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Most advertisers see AI gains only in walled gardens, Taboola study finds

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By Luis Rijo

Taboola survey of 200 senior marketers finds 76% see meaningful performance gains from agentic AI tools, but only within search and social, not the open web.

Bar chart showing AI campaign adoption: Performance Max and Advantage+ at 98%, open web at 80%.

Taboola this week published a survey report showing that 76% of senior performance marketers are seeing meaningful improvements from agentic AI campaign tools, yet the benefits remain concentrated almost entirely within search and social platforms. The report, titled “The Agentic Advantage in Performance Marketing: Securing Incremental Growth Beyond Search and Social,” was conducted in March 2026 across 200 marketing leaders in the United States and United Kingdom and released in May 2026 by Realize, Taboola’s advertiser platform.

The findings land alongside the beta rollout of Realize+, Taboola’s agentic campaign system for the open web that the company launched on April 23, 2026. Taken together, the survey and the product signal how the company is trying to shift budget away from walled gardens by making the argument that the automation advertisers already rely on in Google and Meta can be replicated outside those platforms.

Who was surveyed and how

The study was administered online by Global Surveyz Research, an independent global research firm, with respondents recruited through a B2B research panel and invited via email. All 200 participants hold roles ranging from Senior Manager to VP and are responsible for performance strategy and execution at their organizations. Companies represented span the eCommerce, Banking and Financial Services, Automotive, and Health and Pharma sectors, split evenly 50-50 between the US and UK. Organization size leans large: 41% employ 1,000 to 4,999 people, 43% employ 5,000 to 9,999, and 16% employ 10,000 or more. Monthly marketing budgets start at $300,000 and range up to $5 million or more. The average survey completion time was 6 minutes and 6 seconds.

Responses to most non-numerical questions were randomized to prevent order bias. The survey was conducted entirely in March 2026.

AI adoption is a two-platform market

At-scale adoption of AI-powered campaign solutions is concentrated almost entirely on Google and Meta. According to the Realize report, 91% of respondents currently use Google’s Performance Max at scale, with a further 7% testing or piloting it – meaning 98% of the sample is actively engaged with the product. Meta’s Advantage+ shows almost identical numbers, with 88% using it at scale and 10% in testing, for a combined engagement rate of 98%.

TikTok’s Smart+ occupies a different position. Current at-scale usage sits at just 9%, yet 73% of respondents are in active testing or piloting, suggesting broad exploratory interest that has not yet translated into full deployment. Open web campaign management solutions are used at scale by 36% of respondents, with a further 44% in the testing phase – an 80% total engagement rate that trails the two dominant platforms by a considerable margin.

The concentration matters. Performance Max and Advantage+ are not just the most-used tools; they are also the benchmarks against which all other solutions are judged. Both products use fully automated bidding, audience selection, and creative serving. The survey’s framing consistently positions them as the standard that the open web has not yet matched.

Three-quarters report performance lift

Of the 200 respondents, all are currently measuring the performance impact of their best-performing platforms. According to the report, 76% are seeing meaningful improvements, with 29% reporting a significant lift and 47% reporting a moderate lift. A further 7% describe only a limited lift, 16% say it is too early to determine, and just 1% see no impact. Zero respondents said they are not measuring at all.

The strongest perceived benefit of these tools is real-time CPA/ROAS optimization, cited as the top value driver by 41% of respondents. Saving time and operational efficiency comes second at 14%, followed by improved budget allocation across channels at 11%. Greater ability to drive incremental performance ranks fourth at 10%. Automated creative generation and testing, and improved audience targeting and segmentation, each score 6%.

The ranking reflects a market where performance advertising is primarily evaluated in revenue terms. CPA and ROAS are the dominant success metrics, and solutions that directly optimize toward them carry more weight than those offering operational or creative benefits alone.

Budgets remain locked in search and social

Despite broad satisfaction with AI tools in search and social, budget allocation has not moved significantly toward newer channels. According to the report, 74% of respondents allocate more than 25% of their total budget to paid search, against an average allocation of 22% of total budget. Paid social sees significant investment from 67%, with an average share of 21%.

The open web occupies a moderate position: 63% fund it at a moderate level (10-25% of budget), while only 4% give it significant investment above 25%. Average allocation sits at 13%. Retail Media Networks attract mostly minimal spend from 56% of respondents, with an average of 9%. Connected TV is split between moderate (50%) and minimal (35%) investment, averaging 12%. Affiliate and Partner Networks receive primarily minimal investment from 64% of respondents, averaging 8%.

