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12 Reasons to Wait for the iPhone 18 Pro

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We’re only three months out from the launch of Apple’s premium next-generation smartphone line-up, and while we’re not expecting a sea change in terms of functionality, there are still several enhancements rumoured to be coming to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.

One thing worth noting is that Apple is reportedly planning a major change to its iPhone release cycle this year, adopting a two-phase rollout starting with the iPhone 18 series. That means the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumoured foldable iPhone (“iPhone Ultra”) will be released in September 2026, followed by the iPhone 18, iPhone Air 2, and iPhone 18e in spring 2027.

Overall Design

Rumours suggest the iPhone 18 Pro line-up will largely retain the same design as the iPhone 17 Pro models. Most rumours suggest the rear camera system will look identical to the current generation, featuring a raised “plateau” with three lenses arranged in a triangle – although recent dummies indicate a possible thickening of the plateau and the protrusion of individual lenses. Display sizes are also expected to remain unchanged, with the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max continuing to use 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch panels, respectively (the same dimensions introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro series). iPhone 18 Pro models could drop the current two-tone look of the rear casing found on the iPhone 17 Pro in favor of a more seamless aesthetic, while Apple has apparently updated the back-glass “replacement process” to minimize the color difference between the Ceramic Shield 2 glass and the aluminium frame, resulting in a more unified appearance.

Next-Level Battery Life

Thicker Chassis

The iPhone 18 Pro Max will feature a bigger battery for continued best-in-class battery life, claims a Chinese leaker. The Weibo user known as “Digital Chat Station” said that the ‌iPhone 18‌ Pro Max will have a battery capacity of 5,100 to 5,200 mAh. (The iPhone 17 Pro Max has the biggest ‌iPhone‌ battery to date at 5,088 mAh. Apple says it has a battery life of up to 39 hours.) According to another rumour, the body of the iPhone 18 Pro Max will be slightly thicker than the iPhone 17 Pro Max, raising the device’s weight to around 243 grams. That would make the iPhone 18 Pro Max approximately 3 grams more than the iPhone 14 Pro Max, which is currently the heaviest model Apple has produced. A larger battery is the most likely cause.

Smaller Dynamic Island

Under-Screen Face ID?

Rumours continue to circulate about whether the iPhone 18 Pro models will introduce under-display Face ID, but reports remain divided on when the technology will actually arrive. The feature would move the TrueDepth camera system beneath the display, eliminating the need for the current Dynamic Island cut-out.

According to Wayne Ma of The Information, Apple is targeting a design without a Dynamic Island, replacing it with a single pinhole camera in the upper-left corner of the screen. However, other sources dispute that claim. Display analyst Ross Young believes under-display Face ID is possible for the iPhone 18 Pro, but says a smaller Dynamic Island will still be present. Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman has echoed this view, reporting that the new models will feature a slimmed-down Dynamic Island rather than removing it entirely. Apple is also said to be testing new camera miniaturization technology to reduce the size of the front-facing camera currently located within the Dynamic Island.

The Weibo leaker “Ice Universe” has claimed the Dynamic Island cut-out on the iPhone 18 Pro models will be approximately 35% narrower than it is on the iPhone 17 Pro models. Specifically, they said it will have a width of around 13.5mm, down from around 20.7mm.

Meanwhile, Chinese leaker Instant Digital has offered yet another version of events, saying the Dynamic Island will shrink in size, but that under-display Face ID and camera technology won’t debut this year. The latest word on the subject is that Apple is weighing two options for the iPhone 18 Pro’s Dynamic Island, and a final decision has yet to be made. One option apparently retains the existing screen mold from the iPhone 17 Pro, while the other introduces a significantly smaller “Mini ‌Dynamic Island‌” enabled by moving the Face ID receiver and transmitter components beneath the display.

Upgraded Display

LTPO+

The iPhone 18 Pro models will reportedly use LTPO+ display technology, which should be more power efficient than the current LTPO technology in the iPhone 17 series. Such an upgrade could also contribute to longer battery life (see above), since LPTO+ enables finer control of OLED light emission, potentially allowing the display to optimize its operation based on environmental conditions. In other words, it will know better when to up screen brightness or reduce it, depending on surrounding light sources. The panels are reportedly being supplied by Samsung Display and LG Display.

