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Muck Rack joins Sounds Profitable as podcast industry draws PR platforms in

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Muck Rack, the AI communications platform, today joined the Sounds Profitable Partner Network, the Boston-based trade association for the podcasting industry announced on May 13, 2026. The partnership brings together two organizations whose work has been converging as podcast appearances generate editorial pickups, YouTube clips, and citations in AI-powered search results – blurring the lines between earned media strategy and audio distribution.

The announcement signals something broader than a standard partnership deal. Sounds Profitable, which counts nearly 210 organizations globally in its network, has historically served podcast companies and audio platforms. Muck Rack is not a podcast company. It is a PR software platform used by communications professionals to track media coverage, monitor brand mentions, and measure how organizations appear in news and in AI-generated answers. Its entry into the Sounds Profitable ecosystem reflects a shift in where the podcast industry is drawing attention from outside the audio world.

Podcasting as earned media infrastructure

The rationale for the partnership is grounded in a structural change in how podcast content travels. A single brand appearance on a podcast no longer stays within that episode’s listenership. It lives on YouTube as a video clip, gets picked up by journalists writing about the same topics, and increasingly surfaces when users query AI-powered search systems. According to the press release from Sounds Profitable, 71% of podcast creators now produce video content, meaning the distribution surface of any given audio appearance has expanded considerably.

Muck Rack’s platform monitors exactly that kind of multi-channel propagation. The company combines global media monitoring, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) insights, social listening, media data, AI automation, and analyst advisory services. According to the announcement, the platform helps organizations manage reputation, act quickly, and demonstrate impact across the PR workflow. Thousands of journalists also use Muck Rack’s free tools to showcase their work and analyse news.

For PR professionals advising brands on podcast strategy, the question has shifted. It is no longer only about which shows to appear on. It is about how that appearance travels – whether it earns editorial coverage, whether it surfaces in AI-powered search results when someone asks a brand-related question, and whether the brand’s communications team can measure the full downstream reach of a single recorded conversation.

“PR professionals are finally recognizing what podcast listeners have always known: audio is where trust gets built. Muck Rack has been part of my toolkit throughout my career because it’s one of the few platforms that can actually measure that trust over time,” said Molly DeMellier, Head of Communications at Sounds Profitable. “Bringing Muck Rack into the Sounds Profitable Partner Network gives our team, clients, and the broader podcast industry, the strategic communications infrastructure they deserve.”

The Sounds Profitable network and what membership includes

Sounds Profitable describes itself as the trade association for the podcasting industry. Founded to address a gap between podcasting’s audience scale and the industry’s ability to communicate its value to brands and media buyers, the organization operates an influential newsletter with 10,000 subscribers globally. It runs a podcast covering audio industry developments, maintains what it describes as the only searchable repository of key data points in podcasting, and hosts events including Podcast Movement, Cannes Lions, SXSW, and The Podcast Show.

Partner Network membership, according to the announcement, includes direct access to that research database, membership in a Slack community of more than 2,100 industry leaders, monthly strategic advising sessions, and priority access to major industry events. The nearly 210 members span the breadth of the audio ecosystem – hosting platforms, ad tech providers, agencies, publishers, and now, for the first time in a clearly visible way, a PR software company.

That last detail is the one industry observers are likely to note. The Sounds Profitable Partner Network has functioned as a map of where the podcast industry’s infrastructure sits. Muck Rack’s entry suggests that infrastructure is expanding upstream – into the communications and reputation management layer that operates before a podcast is even distributed, and well after the episode file is downloaded.

The Podcast Show London: where the partnership begins

The partnership launches with a joint appearance at The Podcast Show London, scheduled for May 20 to 21, 2026. Molly DeMellier, Head of Communications at Sounds Profitable, and Natan Edelsburg, Chief Partnerships Officer at Muck Rack, will appear together on the Brand Stage for a fireside chat titled “The New Word of Mouth: Podcasts, Earned Media, and AI Search.”

The session is framed around original research from both organizations. According to the press release, DeMellier and Edelsburg will examine how awareness, earned media, and discoverability now compound across channels, and what that means for communications strategy. The 71% video creator figure from Sounds Profitable’s research shapes part of the session’s argument: that a brand appearance can no longer be treated as a single-channel event.

The Brand Stage placement is notable. The Podcast Show London’s Brand Stage is specifically oriented toward how companies and communications professionals engage with the medium – not the creator or technical side of podcasting. It is a signal about who the session is aimed at: marketing and communications decision-makers who are still forming their frameworks for podcast strategy, rather than podcast industry insiders already embedded in the space.

Edelsburg addressed that gap directly. “Podcasts have become one of the most powerful channels for building brand credibility, but most PR teams don’t yet have a framework for thinking about them strategically,” he said. “Sounds Profitable is the organization that understands this space better than anyone. We’re excited to bring our research and platform to their network and to start that conversation on stage in London.”

Market context: podcast advertising at record scale

The partnership arrives at a moment of documented commercial growth in podcasting. Podcast advertising spending climbed 32% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Magellan AI data. That followed 26% year-over-year growth in Q3 2025. The IAB and PwC’s 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report placed total podcast advertising at $2.9 billion in the United States for the full year.

Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2026, released in March 2026, found that 58% of Americans now listen to podcasts monthly – a new record, equivalent to 167 million people. Weekly listeners stood at 45%, approximately 130 million. The figures represent a medium that has moved well beyond niche status, yet a structural imbalance persists. Consumers dedicate 31% of their media time to audio content while advertisers allocate only 9% of budgets to audio platforms, a 22-percentage-point gap widely cited as the central problem in audio advertising economics.

Video has accelerated the audience reach numbers but complicated the measurement picture. Edison Research updated its podcast ranking methodology in 2025 to include individuals whose sole podcast consumption occurred through video platforms, reflecting the scale shift brought by YouTube. Audioboom reported that over 13% of its business came from video revenue by Q3 2025, and Apple introduced HLS video podcast infrastructure with dynamic ad insertion in February 2026.