The pattern reflects a structural gap. The open web reaches a large audience – Taboola’s own platform touches approximately 600 million daily active users across properties including NBC News, Yahoo, and Samsung devices – yet it captures a fraction of the budget that search and social command. According to the report, the explanation is technical rather than strategic: the open web has yet to match the automation sophistication available in search and social, which offer advertisers more advanced tool options and more attractive CPA and ROAS outcomes.

This budget concentration is not a new observation. As PPC Land has tracked, Taboola began addressing the open web’s automation deficit by expanding the Realize platform in October 2025 with deepened partnerships with TIME, Weather Channel Digital, Gannett, Nexstar, and Slate, followed by the launch of Predictive Audiences in June 2025, which delivered conversion improvements of up to 270% for early adopters.

Workflow integration is the dominant adoption barrier

The biggest internal obstacle to broader agentic AI adoption is not scepticism about performance outcomes. According to the report, 54% of respondents cite difficulty integrating these solutions into existing workflows as the single largest barrier. That figure dwarfs all other options: lack of team knowledge or expertise scores 12%, uncertainty about which technology or vendor to choose scores 9%, and budget constraints rank fourth at 6%.

The challenge grows sharply with budget size. Among companies spending $300,000 to $499,000 per month, only 9% identify workflow integration as the primary barrier. That figure rises to 38% among $500,000 to $999,000 per month spenders. Among the largest two segments – $1 million to $4.9 million per month and $5 million or more per month – it reaches 74% and 68% respectively. The companies that have invested most heavily in existing platforms are the ones finding it hardest to add a new layer of automation on top.

This creates a specific challenge for the open web. Large advertisers, who would generate the most revenue for platforms like Realize, are precisely those with the most entrenched workflows and the highest integration costs. The transition from manual campaign management to agentic systems requires changes to reporting infrastructure, attribution models, and organizational processes that small budgets can absorb more easily than large ones.

82% see potential, few have scaled

When asked about their organizational stance on AI-powered goal-based buying on the open web, 82% of respondents indicate they see meaningful growth potential. The distribution within that 82% is revealing. According to the report, 46% describe it as a high-potential opportunity they have not yet scaled, 19% say they believe in it but are holding back, and only 17% describe it as a proven growth driver at scale. On the sceptical side, 15% question its incremental impact, 2% say they do not believe it drives meaningful results, and 1% have not seriously evaluated it.

The gap between perceived potential and actual deployment is large. The dominant stance is one of cautious optimism – recognizing the opportunity while lacking either the tools or the confidence to act on it fully. According to the report, many of those holding back are not doing so out of caution but because a suitable solution does not yet exist at the technical level they require.

Open web barriers are operational, not philosophical

The factors limiting further open web investment point squarely at operational complexity and measurement gaps. According to the report, 74% of respondents cite too many vendors or the complexity of managing multiple partners as a limiting factor. Lack of unified attribution and measurement ranks close behind at 71%. Brand safety concerns are cited by 54%. Insufficient resources to manage additional channels scores 42%.

Strategic scepticism is rare. Only 7% say they have not seriously considered diverting budgets to the open web, 5% say they do not believe they can reach incremental users, and just 2% say they do not believe incremental performance is achievable. Only 5% report no significant barriers at all.

The data draws a clear line: advertisers broadly believe the open web can deliver performance, but fragmentation and measurement complexity make it operationally harder than staying within walled gardens. This is directly relevant to the investment case for platforms like Realize. The argument is not that advertisers need convincing about the open web’s audience quality; it is that they need a simpler operational layer to access it.

81% would increase open web investment if automation matched search and social

The study’s most direct finding on the market opportunity is this: 81% of respondents agree they would increase open web investment if it offered agentic AI-powered campaign solutions comparable to what they use in search and social. Broken down, 49% strongly agree and 32% somewhat agree. Only 11% disagree, and 8% are neutral.

The intensity of agreement scales with seniority and spend. Among VPs, 67% strongly agree – compared to 46% of Directors and 35% of Senior Managers. The pattern by budget is steeper still: only 3% of organizations spending $300,000 to $499,000 per month strongly agree, rising to 21% among $500,000 to $999,000 per month spenders, 67% among $1 million to $4.9 million per month, and 74% among those spending $5 million or more. The largest advertisers are the most enthusiastic about automation reducing operational complexity.