A20 Pro Chip

2nm Process

The iPhone 18 Pro models will use Apple’s A20 chip, based on TSMC’s 2nm process for power and efficiency improvements. A move to 2nm fabrication increases transistor density, which will enable higher performance. The A20 series is expected to deliver roughly a 15 percent speed gain and about 30 percent better efficiency compared with the A19 series used in Apple’s iPhone 17 models.

Apple’s A20 chip will be packaged with TSMC’s Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) technology, suggesting at least some A20 chips will have RAM integrated directly onto the same wafer as the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, rather than sitting adjacent to the chip and connected via a silicon interposer. This could contribute to faster performance for both overall tasks and Apple Intelligence, and longer battery life from improved power efficiency.

C2 Modem

Replacing Qualcomm

Apple plans to include its next-generation C2 modem in the iPhone 18 Pro models, according to supply chain analyst Jeff Pu. The chip will succeed the C1 modem, which debuted in the lower-cost iPhone 16e as Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, and the C1X modem chip in the iPhone Air, which Apple says is up to 2× faster than the C1. The C2 is expected to bring faster speeds, improved power efficiency, and support for mmWave 5G in the United States – a feature missing from the C1 and C1X.

Apple’s modem roadmap is part of a long-term strategy to reduce reliance on Qualcomm, which currently supplies 5G modems for the rest of the iPhone line-up. The company has been working on developing its own cellular chips for years, aiming for deeper integration and greater control over power management and performance.

New Camera Sensor

Samsung-Made

Samsung is working on a new three-layer stacked image sensor, reportedly intended for the iPhone 18. The sensor, referred to as PD-TR-Logic, integrates three layers of circuitry, which would improve camera responsiveness, reduce noise, and increase dynamic range. The leak comes from a source known as “Jukanlosreve,” who claims the sensor is being developed specifically for Apple’s 2026 iPhone line-up. Sony has long been Apple’s sole image sensor supplier, so Samsung’s entry would be a big shift in the iPhone’s camera supply chain.

Variable Aperture

DSLR-Style

Apple intends to equip this year’s iPhone 18 Pro models with a variable aperture lens, according to reports. Weibo-based leaker Digital Chat Station claims the main rear camera – what Apple calls the 48-megapixel Fusion camera – on both iPhone 18 Pro models will offer variable aperture, which would be a first for the iPhone. A variable-aperture system physically adjusts the lens opening, letting more light in for low-light shots or narrowing the opening for brighter scenes and deeper depth of field.

The main cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro, 16 Pro, and 17 Pro all use a fixed ƒ/1.78 aperture, where the lens is permanently set to its widest setting. With a variable lens, the iPhone 18 Pro would allow users to manually shift the aperture, similar to on a DSLR camera. This would mean more control over depth of field, enabling sharper focus on subjects or smoother background blur. Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in November 2024 that Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro models will get the feature.

5G Satellite Internet

Non-Terrestrial Data

According to a report by The Information, Apple plans to add support for 5G networks that operate via satellites rather than Earth-based towers as early as next year. This advancement would allow future iPhones to gain full internet connectivity through satellite, not just limited emergency features.

If Apple meets the 2026 target, the first devices to feature 5G satellite internet would likely be the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumoured foldable iPhone. Apple partners with Globalstar for its iPhone satellite features, but there is currently no service that delivers full 5G satellite internet directly to a smartphone. That said, Amazon and Globalstar announced in April a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire the satellite operator. Amazon’s Leo satellite network will power existing iPhone features – with scope for additional feature support as part of a forthcoming infrastructure upgrade.

Simplified Camera Control

New Design

Apple is reportedly working to simplify the Camera Control button’s design on iPhone 18 models in order to reduce costs. The current Camera Control button on iPhone 17 models uses both capacitive and pressure sensors beneath a sapphire crystal surface. The capacitive layer detects touch gestures, while the force sensor recognizes different pressure levels for taps, presses, and swipes.

However, according to the Weibo-based account Instant Digital, Apple will remove the capacitive sensing layer and retain only pressure sensing recognition in the second iteration to achieve all Camera Control functions on the iPhone 18. The simplified version is not about reducing functionality in the button, but about saving money. The current solution is said to be very expensive for Apple and is generating costly after-sales repairs.

We don’t expect Camera Control to go away anytime soon – Apple apparently sees it as a key feature, so much so that it has reportedly made deliberate engineering compromises to ensure that the first foldable iPhone features the button.

New Colours

Three in Testing

In February 2026, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported that Apple is testing a deep red finish for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Rumours of purple and brown finishes have also circulated, but Gurman believes those are just variants of the same red idea. Since then, we’ve seen aligned rumours that the devices will come in light blue, dark cherry, dark grey, and silver.

