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She has 400,000 Instagram followers and major brand deals. She’s also AI

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By Eve Upton-Clark

Aitana Lopez is part of a growing wave of AI-generated influencers attracting millions of views as brands race to cash in on virtual creators.

At first glance, Aitana Lopez could be any other influencer. Her Instagram feed is a mix of Pilates workouts, model shoots, and photos posing in front of Coachella’s iconic Ferris wheel and inside the Alo gym.

The 27-year-old is a Scorpio. Her long hair is dyed a soft shade of pink, with dark roots coming through. She also doesn’t exist.

Lopez is a “virtual soul”, or at least that’s what her creators at the Barcelona-based tech agency The Clueless call her. Aitana was created using artificial intelligence, and behind her social media platforms, which have a combined following of nearly 400,000, is a team of eleven people.

Aitana is part of a new wave of digitally created avatars emerging from the attention economy and influencer culture. The technology can be so convincing that one viral MAGA influencer, Emily Hart, reportedly raked in several thousand dollars a month through subscriptions and merchandise featuring bikini photos and pro-Trump content before being exposed as an artificial creation built by a 22-year-old Indian medical student.

Influencer marketing is now a $32.55 billion industry, giving AI influencers a massive market to enter. U.S. influencer spending is expected to hit $12.17 billion in 2026, and six in 10 marketers already use AI in influencer campaigns, according to a new report from Sociallyin, a social marketing agency. A 2025 survey from the social and influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy found that roughly 79% of senior marketers surveyed said they are increasing investment in AI-generated creator content. Brands are showing interest, and creators are cashing in on the demand.

The Clueless team developed Aitana’s content strategy by treating her like a real person. “The most important thing for Aitana is that she has a backstory,” says CEO and cofounder Diana Núñez. “We give her a family, a pet—she has a cat—she has a zodiac sign, a favourite movie. Her crush is Jacob Elordi.”

With anti-AI sentiment on the rise, you might assume artificial content would be met with rejection. The data suggests a more complicated picture. One in three Gen Z consumers now make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from AI-generated influencers, and nearly half of college-aged Gen Z consumers follow at least one AI influencer, according to Whop.

AI influencer content has already generated 216.7 million views across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, according to data from Virlo.ai, which tracked 1,300 videos from 959 creators. There is now even an “Oscars for AI influencers,” with Aitana serving as an official ambassador and a $90,000 prize fund up for grabs. The AI Personality of the Year awards, hosted by OpenArt and Fanvue with backing from AI voice company ElevenLabs, score entries on quality, inspiration, brand appeal, and social clout using a points-based system. Bonus points are awarded for having the “right number of fingers and thumbs.”

(At present, there is no legal requirement to disclose the use of AI in sponsored posts unless the content depicts real people or is presented as news, The Clueless explained. Still, they said they prefer to be transparent with fans. “We know there’s some debate on whether all AI content should be labelled AI, but we think that as long as that tag doesn’t affect the algorithm then it should not matter,” the company tells Fast Company in an email exchange. “Something being AI should not be equivalent to something being bad or harmful.”)

Just as influencers first emerged online, commanding attention, loyal followers, and lucrative brand deals from under celebrities’ noses, AI influencers may represent the next phase of a world where the line between real and artificial keeps blurring.

“No one really cares about the content,” says Núñez. “But we’re consuming a lot of it regardless.” The difference with AI influencers, she explained, as opposed to someone like Kim Kardashian, is Aitana can reciprocate a much closer relationship with her fans.

Aitana responds to comments and interacts with other profiles. She messages fans, who pay to chat with her through the subscription-based platform Fanvue. “If someone wants a photo with Aitana, we reply,” says Núñez. “Obviously there are guys trying to flirt with her, and we don’t answer those.”

For brands, the benefits are clear: AI influencers don’t need to pause to sleep, eat or breathe. “We can make a whole month of content in one morning,” Núñez says.  “With AI, it’s about volume.”

Meanwhile, a recent study of more than 500 North American influencers found that 62% report burnout, though much of that can be attributed to the financial instability of the profession.

Hire an AI influencer, and they can become whoever or whatever a brand needs them to be. Aitana has partnerships with Amazon Spain, Fanvue, footwear brand Gioselin, and swimwear brand Berlook. Her average rate for a paid post ranges from $6,000 to $8,000, while her overall business, which includes brand deals, sponsored posts, and her bespoke “skincare” brand Vellum, a software program designed to enhance the skin texture of other AI avatars, generates roughly $50,000 to $80,000 per month.

As AI becomes increasingly accessible, more creators are following the money. Many of these digital characters, including Aitana, also promote courses on how to build AI influencers. “She’s moving from just being an influencer to being someone who inspires people to learn something,” Núñez says.

Should human influencers be worried? That depends. According to a report from Twicsy, which analysed the earnings, revenue streams, and audience engagement of 11,514 virtual and human influencers, sponsored posts from human influencers still generate 2.7 times more engagement than those from AI influencers. Human influencers are liked 5.8 times more and earn 46 times more than their AI counterparts.

Influencers who have built their brands around personality, storytelling, and genuine connection with followers likely have little to fear, if the Twicsy report is to be believed. Those who rely primarily on highly aesthetic, easily replicable content may want to watch their backs.

Núñez believes it is only a matter of time before AI influencers catch up. “We’re not trying to replace jobs. Right now we have 10 people behind Aitana,” she says. “We’re trying to show a different type of content and create more possibilities with AI.”

As for Aitana, while she looks uncannily human, what The Clueless are building is essentially a brand. “The fundamentals are very similar—identity, voice, and audience,” Nunez says. “Aitana is a brand, like Kylie Jenner is a brand.”

Feature image credit: Screenshots: @fit_aitana

By Eve Upton-Clark

Sourced from FastCompany

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5 AI Strategies To Future-Proof Your Brand By 2027

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By Joshua George

Search has shifted more in the last 12 months than it has in the previous five years combined. The May 2026 Google core update is the clearest signal yet of what’s actually shifted under our feet over the last two years. On May 21, days after announcing at I/O what it described as the “biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years,” Google began rolling out Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model inside AI Mode, and a preview of autonomous information agents is launching this summer for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Put simply, search in 2026 is being replaced. And I’ve spent the last 18 months watching brands either adapt to that reality or lose ground to competitors who did.

Below are five strategies I’d be putting into action in 2026 if I were building a growth plan from scratch.

1. Accept That SEO Has Evolved Permanently

It’s been a habit of some in the SEO industry to simply treat a Google update like bad weather: Ride out the storm, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

But the May 2026 update isn’t weather. In reality, it’s Google doubling-down on a shift that’s been building for two years. The future of search is going to be, whether we like it or not, AI-led.

Does this mean SEO is dead? No; we’ve been hearing that since 2015 and we’re still doing fine. But it does mean that focusing solely on traditional SEO can result in the loss of substantial real estate elsewhere—not just in AI search but now agent-led search. Research found that the Top 10 organic rankers accounted for roughly 76% of AI Overview citations in mid-2025, but only about 38% by early 2026.

In short, ranking on Page One of Google no longer guarantees that your brand will appear in the answer your customer actually sees.