That complexity – audio appearing on video platforms, podcast appearances generating editorial coverage, brand mentions surfacing in AI-generated answers – is precisely the environment Muck Rack was built to monitor. The partnership with Sounds Profitable places Muck Rack in direct proximity to the industry’s primary research and knowledge network at a moment when brands are actively working out what podcast measurement actually means.

GEO and AI search: the emerging measurement frontier

One of the more technically specific aspects of Muck Rack’s offering, as described in the announcement, is its Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) insights capability. GEO refers to the practice of understanding and improving how a brand or organization appears in answers generated by large language models and AI-powered search systems such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and similar tools.

The addition of GEO to the podcast context is not incidental. As podcast appearances generate transcripts, editorial pickups, and YouTube clips, those downstream artifacts become part of the content corpus that AI search systems index and synthesize when generating answers. A brand that appears consistently in high-quality podcast conversations, and whose appearances generate further editorial coverage, may surface more frequently in AI-generated brand-related answers.

Muck Rack’s platform tracks both traditional media monitoring and how brands appear in AI-generated answers. That dual capability places it at an intersection that few PR platforms have reached. For communications professionals working with brands that are expanding into podcasting, the ability to track the full chain from audio appearance to AI search citation represents a new measurement surface.

Industry convergence: PR technology meets the podcast ecosystem

The Sounds Profitable Partner Network has grown from its earlier configuration of around 150 partners – visible in materials from Podcast Movement 2024 – to nearly 210 as of this announcement, a figure also reflected in the organization’s most recent public-facing descriptions. That growth trajectory maps onto the period of strongest commercial development in podcasting, when advertising spending, audience measurement, and distribution infrastructure were all advancing simultaneously.

Muck Rack joining that network is, in one reading, a data point about normalization. Podcasting is now sufficiently embedded in mainstream media and brand communications that the PR platform sector has direct strategic interest in understanding it – not as a novelty or a supplemental channel but as a primary channel for earned media that requires monitoring, measurement, and reputation management at the same level as print, broadcast, or digital news.

The announcement noted that Sounds Profitable sits at the center of the industry for companies looking to enter the space. That positioning has historically attracted audio and advertising technology companies. Its attraction of a communications platform suggests the categories of companies that see strategic value in the podcast ecosystem are expanding.

For marketing and communications professionals, the partnership offers a practical signal: the infrastructure for treating podcast appearances with the same analytical rigor as traditional press placements is taking shape. Whether through Muck Rack’s monitoring and GEO tools, through Sounds Profitable’s research database, or through the two organizations’ joint work that will be visible at The Podcast Show London and in future programming, the gap between podcast strategy and mainstream PR measurement is narrowing.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Sounds Profitable, the trade association for the podcasting industry, and Muck Rack, an AI communications platform used by PR professionals to monitor media coverage and AI search appearances.

What: Muck Rack joined the Sounds Profitable Partner Network, a network of nearly 210 organizations globally. The partnership includes a joint appearance at The Podcast Show London on May 20-21, 2026, with a Brand Stage fireside chat on podcasts, earned media, and AI search. Muck Rack brings global media monitoring, Generative Engine Optimization insights, social listening, and AI automation to a network historically focused on audio and advertising technology companies.

When: The partnership was announced on May 13, 2026. The first joint public appearance is scheduled for The Podcast Show London on May 21, 2026.

Where: Sounds Profitable is based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Podcast Show London takes place in London. The Partner Network operates globally, spanning nearly 210 organizations across the audio and advertising industries.

Why: Podcast appearances now travel across YouTube, editorial coverage, and AI-powered search results – expanding the measurement surface beyond traditional listener data. Muck Rack’s platform tracks how brands appear across all of these channels, including in AI-generated answers. According to Sounds Profitable’s own research, 71% of podcast creators now produce video content, meaning a single brand appearance can reach multiple audiences and platforms simultaneously. As podcast advertising spending reached $2.9 billion in the United States in 2025 and monthly listenership hit a record 58% of Americans, PR professionals are under increasing pressure to account for podcasting within mainstream communications measurement frameworks.

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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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Social Media Is Not Enough. How Smart Founders Market Themselves in the Age of AI

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BY KIMANZI CONSTABLE

Going all-in on social media? That’s not a strategy. It’s a gamble.

In today’s digital society, social media keeps the world connected. It keeps you informed about what’s happening in the world and provides a channel for founders to market their companies.

According to the University of Maine, there are 4.8 billion social media users, representing 59.9% of the global population and 92.7% of all internet users. There’s no denying the opportunity to reach consumers through social media marketing, whether organic or paid.

It’s easy to create an offer, start marketing it on social media, and receive instant sales. However, you don’t own social media platforms, which leaves you dependent on others to get clients.

Depending on someone else to market your business is not a sound strategy, especially given how AI is changing things. Here’s how to create a diversified marketing plan that increases sales no matter what changes online.

Use each social media platform for a different type of marketing.

The beauty of social media for founders is that each platform has its own nuances with the types of consumers who frequent each platform. LinkedIn is considered a professional network. Instagram is a place for visuals. YouTube offers everything from education to entertainment. Facebook is where you can find the best advertising opportunities. TikTok has some of the best organic reach. Lastly, Threads offers thought-provoking conversations.

One way to diversify your social media use for lead generation, consumer education, and client acquisition is to leverage each network in different ways and market to different audiences. Posting the same content across platforms is ineffective because consumers expect optimized content for each platform.

Diversifying your content across platforms gives you the opportunity to split-test different messaging, offers, and client acquisition strategies. It also creates diversification. If one platform is not functioning, you have the other platforms to make up the difference.

Use social media for lead generation. Then, send consumers to the platforms you control.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or any social media platform can change their algorithms, your reach, what you have access to, or how you can market your business. Social media platforms can and do make changes without notice, and those changes can affect your business if they’re your only marketing channel.

Your goal should be to take advantage of the reach of social media, educate your consumers, and then direct them back to your email list, website, and other owned media. Generate leads that are sent to your owned platforms, so that no matter what happens with social media, you have marketing channels.

