By Jim O’Leary

Like many communications and marketing executives, I’ve spent a lot of time listening, learning, and thinking about where our industry is heading.

What you need to know: The next five years will transform communications more dramatically than the previous five decades. Chief communicators and marketing executives face a once-in-a-generation shift as technology fundamentally reshapes how attention is captured, how information spreads, and how reputations are shaped under intensifying pressure.

Here’s the deal: The changes that are needed to survive in this environment map to what I call 5X: five seismic shifts that are reshaping the future of our profession.

1. The Attention Economy: Earned renewal

Traditional PR asked, “How do we get coverage?” Now the question is, “How do we create ideas people feel compelled to share?”

At Weber Shandwick, our Chief Creative Officer is fond of saying that traditional advertising creates work for controlled environments, like admiring animals in a zoo. Yet in today’s world, ideas get injected directly into culture’s slipstream and either survive the jungle or die.

• The strategy: Companies can’t buy attention the way they used to — they must earn it by creating ideas that move through culture, not just media.
• The impact: Winning ideas spread because they let people express their identity and values. Breakthrough concepts don’t just reach communities — they form them.

2. The Creator Economy: Influence redefined

Creators are no longer just a media channel; they’re culture itself. Their content consistently outperforms brand-owned content because audiences trust them more.

• The new reality: Brands must co-create with those who shape culture, measuring actual influence over vanity metrics.
• Why it’s important: Creators increasingly drive earned strategies, capturing attention that attracts traditional media coverage and fuels broader cultural conversation.

3. The Stakeholder Economy: Business meets culture

Political shifts and media fragmentation have created an environment where external posture materially impacts business results. Issues escalate faster, stakeholders expect more, and leaders must constantly balance the tensions between cultural relevance and cultural resilience to drive outcomes.

• Take note: This isn’t traditional “corporate comms” anymore. It’s about helping leaders navigate fluid, high-stakes situations where business strategy and cultural fluency must merge.
• The benefits: Modern corporations can now engage in predictive issue forecasting and real-time stakeholder intelligence, but only if they have the right partners.

4. The Experience Economy: Digital, integrated

Digital worlds crafted in games, virtual reality or augmented reality are moving beyond early awkwardness and clunky hardware to blend physical and digital activations into immersive brand experiences. The cameras, screens and speakers in our pockets will continue to take new forms.

• What this means: Audiences, who increasingly live their waking hours connected, expect personalized, participatory experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. Moments must be felt, not just seen.

• The challenge: Brand experiences and activations that only live in the physical world lack reach and don’t effectively reach a new generation of consumers.

5. The Intelligence Economy: AI as accelerator

Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing our information environment and business — it’s supercharging all four other shifts. Communications leaders and teams aren’t immune. Every executive should be contemplating how to use these tools for anticipatory decision-making instead of reactive responses and agentic orchestration of routine work.

• How it’s done: The ready availability of tools to create custom agents through platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini signals a future where every agency and communications team will need proprietary AI systems as a core competitive differentiator.
• The breakdown: The companies that succeed in this AI generation will look nothing like those that succeeded in the last one. If you haven’t changed your playbook, you’re already behind.

Why this is important now

For communications leaders: This confluence of shifts redefines how the value of communications gets measured, what skills teams need, and how reputation management works in a fragmented, increasingly-AI-paced media landscape.

For agency leaders: In today’s world, nothing is siloed. The separate disciplines of earned media, digital, advisory, influence, and intelligence have converged. Only those who operate seamlessly across all areas will survive the shifts reshaping our profession.

Looking ahead: Intelligence isn’t just another economy — it’s the force multiplying all others. Communications leaders who understand this will lead the transformation. Those who don’t will be transformed by it.

