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 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’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.

Back when the media conversation was more simple, we optimized for reach and frequency, negotiated the cost of a page in The Wall Street Journal, debated whether the evening news was worth the CPM. Media buying felt like placing chips on a table and betting on the audience seated directly across from you.

Throughout my career sitting in agency and CMO chairs, I have overseen hundreds of millions of dollars of media spending. The fundamental question was always the same: how do we persuade people?

Television delivered mass reach. Print delivered credibility. Outdoor delivered frequency. None of it was perfect but at least you knew the audience was there. You might not have known exactly which living room the message landed in, but you knew it had landed in an actual living room, not in a server farm in Latvia talking to a bot pretending to be a man comparing trainers.

Then programmatic arrived.

Suddenly media buying was no longer about audiences but about inventory. Dashboards replaced judgment. Algorithms replaced media planners. The language shifted from persuasion to optimization. Somewhere along the way we stopped asking a much more basic question: is anyone actually seeing this?

Today digital media has reached a strange place. We have built the most sophisticated advertising infrastructure in history, but increasingly it appears to be optimized for impressions that humans barely notice.

Which brings us to what I call the invisible media problem.

Half the Internet Isn’t a Person

One of the realities of modern marketing is that a massive share of the internet is no longer human.

According to Imperva’s 2024 Bad Bot Report, 49.6% of all global internet traffic is automated and 32% is classified as malicious bots. That means roughly half of what moves across the web is not a person.

This matters because automated traffic does not just scrape websites, test passwords or hoover up content for some AI model with delusions of grandeur. It also touches the advertising ecosystem.

The Association of National Advertisers estimated that ad fraud cost marketers $22 billion globally in 2023.

Even in well-managed campaigns, fraud detection firms like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science regularly report 10–15% of impressions failing quality checks such as invalid traffic, fraud or unsafe environments.

So before we get to creativity, persuasion or brand storytelling, we have a more awkward issue to address: a measurable portion of the world’s advertising budget is effectively negotiating with software.

The Ad-Farm Internet

But bots are only part of the problem. A much larger issue is the explosion of websites created primarily to harvest advertising.

In 2023 the Association of National Advertisers conducted a major study into Made-For-Advertising sites. These are web properties designed almost entirely around ad placement rather than editorial value. The study found that 21% of programmatic advertising spend flowed to these sites.

They are easy to recognize once you know what to look for: endless slide shows, recycled articles, celebrity gossip scraped from other publications, AI-generated filler and a constellation of banner ads orbiting the page like satellites. They are less media brands than industrial sheds for storing ad units.

Brands such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever have both publicly pushed agencies and media partners to reduce spending on these environments after discovering how much budget was quietly drifting into them. Unilever’s former CMO Keith Weed warned years ago that the industry risked funding what he called a swamp of content.

The swamp has only grown. Now it has algorithmic drainage, synthetic articles and better monetization.

Seen but Not Really Seen

Even when ads reach legitimate websites and real people, another problem emerges: attention.

Research from Lumen Research, which tracks eye movement and attention in advertising environments, shows that many digital display ads receive less than one second of human attention. The advertising measurement firm Adelaide has found that a majority of programmatic impressions generate minimal measurable attention time, often fractions of a second. Meanwhile the Media Rating Council’s viewability standard allows an ad to count as viewable if 50% of its pixels are on screen for just one second.

One second.

An ad can technically be counted as seen even if a human barely registers it. That may satisfy a dashboard, but it would not satisfy any sane client if you described it honestly. “Good news, your ad was visible for roughly the duration of a hiccup.”

This is the digital equivalent of paying for a billboard that drivers glimpse only while sneezing. 

The industry has become dangerously comfortable confusing the opportunity to be seen with actual seeing.

The Smart Brands Are Already Cleaning House

Some of the largest marketers in the world have begun questioning the system and, more importantly, acting on it.

Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, cut more than $200 million from digital advertising budgets after discovering waste and questionable placements. According to the company, the reduction had little negative impact on sales.

That should have set off more panic than it did. When a giant removes that much spend and the sales line barely flinches, it is not a trimming exercise. It is an indictment.

This is the digital equivalent of paying for a billboard that drivers glimpse only while sneezing. 

Chase Bank conducted its own brand safety audit and discovered its ads were appearing on 400,000 websites through programmatic buying. After tightening controls the bank reduced placements to around 5,000 sites with no measurable loss in performance.