The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max were previously available in Deep Purple, and Apple has never released an iPhone in a genuinely brown color. According to a Chinese leaker, Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro models won’t come in black this year. If the rumor is true, it will be the second consecutive year Apple has ditched what was arguably its most classic color option for the Pro lineup.

iOS 27

Smarter Siri

The iPhone 18 Pro will ship with iOS 27, which brings the biggest Siri shake-up in the assistant’s history. Apple introduced Siri AI at WWDC in June – a rebuilt, more conversational version of Siri with onscreen awareness, personal context understanding, and broad world knowledge that lets it pull up-to-date answers from the web. It also gains its own standalone app for revisiting past conversations, an expanded Visual Intelligence mode, and writing tools that work across email, messages, and documents. Like the iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro is expected to carry 12GB of RAM, so it should run the full range of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features.

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Sourced from MacRumors

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Media spend on customer acquisition accelerates amid rush to AI: Gartner

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Media spending funnelled to conversion and awareness jumped 10% from 2024.

Dive Brief:

  • Nearly two-thirds, or 62.6%, of media spend in 2026 is being directed toward conversion and awareness, a 10% increase from 2024, according to newly released data from Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.
  • CMOs also are investing in human talent, despite AI adoption being a goal for many organizations in an effort to reduce labor costs. The survey found labor accounted for 24.5% of marketing budgets in 2026, up from 21.9% in 2025.
  • The findings signal the importance of new customer acquisition and growth for marketers. Loyalty and retention now accounts for less than 15% of overall media spend, a 29% decrease over the same period.

Dive Insight:

Digital channels continue to rapidly overtake offline ones in terms of overall media spending, largely due to CMOs feeling increased pressure to adopt AI solutions that offer optimization and personalization, per recent Gartner data.

However, the focus on digital channels and short-term optimization may be hurting AI-readiness, according to the report. Organizations that direct a larger share of their budget to loyalty and customer retention tend to be more AI-mature, per Gartner. This implies that less AI-ready organizations may be putting too much emphasis on channels that are easier to measure and automate.

“AI can help marketers optimize faster, but optimization is not the same as strategy,” said Ewan McIntyre, vice president, analyst and chief of research in the Gartner Marketing practice in press materials. “CMOs must guard against letting AI steer too much budget toward the channels and stages of the journey that are easiest to tune, while underinvesting in the touchpoints that build long-term customer value.”

The “CMO Spend Survey” includes responses from 401 CMOs across North America, Europe and the U.K.. Respondents were from a variety of industries, company sizes and revenue, with most working for companies with an annual revenue of $1 billion or more. The survey is conducted annually, with the most recent survey fielded January through March 2026.

While AI is a priority for marketers, few CMOs feel they are able to leverage the technology properly. Previously released data from the survey found 70% of CMOs are unable to implement and scale initiatives surrounding the technology properly, largely due to inadequate internal procedures. Just 30% of CMOs feel their organizations have the necessary infrastructure to meet AI goals. A lack of internal AI expertise is also hindering uptake, with 38% of survey respondents citing it as a key barrier to achieving efficiency with the technology.

Finding those with the AI skills necessary to reach key benchmarks may prove to be a challenge. Only 32% of marketers feel they need to personally update their skills surrounding the technology, per Gartner data released in February.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

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Sourced from MarketingDive

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Google Earth’s Secret Flight Simulator Is Now Free for Everyone on the Web

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By Joe Hindy

All you need to take to the virtual skies now is a browser.

For decades, Google has hidden a flight simulator game in the desktop app for Google Earth, and now everyone in the world can access it through a web browser.

The game is part of a larger push by Google to add pro-level features to the website interface. Some of those features include elevation profiles, new import types, extra data layers and the flight simulator.

Most of the above features are for professional and hobbyist use, but the flight simulator is just for fun. It’s been around since 2007 in the desktop app, and Friday marks its first appearance in the website version of Google Earth.

A Google Earth view of the Grand Canyon
It’s not as in-depth as some other flight sims, but you can’t argue with the breadth of places where you can fly. Google Earth

How to play the flight simulator in Google Earth

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to get into the game. Start by following this link to the Google Earth website and clicking the Explore Earth button in the top right corner. Use the search bar to load the point on Earth where you would like to fly. Finally, click Tools, and the flight simulator is the last option on the list.