2. Audit How AI Talks About Your Brand

Here’s something you might not know: AI already knows about your brand. In fact, an LLM might be turning away your customers on a daily basis, pulling old data from third-party sites or a two-star review from 2016. ​

At my agency, our AI tools give us access to the most granular brand perception data in the AI space. We can see exactly where a brand surfaces across every major answer engine, how it’s characterized, which competitors appear alongside it and which third-party sources the models are leaning on. When you have the data to work with, you can correct the record.

3. Embrace AI, But Value Human Oversight

There are two failure modes I see in 2026, and they’re mirror images of each other.

The first is the brand that treats AI as a threat and refuses to use it anywhere in the content stack. These teams are getting priced out by competitors who are publishing 10 times their volume at higher quality.

The second is the brand that treats AI as a content factory. Generative search models are increasingly capable of identifying low-effort synthesized content and ranking it accordingly.

The winning posture sits between those two extremes. Use AI to compress every part of the workflow where it genuinely adds speed: drafting, research collation, structural variation, translation. Then put your most experienced editors at the back of the pipeline with full authority to rewrite, kill or restructure. ​

4. Build Content That Gets Cited, Not Just Clicked

In an increasingly zero-click world, the most important question isn’t “Did the user land on my page?” It’s “Did the model quote my page when it answered the question on my behalf?”​

Click-driven content is built around keyword density, conversion paths and on-page calls to action. Citation-driven content is built around something else:

• Passage-Level Clarity: Each section should make sense lifted out of context, because that’s exactly what AI models do.

• Internal Consistency: Your facts should match across every page, post and asset.

• Entity Authority: Your brand needs to be associated with specific topics in structured, recognizable ways across the web.

• Verifiable Claims: Make assertions a model can stand behind. Use social proof, internal data or consumer data to back it up. Vague marketing copy doesn’t get quoted, but data does.

If three independent sources agree on a fact about your company, that fact tends to surface inside generative answers. If they conflict, none of them do. Building toward citation means treating your owned content, your earned media and your analyst coverage as one connected system, not three separate channels.

The Final Point

None of these five strategies are speculative; each one maps to a product decision Google or a frontier lab has already soft-launched or announced. The risk isn’t that the future is unclear, but rather that the future is incredibly clear, and yet so many marketing teams are still reading the May 2026 update as a ranking event rather than the formal start of the AI-mediated discovery era. Treat it as the latter. The brands that do will compound a visibility advantage over the next 18 months. The brands that don’t will be writing internal case studies about why they lost theirs.

Feature image credit: Getty

By Joshua George

COUNCIL POST | Membership (fee-based). Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an e-commerce search-first agency and the UK Agency Awards’ 2025 small SEO agency of the year. Read Joshua George’s full executive profile here.

Find Joshua George on LinkedIn and X. Visit Joshua’s website.

Sourced from Forbes

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Your Business May Be Too Measurable for Its Own Good. Here’s What It’s Costing You.

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By Kelly Fletcher, Edited by Chelsea Brown

Customers are making more decisions in places metrics can’t fully reach. The result is a growing disconnect between what you can track immediately and what actually shapes buyer confidence.

Key Takeaways

  • A measurement mindset is healthy, but digital dashboards have trained leaders to expect immediate feedback from every growth investment — a standard that doesn’t fit how PR and earned media actually work.
  • Modern buyers research, compare and ask AI tools for recommendations before speaking to anyone from the business, which means companies that lack market presence enter the contest late.
  • You can be operationally excellent and competitively priced while remaining forgettable. Aim for stronger search presence, message consistency, useful sales assets, third-party validation, executive visibility and improved recognition among priority audiences.

Business owners have spent years being told to measure everything. Track the click, attribute the lead and tie each dollar to a visible result. That discipline has helped companies cut waste and demand accountability, but it has also created a false sense of certainty. Many leaders are growing more confident in the metrics they can see, while customers are making more decisions in places those metrics can’t fully reach.

A measurement mindset is healthy. Without clear goals and reporting, marketing and communications can become scattered and difficult to evaluate. Owners should expect strategy and accountability from every growth investment, including public relations. The problem begins when leaders expect every discipline to produce the same kind of immediate feedback.

Digital advertising can often show whether a campaign is working against a specific optimization goal. PR, media relations and thought leadership work differently. They can and should be measured, but their value often appears across a longer chain of influence: stronger search presence, message pull-through, media authority, share of voice, executive visibility, branded search lift, warmer sales conversations and better recognition among priority audiences.

The difference between measurement and immediacy

Modern business owners aren’t wrong to want proof. Years of digital marketing dashboards, though, have trained many leaders to look for value in one narrow form: immediate action tied to a channel, click or conversion path. That standard works well for tactics like paid search, where weak clicks, poor leads or underperforming landing pages usually show up quickly enough to guide adjustments.

PR doesn’t usually mature that way. A media placement, by-lined article, podcast interview or speaking opportunity may influence a buyer without becoming the final source recorded in a CRM. A prospect may encounter a company through a trade article, hear its executive on a podcast, search through Google or an AI tool and later arrive through direct traffic. The final source may look simple in a report, but the decision was shaped by a wider set of exposures.

PR can be measured, but it shouldn’t be judged only by immediate conversion metrics designed for performance advertising. The better question is whether visibility is making the business easier to find, understand, remember and consider when buyers are forming decisions that aren’t yet visible.

Buyers are forming shortlists earlier

Buyer behaviour has changed in ways that make immediate attribution less reliable as a complete measure of influence. Modern buyers can compare companies, evaluate leadership, read reviews, scan media coverage and ask AI tools for recommendations before speaking with anyone from the business.

The 2025 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report found that buyers reported prior experience with an average of 3.8 of the five vendors on their shortlist and filled a larger share of that shortlist on the first day of the buying journey. If buyers begin with familiar names already in mind, companies that lack market presence enter the contest late.

This is where business owners often misjudge earned visibility. They ask whether a media placement generated a sale within days or whether a by-lined article produced a direct lead. Those questions make sense for a short-term campaign, but they’re too narrow for work designed to build market memory. A buyer may encounter a company’s name several times before reaching out or remember an article during an internal discussion months later.

AI is changing discoverability

Search used to give companies a familiar path to visibility. Buyers typed a query, scanned the results and clicked through to websites. That path has become more fragmented as AI tools, search summaries and answer engines shape how people gather information.

SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click search study found that for every 1,000 Google searches in the U.S., only 360 clicks went to the open web. G2’s 2025 Buyer Behaviour Report found that 78% of B2B software buyers use AI platforms or search functionality to discover and evaluate software, and 79% said AI search had changed how they conduct research.

As AI-assisted discovery grows, companies need credible public signals beyond owned messaging. Earned media, expert commentary, reviews, contributed articles and executive visibility can all influence how a business is understood across search-driven and AI-mediated environments.

The hidden cost of being forgettable

The danger of overvaluing immediate metrics is that it can make leaders feel prudent while they underinvest in the conditions that create future demand. Paid campaigns can be optimized, landing pages can be tested, and sales sequences can be refined. All of that work has value, but it can’t compensate for a weak presence in the places buyers look before they’re willing to engage.

A company can be operationally excellent and competitively priced while remaining forgettable. If buyers don’t recognize the name, can’t find credible validation or don’t associate the leadership team with meaningful expertise, the sales funnel may never get the chance to perform.