Think about that for a moment. Four hundred thousand sites to five thousand. Same ballpark of results. That’s like discovering you have been buying the digital equivalent of air.

Meanwhile Mars, the global food company behind brands like M&M’s and Snickers, has been outspoken about pushing the industry toward attention-based media measurement, arguing that impressions alone are increasingly meaningless.

When companies spending billions begin questioning the system, it usually means something deeper is happening.

AI Is About to Flood the Market With More Junk

If the invisible media problem feels large today, artificial intelligence may soon multiply it. Generative AI tools have dramatically reduced the cost of producing content at scale. Entire websites can now be created automatically, filled with machine-generated articles designed primarily to capture search traffic and advertising revenue.

A 2024 analysis by NewsGuard identified hundreds of AI-generated news sites appearing across multiple countries, many operating with minimal editorial oversight but fully monetized with advertising.

Meanwhile the Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that around 40% of global consumers say they struggle to distinguish AI-generated content from human journalism.

If consumers can’t reliably distinguish real from synthetic and marketers can’t reliably distinguish quality environments from monetized rubbish, the system becomes more efficient at distribution and less trustworthy at every level.

Cheap content plus automated advertising infrastructure creates the perfect conditions for a new generation of invisible media environments.

In other words, the supply of places to put ads is now growing faster than the supply of real human attention. Marvelous for the ad-tech ecosystem. Less than marvelous for anyone hoping to persuade an actual buyer.

The Ad-Tech Tollbooth Problem

Another twist in the story is that brands increasingly rely on complex ad-tech supply chains to reach audiences.

The World Federation of Advertisers has warned that the programmatic ecosystem can involve dozens of intermediaries, each taking a small share of media budgets while adding opacity to where ads actually appear.

A landmark ANA programmatic transparency study found that advertisers often see only about 60 cents of every programmatic dollar reach working media, with the rest absorbed by fees across the ad-tech chain.

No marketer would tolerate losing forty cents on the dollar in any other part of the business. Imagine a CFO being told, “Excellent news, we have located a system where nearly half your money disappears before the work begins.” In most departments that would end in handcuffs or at least a tense board meeting.

Yet in digital media it has quietly become normal, partly because the machinery is complex and partly because complexity has an unfortunate habit of dressing up waste as sophistication.

Why the Platforms Keep Winning

Ironically the invisible media problem has strengthened the largest platforms.

Because they operate closed ecosystems with real user identities, companies like Google, Meta and Amazon offer advertisers a degree of certainty that much of the open web cannot match.

According to GroupM’s global advertising forecasts the largest digital platforms now capture well over half of global digital advertising spending.

Retail media networks have grown particularly fast. Amazon’s advertising business surpassed $46 billion in revenue largely because brands know their ads appear directly next to products in environments where shoppers are actively making decisions.

That is the crucial distinction. Amazon may charge handsomely, Meta may never stop inventing new acronyms and Google may continue its charming habit of changing the furniture every six minutes, but at least marketers can see the commercial logic. The ad is near intent. The buyer is plausibly real. That’s a whole lot better than an AI-generated article called “Seven Surprising Facts About Dishwashers” floating on a site nobody has ever visited on purpose.

When advertisers doubt the open web, they migrate toward environments where attention is easier to verify.

What Marketers Need to Do Now

First, shift the metric from impressions to attention. If an ad is technically served but barely noticed, that’s not media value. 

Second, audit where your ads actually appear. Not in theory. Not by category. Actually appear. Many brands discover astonishing things when they do and few of those discoveries are delightful.

Third, limit exposure to Made-For-Advertising (MFA) sites. A surprisingly large share of programmatic spend flows to these properties by default because the system is built to find cheap inventory before it finds meaningful context.

Fourth, prioritize context over scale. Advertising next to credible journalism, respected creators and trusted platforms often produces far stronger results than chasing cheap inventory across the open web. A smaller audience paying real attention beats a vast digital wasteland every day of the week.

Fifth, reduce supply-path complexity. If too many intermediaries are touching your money before your message reaches a consumer, your budget is not working hard enough.

Sixth, demand human outcomes from machine systems. Programmatic is a tool, not a theology. Optimization is useful, but when every decision is driven by algorithms chasing the lowest CPM the system inevitably finds the cheapest attention available. And cheap attention is often invisible.