Expected budget reallocation averages 24%

If agentic AI solutions existed for the open web, virtually all respondents (99%) say they would allocate some share of their performance marketing budget to it. The average expected allocation is 24%. Half of respondents cluster in the 11-25% range, while 37% would allocate 26-50%. Only 11% would allocate up to 10%, 2% would allocate more than 50%, and 1% would allocate nothing.

The gap between current and anticipated significant open web investment tells the story clearly. Just 4% of respondents currently invest more than 25% of their performance budget in the open web. At least 39% say they would invest 26% or more if agentic AI solutions were available for it. That would not make the open web the dominant channel – the 24% average still trails paid search’s current 22% average allocation modestly – but it would represent a substantial shift in where performance dollars flow.

Why this matters for the marketing industry

The survey’s findings carry direct implications for how performance marketing budgets may evolve. At present, the industry’s agentic AI story is largely a Google and Meta story. As PPC Land has reported, Google’s Performance Max serves over one million advertisers and has received more than 90 quality improvements over the past year, including expanded automation tools, AI-generated creative features, and channel performance reporting. Meta’s Advantage+ demonstrated 22% average ROAS improvements through 2025.

The pressure that dynamic creates on other channels is real. If 74% of performance budgets flow to paid search and social, and those platforms continue improving their automation while the open web remains fragmented, the gap risks widening rather than closing. The survey suggests the market is aware of this dynamic and is looking for a way through it. Whether platforms like Realize can provide the automation layer that unlocks the 81% willing to increase open web investment is a product and execution question as much as a market one.

The Taboola survey also lands as the company reported Q1 2026 revenue of $466.4 million, a 9.1% year-on-year increase. Realize+ is built on two core technical components. The first is the Decision Engine, which includes a Budget Allocator that automatically moves spend toward the highest-performing campaigns in real time. The second is the Element Generator, which creates and continuously updates ads and targeting parameters without manual input. The architecture is explicitly designed to replicate the autonomy of Performance Max and Advantage+ on open web inventory – without the owned-and-operated bias critics of walled garden systems have raised repeatedly.

Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola, addressed the core market demand in the press release accompanying the report: “Advertisers of all sizes are leaning into agentic advertising, and the results are following. Our research shows a clear demand for advertisers that want the same ‘always-on,’ AI-driven performance they see in walled gardens applied to the open web. They are looking for autonomous systems that learn continuously, pivot in real time, and turn every impression into a measurable outcome.”

The survey frames this not as a niche demand but as a near-universal one. Three-quarters of all respondents rate finding a performance channel that delivers incremental outcomes beyond search and social as very or extremely important. Among VPs, that figure climbs to 53% rating it extremely important alone. Among those spending $5 million or more per month, 70% call it extremely important – the single largest concentration of urgency in the entire dataset. The combination of high stated demand, measurable performance gaps, and specific operational barriers provides the clearest public data picture yet of where performance marketing budgets might go if the automation gap between walled gardens and the open web can be closed.

Timeline

  • April 2024 – Taboola launches Taboola Select, a curated premium publisher package for large advertisers with access to a vetted subset of 15% of top US publishers.
  • June 2025 – Taboola announces full commercial launch of Predictive Audiences on its Realize platform, reporting conversion improvements up to 270% for early adopters including The Motley Fool, QuinStreet, and NerdWallet.
  • October 15, 2025 – Taboola expands the Realize platform with deepened publisher partnerships including TIME, Weather Channel Digital, Gannett, Nexstar, and Slate, adding display inventory to a historically native-focused network.
  • October 22, 2025 – Taboola and Paramount Advertising announce Performance Multiplier, connecting CTV advertising to measurable open web performance outcomes via Realize.
  • December 3, 2025 – LG Ad Solutions and Taboola announce Performance Enhancer, combining LG’s ACR data with Realize to connect CTV exposure to digital conversions.
  • January 28, 2026 – Taboola publishes research with Columbia, Harvard, Technical University of Munich, and Carnegie Mellon showing AI-generated ads match human creative performance across 500 million impressions.
  • March 2026 – Global Surveyz Research conducts the survey underlying the “Agentic Advantage in Performance Marketing” report, polling 200 senior performance marketers in the US and UK.
  • April 23, 2026 – Taboola launches Realize+, an agentic AI system for open web performance campaigns built on a Decision Engine and Element Generator, alongside Claude Skills integration.
  • May 6, 2026 – Taboola reports Q1 2026 results: revenue $466.4 million, up 9.1% year-on-year, net income $59.1 million.
  • May 14, 2026 – Taboola and Realize publish “The Agentic Advantage in Performance Marketing” report based on the March 2026 survey of 200 senior marketers in the US and UK.