The controls aren’t shown in the game, but you can find them on Google’s developer website. You can choose to use the mouse or arrow keys to control the pitch and roll of the plane. The Page Up and Page Down buttons increase and decrease thrust, respectively. But be careful — it is quite easy to lose control of the airplane, leading to a topsy-turvy browser screen. The game ends if you crash the airplane, but Google lets you try again as often as you want.

An aerial view of Alabama University's college football stadium.
Google Earth Flight Simulator doesn’t use rendered graphics. These are actual, real-life photographs. Google Earth

What’s it like to play Google’s flight simulator?

The Google Earth flight simulator is an Easter egg in what is ultimately a tool used for education and by a surprising number of businesses.

Playing the game is fun, but not in the same serious-gaming sense as playing Microsoft Flight Simulator or Ace Combat. Those are the types of games you play to complete objectives, for the enjoyment of realistic flight, and the scenery. The only part of that mix where Google Earth’s flight simulator keeps up is its breath taking scenery.

Microsoft Flight Simulator models the Earth at 1:1 scale, allowing players to fly globally using real-world geography, airports, and terrain. It combines Bing Maps data, satellite imagery, and AI-assisted procedural generation to create a highly detailed and often photorealistic representation of the planet. Google Earth lets you do the same, except your map is made up of pictures taken by the Google Maps team or sourced from satellites and low-flying aircraft.

Both platforms present a similar global-scale environment and incorporate photorealistic elements. Microsoft Flight Simulator generally delivers a higher level of visual fidelity through real-time rendering, while Google Earth relies on actual aerial and satellite photography, offering a different form of realism based on real-world imagery rather than fully rendered graphics.

A view of a flight simulator flying underneath the Golden Gate Bridge
Flying under the Golden Gate Bridge is possible in Google Earth’s flight simulator.Google Earth

The photorealism is the best part of Google Earth’s flight sim. The controls are too simple for experienced flight sim players, and they can be a little janky at times, making control of your virtual aircraft frustrating. Other than the thrust settings, there are no additional customization features. This was intended to be a lightweight, novelty experience, not a serious flight simulator.

That said, its simplicity is part of its appeal. Pausing for 15 minutes in a busy day to glide over a football field or descend toward Mount Rushmore—freely accessible from a browser tab and without the need for specialized gaming hardware—remains a quietly remarkable experience.

Feature image credit: Google Earth

By Joe Hindy

Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He’s written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp. 

Sourced from CNET

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The Most Powerful Business Strategy Isn’t a Product or a Pitch. It’s a Person

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BY NICOLE RAMIREZ

With the rise of LinkedIn and the collapse of traditional advertising’s efficacy, human connection is all the more valuable.

There is a category of professionals that most business strategies don’t account for. They don’t have the biggest marketing budget or the most sophisticated funnel and sales tactics. What they have is something harder to engineer and impossible to automate: they seem to know everyone, and more importantly, everyone seems to want to know them.

They’re called super connectors. And in 2026, they may represent the most underestimated business strategy in professional services.

Most professionals treat networking as a support activity, something you do alongside the real work. Super connectors have figured out that for them, it is the real work. The network isn’t a tool they use to run their business. The network is the business. And the returns flow both ways  to the people they connect, and back to themselves in ways that most conventional marketing strategies simply cannot replicate.

The concept isn’t new. Malcolm Gladwell identified connectors as one of the key agents of social change in his seminal work on how ideas spread, describing them as people who link the rest of us to the world, who move through multiple social worlds with ease and bring those worlds into contact with each other.

Now, with the rise of LinkedIn as a professional trust layer, the collapse of traditional advertising’s efficacy, and the explosion of AI-generated content, all make genuine human connection more valuable than it has ever been.

The difference between being a super connector and networking

The easiest mistake is conflating super connecting with heavy networking. They are not the same thing. Networking, at its core, is transactional. You show up, you collect contacts, you follow up when you need something. Super connecting operates on an entirely different logic.

As David Siegel, the CEO of Meetup, described it, networking is self-focused. ”It’s about ego, it’s about yourself.” Super connecting, by contrast, is more about wanting to help others. It’s not done as a quid pro quo. The distinction sounds simple, but it produces measurable business outcomes.

According to network scientist Ronald Burt, the single most reliable predictor of career success is an open network, where the individual connects different clusters of people who don’t know each other. This structural position, sitting at the intersection of otherwise disconnected communities, is precisely what makes super connectors so disproportionately valuable. They don’t just know people, they bridge people and worlds together that most people wouldn’t think to connect.