The smarter approach is to measure what can be measured while also building what must be believed before it can be counted. Leaders should look for stronger search presence, message consistency, useful sales assets, third-party validation, executive visibility and improved recognition among priority audiences. In a buying environment shaped by AI, independent research, peer validation and fragmented discovery, valuable growth work often makes a company memorable before the buyer ever enters the pipeline.

By Kelly Fletcher,

CEO of Fletcher Marketing PR. Working with regional, national and Fortune 500 companies, Kelly Fletcher has 20 years in the full spectrum of integrated communications, specializing in the art and science of how people process brand messaging, problem-solve and purchase.

Edited by Chelsea Brown

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Google’s Display Ads are dead – here is what replaces them in 2026

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By Luis Rijo

Google is phasing out standalone Display Ads campaigns and folding the Google Display Network into Demand Gen, with a migration tool launching in June 2026.

Google last month confirmed that standalone Display Ads campaigns are being retired, with the Google Display Network folded into Demand Gen as the new unified home for visual advertising across more than 2 million sites, videos and apps. A phased migration tool is now rolling out, and the full transition is expected to complete by 2027.

What is actually changing

The announcement, published on May 26, 2026 on the Google Ads and Commerce Blog, marks the end of Google Display Ads as a standalone campaign type. According to Google, advertisers can now manage their Google Display Network (GDN) presence directly through Demand Gen campaigns. The campaign creation workflow changes, but the underlying network remains unchanged – the same inventory of more than 2 million sites, videos and apps remains accessible.

The move is significant in scale and in what it signals. Display Ads have been part of Google’s advertising infrastructure for well over a decade. Folding them into Demand Gen is not a minor interface update. It is a structural consolidation that changes how advertisers set up, manage, and report on their display activity going forward.

What remains available? Advertisers who want to serve ads exclusively on GDN can still do so. According to Google’s Help Center documentation, customers looking for Display-only campaigns can continue purchasing them within Demand Gen using channel controls – a feature that lets advertisers isolate specific placements. The difference is that the campaign shell itself is now Demand Gen, not a standalone Display campaign.

The migration tool and how it works

Google is launching a phased rollout of its migration tool in June 2026. Eligible advertisers can begin moving existing Google Display Ads campaigns to Google Display Network on Demand Gen using the tool directly inside their Google Ads account.

The tool is the recommended path. According to Google’s Help Center, it allows advertisers to update live campaigns with performance history going back 42 days ported over to the new campaign. That historical data transfer reduces learning time to approximately 1 to 2 days and avoids a “cold start” – the period during which Google’s bidding models lack sufficient data and can underperform. The alternative is a manual budget transition, where advertisers gradually shift spend from existing Display campaigns to Demand Gen by decreasing budgets on the former while proportionally increasing them on the latter.

The step-by-step process inside Google Ads involves navigating to the Campaigns menu, filtering by campaign type for “Display,” selecting the campaigns to migrate, then choosing “Upgrade to Demand Gen” from the Edit dropdown. The migration can handle multiple campaigns simultaneously, though Google does not recommend batches of more than 100 campaigns at a time.

A few technical details matter here. Migrated campaigns will be renamed following the convention “[Original campaign name] #2.” The original Google Display Ads campaigns are not deleted – they are set to “Removed” status and remain in the account for reporting purposes for up to five years under Google Ads’ standard retention policy. Advertisers running lift measurement studies – such as Conversion Lift – are advised not to use the migration tool while a study is active, because the converted campaign will not be automatically associated with the ongoing study.

Budget handling on migration day carries a specific wrinkle. According to Google’s documentation, any budget spent earlier in the day on the Google Display Ads campaign will not be recognised by the new Demand Gen campaign. If a campaign has spent $10 of a $50 daily budget before migration, the new Demand Gen campaign resets and starts with the full $50 for the remainder of the day. Temporary underdelivery or overdelivery is possible within the first 24 hours.

Performance claims and real-world data

Google is citing two sets of numbers to support the migration. On average, according to the announcement, advertisers adding GDN in Demand Gen campaigns see a 9.5% increase in return on investment (ROI). The company also pointed to GoFood, a food delivery platform, as a case study. According to Google, GoFood saw a 24% decrease in cost per acquisition (CPA) and a 19% higher conversion volume after adding GDN to its Demand Gen campaigns.

These figures come from Google’s own data and should be read in that context. The 9.5% ROI improvement and GoFood case study reflect conditions that may not transfer uniformly across industries, account sizes, or competitive environments. Advertisers who have relied on standalone Display campaigns for years will need to test and monitor performance independently after migration, particularly during the first several days when fluctuations are expected.

Feature changes: what is gained and what is lost

The move from Google Display Ads to GDN in Demand Gen involves a meaningful shift in feature availability. Not everything carries over directly, and some capabilities available in Display Ads are not available in Demand Gen.

On the inventory side, Demand Gen expands reach beyond what Google Display Ads offered. Where Display Ads ran across GDN, YouTube, and Gmail, Demand Gen adds Discover and Maps (Maps currently in beta). The ad surfaces available expand from three to five, giving advertisers who opt into them a broader footprint.

Creative formats also expand. Google Display Ads supported Responsive Display Ads, uploaded Display Ads (image ads, HTML5, GIF), and product feeds from Google Merchant Center and Business Data Feeds. Demand Gen adds carousel ads, generative image tools, a wider range of video ad formats, and HTML5 (described in the documentation as “coming soon” for GDN in Demand Gen). GIF support, however, is not listed among the available formats in Demand Gen.

On the audience targeting side, the transition introduces Lookalike segments as a replacement for Similar Audiences. Lookalike segments allow advertisers to reach new users who share characteristics with existing customers. The core targeting options – optimised targeting, remarketing lists, custom segments, first-party data, interest, demographics, and contextual targeting – remain available in both formats.

Bidding changes in specific ways. Manual CPC, Viewable Impressions, and Pay for Conversions are not available in Demand Gen. What replaces them are Max conversions, Max conversion value, tCPA, tROAS, Max clicks, and a new option called tCPC (target cost per click). Demand Gen also introduces Flighted Campaign Total Budgets, which are not available in Google Display Ads.

Pay for Conversions campaigns specifically are handled by the migration tool automatically. According to the documentation, these campaigns will be switched to pay for clicks, while continuing to use target CPA to optimise for conversions at the advertiser’s stated target.

Reporting gains one notable capability in Demand Gen: format segmentation reporting. This breaks down performance data at the format level, including In-Feed, Skippable In-Stream, and Shorts, giving advertisers visibility they did not have within standalone Display campaigns.

Logos and business names are pre-populated from existing Google Display Ads campaigns during migration. If a Display Ads campaign lacks a logo, the migration tool creates a placeholder image to ensure continuity. Advertisers can edit this after migration completes.

Key dates and what comes next

The timeline for this migration has three stages, according to Google’s Help Center documentation.

June 2026: The phased rollout of the migration tool begins. Eligible advertisers can start moving existing Google Display Ads campaigns to GDN on Demand Gen using the tool in their Google Ads accounts.

Coming later (no specific date provided): New Google Display Ads campaigns can only be created within Demand Gen. Advertisers can still access and edit existing Display Ads campaigns until they are migrated.

Coming later (no specific date provided): Remaining eligible Google Display Ads campaigns will be automatically migrated to GDN on Demand Gen without any advertiser action required.

The full migration is expected to complete by 2027. Google has said it will provide account notifications in Google Ads as key dates approach.