Summary

Who: Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), through its Realize advertiser platform, in partnership with Global Surveyz Research, surveyed 200 senior performance marketers – ranging from Senior Managers to VPs – at mid-to-large organizations in the United States and United Kingdom across eCommerce, Banking and Financial Services, Automotive, and Health and Pharma industries.

What: A research report titled “The Agentic Advantage in Performance Marketing: Securing Incremental Growth Beyond Search and Social” showing that 76% of performance marketers see meaningful performance gains from agentic AI tools like Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+, yet gains are concentrated within walled gardens. The report also finds 81% would increase open web investment if comparable automation were available, with an average expected budget allocation of 24% to the open web under that scenario.

When: The survey was conducted in March 2026 and the report was published on May 14, 2026.

Where: Respondents are based in the United States and United Kingdom, split evenly 50-50. The findings relate to global digital advertising markets and the structural divide between walled garden platforms and the open web.

Why: The research addresses a persistent structural imbalance in digital advertising, where the open web captures a fraction of performance budgets despite reaching a large share of user time. The primary barriers identified are not performance scepticism but operational complexity: workflow integration difficulties, fragmented vendor environments, and lack of unified attribution. The report was released alongside Taboola’s Realize+ beta, positioning the findings as a market-level argument for agentic AI automation on the open web.

 

By Luis Rijo

Sourced from PPC.Land

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IAB at 30: The leaders who built digital advertising tell the story

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Sourced from The Drum

At IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) this year, the organization marked its 30th anniversary – a milestone that lands awkwardly in the middle of a fresh identity crisis for the business it helped build.

Because yes, the banner ad really did become programmatic. Then it became mobile. Then social. Then video. Then ‘outcomes.’ And now we’re staring down an era where AI can generate the content, optimize the targeting, buy the media and write the post-campaign report, all before anyone’s even worked out what, exactly, we’re measuring.

And yet, in a room full of people whose job titles have evolved faster than their LinkedIn photos, one thing kept popping up: the IAB’s most important product isn’t a deck, a committee or even a conference. It’s the boring stuff. The standards. The definitions. The measurement frameworks. The shared language that stops a market from collapsing into a thousand incompatible ‘trust me, bro’ claims.

To mark the anniversary, The Drum spoke with some of those who’ve seen the whole arc up close, from dial-up chaos to the present day: Rich LeFurgy, the IAB’s founding chair; Wenda Harris Millard, a past chair who remembers just how naïve (and hilarious) those early years were; Scott Cunningham, who helped push the industry into its more technical, standards-led era; and Peter Naylor, who chaired the IAB in 2012 and watched wave after wave of ‘the next big thing’ hit the shore.

We also heard from IAB CEO David Cohen about what 30 years of compounding growth looks like and why, in an AI moment, the industry may need the IAB’s ‘big tent’ approach more than ever.

Start with LeFurgy and you quickly remember, this wasn’t inevitable. He traces the origin story back to something almost quaint – a trade publication editorial that basically said, this new ‘internet media’ thing needs a trade association. “It sparked an idea with me that I really thought we needed a trade association to establish the credibility of the medium,” he tells The Drum.

In April 1996, about 36 people gathered in San Francisco to map out what the thing should be and, crucially, to model it against the grown-up media associations of the day. Because, as LeFurgy puts it, the early internet wasn’t just messy, it was “absolute chaos in the wild, wild west.”

The credibility problem was existential. There were “outrageous claims… ahead of their time,” he says – the kind of lines we still hear in 2026, delivered with slightly better fonts. Agencies, understandably, weren’t buying it. They had a “wake me when it’s over” attitude.

So the IAB did something that seems obvious now and was radical then: it tried to prove the market existed.

“We partnered with PricewaterhouseCoopers to do an audit of actual spending in the fall of 1996… to show that spending was real and to provide air cover for our salespeople,” LeFurgy says.

The “sticker,” he recalls, was $276m in Q4 1996. Cohen, on stage at ALM, put the punchline bluntly: in 2024, the number was roughly $260bn – and the IAB has grown double digits for most of its 30-year run.

If that sounds like destiny, Wenda Harris Millard is here to remind you it was also… absurd. She remembers being in San Francisco in the very early days, trying to find an office, panicking about being late and calling back to New York for the “address.” The response: “OK, it’s w, w, w.”