The business case is straightforward. Research shows that people are four times more likely to make a purchase when referred by someone they know. Referrals convert at three to five times the rate of non-referrals, and referred customers have a 37 percent higher retention rate. In a market where cold outreach is increasingly ignored and paid acquisition costs continue to climb, referrals are arguably the highest-ROI business development activity available. The super connector has built an engine that generates them continuously by earning that trust.

What makes this a strategy, not just a personality trait, is the flywheel it creates for the super connector themselves. Every introduction they make deposits into a trust account with both parties. When either of those people has an opportunity, a referral, or a deal to route, the super connector is the first call. They become the person everyone wants access to, which means inbound never stops. Their reputation compounds faster than any content strategy could, because it is built by other people talking about them, not by them talking about themselves. Over time, they stop chasing business entirely. It starts finding them.

LinkedIn changed what this looks like

For most of professional history, super connecting happened in rooms—conferences, dinner tables, golf courses. The barriers were time, geography, and access. LinkedIn systematically removed all three, and in doing so, created an entirely new scale at which a single person can operate as a bridge between communities.

Research published by LinkedIn in 2025 shows that over 65 percent of business deals begin with informal conversations, often through DMs and comment sections. The platform has become less a resume repository and more a professional trust layer, where reputations are built slowly and publicly, and where being consistently visible to the right people over time generates the kind of familiarity that makes introductions feel natural rather than forced.

In 2025, LinkedIn helped 122 million people secure interviews and 35.5 million were hired through platform connections. But hiring is only the most legible version of what the platform enables. The less visible version, the deal sourced through a comment thread, the partnership that started in a DM, the client who had been reading someone’s posts quietly for six months before reaching out, is where super connectors operate most effectively.

What the data makes clear is that showing up consistently matters more than showing up perfectly. In 2026, networking is less about who you know and far more about who remembers you, trusts you, and sees value in knowing you. Super connectors have understood this intuitively for years. They post, they comment, they make introductions, they refer generously, not because they have a strategy document that tells them to, but because they are genuinely invested in the people around them. The business results are a by product of that investment, not the motivation for it.

The give-first architecture

What distinguishes super connectors from strategic networkers is their orientation toward the relationship itself. They give first. Frequently. Without keeping score.

Research on relationship development shows it takes approximately two years to establish trust and five years to reach what researchers call the “revenue tipping point,” the moment when a relationship begins to generate consistent, compounding business value. This timeline is deeply inconvenient for anyone thinking in quarters. But for those willing to play a longer game, the architecture is nearly impossible for competitors to replicate quickly.

The give-first orientation shows up differently depending on the person. Some make introductions, others share opportunities, others amplify publicly, others show up in moments of professional difficulty with a kind word and a specific offer of help. What matters is not the form but the consistency and the genuine lack of strings attached. People can feel the difference. And on a platform like LinkedIn, where interactions are public and patterns are visible over time, that difference accumulates into a reputation that either opens doors or closes them.

The visibility layer

There is a practical dimension to super connecting that often goes underappreciated: it requires being findable. An extraordinarily generous professional who operates entirely in private, no digital presence, no public record of their thinking, no trail of interactions that others can encounter and follow can still be a connector, but their impact is bounded by the size of their immediate network. Visibility removes that ceiling.

Every thoughtful comment, every generous introduction made publicly, every post that shares a hard-won perspective rather than recycled advice, it all compounds into something no ad budget can buy: the sense that someone already knows how you think before they ever reach out.

This is where the modern super connector has an advantage that previous generations simply didn’t. Consistent, original content on LinkedIn, sharing a perspective, making an observation, drawing a connection between ideas that others haven’t made yet serves as a continuous, low-friction advertisement for the kind of person you are and the kind of relationships you build. It creates what might be called ambient trust: the slow accumulation of context that makes a stranger feel like they already know you before they ever reach out.

The professionals generating the most consistent inbound business right now, without a massive ad budget, without a complex funnel, without a sales team tend to share a common characteristic. They have been showing up consistently in public, giving generously in private, and connecting people who need each other without expecting anything in return.

From networker to super connector: How to make the shift

The difference between a networker and a super connector is not talent or personality. It is intention and habit. The shift is available to anyone willing to change how they show up, not just when they need something, but consistently, in ways that create value for others before they create value for themselves.

Here is what that shift looks like in practice.