By Jim O’Leary

Chief Executive Officer, North America, and Global President, Weber Shandwick

Sourced from AXIOS

By Lowe’s Creator Contributor

The creator economy has moved beyond niche marketing – it’s now central to how brands build trust and grow. It’s a $250 billion global force reshaping how brands build loyalty, drive engagement and grow their businesses. Once viewed as a playground for influencers, today’s creator economy is at the centre of serious business strategies — and it’s only getting bigger. Goldman Sachs predicts it could nearly double to $480 billion by 2027, according to their 2023 Creator Economy report.

Brands are adapting fast. Across industries, businesses are moving from traditional influencer partnerships to more structured, community-driven programs. They’re not just sponsoring creators – they’re building platforms to empower them.

The Rise of the Creator Economy

Social media has democratized content creation, and consumers increasingly trust the voices they follow online – especially millennials, Gen Z and even Gen Alpha, generations shaping the future of brand loyalty. According to a recent study from Sprout Social, 61% of consumers say they trust recommendations from creators more than they trust brand advertising. Creators bring authenticity, relatability and niche expertise — the ingredients brands need to build real connections in a crowded digital marketplace. Even for a home improvement brand like Lowe’s, creators are valuable partners who help to build credibility and affinity.

Statista reports there are now over 200 million creators globally, ranging from full-time digital entrepreneurs to part-time hobbyists. These creators aren’t just marketing channels. They are community leaders, entrepreneurs and culture builders.

The shift has been so significant that it even dominated conversations at CES this year, where a panel on the creator economy highlighted how creators are reshaping not only marketing, but commerce and culture at large.

From Influencer Marketing to Creator Empowerment

Brands today are rethinking what it means to partner with creators. In the past, traditional influencer marketing was transactional — one post, one campaign. But the new wave of partnerships is deeper and more collaborative.

Companies now are building communities that help creators grow their brands, not just promote products. These programs offer tools like customizable storefronts, access to startup funding for business ventures, product samples, project sponsorship and long-term sponsorship opportunities — a far cry from the one-off campaigns of a few years ago.

Lowe’s Creator Network partner Chris Loves Julia

Courtesy of Lowe’s

Retailers are taking note. Lowe’s, for example, recently launched the first creator network in home improvement and DIY, designed to support creators at every stage of their journey. Their platform provides opportunities for creators to build real-world projects, inspire their audiences and grow sustainable businesses. Early partnerships include digital creators like MrBeast, DadSocial and Chris Loves Julia, signaling a move toward community-building rather than simple brand endorsements.

These programs are not just marketing tactics, they’re growth strategies. Empowering creators to build authentic relationships with their audiences leads to deeper loyalty and long-term trust – and the brands that they partner with will reap the benefits.

The Next Phase: Community, Commerce and Culture

As the creator economy matures, brands that succeed will be the ones that recognize creators as more than content producers. They are entrepreneurs, innovators and community builders.

The most forward-thinking companies are blending commerce and culture, embracing a wide range of creators – from household names to niche leaders, who inspire real-world action, not just digital clicks. By investing in long-term partnerships, brands are positioning themselves not just as advertisers but as collaborators in creators’ business growth.

Social commerce is at the heart of this evolution, and it is expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2026, according to Statista. Creators are leading the way, shaping how consumers discover, engage with and buy from brands.

In this landscape, structured creator networks mutually benefit brands and creators. They build community and loyalty in ways traditional advertising cannot, while giving creators the tools and resources they need to turn passion into a sustainable business — a win-win.

Looking Ahead

The creator economy isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’s becoming more essential to brand strategy. Companies that empower creators — offering real support, building trust and fostering community — will be the ones that build a lasting brand legacy.

The future isn’t just about reaching audiences and generating clicks. It’s about building together every day to shape culture, commerce and community.

Feature image credit: Lowe’s Creator Network partner Chris Loves Julia. Courtesy of Lowe’s

By Lowe’s Creator Contributor

Sourced from Forbes

By Parmy Olson

Chatbots are pivoting to the ad model and optimizing for eyeballs, just like social media did. Remember how that turned out?