“The reason we lived in this crazy bubble… it’s the only thing this young girl knew was when we said address,” Harris Millard says.

That’s the real point of the nostalgia: the industry didn’t just lack tools, it lacked basic shared assumptions. Which is why the IAB’s early focus on standards and measurement wasn’t admin. It was survival.

The rails: standards, measurement and the right to trade

If you want the IAB’s core value in one sentence, Peter Naylor offers it: the IAB helped make digital “as easy to buy and easy to sell as possible.” And that “easy” was hard-earned.

Harris Millard frames it as a practical necessity: “We had to focus on a lot of the standards that didn’t exist… trying to figure out the rules everybody should be trying to play by and you need some kind of a governing body for that to happen.”

Her warning is still current: “The worst thing that can happen is that individual companies run off and decide what their standards… should be… That just creates even more chaos.”

She points to measurement as a defining contribution: “The IAB took a lead role in measurement, because we promised marketers that this would be a very accountable medium.”

LeFurgy is even more explicit about what standards did in those early banner years: they reduced friction. And friction in a market trying to convince Madison Avenue it’s real is fatal.

“There was a lot of friction in the marketplace,” he says. Without standards, “700 different banner sizes” meant teams obsessed with technical negotiation rather than “creating great advertising and great media plans.”

That line matters because it’s the throughline to today: the format has changed, but the role of standards hasn’t. The glamorous world of banner sizes has simply been replaced by the even more glamorous world of AI governance, interoperability, data rights and “what counts as an impression when nobody’s looking at a screen.”

Acceleration: waves keep coming and you don’t get to stop the ocean

Naylor’s mental model of digital isn’t a timeline; it’s a coastline. “There’s been wave after wave of big innovation. We started with banners and buttons and then search and then social media. AI is obviously here right now and all in between is the rise of commerce and the rise of video,” he says.

When he wants an example, he goes straight to the moment TV began to understand the internet wasn’t just “promo.” Disney putting full episodes online triggered a chain reaction – NBC, then Hulu, then OTT becoming “streaming” as default.

His point isn’t just that things change. It’s that the IAB’s job is to stop every new wave from splintering the market into incompatible definitions.

Because digital isn’t a single channel but, in actual fact, infrastructure. It leaks into everything: retail, entertainment, publishing, commerce, creators, the open web, the walled gardens and, now, generative systems that might not need ‘websites’ in the way the last 30 years assumed.

Transformation: from ‘midnight banner swaps’ to AI-era compliance

Scott Cunningham’s origin story is the perfect antidote to any tendency to mythologize those early years. “Way back when, I was the guy who was at the bar on Saturday night and who had to leave at midnight to stumble into the office to change out the whole front of the website so that we had a new banner ad,” he says.

Then, someone arrived with an ad server. “I said, ‘I love you. This is great. Now I don’t have to leave the bar any more on the weekends.’”

That’s not just a funny story. It’s a snapshot of what “professionalizing the industry” actually meant: moving from human duct tape to systems, protocols and repeatability.

Cunningham later helped found the IAB Tech Lab in 2014 and today he’s focused on quality assurance and compliance because, in the AI era, ‘trust’ isn’t a slogan. It’s a requirement for the market to function.

“I joined [AAM] to help the industry put together a lot of good quality assurance programs moving forward,” he says, “because I do believe that compliance is where we need to take things.”

LeFurgy thinks the current AI disruption will be as significant as the dotcom era, but with a key difference: we’re not starting from zero any more and everyone knows enough to be scared.

Which is why his prescription sounds familiar: “Coming together as an industry so that we can create a standard so that everybody’s running on the same rails [and] we do the best thing for the consumer.”

30 years of compounding and the next job for the IAB

Cohen’s anniversary framing was simple: the IAB has been at the centre of every major inflection point because it keeps doing the same thing, over and over, in new contexts – convene, define, standardize, measure, repeat.

The shift now is that the next inflection point isn’t just a new channel. It’s a new actor in the system: AI that can create, distribute and monetize at machine speed while simultaneously raising questions about scraping, rights, provenance and what it even means to ‘trade’ attention.

Meanwhile, retail media is charging in as the newest ‘wave’ and, if the last 30 years taught the industry anything, it’s that retail doesn’t get to invent its own physics. It will need shared definitions, shared standards and shared measurement, or it’ll recreate the chaos that banners had to climb out of.

30 years on, the IAB’s achievement is not that it predicted the future, it’s that it built the plumbing that let the industry survive its own imagination.