Stop attending events to collect contacts and start attending to make connections for other people. Before the next conference, dinner, or industry gathering, ask yourself who in the room should know each other and make those introductions. Not because it benefits you directly, but because facilitating a useful connection is the fastest way to become the kind of person people remember and return to.

Make one introduction a week with no agenda. Identify two people in your network who would genuinely benefit from knowing each other and connect them by email, on LinkedIn, or in person. Do it consistently. Do it without expectation. Over the course of a year, that single habit quietly repositions you from someone who networks when it’s convenient to someone whose name comes up in conversations you were never part of.

Make your generosity visible. When you make an introduction publicly, tagging both people, explaining why you’re connecting them, you do two things simultaneously. You create real value for the people involved, and you signal to everyone watching exactly the kind of person and professional you are. Visibility without substance is noise. But generosity made visible is its own form of marketing, and it compounds.

Show up before you need anything. Comment on people’s work, share their wins, amplify their ideas, consistently and genuinely, not strategically. The professionals who only surface when they have an ask are the ones nobody thinks of first. The ones who showed up when there was nothing in it for them are the ones who get the call when something matters.

Shift how you think about your network entirely. A contact list is something you extract from. A community is something you invest in. The mental shift from “who can help me” to “who can I help and who should know each other” is the actual transformation and it is the one that takes the longest, requires the most patience, and generates the most durable business results of anything a professional can do.

The networker asks: “What can this connection do for me?” The super connector asks: “What can I make possible for the people around me?” The second question, asked consistently and acted on generously, is a business strategy. It just doesn’t look like one until it’s already working.

Building something that lasts

The strategy sounds deceptively simple. It is, in practice, one of the hardest things to sustain due to the longer timeline. The results are invisible for longer than most people are comfortable with, and the whole architecture requires a genuine orientation toward other people that cannot be faked at scale.

But for those willing to build it, the compounding returns are real. In a market where everyone is optimizing for reach and very few are optimizing for trust, the super connector has found the one competitive advantage that AI cannot replicate, and money cannot buy.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

BY NICOLE RAMIREZ

Sourced from Inc.

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Her Agency Represents More Than 200 Creators. She Gives Them All the Same Advice

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BY SOPHIE MEHARENNA

Today, growth happens in public, not behind the scenes.

There’s a version of building a company where the walls stay up. The brand stays manicured, the founder is always composed, and the audience only sees the result.

Nowadays, that veiled approach to business seems like a distant and outdated mode—building out loud, in public, and in real time has become the new GTM.

Shannae Ingleton Smith, co-founder, CEO, and president of Kensington Grey Agency, has spent the last several years proving this. Her creator management firm represents more than 200 culturally relevant creators across the globe and operates a ventures arm that grew through radical transparency, practiced before it was a strategy or a trend.

She started by giving everything away

Kensington Grey, named after Ingleton Smith’s daughter, didn’t begin as a business. It began as a private Facebook group.

Ingleton Smith spent years in advertising sales at Rogers Media, one of Canada’s largest media conglomerates, watching brands spend millions on placements while readership migrated to social. She also watched the people deciding who got deals consistently fail to reflect the communities they were supposedly serving.

“I always made it a point to advocate for people of color, to advocate for Black women, to make sure those stories were being told in the boardrooms,” she said in a recent interview with Inc.

While on maternity leave, she and her best friend started a pro bono Facebook group advising Black creators on pricing, pitching, and industry access. The group grew to 400-plus creators. Members came back with wins rooted in their guidance, and a viral story about the process drew attention to the community’s organic growth and success. The DMs that followed, asking for their formal support, were the launch pad for starting the agency.

The origin of Kensington Grey is an act of building in public.

“Those things were previously gatekept by the influencer marketing community,” Ingleton Smith says. “But those were our posts going the most viral because nobody was talking about that.”

The transparency wasn’t a tactic. It was a value system that happened to build the brand.

What building in public requires

Most conversations about building in public collapse into content advice: post more, share your process, be relatable.

Ingleton Smith’s version is more demanding. “Throw perfection out the door,” she says.

She noted that audiences expect founders to share the journey—good and bad—in real time. That’s accountability to an audience sophisticated enough to distinguish authenticity from performance, and willing to act on that distinction.

“People buy things and support brands they believe in now more than ever,” she says. “Growing up, the general consumer didn’t know who the CEO of Dell was, but people know Hailey Bieber is behind Rhode. They know Danessa Myricks is behind Danessa Myricks.”