Focus on building your email lists.

Founders’ and their companies’ greatest asset is their email list. With an email list, you always have a way to market your offers, even if social media disappears. It’s also smart to create multiple email lists that are segmented based on how consumers found your company. You can split-test messaging, offer different options to different audiences, and build an asset that increases your company’s valuation. Email lists are sellable assets.

Leveraging PR, thought leadership content, podcast guests, public speaking, media features, and educational content creates a strong and visible personal brand. Building a personal brand means you’ll always be able to sell, no matter how your offers change.

Your personal brand is even more important in the age of AI, as chatbot search pulls your credibility from the internet. One way to diversify your marketing beyond social media is to continue building your personal brand and show up more visibly in traditional and AI search results.

Leverage offline marketing channels.

In the digital information age, it can be easy to focus on only online marketing strategies. There’s a whole world of opportunity offline, at conferences, events, meetups, local networking, and more. Consumers have online fatigue post-pandemic, and in the age of AI and the metaverse. You’ll find potential clients and your consumers participating in offline channels, and you can reach them when you show up.

One great way to diversify beyond social media marketing is to add offline networking to your marketing plan. Connect with your local consumer base and, if you’re a nomadic founder, as you travel.

Social media offers a great opportunity for marketing, but it shouldn’t be your only channel, as you don’t own or control it. Create a diversified marketing plan and watch your revenue increase. It’s wise to have options.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

BY KIMANZI CONSTABLE

Sourced from Inc.

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Snap’s Q1 Makes Its AR Glasses Bet Harder To Ignore

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By Maureen Kerr

Snap’s first-quarter results gave investors something they have not always had from the company: evidence of operating discipline.

Revenue rose 12% year-on-year to $1.53 billion. Daily active users returned to growth, reaching 483 million. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $233 million, while free cash flow climbed to $286 million. Net loss narrowed to $89 million.

On the surface, this was a cleaner Snap story: stronger engagement, better margins and a more credible path toward sustained cash generation.

But the more important strategic question sits outside the quarter. Snap is still asking investors to believe in Specs, its augmented reality glasses that are a bid to compete with Meta, Apple and Google for the next consumer computing surface.

Evan Spiegel used the results to reaffirm Snap’s commitment to “intelligent eyewear,” saying the company would keep investing in Specs and share more at AWE on June 16. Snap also pointed to an expanded Qualcomm collaboration, growth in Specs Lens creation, and use cases across learning, gaming and AI-powered experiences.

Why Snap Is Betting On Specs AR Glasses

Specs is Snap’s attempt to define the next computing interface before Apple, Meta or Google fully normalize it. Snap argues that it already owns several ingredients that should matter in AR: the camera habit, a large visual messaging network, a Lens creator ecosystem and a young audience comfortable using the camera as a communication layer.

If augmented reality moves from the phone screen to the face, Snap wants to be more than an app inside someone else’s operating system. That is also what makes Specs vulnerable.

Specs Inc. And Irenic Capital’s Activist Pressure

In January, Snap established Specs Inc. as a wholly-owned subsidiary, telling investors the structure “enables new partnerships and capital flexibility including the potential for minority investment” and “supports clearer valuation of the business.” The subsidiary was an acknowledgement that Specs needs to be financed and valued differently from the core advertising and subscription business.

Activist investor Irenic Capital took that signal further, urging Snap to spin off or shut down Specs.

Snap’s response, set out in an 8-K filing on 15 April, was a different kind of discipline: approximately 1,000 team members cut, 16% of full-time employees, more than 300 open roles closed and an annualized cost reduction of more than $500 million by the second half of 2026. The cuts created room for the conviction instead of retreating from it.

So the central tension in Snap’s Q1 is not whether the company is improving. It is whether that improvement earns management the right to keep funding one of the most speculative bets in consumer technology.

For shareholders aligned with Irenic, Specs can look like capital misallocation dressed up as vision. For Snap, abandoning it carries a different risk. The company remains subscale against Meta and Google in advertising and exposed to platform shifts it does not control. A successful AR glasses platform would give Snap something more defensible: a hardware-software interface built around the camera, not just another ad product inside a crowded social market.

The better question, then, is not whether Specs is expensive. By any reasonable measure, it is. The question is whether Snap can turn operating discipline into strategic permission.

Can AR Lenses scale into a real platform?

Q1 helps Spiegel’s case. Snap showed stronger cash generation, tighter cost control and continuing AR engagement, with Snapchatters using AR Lenses more than 9 billion times per day on average and more than 400,000 Lenses submitted in the quarter, up more than 150% year-on-year.

But activist pressure means the clock is now louder. Specs does not need to become a mass-market hit immediately. It does need to prove that Snap’s AR advantage can travel from playful lenses to a developer platform with use cases, distribution and eventual monetization.

That is the real bet inside Snap’s earnings: not just that the company can recover, but that recovery can buy it enough time to invent what comes next.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

Feature image credit: Getty

By Maureen Kerr

Sourced from yahoo!finance

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The mobile web will stay with us for a while

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By Peter Evers

After Russell Beattie’s post about the end of Mowser, a mobile transcoder, last Monday, a lot of bloggers reacted fiercely on his controversial viewpoints about the end of the mobile web. As a mobile marketing professional I feel kind of obliged to write about my view on the future of the mobile web.

Let’s start with a short recap about what happened this week. On Monday Russell Beattie, founder of Mowser, an application that transcodes normal websites to mobile websites, announced that Mowser has stopped. In this very personal article Russell came up with different reasons for the end of Mowser, such as lack of funding and personal debts but mostly Russell’s lack of confidence in the future of the mobile web. Russell states:

…I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to. In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I’m tired of wasting my time…

With this kind of powerful expressions, the commotion he caused in the blogosphere doesn’t come as a surprise. Almost every mobile blog I’m subscribed to wrote about it. Especially the articles at MobHappy, MobileMarketingWatch and mocoNews.net were worth reading, But what is Russell actually saying? If you read his text carefully you might have understood that the thing he isn’t confident about is browsing mobile-only websites on two-inch screens.