Seventh, rebuild media judgment as a strategic skill. The industry became so enchanted by automation that it started treating discernment as old-fashioned. It is not old-fashioned. It is what prevents nonsense from being purchased at scale.

The Question That Ruins the Presentation

After decades in marketing I have learned one small but useful trick. Whenever someone presents a digital media report full of impressive numbers, I ask a very old-fashioned question: Where did the ads actually appear?

That question has an almost magical ability to suck the oxygen out of a room. Suddenly the conversation moves from abstractions to accountability. Because once that question is asked the invisible media problem stops being theoretical.

It becomes a judgment problem, a procurement problem, a governance problem and, for any marketer with responsibility for real money, a professional pride problem.

Media was supposed to help persuade people. Somewhere along the way too much of digital media became a machine for serving ads into murky environments, reporting back numbers and calling the whole thing progress.

It’s not progress if nobody sees it. It’s not efficiency if nobody notices it.
And it’s certainly not brilliant targeting if your so-called best-performing audience turns out not to be a middle class family from East London but a robot family from a server farm East of Bucharest.

The invisible media problem is not that digital advertising no longer works. It’s that too much of the system has become indifferent to whether it works for the reason we pretend it does. That is the plot it has lost.

Sources: Association of National Advertisers Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study; Association of National Advertisers Made-For-Advertising Website Study (2023); Imperva Bad Bot Report (2024); Lumen Research Attention Measurement Studies; Adelaide Attention Metrics Research; Media Rating Council Digital Viewability Standards; NewsGuard AI Generated News Site Investigation (2024) ; Reuters Institute Digital News Report (2024); World Federation of Advertisers Programmatic Supply Chain Analysis; GroupM Global Advertising Forecast.

I’m writing this after the first 24 hours of missile and drone interceptions over Dubai. We knew the attack on Iran was happening, so no one here was naïve about the likelihood of a response. But that didn’t make the experience less jarring. From my terrace in the Marina and from JBR beach, I could see the streaks in the sky, the brief bloom of light and then wait for the delayed concussion. At one point I witnessed the blast from an interception that I soon learned had struck the front of a friend’s building on Palm Jumeirah. I stood there watching the plume of smoke rise because there was nothing else to do.

My phone has been lighting up with WhatsApp threads filled with fear and confusion, market alerts and far-flung friends asking if my family and I are okay. Yesterday, the US and Israel struck Iran. The region is tense, to say the least.

Yet somewhere, right now, a brand still has a pre-scheduled (probably AI-written) LinkedIn post going live about a topic that seemed quite relevant at the time it was composed but now seems tone deaf.

There is something almost admirable about the discipline of a well-oiled marketing machine. Until it becomes grotesque.

Silence Is Strategy

Often, the best first move in a real crisis is to stop talking. Not forever. Just long enough to read the room.

Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer reports that 71% of consumers say it is more important for brands to show empathy than promote products during uncertain times. That’s not sentimentality. That’s market data.

Over the years we’ve worked with a long list of companies where there was always a threat of catastrophe, like airlines, gas companies and car makers. In those categories accidents are not theoretical. They happen. We always had a policy of pulling ads and content immediately following any kind of incident in their sector. You do not run a glossy airline campaign the day after a crash. You do not push horsepower messaging after a pileup dominates the news. Handling hundreds of crisis situations over decades has taught us one simple lesson: sometimes you really have to learn when to shut the f%&k up.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I was living in Moscow. (I’m just lucky like that). The brands that responded fastest were not the ones drafting clever copy. They were the ones making hard decisions. Airbnb shifted its focus toward housing refugees and later reported facilitating more than 100,000 free stays. As soon as it became clear that this was going to be a prolonged conflict, harder decisions had to be made. McDonald’s and many of our clients exited Russia, some after decades in the market. And we moved our headquarters to Dubai.

The same pattern repeated during the early days of Covid. Airlines, hotel groups and cruise lines that paused aspirational advertising while borders were closing avoided looking delusional. Those that kept running “escape now” creative looked detached from reality.

Context Beats Calendar

I’ve said this before: Marketers love a calendar. It gives the illusion of control.

But Sprout Social’s 2023 research found that 53% of consumers say brands that fail to adjust messaging during major global events appear disconnected from reality. Disconnected is polite language for out of touch.

AI can schedule content. But it can’t hear missile interceptions outside your window. Judgment still requires a pulse.

Your Employees Are the First Audience

Before your customers read your statement, your employees do.