Or, to borrow the vibe of those early meetings that LeFurgy described, digital grew up because somebody, at some point, decided the boring work mattered enough to organize around it.

Sourced from The Drum

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Branded Merch Evolution: Five Trends Marketers Should Know

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By Drew Holmgreen

​Since seemingly forever, branded merchandise has lived on the outskirts of marketing strategy. It’s often treated as a giveaway or an afterthought—something that only belongs when you have to do a trade show.

In a past life at a branding agency, I was as guilty of this thinking as anyone. We believed that a new company logo absolutely had to look great on a baseball cap, but we never got around to designing and ordering it until the very end. And we often thought about the caps’ price first and even rolled our eyes at the request, considering it a waste of budget.

Wow, was I wrong. We now live in a world where real-life, one-to-one connections should matter more to brands than ever. We’re overrun with impersonal, swipe-right ads and marketing messages all day, everywhere we look. And a branding opportunity as intimate as a product people wear on their bodies or take with them everywhere they go can no longer be an afterthought.

In this way, I see merch evolving into a primary channel for building lasting brand connections, shaping perception and delivering long-term impact. For organizations and leaders willing to rethink their approach, the opportunity can be significant. Here’s what’s changing.

1. From Volume To Value

Consumers don’t want more products. They want better ones. Across the market, research shows that merch can drive strong emotional responses, increasing brand favourability and appreciation. But low-quality items don’t just get ignored or tossed; it can actually weaken brand perception.

Durability, design and material quality now determine whether a product is kept or discarded. Cultural values are on display with the products we choose, as Starbucks showed in a recent collab with Peanuts characters to promote kindness.

One product that earns a place in someone’s daily life is more valuable than dozens that don’t. Therefore, I recommend you shift from quantity to relevance.

2. Retail Quality Is Now The Standard

Related to my first point, one of the biggest shifts in the game right now is toward retail-inspired design.

Buyers are prioritizing products that feel like something they would purchase themselves. Think better fabrics, cleaner design and more thoughtful construction. Or co-branding with the likes of Nike, Patagonia and Yeti gear. The merch that works now comes off the display rack, not out of the bargain bin.

The next time you’re at an airport, look around at the kind of logoed items people wear or carry proudly. You see it especially in apparel, drinkware and tech. It’s about intentional design. The most effective branded products don’t look promotional. They fit naturally into everyday life. Take the Aussie hardware retailer whose hat went viral with fashion influencers. Great merch now signals a person’s tastes and values, not “this space for rent.”

A useful test for brand builders: Would someone choose your product if it had no logo at all? If not, rethink the item. You can do better.

3. Experience Drives Impact

Products alone are no longer enough in physical marketing. Curating a full experience is becoming just as important. Touch, yes, but also sight, sound, smell and taste.

At the most beloved brand activations, customization and interaction consistently outperform static distribution. Build-your-own items, on-site personalization and immersive moments create stronger engagement. These are the new normal in merch. “Give us your email address and we’ll give you a pen” doesn’t live here anymore. People want experiences, not transactions.

In many cases, the product is simply the extension of that experience, a lasting reminder of a moment. Luxury destinations and hotels have figured this out. I think more brands should think beyond distribution and ask how their merch creates interaction, not just exposure.

4. Core Categories Still Work, But Must Evolve

Apparel, drinkware, bags and technology remain among the most effective physical advertising categories because they align with daily routines. People take them places and generate impressions. More impressions mean a greater return on investment (ROI).

But expectations within those categories have changed. Apparel now reflects modern fits and softer textures, with retail aesthetics. Drinkware and bags are more design-forward and sustainability-conscious. Tech products signal innovation and relevance.

People will always have use for these categories. You’ve got to wear something. You’ve got to drink out of something. The strategy that works isn’t to replace these staples but to upgrade them. A familiar product, executed well, will outperform a novel one that feels disposable.

5. Sustainability Is Expected, Not Optional

Sustainability is no longer a niche request. Especially for major brands with sustainability goals of their own, it’s becoming a baseline expectation.

A major part of this shift is a result of our changing demographics. Younger consumers increasingly associate environmentally responsible products with brand trust. But more importantly, they expect transparency. Materials, sourcing and impact matter more than messaging alone.

For brands, this means sustainability (the real thing, not greenwashing) should be built into product decisions, and better still, part of the storytelling about why the merch piece was selected.

Strategy, Not Compulsion

All of this is to say, based on everything we observe in marketing, merch is no longer an ancillary tactic intended to round out a campaign so that we can call it integrated.