I can say that I don’t believe in mobile-only websites with no or little PC presence too. If a website is only visible on a phone and not or hardly available on a PC, people probably will not know about its presence. The reasons are that I don’t think mobile search is widely used and I guess that mobile-only sites will not start their own mobile advertising campaigns to gain visitors. Besides, if the site is found, people will not bookmark it or subscribe to it, simply because people don’t bookmark or subscribe to sites on their phone. So how will a mobile-only website ever gain readers? The only way is that people simply remember their URL and spontaneously visit the site once in a while.

Though I have to make one exception. If a mobile-only website supports a mobile application that is installed on the phone, it might have its right to exist. But still, the application will be central and the mobile website will be play a secondary role.

The situation changes when the screen gets bigger and the technology gets more advanced. Smartphone and iPhone users will probably bookmark more and even subscribe to their favourite sites. These phones can even give you the ‘real thing’, but that’s where my doubts come in. Whenever I access the real internet on a smartphone or iPhone it simply takes too long. The connection speed is just not fast enough. And although I’m not a mobile technician, I think it will take a couple of years before cellular data connections are comparable to the PC internet connection we’re used to nowadays. A mobile website as an extension for a regular website is a proper solution for this problem. It gives you the same information without much hassle and a minimal waiting time. The only thing that’s different is the minimal experience, but your experience will be much worse when you’ll have to wait twenty seconds after every click on a regular website accessed from a phone. That’s why I decided to install Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Plug-in on my personal blog. It looks a lot less flashy on a phone, but is fully accessible, readable and loads faster than the full version.

In the aftermath of Russell’s article I also read an interesting article by Alexander van Elsas, titled “Forget about mobile web browsing, think interaction!” which kind of explains the whole point made by Alexander. Alexander writes:

…I have never really believed in a mobile web. But I also believe that current mobile thinking is often dominated by two things, technical capabilities and bringing web services to the mobile. But these things aren’t of any value to me. (…) When it comes to using a mobile phone I have different needs. Needs that aren’t exactly the same as I have on the web, sitting behind a computer. The mobile phone is by all means my remote control of life. It is primarily an interaction device. I call and SMS with it. I also take pictures, upload them, and sometimes I use it for e-mail. The only time I use it for web browsing is when I need to pass some time…

I agree that the mobile phone is primarily an interaction device and that the mobile web should allow even more interaction than the regular web already does. The mobile web should efficiently interact with the typical interaction functionalities that our phone offers us. But to become widely used by people such as our mothers (isn’t she always the one we keep in mind whenever we develop something?), I think it’s important that there’s a certain transition period. In this period it’s better to copy the old and well-known than start with a whole new thing.

It also happened when TV became popular. The earliest television content was made out of plays, straight from the theatre. The earliest websites were static like newspapers and the earliest mobile internet sites are like regular websites. In all these cases the specific features of the new medium came in after a transition period. I think people need this period to become familiar with a new medium. They need to understand the new logic first to integrate the new medium in their daily life. Advertisers mostly react on statistics, and great statistics will only come with wide usage. So this transition period is also necessary to convince advertisers of the power of the new medium. As we are innovators, new media professionals like to skip this period because we already know how the new medium can fulfil its potential. But I think we can’t.

By Peter Evers

Sourced from TNW

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What is “TV”?

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By Mike Driehorst

This week’s TV upfronts are proof that media and the technology behind it are rapidly changing, removing siloed strategies from media choices – forcing marketers to get back to that core question.

It’s fascinating how technology has merged nearly all (or just all?) the media categories. While the marketing question has always centered on “What do you want to accomplish?” it’s also been closely aligned with “Where do you want to advertise?” The media choices were very distinct: TV, print, OOH, radio, mail and, very early in the digital era, web banners.

But technology’s evolution makes the platform less important since most platforms are not tied to just one strategy.

TV, with the growing capability of connected TV, is not just for awareness, it also can be for performance and commerce marketing, says analyst Andrew Lipsman in The Current.

Social media is no longer just top-of-funnel, as it also can be for short-term performance marketing, such as via affiliate marketing with creators and influencers.

And even media relations is no longer *just* about awareness and thought leadership. Targeted and smart earned media play into answer engine optimization.

But let’s get back to TV. This week’s TV upfronts are proof that technology is changing what “TV” is. While the WSJ has a story about streaming platforms overtaking traditional TV in ad spend, broadcasters have had streaming platforms for quite a while.

The broadcast TV giants of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox now have to share center stage with not only  Amazon and Netflix but also with the likes of Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast.

And, don’t even get me started talking about how TV has become a subset of video marketing (looking at you short-form video, microdramas, branded video content and even video games).

What this all boils down to is: As technology mashes up the capabilities and identities of online and offline media, marketers need to remain steadfast to that core question: What do you want to accomplish?

Feature image credit: 2026 NBCUniversal Upfront, with (L-R) Jennifer Garner, D’Arcy Carden, Gemma Chan, Chloe Sevigny, “The Five Star Weekend” on Peacock. (Credit: NBCUniversal/Getty Images)

By Mike Driehorst

Mike Driehorst is a SmartBrief senior editor, working on newsletters covering social media, advertising, agencies, interactive and multicultural marketing, as well as the mobility industry. After an early career in newspaper journalism, Mike worked in public relations, social media and digital marketing on both the agency and client side for 20 years before joining SmartBrief in early 2019.

Sourced from Smart Brief

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“It’s time all men paid attention”: raunchy ad exposes the literal meaning of ‘toxic masculinity’

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Plastic Change highlights the dangers of microplastics.

While plastic pollution is an ongoing environmental concern, it can be difficult to raise awareness in fresh ways that engage general audiences. To tackle this, Danish NGO Plastic Change has released a provocative new campaign drawing attention to the dangers of microplastics in a wholly unconventional way.