The founder and the brand are no longer separable

Kensington Grey’s growth makes this concrete. When the agency launched, management firms had social pages but weren’t using them. Ingleton Smith ran Kensington Grey’s Instagram the way she’d run a creator’s account by posting daily, taking positions, and sharing what the industry kept quiet.

“That visibility helped us gain clients and opportunities for our creators,” she says. The agency built community the same way it taught its talent to—by showing up consistently and providing real value to people, whether or not they were on the roster.

The business case for a long-standing community

Kensington Grey’s support in the launch of Jenee Naylor’s bespoke sunglass line, 12PM Studios, is the clearest proof of concept, and Ingleton Smith is careful not to let it read as a formula anyone can lift.

“The community building starts way before launch,” she says.

Naylor had driven hundreds of thousands in sales through Target collections, Amazon drops, and six years of YouTube content before one of her own products shipped.

“There are people with millions of followers who are just there to watch,” Ingleton Smith shares. “Jenee’s audience—she has trained them to shop.”

The infrastructure matched: Naylor as creative director, her husband on finance and paid media, a full-time hire before launch day.

“We built this to be a household name from day one,” Ingleton Smith says.

Community isn’t built in a pre-launch sprint

“Get on camera so your audience feels like they know you,” Ingleton Smith says. That takes years of work, but it’s also the only version that converts when it matters.

Ingleton Smith recommends that any CEO who really wants to make an impact should show up—not because founders need to become influencers, but because the audience has gotten too smart for the alternative.

Feature image credit:  Adobe Stock, Kensington Grey

BY SOPHIE MEHARENNA

FOUNDER + NARRATIVE STRATEGIST, @WORDYSOPH

Sourced from Inc.

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Zoom and Google Already Had This Product. But He Built It Anyway and Hit $1.5 Billion: ‘Care More About Your Particular Problem’

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By Jonathan Small, edited by Dan Bova

Can you build a $1.5 billion company in a market that Zoom and Google already dominate? Chris Pedregal proved you can. The Granola founder sat down with the Silicon Valley Girl podcast to talk about his popular AI notepad, which records meetings, transcribes them and lets users chat with their entire meeting history.

Taking on tech giants requires patience. Rather than launching publicly, Pedregal spent a full year sitting next to 150 users, watching them install and use the product, going home to fix what was broken and doing it again the next day. He resisted a public launch until the product was “meaningfully better than the competition.” The result was 500 installs on day one with zero advertising, followed by viral organic growth that eventually attracted major enterprise clients. This kind of intense focus is harder for Big Tech companies that have to spread their attention across dozens of products and hundreds of millions of users.

The mistake most founders make, he says, is letting the noise of social media and FOMO win. “Do not let it mess with your head,” he told host Marina Mogilko. “Care more about your particular problem.” The underlying problem you’re solving probably hasn’t changed in two years. Neither has the only thing that beats Big Tech.

By Jonathan Small,

Founder, Strike Fire Productions. Entrepreneur Staff. Jonathan Small is a bestselling author, journalist, producer, and podcast host. For 25 years, he… Read more

Edited by Dan Bova

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Brands are ditching mega influencers – the most influential people online are not who you think

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By Becca Monaghan

For years, influencer marketing has been dominated by big names and even bigger followings. Brands have invested heavily in creators who can deliver instant reach and visibility. But a shift is quietly taking place.

More brands are now turning to micro influencers. These are creators with smaller, more defined audiences and often a stronger sense of community and niche interests. Their content tends to feel more personal and less like traditional advertising, which can make it more effective with audiences who are increasingly wary of feeds saturated with product placements.

The shift reflects a wider change in how people use social media. Trust and relatability are becoming more important than scale. Whether it’s discovering a new skincare product, booking a hotel or finding outfit inspiration, people are often more likely to take recommendations from someone who feels familiar rather than a distant figure with millions of followers.

For brands, that means rethinking what influence actually looks like. Rather than prioritising sheer reach, many are focusing on creators who can spark genuine conversations and recommendations.

The key question now is how brands can make this approach work at scale while keeping the authenticity that makes micro influencers so effective.

For Jamie Love, social media expert and founder of Monumental Marketing, the change is very much intentional. Once upon a time, brands were heavily focused on creating awareness; now they’re knuckling down on sales.

 Jamie Love

Jamie cites TikTok Affiliate as completely revolutionising the game, with smaller creators able to drive real results with far lower investment risk.