Where the money goes – and does not go

There is a dimension to this migration that sits outside the migration checklist: the question of who ultimately benefits from ad spend flowing into Demand Gen rather than standalone Display, and how the balance between Google-owned and publisher inventory shifts in the process.

Google Display Ads – the format being retired – ran by default across the Google Display Network, a third-party publisher ecosystem spanning more than 2 million sites and apps. When an advertiser ran a Display campaign and ads served on an external publisher’s website, a portion of that revenue was shared with the publisher via AdSense or Google Ad Manager. That revenue-sharing model has underpinned publisher monetisation across the open web for over a decade.

Demand Gen has a more layered inventory structure, and understanding it requires separating the surfaces available within the campaign type. The primary surfaces in Demand Gen – YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps – are all Google-owned properties. Discover is Google’s personalised content feed. Gmail is Google’s email service. Maps is Google’s navigation product. According to PPC Land’s analysis of Demand Gen placements, unlike traditional YouTube ads where Google must split revenue with video creators, Demand Gen placements on surfaces like Discover and Gmail allow Google to retain a larger portion of advertising revenue. Those surfaces carry no revenue share obligation to external publishers.

GDN is also available within Demand Gen – but the mechanics are different from how standalone Display Ads worked. In a standard Display campaign, GDN was the entire network, and every impression served on a third-party publisher site generated revenue for that publisher. In Demand Gen, GDN is one channel among several, accessed via explicit channel controls at the ad group level. The default campaign configuration points spend toward YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Advertisers who want GDN inventory must actively opt into it. That shift from default to opt-in is consequential at scale.

In Display & Video 360, the distinction is encoded directly into the reporting infrastructure. According to PPC Land’s coverage of DV360’s granular inventory controls, the standard Inventory Source reporting dimension labels YouTube, Discover, and Gmail traffic as “Google Owned Properties,” while GDN traffic appears separately as “Google Display Network.” Google itself maintains that boundary in its own systems – a clear delineation between inventory where revenue stays with Google and inventory where a share flows to external publishers.

The financial trajectory of Google’s Network advertising segment – the one that pays out to publishers – makes the stakes concrete. Google’s advertising revenue distribution reached a point in mid-2025 where 90% of revenues were flowing to its own properties rather than through publisher partnerships, according to PPC Land’s analysis following Alphabet’s Q2 2025 earnings. Network advertising revenue – covering AdSense, AdMob, and Google Ad Manager – declined 1% year-on-year to $7.4 billion in Q2 2025. By Q1 2026, that figure had fallen further to $6.97 billion, a 4% year-on-year drop of approximately $285 million in a single quarter, according to PPC Land’s coverage of Alphabet’s earnings release.

The Display Ads migration adds structural momentum to that decline. In standalone Display campaigns, GDN publisher inventory was the default and the entire point of the campaign type. In Demand Gen, GDN is an optional channel that requires a deliberate activation step. Every advertiser who migrates without explicitly enabling GDN via channel controls will, by default, direct their visual advertising spend toward Google-owned surfaces where no publisher revenue share applies. Budget that previously flowed to external websites through AdSense now flows to YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps instead.

Google’s Network ad revenue decline has also been attributed in part to AI Overviews reducing click-through rates from search results, which reduces traffic to publisher sites and therefore ad impressions served through AdSense and Ad Manager. The Display migration applies pressure from a different direction: it reduces the share of advertiser display budgets that flow to external publishers, independent of what happens to search traffic volumes.

GDN inventory remains technically available inside Demand Gen, and publishers on the network can still earn revenue from advertisers who opt in. That is the honest limit of the claim. But the structural change is real: the campaign type that made GDN the default has been retired, and the one replacing it treats GDN as an elective channel within a portfolio that tilts heavily toward Google’s own properties.

Why this matters for the marketing community

This consolidation is one of several structural moves Google has made to reduce the number of distinct campaign types in its advertising platform. The retirement of YouTube Video Action campaigns in favour of Demand Gen completed by April 2025, and Demand Gen was expanded to Display & Video 360 in October 2024. The pattern is consistent: Google is reducing campaign-type fragmentation and concentrating activity inside a smaller set of formats built around its AI-driven bidding and creative tools.

Google quietly removed Display and Video campaign support from Performance Planner on March 9, 2026, eliminating the ability to model those campaigns in its forecasting tool. Taken together with the Display migration announcement, the signals from Google have been clear for months. Standalone Display infrastructure is being wound down.

The Google Marketing Live 2026 announcements in May included Demand Gen’s expansion to Google Maps with Promoted Pins, and further AI-assisted campaign creation tools – all pointing toward Demand Gen as the primary canvas for visual advertising across Google’s owned-and-operated surfaces.

For advertisers, the operational consequences are real. Campaigns that have accumulated years of performance history inside Google Display Ads will need to be migrated. The migration tool attempts to transfer 42 days of historical data to ease the transition, but the learning reset is not zero – performance fluctuations within the first several days are explicitly flagged by Google’s own documentation. Advertisers running lift studies or time-sensitive campaigns will need to plan the migration window carefully.

The removal of Manual CPC and Pay for Conversions bidding in Demand Gen will also require workflow changes for teams that have built their optimisation processes around those options. February 2026 changes to how Lookalike segments function in Demand Gen – converting them from hard targeting constraints to audience suggestions – had already altered the audience control model. The Display migration adds another layer to the adjustment.

Advertisers who re-approve migrated ads should expect them to go through the standard approval process. According to Google, migrated ads are treated as newly created ads regardless of how they are transitioned, which means they must be submitted for approval before they can serve. This is particularly relevant for advertisers planning to migrate close to a campaign’s scheduled start date.

What best practices say

Google’s Help Center outlines recommended steps for advertisers using the migration tool. On channels, the guidance is to keep GDN-only selected in channel controls during migration to ensure a proper campaign setting transfer – additional channels like YouTube and Gmail can be added after the migration is complete.

On audiences, Google recommends replicating the audience approach from comparable Display campaigns and testing Lookalike segments. On bidding, the advice is to try similar bid levels to existing Display campaigns, set the conversion attribution window to more than 28 days, and limit bid changes to no more than plus or minus 15% – waiting at least a week between adjustments.

On creative, Google recommends expanding the number of assets, including a business logo and video assets. According to the documentation, this allows ads to scale across the widest possible range of inventory slots, which typically leads to stronger overall performance.

Campaign consolidation is also advised: combining similar audience themes across ad groups, and considering merging ad groups with fewer than approximately 30 conversions in 30 days. A consolidated campaign structure allows Google’s AI to learn more efficiently.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, affecting all advertisers currently running Google Display Ads campaigns globally, announced via the Google Ads and Commerce Blog.

What: Google Display Ads campaigns are being retired as a standalone campaign type. The Google Display Network is being folded into Demand Gen as the unified home for visual advertising, expanding the available ad surfaces from GDN plus YouTube and Gmail to also include Discover and Maps. A migration tool is launching in June 2026 to help advertisers transfer existing campaigns, with 42 days of performance history ported over. The full migration is expected to complete by 2027.

When: The announcement was published on May 26, 2026. The migration tool rollout begins in June 2026. A future date – not yet specified – will prevent the creation of new standalone Display Ads campaigns. A second future date will trigger automatic migration of all remaining Display campaigns.