The best adverts are built to spark conversation and stop us in our tracks, and Plastic Change’s new ad is no different. Appropriating the saucy visuals of underwear branding, the playful yet powerful campaign is a perfect example of how subverting expectations can make a huge visual impact that resonates with audiences for good.

Created by marketing agency Worth Your While in collaboration with Glue Society, the campaign centres around how microplastics are infiltrating everywhere (and I mean everywhere), including men’s genitals, in some cases leading to fertility issues. Giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’, the ‘Are You Packing Microplastics?’ campaign is a strong call to action masked behind satirical subversion.

Shot by legendary photographer Derek Henderson, whose work has been featured in Vogue, Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton, the ads mimic the visuals of sleek black and white Calvin Klein campaigns. CK’s signature bulge has been replaced by PET plastic bottles, while the waistbands bear provocative messages like “4 out of 5 dicks are packing plastic” and “How toxic is your masculinity?”.

Plastic Change campaign

(Image credit: Plastic Change/Worth Your While/Glue Society)

The campaign was sparked by research from the International Journal of Impotence Research, which discovered microplastics in 80% of human penile tissue tested, while the Journal of Toxicological Sciences similarly found microplastics in every human testicle studied.

“Environmental campaigns often fail to reach men,” says Anne Aittomaki, strategic director at Plastic Change. “Studies show that many men associate environmentally conscious behaviour with femininity and are therefore less influenced by the messages of environmental campaigns. The campaign aims to flip that script by reaching out to men. If saving the planet doesn’t feel urgent, maybe saving your sex life and ability to reproduce will. This isn’t scare-mongering – it’s science. And it’s time all men paid attention,” she adds.

Plastic Change campaign

(Image credit: Plastic Change/Worth Your While/Glue Society)

For more inspiring campaigns check out Prost8’s cheeky optical illusion billboard or take a look at GirlvsCancer’s provocative billboard ad that was banned by the ASA.

Feature image credit: Plastic Change/Worth Your While/Glue Society

By 

Natalie Fear is Creative Bloq’s staff writer. With an eye for trending topics and a passion for internet culture, she brings you the latest in art and design news. Natalie also runs Creative Bloq’s 5 Questions series, spotlighting diverse talent across the creative industries. Outside of work, she loves all things literature and music (although she’s partial to a spot of TikTok brain rot).

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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The Brands Winning Right Now Aren’t Running More Ads—They’re Building Presence

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BY NICOLE RAMIREZ

Coterie’s recently launched in-hospital gifting program is an example other businesses should follow to find new customers.

There is a version of modern marketing that most brand strategists are still running. It involves targeting, retargeting, optimizing, and allocating more budget to chase more eyeballs across more platforms, hoping that enough impressions eventually build enough trust to drive a purchase. It’s an approach that is getting more expensive, more crowded, and less effective every quarter.

The brands that are breaking through right now are not doing it by outspending. They are doing it by engineering a presence at the exact moment loyalty is most likely to form.

Coterie, a premium baby care brand, made that case last month when it announced its first in-hospital gifting program with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Every postpartum patient on the newly renovated fourth-floor maternity unit now receives a complimentary care package of Coterie diapers and wipes. The visitors’ lounge has been renamed the Coterie Visitors Lounge. The brand is not running an ad in this environment. It is woven into the experience itself.

The move is worth paying attention to, a great example of a marketing philosophy that is quietly separating the brands gaining ground from the ones fighting for the same digital real estate everyone else is already on.

Why advertising alone Isn’t enough anymore

The new parent space is one of the most competitive consumer categories in the country. Legacy giants have dominated shelf space and ad budgets for decades. Newer entrants compete on clean ingredients, sustainability credentials, and premium positioning, and most of them are doing it through the same channels, targeting the same overwhelmed new parents scrolling through the same feeds.

A brand that reaches a new parent through a digital ad is competing with dozens of other brands doing exactly the same thing, at a moment when that parent is distracted, sceptical, and already drowning in product recommendations. Attention is easy to buy. Trust is not something a media budget can manufacture.

“Hospitals are the most trusted environment to establish credibility and an emotional connection with new parents,” says Jess Jacobs, Coterie’s CEO. “Our clinically tested diapers and wipes help ensure continuity of care from hospital to home. It was important for us to work with a hospital that aligns with our health and safety standards.”

The principle behind the partnership

There is a principle at work here that extends well beyond baby products. Call it trust by proximity: the idea that a brand earns credibility not by outspending competitors in a crowded ad landscape, but by being present in an environment that already carries trust.

In this model, the institution is the context, not the channel. When a hospital that new parents rely on for one of the most consequential moments of their lives puts a brand’s products in their hands, that brand inherits a degree of institutional credibility that would take years to build through conventional advertising. The brand naturally steps into trust that already exists at the moment needed.

But the principle is not limited to hospitals. It applies anywhere a brand can be genuinely present, in a community, at a moment, through a person, in a way that feels earned rather than paid for. The brands executing this well are not asking where the audience is scrolling. They are asking when the audience is most open, and what it would mean to be there.

Jacobs frames it this way: “Our community is at the centre of everything we do. We invest heavily in our parent community, recognizing that a peer recommendation or a trusted source carries far more weight than paid advertising. The best marketing is the parents who love to use it; a glowing review is a core parental currency.”

That line, “a glowing review is a core parental currency,” is a useful shorthand for a broader truth about how trust-based marketing works at scale. The goal is not to reach more people with a message. The goal is to create an experience so precisely timed and genuinely useful that the audience becomes the distribution channel. Presence generates advocacy. Advocacy generates reach. Reach that comes from advocacy carries a weight that paid media cannot replicate.

Presence as a growth strategy

The instinct in modern marketing is to follow digital traffic and to be wherever the algorithm says the audience is. What Coterie is demonstrating is that the most valuable position goes beyond where they are scrolling online.

“A lot of our success is a result of having a direct relationship with our customers,” Jacobs says. “Keeping that closeness with them is top of mind when we decide where we want our presence to be. We’re meeting parents at a key moment, where trust-based referrals can happen organically. That is what makes it so valuable. We find that when parents try us out, they often convert to long-time customers.”