Chatbots might hallucinate and sprinkle too much flattery on their users — “That’s a fascinating question!” one recently told me — but at least the subscription model that underpins them is healthy for our wellbeing. Many Americans pay about $20 a month to use the premium versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini Pro or Anthropic’s Claude, and the result is that the products are designed to provide maximum utility.

Don’t expect this status quo to last. Subscription revenue has a limit, and Anthropic’s new $200-a-month “Max” tier suggests even the most popular models are under pressure to find new revenue streams.

Feature image credit: picture alliance

By Parmy Olson

Sourced from Bloomberg

By Ralph Jones

‘Find your strong’. ‘Succumb to the bread crumb’. ‘We’ve got your back, face’. Ever notice that ad copy is becoming increasingly nonsensical and often just bad? Ralph Jones digs into the weird world of modern advertising, where the end goal isn’t necessarily the selling of a product

was first conscious of something rotten in the advertising industry when, standing on a Tube platform, I saw a KFC advert looking back at me. I love KFC. I should be glad to see an advert for KFC. Instead, I was horrified by the poster. “Succumb to the bread crumb,” it declared. I stared at it for a while. “Succumb to the bread crumb”? How could you work on that ad campaign and choose that phrase, knowing that the infinitely better “Succumb to the crumb” was not just staring you in the face but clawing at your hair and screaming into your ears?

It’s hard to escape the niggling feeling that advert copywriting is getting worse. No doubt you have your own personal crusade: maybe it’s adjectives being used as nouns – the trend that had Lexus saying “experience amazing”, or trainer company Saucony declaring, “find your strong”; perhaps it’s the fashion for “I am”, which led brands like Mercedes to launch slogans like “I am Mercedes”. There is plenty to choose from. As brands shriek at you over the noise and AI threatens to take over writing of all kinds, is the art of great copywriting at risk of extinction? Are we struggling to find amazing?

Desperate to discover how a company could plump for “succumb to the bread crumb”, I went straight to the source. “We reached ‘succumb to the breadcrumb’ after a process of creative exploration, and it was one of 400 potential lines we considered for the campaign,” says Monica Sillic, KFC’s chief marketing officer. “We knew we wanted the copy to be punchy, playful and nod to the highly stylised world we’ve depicted in our recent creative. ‘Succumb to the breadcrumb’ stood out to us because it felt memorable and relevant to our breadcrumbed chicken, which is freshly prepared by our restaurant teams every day.” Why didn’t they use “succumb to the crumb”, I ask. “We deliberately chose to use breadcrumb versus crumb because ‘crumb’ could apply to a huge number of other food items, from cakes to sandwiches.”

There is no argument, of course. “Succumb to the bread crumb” is objectively one of the worst things ever committed to print, and a great example of how pedantry kills great copy. Even if you might have thought a focus group could have spotted this problem, brands don’t always use them, and may simply assume that critics don’t fully appreciate the work anyway. (A mini Mandela Effect exists here, incidentally. When I speak to Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of the UK wing of advertising agency Ogilvy, he is convinced that he saw “succumb to the crumb” somewhere. KFC do not respond to my question about whether they altered the wording in reaction to online feedback, and it seems unlikely that they would have done, given how much they love the version they chose. Sutherland may have seen what his brain dearly wanted him to see.)

“There is a decline in advertising as poetry,” Sutherland says, citing a variety of factors. One unfortunate effect of a more fragmented population having less of a shared cultural lexicon, Sutherland points out, is that it is harder for phrases like “it does exactly what it says on the tin” and “should’ve gone to Specsavers” to have the impact they once did. For this reason, brands often try to go for the jugular. “Tone of voice has sometimes become excessively abrupt,” says Sutherland. “‘Just Do It’ for Nike – fantastic endline – but it gave rise to a whole fashion for what you might call ‘the imperative’ in advertising. I would argue that advertising is there to persuade, not to command.”