Gallup’s 2023 research shows that 70% of employee engagement variance is tied to manager communication. In a crisis, internal silence is deafening.

Microsoft’s leadership has consistently communicated internally within hours of major global disruptions before going public. The sequencing matters. If your own people are anxious or confused, your external messaging will feel cosmetic.

Purpose Gets Audited Under Pressure

Every brand has a purpose statement. Crisis is where it gets tested.

Deloitte’s 2024 Global Marketing Trends report shows purpose-led brands have outperformed the market over a decade. Not because they have nicer websites, but because they behaved consistently when it was inconvenient.

Patagonia did not suddenly discover environmental conviction during turbulence. It redirected tax savings in 2022 toward environmental causes in line with long-standing commitments. Consistency under pressure builds credibility.

Media Efficiency Changes When Fear Dominates

There is also a practical argument for restraint.

Nielsen data shows brand recall can drop by up to 40% when ads run next to heavy negative news coverage. In other words, you may be paying for impressions that no one is emotionally available to process.

During early pandemic volatility, Unilever reduced media spend in certain markets to avoid adjacency to distress coverage and refocused on essential messaging. That wasn’t retreat. It was discipline.

Do Not Hijack the Moment (especially if the moment is about a hijacking)

Crisis is not a creative brief.

Kantar’s 2023 research found that 75% of consumers say brands should avoid humorous or lighthearted messaging during serious global events. There is a line between relevance and opportunism, and most brands are not nearly as good at spotting it as they think they are.

In the early days of the Ukraine invasion several fashion brands faced backlash for continuing glossy promotional content. Meanwhile LVMH quietly suspended operations in Russia. One approach created noise. The other conveyed gravity.

If your first instinct is to build a themed campaign around geopolitical chaos, step away from the keyboard. If you’re wondering if the joke is “too soon”, it almost certainly is.

If You Speak, Be Specific

Vague solidarity statements are cheap. Action is expensive. That is precisely why it works.

Cone Communications research shows 64% of consumers will buy from brands that take action aligned with their values, yet only 25% believe most brands actually follow through. That gap is where reputations are either built or dismantled.

After the Astroworld tragedy in 2021, multiple brands quietly paused influencer campaigns and promotional partnerships tied to the festival. There was no attempt at clever real-time commentary. Silence was the correct response.

During the Maui wildfires in 2023, several major travel brands and tour operators suspended destination advertising while residents were evacuating. That meant foregoing revenue and avoiding tone deaf promotion in the middle of a disaster.

Specific action sometimes means saying less, pulling spend, freezing posts and resisting the urge to perform. In a crisis, discipline is often invisible. That is the point.

Investors Are Listening Too

This conversation does not end with consumers.

PwC’s 2023 Global Investor Survey found that 76% of investors consider how companies manage geopolitical risk when allocating capital. Your crisis response now sits alongside your earnings call in the assessment of competence.

During the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023, institutions that communicated quickly and clearly stabilized perception faster than those that hesitated. In volatile markets, clarity has monetary value.

The Algorithm Amplifies Emotion, Not Accuracy

Research from MIT published in Science found that false news spreads significantly faster on social platforms than verified information. Speed is not the same as wisdom.

During recent Middle East escalations misinformation surged on X and TikTok within hours. Brands that rushed to comment risked amplifying noise. Waiting for confirmed information is not timidity. It is risk management.

The Internet Has a Long Memory

You do not get to quietly delete your way out of a bad crisis response.

Pew Research in 2023 reported that 85% of adults believe companies remain accountable for online statements even after deletion. Screenshots are the permanent record.

Brands that mishandled pandemic messaging in 2020 still see those posts resurfaced years later in analysis and commentary. Crisis conduct becomes archived evidence.

Be Careful Out There

Back here in Dubai, the sun is shining (it almost always is) and the marina looks calm. There’s not a lot of traffic. Boats are neatly tucked into their slips, as most people are still sheltering in place, bracing for the next wave…which may or may not come.

Of course, marketing will resume (hopefully by the time you read this). Campaigns will relaunch. Everything will normalize. But if you can hear missile interceptions and your primary concern is click-through rate, something is misaligned. There is a time to push and there is a time to pause. The professional skill is knowing which moment you are in.

If the sky lights up outside your window tonight, close the laptop. Check on your people. The impressions can wait.