This is the insight that gets lost when brands evaluate a move like this through a traditional ROI lens. The gifting program works as a referral engine with an unusually favourable starting condition. A parent who encounters a brand at a moment of peak emotional attention, when they are exhausted, grateful, and holding a child they have been waiting months to meet, receives what they see as a free sample. But they are actually experiencing the brand at the exact moment when memory formation and loyalty are most likely to occur.

That is something that no digital ad budget can buy.

What comes after the first impression

What makes Coterie’s approach particularly sophisticated is the entry point to a relationship the brand is explicitly built to sustain.

“Once a customer turns into a subscriber, we use what we know about a parent’s experience to make their life easier, not to increase spending,” Jacobs says. “We want the Coterie experience to feel helpful rather than transactional.”

Helpful rather than transactional. That distinction is where most brands fail at retention. The instinct after acquiring a customer is to monetize, to upsell, cross-sell, and maximize lifetime value through extraction. What Coterie is describing is an entirely different orientation: use what you know about a customer to reduce friction in their life, and let loyalty be the outcome rather than the target.

This is presence in its fullest expression. Not a single well-timed touchpoint, but a sustained relationship built on the premise that the brand’s job is to be useful, before the sale, at the moment of first experience, and long after the initial conversion.

The broader lesson

The hospital-to-home model is specific to Coterie’s category, but the underlying logic applies across industries. Brands building durable market positions right now are not doing so through louder campaigns or bigger ad budgets. They are doing it by identifying the moments and environments where trust is already present and earning the right to be there.

“For consumer brands, growth channels don’t necessarily have to be restricted to retail,” Jacobs says. “It’s finding and meeting your customers where they are.”

Where your customers are is only half the question. The more useful question is when they are most open and whether your brand has done the work to deserve a presence in that moment.

Digital ads will always be part of the marketing budget. Genuine presence is harder to manufacture, slower to build, and worth considerably more when it lands.

In the Visibility Economy, the brands that win in the long term are not the ones with the biggest media budgets. They are the ones that figured out how to be in the right room, at the right moment, in a way that feels less like marketing and more like exactly what was needed.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Feature image credit: Adobe Stock

BY NICOLE RAMIREZ

Sourced from Inc.

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Use These 7 High-Impact Moves to Master Seasonal Advertising Before Your Competitors Do

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By Tonia Ryan, Edited by Kara McIntyre

Continuous advertising doesn’t always mean effective advertising.

Key Takeaways

  • Instead of spreading your budget thin every month, focus your marketing budget primarily on the times when your customers are ready to buy.
  • Pinpoint your busiest, most profitable months by reviewing your sales and tracking when people are searching for your services the most.
  • Your online presence is like a big, sparkling window to your store. Before anyone decides to buy, they’re searching for you online — so make sure it looks good.

Let’s have a real, best-friend chat about growing your business. We both know how hard you work every single day. You show up, give it your all and sometimes wonder why the results do not match your massive effort.

You do not have to work around the clock or pile more tasks onto your to-do list to grow your income. The biggest game-changer is simply doing the right things at the exact right time. Let me walk you through seven simple, fun steps to master seasonal advertising and see amazing results.

1. Stop advertising the same way all year

I used to think it was smart to keep my marketing running at the exact same level all year long. I wanted my business to always be on everyone’s mind. Experience taught me a different lesson. Continuous advertising does not always mean effective advertising.

I think of my business like the ocean. It is full of big, powerful waves of demand that come and go. Instead of spreading my budget thin every single month, I save my dollars for when customers are truly ready to say yes. When those high-demand times roll in, I go all in and catch that amazing momentum.

2. Find your money months

Every single year, I sit down with my favourite planner and look over my past sales. I pinpoint exactly when my busiest, most profitable months happen. I pay close attention to when phone calls and emails start rushing in.

I track when people search for what I offer the most. These are my “money months.”

I ask myself simple questions. When did the money really roll in? Which months brought the most client calls? By finding these patterns, I know exactly where to put my extra focus and energy. I build my budget around these peak times, and the results are always incredible.

3. Think like your customer

My biggest lightbulb moment happened when I stopped thinking like an owner and started acting like my customer. I realized I could not just focus on selling all day long. I had to step into their shoes and figure out what they actually wanted.

My clients have busy lives, wild schedules and specific reasons for needing my help. When I see my customers’ needs peaking, I make sure my business shows up everywhere they look. I time my visibility to match their highest interest. This way, I am always easy to find and ready to help.

4. The Rebel Wax strategy

Seeing a strategy play out in real life makes it so much easier to understand. I love finding great examples to showcase. Bree Mesquit, the founder of Rebel Wax, is doing it right.

She created a fantastic wax line that she sells directly to estheticians. She has an outstanding year round business, but spring, summer and holiday seasons are when the majority of the magic happens. People buy swimsuits, hit the beach and they want to look great, so demand shoots straight up.

Mesquit averages over seven million social media views a month. After seeing me talk on social media and through an article I wrote about how important it is to show up in online search, Mesquit actually reached out to thank me for sharing those tips. Now, things are coming full circle for her business because she understands that her customers and students are searching for her and her business on Google before they decide to buy. Everything has finally clicked into place for her brand to take her business to the next level.

5. Ensure your Google presence is up to speed

Let me share a fun little habit of mine. Whenever I see a catchy ad for a new company, the first thing I do is grab my phone. I search for them online immediately. Your customers do the exact same thing!

Before they ever decide to buy, they search to see what shows up about you. Even if my ads do a fantastic job of getting people excited, bad reviews can ruin everything. If my business info is outdated, I miss out on sales at the very last second.

Making sure your online presence is polished is the magic key. It turns curious visitors into happy, paying customers.

6. Optimize your digital footprint

Think of your digital footprint as a big, sparkling window to your store. Before anyone walks in or clicks the buy button, they peek through that window. They want to see what is waiting on the other side.