Another advert a friend alerted me to was one for shaving brand Wilkinson Sword, in which the reader was assured: “We’ve got your back, face.” The word “face” stood alone, miles away from the rest of the sentence. Given that this was an advert for a razor, the unwelcome – and presumably unwanted – image of someone shaving their back came to mind. I spoke to Dan Watts, who created that advert and a range of others with his team at Pablo London, where he is editorial creative director. Pablo knew they were going up against the mighty Gillette, so needed to give their client something that would make a splash. “You just wanna be noticed and get talked about. And if that means half the people are slagging it off and half the people are loving it, that’s great.”

So are these kinds of ads designed to be so unclear that they are talked about solely because of their lack of clarity? Adverts like one spotted two years ago for Ufit protein drinks – “So glad I don’t have a thigh gap, I almost dropped my phone down the toilet” – seem to make that paranoia feel justified. As one Reddit commenter suggested: “I have a theory that Tube ads are intentionally terrible so that you spend longer staring at it trying to work out what is going on.” I certainly stared at “Succumb to the bread crumb” for a long time. Did it make me want KFC more than “Succumb to the crumb” would have?

There is a holy sweet spot, of course, between “Succumb to the bread crumb” and an advert where no one knows what’s happening. “The best press ads always have a degree of obliquity to them,” Sutherland says. “You don’t serve a good advertisement as a hot meal on a plate but you do serve it as what you might call ready to heat. A good ad needs to have that Pot Noodle quality, where most of the ingredients are there but you do have to add boiling water yourself.” Some adverts judge this perfectly. Others – like L’Oreal’s “for make-up that lasts longer than your favourite cheese” – make you so bewildered you’re angry. But, as Watts says, no one remembers 99 per cent of advertising; so is it better to be remembered, however negatively, than leave no trace whatsoever? Many agencies would say yes.

Although it might feel like advertising has become both more opaque and more provocative, Watts doesn’t necessarily agree. He thinks, in fact, that the market has become more risk-averse. “Advertising used to be provocative in the right way,” he says, mentioning the Saatchi and Saatchi campaign for Samaritans which used the line “why you should think more seriously about killing yourself” under an image of a kitchen knife. Today, he says, this advert would be deemed offensive, and a more inoffensive version would be chosen.

Relatedly, copywriting may have fallen down the priority ladder in the industry, being stood on by elements like typography and photography. One of the types of advertising that has died, says Sutherland, is long-copy posters. Brands tended to assume that if people wanted that much information, they could just visit the company’s website. Rarely, of course, can people be bothered to do that. “People have lost faith in the ability of great writing to move people’s hearts and minds,” Sutherland thinks. The erroneous assumption today – conscious or not – is that people don’t have time to read a paragraph of copy.

As well as the indisputable truth that AI can now churn out endless variants on a tagline, putting copywriters out of work in an already saturated market, there is more concrete evidence that copywriters might be less skilled than they used to be. It used to be that you trained as a copywriter or as an art director, Watts explains. Now, “you get creatives, really. Creatives come together and they’re thinking in social [media terms], and they’re thinking in ideas. Nine times out of 10, no one is really brilliant at one thing; they’re kind of good at lots of things. The result of that is that you don’t find that many amazing art directors or copywriters because you don’t really need them in the same way that you used to.” He points to a diminished focus on teaching the art of copywriting, highlighting the 2021 closure of The Watford Course, a creative advertising qualification that condensed everything into a year. “It’s very rare that you need a copywriter to come in and write a beautifully written print ad. That was the job 20, 30 years ago.”

If you believe in the power of great writing, it is difficult to see AI coming up with anything as funny, elegant or charming as “drinka pinta milka day”, “beanz means Heinz”, “you either love it or hate it”. or even, “hi, I’m Barry Scott”. But advertisers will continue to resort to every trick in the book in order to get your attention. In recent years, in the case of Oasis, that involved giving up entirely – or creating a uniquely honest campaign, depending on your point of view: “It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets,” read one poster. “Advertising doesn’t work on you. Celebrate this fact with a tasty drink,” read another. The shamelessness of this campaign probably does bring a smile to your lips – something all great copywriters should do, even if they may be struggling more than ever before.

By Ralph Jones

Sourced from Independent