Sources: Edelman Trust Barometer 2024, Sprout Social Index 2023, Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2023, Deloitte Global Marketing Trends 2024, Nielsen Ad Adjacency and Recall Data, Kantar Global Brand Guidance Research 2023, Cone Communications CSR Study, PwC Global Investor Survey 2023, MIT Research on False News Spread, Science, Pew Research Center Digital Accountability Study 2023

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

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

Retail Media Is No Longer a Test Budget

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

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

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

Why CFOs Are Driving the Shift

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

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

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

AI Will Push Retail Media Even Closer to the Transaction

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

This Is a Global Phenomenon

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Cost: Fragmentation and Creative Compression

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

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

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

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

What Smart Marketers Are Doing 

This is where it gets interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the world of zero-click search.

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

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

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

Why Google is keeping the customer on Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search is splintering: people are searching on TikTok and Instagram

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

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

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

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

Amazon and retail media: the funnel collapses inside the store

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI answers compress the journey even more

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

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

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

A preview of the future: super-apps

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

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

What marketers should do now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the moment I started my career, my entire raison d’être has been creativity. Not creativity as decoration, but creativity as conviction. My job was never to make clients comfortable. It was to push ideas far enough that their palms sweat, because if an idea didn’t create a little fear, it probably wasn’t doing anything useful. I certainly didn’t get into marketing to play it safe. And I never believed boring was a defensible strategy.

So I can’t help but notice that marketing has become more risk-averse at the exact moment risk matters most. The market is now a knife fight for attention, trust and distinctiveness while most brands are optimizing for “inoffensive” work that disappears on contact.

What’s changed is not that risk got riskier. It’s that safe got less effective. The same approvals, the same brand-safety reflexes, the same “let’s not upset anyone” instincts now collide with three realities: culture moves faster than committees, AI makes sameness cheap and abundant, and consumers punish generic messaging with the same criticism that used to be reserved for bad customer service.

A behavior shift

I’m not arguing that brands were ever fearless. They weren’t. It has always taken an unusually insightful and courageous client champion to shepherd a great creative idea all the way to the finish line without watching it get watered down, softened and negotiated into something unrecognizable and benign. That tension between ambition and approval has been part of this business forever.

What has changed is not the existence of fear, but its dominance. Brands are measurably more cautious today than they were even three to five years ago.  Cannes Lions and WARC research from 2024–2025 shows that only about 13 percent of brands now describe themselves as risk-friendly, a sharp decline from the pre-pandemic years when “brave creativity” was still something companies actively claimed to reward. The same research points to a steady increase in approval layers and brand-safety “gating”, even as cultural cycles have accelerated, and media has fractured into faster, messier channels that punish hesitation.

At the same time, Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer shows a global rise in grievance and suspicion. Faced with that data, many brands have drawn the safest possible conclusion: reduce exposure rather than increase clarity; avoid interpretation rather than sharpen intent.

The result is not that creativity has suddenly become worse. It’s that risk tolerance has declined systemically, embedded into processes, governance and default behaviors, long before an idea ever evolves into a campaign.

What safety looks like today

Modern brand safety is no longer primarily about preventing harm. It is about avoiding interpretation. That distinction matters, because harm is contextual and rare, while interpretation is constant and unavoidable. The result is a form of marketing that is technically correct, legally defensible and increasingly empty.

You can see this shift clearly in the work itself. Language has become broader and vaguer, designed to mean just enough to pass review without meaning enough to provoke reaction. According to Kantar’s Global Creative Effectiveness update in 2024, ads that rely on generic messaging underperform distinctive creative by more than 50 percent on brand recall, yet the proportion of campaigns described as “brand safe” or “low risk” continues to rise across global categories. Brands are choosing reassurance over memorability even as the data shows memorability is what drives growth.

Creative half-lives have also shortened. Campaigns are launched, tested and quietly retired at the first sign of friction. This isn’t agility; it’s fragility. WARC’s 2024 analysis of global campaign duration shows a continued decline in long-running creative platforms, replaced by short bursts of interchangeable content optimized for platforms rather than people. When work is designed to offend no one, it is unlikely to impress anyone, so it rarely earns the right to live longer than a few weeks.

Pullbacks now happen faster, too. The threshold for “risk” has dropped from genuine harm to perceived discomfort. Brands routinely pause or revise campaigns within hours of online criticism, even when there is no evidence of commercial impact. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer helps explain why: with grievance and suspicion rising globally, many organizations have decided that the safest move is to minimize exposure altogether. The interpretation is blunt but common: if people are angry, shelter in place.