These items are a strategic medium for your brand with long-lasting importance. A well-chosen item can live with someone for months or years, becoming part of their routine and reinforcing brand connection. They become braggable and boastable within social circles. And they create joy each time the loyal recipient wears it, fills it up or plugs into it.

Brands that win will treat merch accordingly. They will prioritize design, quality and relevance. They will make merch among the first considerations in broader campaigns. And they will focus on creating items people choose to keep, not just accept.

This is a crowded, impersonal, digital-first world. The most powerful impressions are often the ones people can hold on to.

Feature image credit: Getty

By Drew Holmgreen

COUNCIL POST | Membership (fee-based) Drew Holmgreen, CAS, President & CEO, Promotional Products Association International. Read Drew Holmgreen’s full executive profile here. Find Drew Holmgreen on LinkedIn. Visit Drew’s website.

Sourced from Forbes

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One of the world’s most popular typefaces gets an upgrade

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Say hello to Gotham Variable.

One of the most popular typefaces in the world, Gotham, has been upgraded by Monotype. Say hello to Gotham Variable, a major evolution of the iconic typeface, which introduces continuous control across weight and width in a single, performance-optimised file.

Gotham, designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones and published by Hoefler & Co., has been involved in various elements of global communication since it launched publicly on the January 2001 cover of GQ. It has been used by brands the world over, including Netflix and Coca-Cola, the United States Postal Service and Saturday Night Live. Twenty five years later, it enters a new era that enables a new level of creative control and adaptability.

Gotham Variable consolidates multiple static files into a single streamlined file, which improves performances, reduces load times and simplifies implementation across platforms. It’s also highly adaptable, working seamlessly across screens, systems and contexts while maintaining Gotham’s iconic qualities. There are also 54 new intermediate styles, including subtle new shades of weight and a new Compact width.

Why has it been upgraded now? “We’re at a point with variable fonts that they are more what we have come to expect from a workhorse family, rather than an experiment, an add-on, or a nice-to-have,” explains says Sara Soskolne, previously senior designer at Hoefler & Co., now executive creative director at Monotype and lead designer for Gotham Variable.

“Reverse engineering variability into an existing and very widely used family is a trickier task than creating a new family that’s conceived as variable from the start. Since Gotham was not designed with variable functionality in mind, I think it made sense to wait a little to make sure variable fonts had reached a critical mass of adoption and expectation before embarking on creating a variable version of a family like Gotham.”

Gotham Variable

(Image credit: Monotype)

Gotham was also an obvious choice for an upgrade. “Gotham has spent 25 years earning an extraordinary kind of trust, from political campaigns to billboards, and across some of the world’s most iconic brand identities,” explains Sara.

“With Gotham Variable, we tried to imagine what this typeface could become without losing sight of its powerful legacy. Many of the styles in Gotham Variable have never existed before. Making them feel like they always belonged was the hardest part, and the most essential.”

Gotham Variable

(Image credit: Monotype)

As well as its technical improvements, Gotham Variable features expanded language support, including Vietnamese, supporting complex diacritics, stacked accents and tone marks. It also includes enhanced Cyrillic and Bulgarian.

“Adding language support to an existing typeface family is no quick and easy task. Getting the proportion and style right for these new glyphs was essential to stay true to Gotham’s DNA. Particularly for the hook and horn, matching Gotham’s expressiveness was key,” says Jordan Bell, senior type designer at Monotype.

For Sara, the connection to Gotham was personal: “My relationship with Gotham stretches back nearly 20 years, which is when I first started collaborating on expansions to what was then still quite a small family. This progressed from smaller initial forays, like adding extended numeric sets and expanded Latin language support, to filling in the width range between Gotham’s original and Condensed extremes to create what became its full 66 styles that were released in 2009; and then to expanding that entire family to cover the Greek and Cyrillic scripts for its 2015 release.

“More recently, I worked with Manual Creative on several bespoke decorated styles of Gotham Condensed for the Obama Foundation, which was a lovely way to reconnect to the family and sort of test the limits of how far it can be pushed while still feeling like Gotham before leading this new Variable expansion.

“And, living in NYC this whole time, on a personal level I’ve had the good fortune of living with some of Gotham’s vernacular sources in signage around the city, to the extent these still exist.”

Gotham Variable

(Image credit: Monotype)

In terms of challenges on this project, there were a few key issues: “To my mind, the main challenges came from the fact of grafting things like variability and Vietnamese language support onto an existing family,” says Sara.