Where: The change applies to Google Ads globally. Advertisers manage the migration from within their Google Ads accounts. Google Display Network inventory – more than 2 million sites, videos and apps – remains available via Demand Gen campaigns after migration.

Why: Google frames the migration as a response to shifting consumer behaviour and a push toward more unified campaign management. The consolidation aligns with a multi-year pattern of reducing standalone campaign types: Video Action Campaigns were absorbed into Demand Gen by April 2025, Display was removed from Performance Planner in March 2026, and Google Marketing Live 2026 confirmed Demand Gen as the primary vehicle for visual advertising across Google’s owned-and-operated surfaces. Advertisers adding GDN in Demand Gen campaigns see on average a 9.5% ROI increase, according to Google’s own data.

By Luis Rijo

Luís Rijo is a seasoned marketing professional with over 10 years of experience in Digital Marketing,  Search, Social, Display, Video, and DOOH. Based in Europe. Also writing in the spend. Reach out via [email protected]

Sourced from PPC Land

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Your Business May Be Too Measurable for Its Own Good. Here’s What It’s Costing You.

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By Kelly Fletcher| Edited by Chelsea Brown

Customers are making more decisions in places metrics can’t fully reach. The result is a growing disconnect between what you can track immediately and what actually shapes buyer confidence.

Key Takeaways

  • A measurement mindset is healthy, but digital dashboards have trained leaders to expect immediate feedback from every growth investment — a standard that doesn’t fit how PR and earned media actually work.
  • Modern buyers research, compare and ask AI tools for recommendations before speaking to anyone from the business, which means companies that lack market presence enter the contest late.
  • You can be operationally excellent and competitively priced while remaining forgettable. Aim for stronger search presence, message consistency, useful sales assets, third-party validation, executive visibility and improved recognition among priority audiences.

Business owners have spent years being told to measure everything. Track the click, attribute the lead and tie each dollar to a visible result. That discipline has helped companies cut waste and demand accountability, but it has also created a false sense of certainty. Many leaders are growing more confident in the metrics they can see, while customers are making more decisions in places those metrics can’t fully reach.

A measurement mindset is healthy. Without clear goals and reporting, marketing and communications can become scattered and difficult to evaluate. Owners should expect strategy and accountability from every growth investment, including public relations. The problem begins when leaders expect every discipline to produce the same kind of immediate feedback.

Digital advertising can often show whether a campaign is working against a specific optimization goal. PR, media relations and thought leadership work differently. They can and should be measured, but their value often appears across a longer chain of influence: stronger search presence, message pull-through, media authority, share of voice, executive visibility, branded search lift, warmer sales conversations and better recognition among priority audiences.

The difference between measurement and immediacy

Modern business owners aren’t wrong to want proof. Years of digital marketing dashboards, though, have trained many leaders to look for value in one narrow form: immediate action tied to a channel, click or conversion path. That standard works well for tactics like paid search, where weak clicks, poor leads or underperforming landing pages usually show up quickly enough to guide adjustments.

PR doesn’t usually mature that way. A media placement, bylined article, podcast interview or speaking opportunity may influence a buyer without becoming the final source recorded in a CRM. A prospect may encounter a company through a trade article, hear its executive on a podcast, search through Google or an AI tool and later arrive through direct traffic. The final source may look simple in a report, but the decision was shaped by a wider set of exposures.

PR can be measured, but it shouldn’t be judged only by immediate conversion metrics designed for performance advertising. The better question is whether visibility is making the business easier to find, understand, remember and consider when buyers are forming decisions that aren’t yet visible.

Buyers are forming shortlists earlier

Buyer behavior has changed in ways that make immediate attribution less reliable as a complete measure of influence. Modern buyers can compare companies, evaluate leadership, read reviews, scan media coverage and ask AI tools for recommendations before speaking with anyone from the business.

The 2025 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report found that buyers reported prior experience with an average of 3.8 of the five vendors on their shortlist and filled a larger share of that shortlist on the first day of the buying journey. If buyers begin with familiar names already in mind, companies that lack market presence enter the contest late.

This is where business owners often misjudge earned visibility. They ask whether a media placement generated a sale within days or whether a bylined article produced a direct lead. Those questions make sense for a short-term campaign, but they’re too narrow for work designed to build market memory. A buyer may encounter a company’s name several times before reaching out or remember an article during an internal discussion months later.

AI is changing discoverability

Search used to give companies a familiar path to visibility. Buyers typed a query, scanned the results and clicked through to websites. That path has become more fragmented as AI tools, search summaries and answer engines shape how people gather information.

SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click search study found that for every 1,000 Google searches in the U.S., only 360 clicks went to the open web. G2’s 2025 Buyer Behavior Report found that 78% of B2B software buyers use AI platforms or search functionality to discover and evaluate software, and 79% said AI search had changed how they conduct research.

As AI-assisted discovery grows, companies need credible public signals beyond owned messaging. Earned media, expert commentary, reviews, contributed articles and executive visibility can all influence how a business is understood across search-driven and AI-mediated environments.

The hidden cost of being forgettable

The danger of overvaluing immediate metrics is that it can make leaders feel prudent while they underinvest in the conditions that create future demand. Paid campaigns can be optimized, landing pages can be tested, and sales sequences can be refined. All of that work has value, but it can’t compensate for a weak presence in the places buyers look before they’re willing to engage.

A company can be operationally excellent and competitively priced while remaining forgettable. If buyers don’t recognize the name, can’t find credible validation or don’t associate the leadership team with meaningful expertise, the sales funnel may never get the chance to perform.

The smarter approach is to measure what can be measured while also building what must be believed before it can be counted. Leaders should look for stronger search presence, message consistency, useful sales assets, third-party validation, executive visibility and improved recognition among priority audiences. In a buying environment shaped by AI, independent research, peer validation and fragmented discovery, valuable growth work often makes a company memorable before the buyer ever enters the pipeline.

By Kelly Fletcher

Edited by Chelsea Brown

Working with regional, national and Fortune 500 companies, Kelly Fletcher has 20 years in the full spectrum of integrated communications, specializing in the art and science of how people process brand messaging, problem-solve and purchase.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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The Creator Economy’s Next Moat Isn’t Reach. It’s The Data You Already Own

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By Jason Davis

For a decade, the creator economy was sold on a single promise: reach. Find the right voice, buy the right audience, and a brand could borrow trust it could never manufacture on its own. That promise built a market that now exceeds $250 billion globally and is projected to clear $500 billion by 2030. But the thing that built the industry is no longer the thing that will define who wins it.

The defining asset of the next phase is data — specifically, the historical campaign data that agencies, networks, and platforms have spent years accumulating and, until recently, treating as exhaust. As artificial intelligence moves from novelty to infrastructure, that exhaust is turning into the most valuable proprietary asset in the business. The firms that recognized this early are about to separate from the firms that didn’t.

From Gut to Ledger

The creator economy is in the middle of a quiet but total reclassification. Brands are no longer treating creators as a brand-awareness experiment funded out of the marketing slush fund. They are restructuring core budgets around creators as primary media channels; with the same accountability they demand from paid search and programmatic. The IAB projects more than $24 billion in paid amplification of creator partnerships alone heading into this year, with social amplification up nearly 50% year over year.