To compensate for the resulting lack of impact, brands lean harder on media weight. Spend replaces distinctiveness. Reach replaces resonance. This is visible in global FMCG and financial services, where Kantar reports rising media investment alongside flat or declining creative effectiveness scores. The work doesn’t work harder, so the money does. This is hardly a new phenomenon, and one that frustrates me more than somewhat.

Underneath all of this is a quieter but more consequential change: a shift from judgment to checklists. Decisions that once relied on senior marketing instinct are now filtered through brand-safety frameworks, legal matrices and reputational risk scoring. None of these tools are wrong on their own. The problem is that they are rarely balanced by an equally rigorous framework for growth, differentiation or cultural impact. Legal teams have veto power; creativity does not.

This is not restraint as strategy. It is defensive marketing as default. And now that AI can generate perfectly acceptable creative at scale, “acceptable” has quietly become the most expensive position a brand can take.

Why this shift happened now (and not earlier)

The reason this shift is happening now, and not ten years ago, is not cultural fragility or a sudden loss of nerve. It’s structural. Three forces converged in the past few years and collectively rewired how risk is perceived, escalated and approved inside organizations.

First, backlash visibility exploded. Social amplification compresses reaction time and exaggerates scale. A handful of critical posts can look like a global uprising inside a boardroom, even when there is no evidence of commercial impact. According to a 2024 YouGov global study on brand crises, fewer than 10 percent of social media controversies translate into measurable sales decline, yet more than 60 percent of senior marketers said they would pause or pull a campaign based on early online backlash alone. Perception now outruns consequence. Brands are having a kneejerk reaction to the appearance of risk, not the reality of it.

You can see this in how quickly campaigns are withdrawn. In 2024 and 2025, multiple global brands paused or edited work within hours of online criticism, long before any data on consumer behavior or revenue impact existed. The reflex is speed, not judgment. The lesson brands have internalized is not “be more thoughtful,” but “don’t give people anything to interpret.”

Second, AI flattened baseline quality. Generative tools have made acceptable creative cheap, fast and abundant. According to SurveyMonkey’s 2025 global marketer study, nearly 90 percent of marketing teams now use AI in day-to-day content production. The upside is efficiency. The downside is (as I have said repeatedly) sameness. When everyone can produce work that clears a basic quality bar, the natural pressure to take creative risk disappears. You no longer need conviction to get something out the door. You just need a prompt.

WARC’s 2024 analysis of global creative effectiveness shows the gap widening between distinctive campaigns and the growing volume of low-impact, AI-assisted content. Average ad recall and emotional response scores declined year-on-year even as content output increased. In other words, brands are producing more work that feels fine and lands nowhere. AI didn’t make brands cautious. It made caution easier to justify.

Third, governance creep filled the vacuum. Over the past few years, legal, compliance and reputation teams have gained expanded veto power, often without any corresponding accountability for growth, pricing power or differentiation. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a rational response to increased scrutiny, regulation and public visibility. But it has consequences. Decisions that were once made through senior marketing judgment are now filtered through risk matrices and brand-safety frameworks designed to prevent downside, not create upside.

McKinsey’s 2024 global marketing governance report noted a significant increase in cross-functional approval requirements for major campaigns, particularly in regulated industries and global brands operating across multiple cultural contexts. More stakeholders. More sign-offs. More opportunities for dilution. What disappears in that process is not recklessness. It’s edge.

Together, these forces didn’t make brands wiser. They made them procedural. Marketing decisions are now optimized for defensibility rather than distinctiveness, for process rather than point of view. And once caution is embedded into systems, not just people, it becomes the default setting long before an idea ever reaches the work.

That’s the shift. And it explains why so much marketing today feels safe, polished and strangely absent — even as the market becomes louder, faster and less forgiving of anything that doesn’t leave a mark.

Brands that continue to take risk stand out more than before

Risk hasn’t become smarter. It has become rarer, which is exactly what increases its impact.

You can see this most clearly in categories where caution has become the default. As brands collectively soften their tone, narrow their claims and optimize for reassurance, the few that refuse to neutralize themselves now stand out more than they did even five years ago.

