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

Fair enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The technology mattered. The people mattered more.

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

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

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Years We Confused Activity with Talent

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

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

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

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

AI Does Not Democratize Distinction

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

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

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

But they are not the same thing as originality.

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

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

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

Above average work looks remarkable to average workers.

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

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

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

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

The New Premium Is Human Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

The Gap May Actually Get Bigger

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

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

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

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

A Different Kind of Creativity Crisis

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

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

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

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

The challenge is making sure the humans do too.

So this happened.

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

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

You can already hear the brakes failing.

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

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

All for a tumbler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Is Not the Adult in the Room

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

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

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

The problem is treating AI like judgment.

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

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

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

Context Hijacks Campaigns

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

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

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

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

Localization Is Not Cultural Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

“People Are Overreacting” Is Not a Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether Adidas meant that statement is almost beside the point.

The Numbers Don’t Care About Your Intent Either

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

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

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

Everything, obviously.

Speed Makes Stupidity Scalable

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

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

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

Every Campaign Needs a Kill Switch

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

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

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

That means asking, before launch:

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

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

The Adult in the Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last year, the industry found out the hard way.

The Year the Lions Lost Their Roar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Is Bigger Than One Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is exactly why this announcement feels different.

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

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

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

Better Late Than Never. 

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

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

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

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

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

1.5 Billion Devices May Be Your New Media Channel

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

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

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

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

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

Your SEO Budget Has a Blind Spot

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

Show Up or Pay Double

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

Siri Doesn’t Do Keywords.

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

“Is Heineken a responsible brand?”

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

“Which hotel in Kyoto do people actually recommend?”

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

The Mainstream Just Arrived.

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

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

First Mover Isn’t a Cliché Anymore

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

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

Nobody Gets a Free Pass

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

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

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

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

One Interface. Three Judges.

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

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

PR for Robots: The Hospitality Session

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were guilty by algorithm.

This Is Not a Drill.

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

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

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

The Numbers Don’t Lie

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

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

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

The Glitch That Stole Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

The Brands Going the Other Way

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

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

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

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

Don’t Get Swooshed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Actually Happened

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

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

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

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

This Is Not An Isolated Incident

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

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

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

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

Your dashboard is full. Your funnel is largely empty.

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

“Data-Driven” Became A Religion. 

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

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

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

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

The Pivot That Changes Everything

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

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

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

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

What You Should Do This Week

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

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

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

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

Finally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he suggested people check the website.

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

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

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

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

THE FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE HALL OF THE UNPREPARED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ARROGANCE TAX, DEFINED

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

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

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

WHAT A PREPARED EXECUTIVE ACTUALLY DOES

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

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

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

THE MEME STOCK EXCEPTION (NOT!)

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

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

A CLOSING THOUGHT

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

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

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

It wasn’t. It never is.

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

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

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

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

The Tactic Everyone Uses and Nobody Talks About

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

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

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

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

The Six-Week Runway

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

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

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

The Phone Everyone Recognized

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Borrowers in the World

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

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

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

When Everyone Knows Exactly What You’re Not Saying

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

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

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

Tips for Marketers Who Want to Play This Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One Thing Worth Watching

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Question Nobody’s Actually Asking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What “Good” Actually Looks Like

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

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

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

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

The Availability Problem

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

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

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

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

The Holding Groups Figured This Out

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

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

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

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

The Wrong Question Is the One Everyone Keeps Asking

Everyone wants to know whether AI will replace marketers.

Wrong question.

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

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

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

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

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

Not shocking. But provocative.

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

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

The Line Between News and Entertainment Is Gone

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

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

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

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

Distribution Has Fragmented. Interpretation Has Exploded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust Has Shifted from Institutions to Individuals

Trust didn’t disappear. It moved.

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

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

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

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

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

News Happens Fast. Credibility Builds Slow

News still originates somewhere. That hasn’t changed.

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

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

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

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

Speed creates awareness. People create belief.

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

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

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

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

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

What Needs to Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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