When people search for me, I make sure they see clear, fresh information. Strong, positive reviews prove that I am active and ready to help.

If that digital window is foggy or outdated, your ads have to work way harder. Treat your online footprint like a welcoming, trustworthy storefront. Make it work for you, not against you!

7. Prep before the rush hits

Waiting until my business was slammed to update my profiles used to be a huge mistake. I always ended up scrambling at the worst possible time. Now, I make it a strict rule to get ahead of the game.

I give my business a full check-up year-round. I update my Google profile and add beautiful new photos. I also send a quick note to happy clients asking for fresh reviews.

Then, right before the busy wave hits, I crank up my ads. Because I prepared ahead of time, I am fully ready to ride the wave of demand without any stress.

Keep showing up smarter

Showing up at the perfect moments is the real secret to success. Make sure your business looks trustworthy and bright when people finally find it.

When you get the timing right, everything shifts in a wonderful way. You will stop spinning your wheels and start seeing fantastic rewards. Focus on showing up at the right time, and let your business shine. Now, let’s get out there and ride that next big wave together!

By Tonia Ryan

Entrepreneur Leadership Network® Contributor
Tonia Ryan has made her mark as a highly accomplished entrepreneur, ghostwriter for best-selling authors… Read more

Edited by Kara McIntyre

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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8 Ways Creators Can Make Money Away From Social Media

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By Kristen Bousquet,

The creator economy has matured well past the era of sponsored posts being a creator’s only income stream. As the industry grows, more brands are investing in influencers in a much bigger way, meaning that today’s top creators are turning into multi-hyphenate entrepreneurs building businesses with real staying power. Brand deals remain a part of the mix, but they’re no longer the whole story.

Creators are seeing the need to diversify their income streams because brand deals are inherently volatile. Between creator economy saturation, algorithm changes, budget cuts, and brand pivots, creators need multiple streams of income. From digital products to book deals, a new class of creator-entrepreneurs who use their audience as a launchpad is emerging.

1. In-Person Events

People using social media are craving community, so it’s no surprise that in-person events are something that more and more creators are investing their energy into. Events put the creator fully in control, and they allow online communities to meet in real life and fostering even stronger relationships.

Jacklyn Romano, a creator and the founder of Sweat & Sculpt by Jac, created her fitness pop-up business directly from her online community. It was a natural extension of her influencer background, giving her the perfect foundation to host these events. She already knew what her audience wanted before she ever asked them to buy a ticket.

“The events have become a significant and rapidly growing portion of my income,” says Romano, “It’s transformed my business from being solely dependent on brand deals to having a diversified and much more stable income model.”

2. Digital Services

Creators have professional skills that brands desperately want, which is why we’re seeing more and more of them packaging those skills as services.

Jayde Powell, a freelance social media creative, turned creating content online into a diverse business where she steps into agencies as a strategist, creative director, or producer depending on what the account needs.

“Because my perspective is social-first, I’m offering a very digital-native, social media-focused lens on the work, which most brands are looking for,” says Powell. Often, traditional agency staff can’t create deliverables in the same way a creator can.

Michael Lemus, a bisexual Latino content creator with almost 50,000 followers on Instagram, is another example of just that.

“My experience as a creator helps me offer real-world insights to clients navigating the digital space,” says Lemus. Both Powell and Lemus are great examples that creators aren’t just content machines. They’re deeply skilled professionals who are able to offer a unique perspective for brands on their marketing and social media projects.

3. Digital Products

Digital products are a natural next step for many creators who have built online communities around a certain topic. Courses, templates, guides and paid membership communities are all options that allow creators to monetize their expertise at scale without trading time for dollars.

Remi Ishizuka, a creator and the founder of HomeBodies, built and Instagram following of over 1 million by opening sharing her healthy lifestyle online.

“After a decade of openly sharing fitness and wellness with an engaged audience, launching HomeBodies felt like a natural evolution,” notes Ali Grant, CO-CEO of The Digital Dept. and Ishizuka’s manager. The program lets her community workout “alongside her” while generating reliable recurring revenue on top of brand deals.

Ishizuka shows that digital products work best when they’re a logical extension of what a creator has already been giving away for free on socials.

4. Speaking Gigs

Jess Bruno, a creator who brings major personality to her socials, recognized early that Instagram alone wasn’t a stable income strategy. She made it her mission to show up in spaces where her audience already existed.

After a year of laying the groundwork to be invited into rooms where she could share her knowledge, the bookings started flowing in.

“I’m now booking 1-2 paid speaking engagements every single month,” says Bruno, “The best part is they now reach out to me.”

Not only is she being paid rates starting at around $500 per gig, she’s also able to generate new leads for other income streams of hers, like digital products and services.

5. Authoring Books

Gigi Robinson’s path to becoming a published author was unconventional. She cold pitched A Kids Co., and when DK Books and Penguin Random House later acquired the series, she became a Penguin author overnight.

Not only has she been able to garner the credibility of being a published author at such a well-known publishing house, but the financial contribution of her book to her business goes beyond royalties. She’s been able to land more brand deals, get more consulting gigs and work with brands in other paid capacities.

“There’s a credibility shift that happens when you can hand someone a hardcover with your name on it from a publisher they recognize,” notes Robinson, “It opens doors I would have spent years trying to knock on otherwise.”

6. Commercial, TV & Film

For creators with performance backgrounds or specialized skills, the entertainment world has become a genuine income streams — especially for those with a significant social media following. In fact, many auditions and castings ask for information about your social media as a prerequisite.

While Alex Wong still auditions like any working dancer/actor, his social presence has opened a new lane. Wong has seen a ton of crossover, like booking a dancing role in a project, then later being separately contracted for the social media campaign for that same project.

“Sometimes the projects look for people with a social media following to boost it,” he says, “Generally the social media campaign pays more.”