Ryanair is an obvious example. While most airlines moved toward softer, more empathetic messaging in the post-pandemic period, Ryanair doubled down on its abrasive, self-aware tone. In a category converging on politeness and apology, the contrast created disproportionate cultural presence relative to spend and helped sustain commercial performance. The risk wasn’t new. What changed was how alone they were in taking it.

Duolingo followed a similar path in tech. As platforms “grew up” their voice, professionalized their messaging and leaned into neutral UX-led communication, Duolingo refused to mature in the expected way. Its chaotic, polarizing personality became more distinctive precisely because competitors retreated into safe, feature-driven language. Subscriber growth and downloads continued, not in spite of the tone, but because it was now so clearly differentiated.

Huda Beauty shows the same dynamic in a different category. At a moment when many beauty brands shifted toward “clean,” minimalist positioning and carefully scrubbed messaging, Huda Beauty leaned harder into founder voice, spectacle and cultural visibility. The work wasn’t subtle, but that was the point. The contrast drove faster direct-to-consumer velocity and stronger launch impact because it cut through a category increasingly optimized to offend no one.These brands are not reckless. They are intentionally non-neutral in a neutralized market. And that is the difference. 

Brands that became safer slowed growth

Safety doesn’t kill brands. It caps upside. And the evidence for that has become much clearer over the past two years, because several global brands have now said the quiet part out loud: growth stalled not because the product failed, but because the brand stopped creating desire.

Nike is the most explicit case. Between 2023 and 2024, Nike, the “Just Do It” brand leaned heavily into performance marketing, efficiency and DTC optimization while pulling back on culturally bold, emotionally charged brand storytelling. The result wasn’t a sudden crash, but a visible loss of momentum: slowing revenue growth, declining foot traffic and market share pressure in key categories. What makes Nike different is that leadership acknowledged the mistake. Executives publicly stated that the brand had lost heat, over-optimized for short-term performance and underinvested in brand-led storytelling. Nike’s subsequent pivot back toward sport, emotion and cultural relevance wasn’t cosmetic. It was corrective.

Burberry tells a similar story in a different category. After a period of creative resurgence, Burberry drifted into safer, quieter luxury signaling. The work became polished, restrained and easier to approve — and less distinctive. In 2024, the brand issued profit warnings and leadership openly acknowledged a loss of relevance and clarity. The problem wasn’t execution. It was a lack of emotional tension. In luxury, when a brand stops taking creative risks, demand softens long before consumers consciously articulate why.

Starbucks shows how this plays out at scale. Over time, Starbucks standardized its messaging, leaned into operational consistency and relied more heavily on promotions and pricing to drive traffic. Same-store sales pressure and declining relevance with younger consumers followed. In 2024, Starbucks leadership acknowledged that the brand had become too transactional and needed to rebuild emotional connection, not just optimize throughput. Again, the issue wasn’t visibility. It was meaning.

None of these brands failed. They’re still large, powerful businesses. But in each case, growth slowed when marketing shifted from creating desire to managing risk. The common thread isn’t bad leadership or weak products. It’s what happens when safety becomes the default posture and brand conviction gives way to process.

This is the danger moment. When brands stop taking risks, they don’t disappear. They become quieter, slower and easier to replace. And in a market where AI can produce perfectly acceptable work on demand, “acceptable” is no longer a neutral choice. It’s a ceiling.

For large brands, hitting that ceiling looks like a slowdown. Scale, distribution and awareness soften the impact. Safety behaves like a speed bump — growth continues, just without momentum.

For smaller brands, the same behavior has a very different outcome. They don’t have the luxury of legacy, footprint or habitual demand to carry them through periods of indistinct marketing.

This is where the real mistake happens. When smaller brands play it safe and start acting like big brands, they voluntarily give up one of the few advantages they actually have. They trade nimbleness for process. Provocation for permission. Speed for approval. In trying to look credible, they abandon the ability to be memorable.

When smaller brands adopt the same safety reflexes — the same vague language, neutral tone and fear of interpretation — they don’t stabilize growth. They stall it entirely. Without risk, there is no shortcut to relevance, no reason to choose them and no second act to fall back on.

Why safety is now more dangerous than it used to be

For years, brands could afford to play it safe because baseline competence still required effort. That’s no longer true. AI has erased the advantage of being merely “good enough.” Acceptable creative is now instant, abundant and indistinguishable. When everyone can clear the same quality bar, clearing it stops meaning anything.