Not to mention, feed visibility is becoming harder to attain.

“Smaller accounts tend to have more engaged communities and stronger audience relationships, which often leads to deeper influence and better conversion compared to creators with massive but less connected followings,” he shares.

The good thing for micro influencers is that they can pretty much work across any industry, Jamie notes, though influencer marketing “shouldn’t be treated as a one-trick pony”.

That said, there are areas that work particularly well for smaller creators, including beauty, fashion, hospitality and travel. These are categories where audiences are often looking for recommendations from people they trust, rather than content that feels overly polished or PR-perfected.

The digital social media age has forced people to evolve and become more savvy with the way they consume ads, and quite frankly, “people see through marketing much quicker now”.

“Good marketing should feel seamless, rather than jarring. A beauty influencer suddenly promoting a car with no natural connection? Audiences spot that immediately,” he shares.

 Pexels

So, when it comes to selecting micro influencers for the job, what metrics actually matter?

Through and through, engagement is still key. According to Jamie, follower count is somewhat a thing of the past in terms of not being able to portray the full story.

“Views, for instance, are also incredibly important because they show how well content travels beyond an influencer’s existing audience,” he shares, citing that his company has worked with many creators who consistently outperform their follower count.

“That’s often a strong indicator that they’re producing genuinely valuable content that platforms want to push organically,” he shares.

 Pexels

As for whether micro influencers are here to stay, Jamie sees the shift as part of a wider evolution, and something he has been discussing for some time.

“It’s not a quick-win strategy. The brands seeing the best results are the ones taking a long-term, ecosystem-led approach,” Jamie says. “Combining different creator types, building relationships over time and understanding how creators fit into the wider customer journey rather than treating influencer marketing as a standalone channel.”

By Becca Monaghan

Sourced from indy100

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This shocking new advert looks like a trailer for a horror movie, but it has a deeper message

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Will you be able to watch until the end?

We see people caged, restrained and immobilised under harsh spotlights. They’re subjected to sensory deprivation, gassed; showered with chemicals, injected with viruses and put under the knife.

But the disturbing video below isn’t a trailer for a new Saw movie. It’s the boldest and most challenging advert yet from the animal rights organisation PETA (also see our roundup of World Cup 2026 adverts).

Bodies of Research – YouTube

Watch On

PETA’s new campaign End Animal Abuse aims to help viewers grasp what happens behind closed laboratory doors. Instead of relying on graphic depictions of animals, the 60-second film aims to create a direct emotional connection between viewer and animals subjected to testing by confronting audiences with human suffering instead.

It closes with a shot of a trembling woman on a metal gurney as a blanket is draped over her shoulders, before the text appears: “Relax, these are professional actors. But in reality, animals get treated like this every day”.

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Peta advert
(Image credit: Peta)

With stark monochromatic imagery and infrared imaging techniques set to Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor, the aim was to create an aesthetic that blends elements of arthouse cinema and experimental documentary.

The ad also aims to co-opt the visual language of fashion, with headgear that blurs the line between Maison Margiela-esque haute couture and instruments of torture. The result is disorientating and unsettling to watch.

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Peta advert
(Image credit: Peta)

The ad was conceived and directed by Favio Vinson through Flavour on the Rocks and co-produced by Papaya Films.

Favio Vinson, Director at Papaya said: “We engaged in making this campaign for the challenge of tackling an important issue through a fresh approach. We committed to a very simple concept that would make the viewer directly relate to animals through heightened visual means. This way, the viewer wouldn’t be able to look away, despite the implied horror of the subject.”

Feature image credit: Peta

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Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant

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A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.

Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.

That’s when Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on April 20.

After a 2015 change to the law, federal agencies are not supposed to collect data on U.S. citizens in bulk. But some found a workaround to requesting warrants by simply buying the data instead.

Last week, some 130 civil society organizations signed on to a letter urging members of Congress to include closing the data broker loophole in FISA 702 reauthorization, citing the “unprecedented expansion of warrantless mass surveillance that is sweeping up the private information of communities across America” and the potential for the loophole to be used “to supercharge AI-powered surveillance.”

At a Senate hearing last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Federal Bureau of Investigations director Kash Patel if he would commit to not buying Americans’ location data, which is usually obtained from cell phones. Patel declined to do so, instead saying the FBI “uses all tools” and “we do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on which commercial data the FBI purchases. In 2023, then-FBI director Christopher Wray had indicated that the agency had backed away from using “commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising.”

Feature image credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

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