You cannot run a $24 billion line item on instinct. Accountability requires a ledger — and a ledger requires data. Every brief that converted, every creator-audience pairing that over performed, every format that died on arrival: each is a data point. Multiply that across thousands of campaigns and years of activity, and you have something no amount of venture funding can replicate overnight. You have a proprietary record of what works, indexed to real outcomes.

Brad Hoos, CEO of the Outloud Group explains ‘Data underscores everything we do, proprietary data is the difference-maker between brands returning to an agency for repeat business and walking away if their campaign hasn’t been informed by learnings from thousands of previous engagement or ROI expectations’

This is the part the market has consistently under priced. The conventional view holds that an agency’s value lives in its relationships and its taste. Both still matter. But relationships are portable and taste is subjective. A decade of structured, outcome-linked campaign data is neither. It is the one asset a competitor cannot poach, copy, or outspend.

Why AI Changes the Math

The reason historical campaign data has gone from useful to critical in such a short window is artificial intelligence. AI adoption among creators is no longer experimental — recent surveys put usage of at least one AI tool above 90%. But the more consequential shift is happening upstream, where AI is collapsing the workflow that used to take weeks of human judgment into hours of machine-assisted decision-making.

AI is only as good as what you feed it. A model trained on the open internet can write a serviceable brief. A model trained on your firm’s proprietary history of which briefs converted, for which audiences, at which price points, in which formats, is doing something categorically different. It is no longer generating plausible content; it is making predictions grounded in proven outcomes. Predictive forecasting for creator cohorts — planning a campaign’s performance before it launches — is becoming a real capability, and it runs entirely on the quality and depth of the data behind it.

That is the inflection point. For ten years, historical campaign data was a cost centre: something to store, occasionally audit, rarely revisit. AI converted it into the training substrate for competitive advantage overnight. The data didn’t change. Its strategic value did.

Scott Sutton, CEO of Later describes the way AI becomes critical to data as being a ‘Process of compounding interest whereby the more campaign data gleaned allows for a more advanced informed client and agency of record where creator matching and performance are tracked’

The brands are already moving. Marketers are actively diverting budget toward AI-augmented creator content, and the question is which partners have the data foundation to meet them there — and which are about to discover that reach without a ledger is a commodity.

 

The Coming Bifurcation

This sets up the defining structural divide of the next several years. On one side sit the firms that have been disciplined about capturing, structuring, and retaining their campaign history — and now hold a proprietary dataset that compounds with every new activation. On the other side sit the firms that treated each campaign as a one-off, billed the client, and let the data evaporate.

The first group is building a flywheel: more campaigns produce more data, more data sharpens the AI, sharper AI wins more campaigns, and the cycle tightens. The second group is running on a depreciating asset — relationships and reputation that AI is steadily commoditizing. There is no catching up to a decade of structured data by spending more next quarter. The advantage compounds, which means the gap widens.

Three forces are accelerating the divide. Attribution is becoming platform-native, with shoppable video generating first-party purchase data that closes the measurement gap that long protected mediocre performers. Regulation is tightening — the FTC on disclosure, the EU’s Digital Services Act on platform accountability — pushing spend toward established, compliant, data-governed partners and away from handshake deals. And campaign cadence is shifting from quarterly tentpoles to always-on programs, which generate exponentially more data and reward the firms equipped to learn from it in real time.

What This Means for Operators and Investors

For operators, the mandate is unambiguous: treat your campaign data as a balance-sheet asset, not an operational by product. Capture it with structure. Govern it with discipline. The agency that can show a brand not just who to work with but a data-backed prediction of how a campaign will perform is selling something its competitors structurally cannot.

For investors and acquirers, the implication is sharper still. In a fragmenting market, the durable underwriting question is no longer “how much reach does this asset control?” It is “what proprietary, AI-ready data does this asset own, and does it compound?” Reach can be rebought. Talent can be re-signed. A decade of structured, outcome-linked campaign data is the rare asset in this industry that cannot be — and that is precisely why it is becoming the one worth paying for.

The creator economy spent its first decade proving creators could move audiences. It will spend its next decade proving who can predict it. The firms that have been quietly building the ledger already know the answer.

Feature image credit:  Chen Chao/China News Service via Getty Images

By Jason Davis

Find Jason Davis on LinkedIn and X.

Sourced from Forbes

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iPhone 18 Pro Release Date: Apple Freezes Out Android Competition

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By Ewan Spence

The annual battle for premium smartphone sales is won not only by hardware specifications and software upgrades, but also by marketing and release date strategies. Apple’s September launch of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max creates bottlenecks in global distribution channels, consumer confidence, and the launch dates of Android-powered rivals. With Samsung and Google events forced back into July and August, consumers are watching a chess match between Apple and its rivals.

The iPhone 18 Pro Leaves Android In No Man’s Land

The iPhone 18 Pro release date pushes Android smartphones out of contention in September, forcing premium manufacturers to change their hardware launch dates and adopt defensive marketing strategies.

Apple’s iPhone launch dictates the global smartphone cycle. The weight of marketing and brand awareness shifts to the iPhone, and the visibility of premium Android handsets will diminish. Consumers’ hard-won attention during the summer launch window for premium smartphones will drop immediately when the iPhone is revealed.

The earlier the launch of the iPhone 18 Pro, the less time Apple’s Android competitors have to establish themselves as “the best smartphone”. They are forced into weaker defensive launch dates, creating lifecycles that are counter to the iPhone’s primary cycle. The iPhone 18 Pro’s launch will reset not just the iPhone market but also threaten each manufacturer as they face Apple’s prolific advertising.

Samsung relies on its premium foldables to illustrate its hardware prowess, and the Galaxy S26 family launched almost diametrically opposite Apple’s cycle in Feb. 2026. Google has shifted its Pixel smartphone announcement to August, leaving a sales window measured in weeks before Apple dominates the supply channels.

Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro Release Robs Android Of Retail Momentum

Apple’s early September release schedule forces network operators to reallocate marketing subsidies and channel inventory away from premium Android devices to the iPhone 18 Pro.

Demand for the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max is expected to be at least as high as 2025’s iPhone 17 Pro. Pre-orders of the iPhone 17 family were surpassing those of the iPhone 16. Each network and each retailer has to balance that same wave at their own level, including managing inventory space.

Carriers will ensure there is warehouse and shelf space for the new iPhone, which means clearing out the Android-powered opposition ahead of time. Manufacturers will lose the visibility they had in the days and weeks before the iPhone launch, robbing them of momentum during the window when annual iPhone contracts are ending, and consumers are looking for a new phone.

Apple Can Own The Market With The iPhone 18 Pro Release

The launch of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max on Sept. 9, and the retail release on Sept. 19 secures Apple’s control over the seasonal market. Google, Samsung, and the Android competition are forced to compress their Q3 schedules before rebuilding for the Q4 holiday season, while Apple demands carrier resources and dominates online sentiment.

The launch timing and the hold over the market are just as crucial to the success of the iPhone 18 Pro as the hardware specifications and software upgrades.

Feature image credit:; Getty Images

By Ewan Spence

Find Ewan Spence on LinkedIn and X. Visit Ewan’s website.

Sourced from Forbes

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“Unsexy” Marketing Channels Are Beating Digital by big Margins

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By JOY GENDUSA

Most marketing plans are relying solely on digital marketing, and they are missing traditional revenue-boosting advertising channels.