At the same time, performance media has become less efficient. CPMs are higher, attention is more fragmented and returns decay faster. WARC and Kantar both show a widening gap between spend and effectiveness, particularly for brands without strong memory structures. You can still buy reach, but you can’t buy resonance. And without resonance, brands are forced to spend more just to stand still.

Attention itself has also become more fragile. Cultural cycles move faster, campaigns live shorter lives and audiences forget quicker. Long-running platforms have given way to bursts of interchangeable content optimized for feeds rather than memory. The result is a paradox: brands are communicating more and being remembered less.

In that environment, neutral brands don’t feel safe. They feel invisible. They disappear faster than controversial ones because they leave no trace. A brand that provokes a reaction at least creates memory. A brand that carefully avoids interpretation often creates none.

This is where many brands are making the wrong call. The mistake isn’t choosing restraint. Restraint can be strategic. The mistake is choosing it by default, without asking what it actually costs.

What does safety cost us in memorability when everything else looks and sounds the same? What does neutrality do to pricing power when there’s no emotional reason to prefer us? What signal does silence send internally, to teams looking for conviction, and externally, to customers deciding what matters?

Large brands can absorb those costs for a while. Scale, distribution and habit act as shock absorbers. Safety slows them down, but it rarely stops them outright. Smaller brands don’t get that grace period. When they default to the same safety posture — the same vague language, neutral tone and fear of interpretation — they give up the one advantage they actually have: the ability to be fast, opinionated and provocative. In trying to behave like big brands, they surrender the very traits that allow them to compete.

And in a market shaped by AI, declining media efficiency and vanishing attention, fear doesn’t just protect downside. It quietly guarantees irrelevance.

The decision framework winning brands are using

The brands winning right now aren’t braver. They’re smarter.

They don’t debate risk as a creative preference or a personality trait. They treat it as a strategic allocation decision. Risk isn’t something you sprinkle across campaigns or outsource to an agency brainstorm. It’s something you deliberately place, the same way you place budget, talent or leadership attention.

Where risk creates memory: Winning brands understand that not every message needs edge, but some absolutely do. They take risk where memorability matters most: brand launches, platform-defining campaigns, moments where they need to be remembered a week later, not just clicked today. They accept that mild discomfort is often the price of recall and that ideas no one objects to are rarely the ones anyone remembers.

Where restraint protects trust: They are equally deliberate about where restraint protects trust. Not everything benefits from provocation. Regulated communications, moments of genuine vulnerability or categories built on reassurance demand discipline, not drama. The difference is intent. Restraint is chosen because it serves the brand, not because it’s the path of least resistance. Trust is protected without draining the brand of personality everywhere else.

Where silence is strategic: They also recognize that silence can be strategic. In a culture that rewards constant reaction, sometimes the strongest signal is refusing to participate. Winning brands don’t feel compelled to comment on every trend, controversy or cultural flashpoint. They understand that speaking less, but with clarity and conviction, often builds more authority than filling feeds with cautious noise.

Where safety is just habit: Most importantly, they know how to spot where safety has become habit. This is the hard part. It requires asking uncomfortable questions inside the organization: Are we avoiding this idea because it’s wrong, or because it’s unfamiliar? Are we protecting the brand, or protecting ourselves? Is this decision grounded in insight, or in fear dressed up as process? When safety can’t clearly justify itself in terms of growth, memory or trust, it stops being strategy and starts being inertia.

This is the blueprint. Not more risk everywhere. Not reckless provocation. But conscious placement. Risk is no longer a creative choice. It’s a strategic allocation decision.

Risk is more valuable than ever

What’s actually changed isn’t that risk suddenly became smarter, more sophisticated or more virtuous. Risk became scarce. And in markets driven by attention, memory and meaning, scarcity creates value whether brands like it or not.

That’s why the work that still makes people uncomfortable now travels further than the work designed to make everyone comfortable. It’s not louder. It’s not more outrageous. It’s just rarer. In a world where AI can generate perfectly acceptable creative in seconds, the only thing left that still signals intent is the willingness to commit — to a point of view, a tone or an idea that someone might argue with.

Which brings me back to where I started. I didn’t spend a career pushing ideas until clients’ palms sweat because I enjoyed discomfort for its own sake. I did it because that tension was usually the tell. It meant the work was doing something. It meant it had edges. And edges are where memory lives. Risk-aversion isn’t killing marketing. But unthinking safety never propels brands forward.