.

Every discount teaches your customer something. The question is: are you teaching them to buy… or to wait?

A Better Framework for Crisis Pricing

Most pricing frameworks break down in a crisis because they assume stability. What you need instead is a decision model that works under pressure, one that protects long-term value while still allowing for short-term flexibility. That requires discipline, not instinct.

• Define the behavior you want (trial, volume, loyalty, urgency)
• Choose the least destructive lever (value-add, bundle, financing, exclusivity, timing)
• Anchor it to a reason (event, loyalty, duration, inventory, behavior)
• Protect your reference price at all costs
• Make it feel earned, not given away

Limited Time Only

Desperate times don’t call for desperate discounts. They call for disciplined thinking. The brands that come out stronger aren’t the ones that sold the cheapest. They’re the ones that protected their value while everyone else was busy giving theirs away.

Sources: McKinsey & Company: Pricing and promotion effectiveness research; Harvard Business School: Studies on promotions and consumer purchase timing; Nielsen: Pricing perception and discount impact studies; PwC: Consumer trust and pricing transparency research; Deloitte: Value-added promotions and bundling insights; Boston Consulting Group: Targeted promotions vs mass discounting; Accenture: Pricing discipline and post-crisis recovery performance; KPMG: Consumer behavior and price sensitivity trends

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

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

Now the bad brief has had a glow-up.

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

But then we start to read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI writes what you ask. Not what you need.

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

In other words, it gives form to indecision.

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

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

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

The rise of the impressive but unusable brief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this matters even more now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few more tips, because some of this is fixable

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

Choose one primary objective and maybe one secondary one.

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

State the real constraints only.

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

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

What an ideal marketing brief actually looks like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One final brief point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Doesn’t Reward Volume. It Rewards Authority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buyers Trust Everyone Except You.

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

Regional Reality: Credibility Travels Faster Than Content.

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews Help. But They Don’t Carry You.

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

Platforms Are Quietly Killing Your Content Strategy.

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

AI Has Removed Any Remaining Illusion.

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

So What Actually Works?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yap Yap Yap.

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

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

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

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

They Don’t Persuade. They Sort.

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

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

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

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

Why They Scale (and Why Everyone Copies Them)

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

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

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

Why They Feel Off (Even When They Work)

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

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

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

The Performance Trap

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

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

What Smart Marketers Do Instead

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

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

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

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

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

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