Trends are seductive, but they don’t always pay off. Just look at Meta’s metaverse. Billions were poured into building a futuristic 3D world for work and play, only for the virtual reality hype to outpace real-world adoption, resulting in losses exceeding $80 billion.

That’s the danger of chasing what’s new simply because it’s hot in the moment.

In marketing, flashy doesn’t equal results. What drives revenue for your business may be far less glamorous. I know it is for me. I built my company, PostcardMania, from a small startup with no investors into a $100+ million business by relying on marketing that works—not what’s trending.

It’s the proven channels that keep showing up, delivering measurable returns, while others spark and fade just as quickly as they arrived. Because at the end of the day, there’s only one metric that matters: does it bring in revenue?

Here’s why, in marketing, reliable beats flashy every time.

Traditional marketing is making a comeback

Have you ever tried opening a social media app to find it’s down? It’s annoying at best and panic-inducing at worst if your revenue relies on it. You probably remember how you felt on January 19, 2025, when TikTok went down for 14 hours. Meta also experienced technical issues on March 11, 2026, causing global outages on Instagram.

The reality is, not every marketing channel is 100 percent stable. Traditional forms of advertising, however, have not wavered. Print media, radio, and television have continued functioning and have been widely available for advertising regardless of political or social uncertainty. People feel they can expect and rely on traditional advertising.

About 67 percent of people find mail trustworthy for protecting privacy, and when 1,200 consumers were asked which marketing channel they trusted the most, 76 percent said direct mail—that’s three out of every four people. Only print ads in newspapers and magazines (82 percent), TV ads (80 percent), and mailed catalogues (76 percent) ranked better, and all are considered unsexy by today’s marketing standards.

If you haven’t added a highly trusted channel into your marketing mix, you could be leaving leads and revenue on the table.

Think about it: Aren’t you still a little suspicious of the businesses you’ve never seen before that pop up on your social media feed? Do you buy from them right then and there?

Most traditional advertising has a higher ROI

Meta’s most recent annual report revealed another increase in the cost of its digital advertising. Looking at Q4 2024 and 2025, ad prices rose by 6 percent year-over-year, and 9 percent for all 2025 compared to 2024.

Digital advertising has become significantly more expensive over the past several years. Price benchmarking puts the average search cost per click at $2.41 in 2019; this benchmark climbed to $5.26 in 2025—an increase of 118 percent. Spending more means you’re making less. While the cost of U.S. postage for marketing mail has also increased, the return on investment of direct mail is still higher than digital advertising. According to research, the average ROI of direct mail is 161 percent and exceeds email ROI by 266 percent, beating digital display ROI by 600 percent, and paid social media ROI by 667 percent.

Digital channels attract a lot of user attention but clicks and shares don’t always translate to revenue. I’ve found this to be the case for my own business. For us, leads from direct mail generate $234.54 per lead compared to digital leads, which generate $41.60.

Bottom line: Try something other than digital ads, track your ROI closely, and scale up what works best for your business.

The decline of digital marketing isn’t just ROI-based

Most of us are feeling it to an extent—more and more adults continue to report negative feelings about digital overwhelm. Multiple countries are implementing social media bans for minors as studies show influencers suffer negative emotional impacts. Doomscrolling has led to rising rates of anxiety, depression, stress, emotional dysregulation, and decreased attention spans. Social media is addictive and trendy, but not always for the best when not used in moderation.

Consumers, on the other hand, report feeling calmer, more attentive, and more in control when interacting with print media or connecting in person. One study found that reading for just 30 minutes can lower heart rate and muscle tension. Another study showed it takes consumers 21 percent less cognitive effort to process tangible direct mail pieces than digital marketing.

Print media, while easy on the brain, increases recall. This is because physical materials improve a reader’s ability to understand and remember a message.

Your marketing channels need to be reliable and consistent, create revenue, and also positively impact your consumer base—even if they aren’t sexy. By implementing more opportunities for your prospects and customers to interact with you in person, on the phone, or through print media, you’ll increase those “feel-good feelings” and build lasting positive relationships.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

By JOY GENDUSA

Sourced from Inc.

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Anti-social: It’s fads, not friends, which now dominate our feeds

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By John Laurenson

Social media platforms used to be about communication between friends – now many are increasingly short video entertainment hubs. The business model is to increase the time people spend on their apps and increase ad revenue. But is there already a consumer backlash?

Aurélia fixes herself a coffee, sits down in her beautiful garden not far from Paris and goes on Instagram “to relax.” First up: “a guy I like a lot who does interior design. He’s in Venice at the moment.” She’s into interior design, and has even just had two bird drawings by the 19th Century English designer William Morris tattooed on her arms. She scrolls down. Two kittens having a fight. “I love animals so I get a lot of animals. That’s how it works, social media. You click on bananas and they give you bananas.”

There are ads too – although they look just like the other posts – for a robot-vacuum cleaner, a diet and bed linen (with Morris-inspired designs). But no friends. She has 198 on Instagram but she says “it’s completely changed. I practically don’t see any friends’ posts anymore.” She’s pretty much given up posting herself. “I don’t think anyone sees them anymore anyway.”

While there remain committed social, amateur posters on Instagram and especially Facebook, the switch from communicating with people you know to scrolling through professionally made content from people you don’t, is even more pronounced among young users.

Kylian, 16, is in vocational training to become a chef. He’s on TikTok and Youtube a lot, he says. “I like looking at videos more than photos or messages. I watch videos made by people I don’t know. I don’t post at all. I’m a rather shy person. I stay in my bubble. I watch and that’s all. I keep my reactions to myself.”

“I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators,” says Lucie, also 16. “They’re more interesting than the posts of people I know.” She doesn’t post except sometimes “stories” which disappear after 24 hours.

Whether it’s TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the “digital town square” of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.

Many social media users, such as Aurélia, have largely given up on posting content or comments (Credit: John Laurenson)

Many social media users, such as Aurélia, have largely given up on posting content or comments (Credit: John Laurenson)

In France, annual official Barometre du numerique 2026 shows 49% of social media users are “active only occasionally”. In the UK, an Ofcom report  published in April showed a year-on-year drop of users who actively post from 61% to 49%. In the US, a Morning Consult survey of June last year found 28% reported posting less often than the previous year. Just 33% now post daily compared to 57% who use it for entertainment daily. The gap is a lot wider still for Gen Z – 18% active for 74% passive.

Vanessa Lalo, a Paris-based clinical psychologist specialising in on-line behaviour, says “users have become more conscious that the traces you leave (on social media) stay there forever and some no longer want to maintain social media relations that can be superficial. Some don’t want the exposure to criticism that might be a risk when you post or the feeling that their post will seem poor alongside all the professional content”.

However, Lalo adds, people haven’t stopped posting, rather they are posting different things and in different places. “On TikTok, for example, young people publish a lot of content but it’s more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives.”

That still happens, she says, but it’s moved from social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to messaging sites like WhatsApp. There’s also been a move towards private groups on Instagram and Snapchat. “These are much more intimate places where you’re not bombarded with ads and content made by influencers,” she says.

“What we’re seeing is social media splitting in two,” says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. “Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social. The catch is, those kinds of spaces are harder for companies to make money from.”