7. Guest Writing & Editorial Contributions

While video content gets all the hype, written content can help creators build credibility in a different, often deeper way. Brianna Doe, a creator and founder of Verbatim, a marketing agency, leaned into writing on LinkedIn when everyone told her to pivot to video. This is exactly how brands and editors starting filling up her inbox with offers.

“It’s not the biggest line item in my revenue, but it helps a ton as a credibility and distribution play,” says Doe, “Every published piece sends people back to my own platforms.”

Those readers convert into brand partnerships, agency clients, and expanded reach, making guest writing a strategic investment, not just a side hustle.

8. Full-Time Employment

Contrary to popular belief, not all creators want to create full-time, and Carly Chamerlik is a prime example of this. After 18 months and growing to about 70,000 followers, Chamerlik got a DM brand a brand that she organically talked about on socials. Her content acted as her resume, and they offered her a full-time remote job.

“Without content creation, I don’t think I would’ve been able to get in front of the right people in order to have this opportunity become reality,” Chamerlik says.

She now balances the stability of a corporate salary and benefits with the creative freedom of continuing to make content, and she says that the company is actively supportive of both.

Bottom Line

These creators didn’t abandon their audiences to build businesses.. They built businesses because of their audience. Each income stream is proof that a creator’s most valuable asset isn’t their follower count, it’s the skills and trust that they’ve built.

The most successful creators are surrounding brand deals with income streams they now fully own and control. The creator economy’s next chapter is about going deep, building real businesses and becoming the kind of entrepreneur that doesn’t need to wait for a brand’s budget to get approved. The line between “influencer” and “entrepreneur” will continue to blur.

Feature image credit: Getty

By Kristen Bousquet

Find Kristen Bousquet on LinkedIn.

Sourced from Forbes

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These Marketing Concepts Have Become Meaningless—and They’re Sabotaging Your Strategy

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By Mark Ritson

Terms like insight, disruption, and engagement are misunderstood, misleading, and misdirect your media spend.

When marketers talk about their “films,” as if they are producing minor Spielbergian classics, it doesn’t just sound pompous and self-absorbed. This kind of thinking is what leads to bad advertising.

We pay to watch films. We want to understand the story and relate to the characters. Ads, by contrast, are watched unwillingly—not only with an abject lack of interest, but with significant motivation to ignore the message.

There are two Cannes festivals: one for film, and one for advertising. The industry would do well to remember that.

So when the industry refers to ads as “films,” it’s a marketing misnomer of grand proportions: not just inappropriate but directionally false. And it’s far from the only one.

Ad breaks: These are not breaks for ads—they are breaks from them. The TV industry’s own behavioural data shows more than half of in-room viewers disengage entirely during commercial breaks. Yet media buyers price reach against an exposure that, for the majority of impressions, never actually happens. We value a room with two adults in it more highly than with one, even though the research shows a lone viewer is more than twice as likely to watch the ads.

Storytelling: Most modern advertising is structurally incapable of telling a story. A 6-second bumper has a logo and a prayer. Calling that “storytelling” is creative cowardice dressed up as craft.

Activation: Whether it’s a tent at SXSW, a sampling stall in Westfield, or a TikTok stunt, most don’t move consumers. First, “activation” lets a team confuse doing a thing with achieving a thing. Second, it eats brand budget to the tune of six figures of media money being spent on canapés and an Instagram influencer.

Engagement: The metric of choice for the strategically lost. A Like is not engagement. A comment is not engagement. A share, in most cases, is not engagement. In essence “engagement” does not actually mean engagement. The misnomer has redirected an entire generation of marketing investment toward the 0.5% of category buyers who interact with brand content—usually because their hand slipped—while the 99.5% who actually drive sales go un-served.

Brand loyalty: The oldest lie in marketing. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent 40 years demonstrating that loyalty—in the sense of exclusive, committed, repeat purchase—is fictional. Category buying is a polygamous, stochastic, wobbly thing driven by mental and physical availability, not anthropomorphic devotion.

Brand love: The phrase implies an emotional bond between human and brand that no behavioural dataset has ever supported at any meaningful scale. Yes, we all have one or two brands we actually love. But the other 2,984 in our current repertoire don’t make our heart skip even a little beat. The job isn’t to be cherished—it’s to come to mind at the moment of purchase. Less romantic. Far more profitable.

Insight: They exist. But a genuine insight—a non-obvious observation about consumer behaviour that, acted upon, unlocks enormous growth—is a career exception, not a process; 99% of what gets stamped “insight” meets none of that definition. “Moms are busy.” “Gen Z values authenticity.” “People want convenience.” These are not insights. They aren’t even accurate. They are observations a moderately attentive 12-year-old could supply while playing a video game.

Full funnel: Advertising’s core concept is bandied around in a shotgun manner to suggest that A. we extract the whole customer journey, and B. get a firehose out and soak that puppy from top to bottom. That’s not what it should mean. It’s crucial to take in the full funnel during any initial diagnosis. But then you activate data and strategic thinking to work out where you want to apply resources to unlock growth.

Disruption: Clayton Christensen’s theory was a precise, narrow account of how low-end entrants displace incumbents: It’s usually slow and initially ignored by incumbents who don’t see the threat. Yet the word now means literally anything. Every Series A deck describes a disruption play. Every challenger brand pitches itself as disruptive when it is, in fact, a slightly cheaper version of an existing thing. Real disruption—rare, hard, terrifying—gets buried under the marketing copy of a marginally cheaper razor delivered by mail.

Consumer: We call them that because consumption is the only part of their lives we are interested in. But consumption is, for almost every human alive, the least interesting thing they do. A “consumer portrait” is likely to be 900 words on what they think, feel, hope, and want from a brand’s product—which should be one sentence. The remaining 875 words should be about a human: their job, kids, fears, Saturday mornings. If we saw them as human first, ironically, we’d understand them better as consumers second.

And we’d make work that actually moves them.

By Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson has a PhD in Marketing and spent 25 years working as a marketing professor, and has also worked as both a global brand consultant and as the in-house brand consultant for LVMH. His articles have appeared in the Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Consumer Research.

Sourced from ADWEEK

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