Small business owners are being pushed to become presenters, editors, trend spotters and content creators, on top of actually running the business – Matt Navarra

It was TikTok that helped to pioneer an algorithm that figures out from the moment you start scrolling what you like, and then fills your feed with material calculated to keep you on the app for the longest possible time.

Now, says Matt Navarra, “Meta has built what it calls an AI system for unconnected content recommendations on Facebook and Instagram, which basically means, they’re increasingly showing you stuff from people you don’t follow because the machine thinks you’re going to like it. It’s not biased towards, is it a professional creator? Is it a brand? Is it a friend? If they can see that you’ve engaged with a friend a lot, you might see a lot more of their content. It’s just that who you are friends with, who you follow, has become irrelevant in a way.”

This all means that small businesses, that have long used social media for free promotion have to up their game.

“There’s a real opportunity for some small businesses,” says Matt Navarra. “A bakery, florist, salon or local café can still break through if they have a good story, strong visuals or behind-the-scenes content people want to watch. But it also means the job has changed. Small business owners are being pushed to become presenters, editors, trend spotters and content creators, on top of actually running the business.”

The social platforms continue to be monetised predominantly by ad revenue. That is still the core business model. And ad revenue continues to grow – Matt Navarra

Social media is evolving into something passive like television, albeit television that adapts as you zap. Or rather which knows you so well that it doesn’t seem to matter that much that it’s taken the remote control. You give the platform information about yourself that it uses for commercial gain and, in return, it gives you content tailored to please you for free.

The transition from truly social media to entertainment platform does seem to be paying off. “The social platforms continue to be monetised predominantly by ad revenue. That is still the core business model. And ad revenue continues to grow,” says Matt Navarra. Global social media ad revenue is expected to reach $317 billion (£236bn) in 2026, up from $277 billion (£206bn) last year. Meta is the biggest winner. Its ad sales already increased 22% year-on-year in 2025. Ad sales are expected to hit $243 billion (£181bn) this year, enough to overtake Google for the first time.

AI powered digital ad targeting is becoming ever more effective and precise. “The social platforms allow companies to put ads amongst the content that you’re scrolling through. Every third or fourth scroll is an ad. And they are the world’s best ad targeting engines. They know so much about your interests because of what you’ve looked at, liked, engaged with, what you’ve chosen to follow, the time you’ve spent in certain areas of the app, things like that,” Navarra says.

“So advertisers will go in and say: ‘I want to place an ad next to people in the UK who are between thirty and sixty years old and who are interested in DIY’ and the social platforms will have that information and will place the ads accordingly.”

The price will depend on the number of impressions (clicks) the advertiser wants and how tight the criteria are. It costs more to place ads in the social media feeds of people who buy horses than people who buy ice-cream.

More like this:
• TikTok is tracking you, even if you don’t use the app. Here’s how to stop it
• How to stop AI from turning your brain to mush
• This monkey selfie will protect you from AI slop

Might there be a backlash coming? Don’t many people go on to social media to see how friends are reacting to their posts or comments before settling down to scroll through professionally made content?

Whether it’s the shrinking social motivation to get on these apps or something else, the amount of time people spend on social media plateaued at an average of 141 minutes in 2025, down slightly from 143 minutes in 2024. However, this is only part of the story, as the number of people using social media and the total time humanity spends on these apps continues to rise. For Gen Z it’s higher still. Around five hours a day in the United States where, for this demographic, social media has also become the primary search engine and shopping tool.

Meanwhile, for those who miss what are fast becoming the old days when social media enabled you to share a bit of your life, a joke or a point of view with people you more-or-less knew, there are tools within platforms, says Matt Navarra, that allow you to choose to see mainly friends and family content. “People can flick to a feed that gives them that,” he says. “But most people don’t.”

Feature image credit: Getty Images

By John Laurenson

Sourced from BBC

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The future of OOH isn’t standing still

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By Patrick Dolan

As consumers move through their days, static thinking about out-of-home media is struggling to keep up. From transit wraps to rideshare placements, the most compelling OOH opportunities are no longer fixed to a single spot – they’re traveling the same routes your audience is.

Marketing has become incredibly sophisticated at understanding how people move. Brands invest heavily in customer journey mapping, location intelligence, attribution and audience analytics to understand where consumers spend their time and how they make decisions.

Yet when it comes to media planning, we often still think about audiences as if they’re stationary.

The reality is that consumers are constantly moving. They travel between offices, stores, restaurants, entertainment venues, transit systems, airports, campuses and neighbourhoods. They encounter countless environments throughout the course of a day, and every one of those environments creates an opportunity for a brand to show up in a way that feels relevant and connected to the moment.

Moving media

As consumer behaviour has evolved, so has out-of-home.

For many marketers, OOH is still synonymous with billboards, street furniture, and place-based media. Those formats remain incredibly important. They build awareness, deliver scale and continue to be a critical part of successful media plans.

But they’re no longer the whole story.

Today’s OOH landscape includes a growing range of moving and dynamic formats that allow brands to engage consumers throughout their daily journeys. Transit media, rideshare advertising, vehicle wraps, mobile billboards, waterway media and other dynamic executions extend a brand’s presence beyond fixed locations and into the spaces between them.

While a billboard may establish a powerful presence at a destination, moving media follows the flow of consumer activity – reaching people as they commute, shop, attend events, travel and experience their communities.

Location matters 

This shift reflects a broader change taking place across marketing.

Advertisers increasingly recognize that context matters. Knowing who someone is remains important, but understanding where they are, what they are doing, and the mindset they’re in can be equally valuable. Relevance is often created by the environment surrounding the message as much as the audience receiving it.

That’s where OOH has a unique advantage.

Out-of-home doesn’t interrupt the consumer experience. It exists within it.

Whether it’s a transit campaign surrounding a major event, a mobile activation supporting a product launch or a rideshare program concentrated around a convention district, OOH has the ability to reinforce a brand message in a way that feels timely, contextual and authentic. In those moments, location isn’t simply where the ad appears – it becomes part of the creative canvas.

Measurement capabilities 

At the same time, the industry’s measurement capabilities have advanced significantly.

For years, OOH was often viewed primarily as an awareness medium. Marketers appreciated its visibility and scale but struggled to evaluate it using the same frameworks applied to other channels.

That’s changed.

Today, advertisers have access to sophisticated tools that provide deeper insight into audience movement, campaign reach, visitation patterns, engagement and attribution. Location intelligence, mobile data, geofencing and improved measurement methodologies are helping marketers better understand how OOH contributes across the customer journey and how it drives real business outcomes.

This progress comes at exactly the right time.

Marketers are navigating an increasingly fragmented media environment where attention is harder to capture, and every investment is expected to perform. As a result, there is growing demand for channels that can deliver scale, flexibility, contextual relevance and measurable results.

OOH is uniquely positioned to deliver all of the above.

Opportunity ahead

The industry’s continued growth reflects its ability to evolve alongside changes in technology, consumer behaviour and media consumption. Dynamic and moving formats represent the next step in that evolution, creating new opportunities for brands to connect with consumers wherever their journeys take them.

The opportunity ahead is not to rethink the value of OOH. It’s to broaden our understanding of what OOH can be.

Consumers are moving. Media planning is becoming more movement-oriented. And the ability to engage audiences in motion will be one of the defining strengths of out-of-home in the years ahead.

 

By Patrick Dolan

Sourced from The Drum

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