“In adding variable functionality, suddenly all the spaces in between Gotham’s static styles – which were where we hid the sleight of hand involved in making them look the way they do – are now visible and completely accessible to users. So we had to be very intentional and critical about how that was handled.

“In adding Vietnamese support, because it’s a language that includes stacked accents (which often require more vertical space to incorporate), but we couldn’t go changing the line height of Gotham, we needed to include these across the whole design space without them feeling cramped or crowded.

“Underlying all of this is the temptation, once you’re opening up the hood, to turn this into a Gotham 2.0 and revisit some of those very early decisions that are causing some trouble later on. But we agreed very early on to keep this new expansion fully backwards compatible and only expand what’s available to users, not to change anything that existed previously, which I think was absolutely the right call.”

I asked Sara which element on Gotham Variable she was most proud of: “I’m probably most proud of how this all came together to create a variable version of such a beloved family that still feels utterly like Gotham at every moment.

“Since I wasn’t one of the original designers of Gotham, but have increasingly become its custodian over the years, I have a deep sense of responsibility to the intent behind it and the DNA that was created by those original designers. That can make some decisions (such as adding new styles) feel more challenging, but it also means it feels more rewarding when I get it right.

“So, I’m particularly excited about the new Compact width we’ve added in between the original and Narrow widths, which is meant to visually look just like the original width but set more efficiently in text.

“And even after staring at it for months, I never get tired of playing with the variable width slider and watching those stroke endings change their orientation in between the Extra Narrow and Condensed. There’s still plenty sleight of hand in this version, we just had to find different places to hide it!”

Gotham Variable is available on Monotype Fonts, Monotype Connect and MyFonts. Find out more about Gotham Variable.

Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.

Feature image credit: Monotype

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Rosie Hilder is Creative Bloq’s Deputy Editor. After beginning her career in journalism in Argentina – where she worked as Deputy Editor of Time Out Buenos Aires – she moved back to the UK and joined Future Plc in 2016. Since then, she’s worked as Operations Editor on magazines including Computer Arts, 3D World and Paint & Draw and Mac|Life. In 2018, she joined Creative Bloq, where she now assists with the daily management of the site, including growing the site’s reach, getting involved in events, such as judging the Brand Impact Awards, and helping make sure our content serves the reader as best it can.

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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How Small Teams Use AI to Outship Bigger Companies

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For years, the startup advantage was speed. Big companies had the money, the teams, the brand recognition, and the distribution. Small teams had urgency.

But AI is changing what urgency can actually produce.

A founder with the right tools can now test product ideas faster, build internal systems earlier, automate repetitive work, personalize outreach, analyse customer behaviour, and ship updates without waiting on a full department. The gap between a five-person team and a fifty-person team is no longer only about headcount. Increasingly, it is about how well that team uses leverage.

This is why the most interesting companies right now are not always the ones hiring the fastest. They are the ones learning how to build, operate, and make decisions at the speed of AI without losing control.

Why AI Gives Small Teams an Edge

Large companies often have more money and more people, but they also move through more meetings, approvals, and internal processes. Small teams do not have to wait as long to act.

AI helps them move even faster by reducing manual work. A founder or operator can use AI to summarize meetings, organize customer feedback, draft follow-ups, create marketing assets, improve reporting, and test new ideas quickly.

The result is not just more output. It is better momentum.

Speed Still Needs Strategy

Moving fast is powerful, but only when it is done with focus. AI can help teams work faster, but it can also create confusion if used without a clear plan.

The best small teams are not using AI just because it is popular. They are asking smarter questions:

What should we automate first?
What still needs human judgment?
Where are we wasting the most time?
Which systems will help us scale without adding unnecessary complexity?

That is where the real advantage begins.

A Timely Conversation for Boston Builders

For founders, operators, and early-stage teams, the big question is no longer whether AI matters. The question is how to use it in a practical way to build faster, stay lean, and compete with bigger teams.

That is the focus of UGLY TALK: HOW TO ACTUALLY BUILD AT THE SPEED OF AI AND OUTSHIP A BIGGER TEAM in Boston.

This event is designed for people who want to understand how small teams can use AI to work smarter, automate better, and avoid the common mistakes that slow companies down.

Final Thought

AI is changing what small teams can accomplish. The teams that win will not be the ones using the most tools. They will be the ones using AI with focus, discipline, and clear execution.

For anyone building, operating, or scaling with a lean team, this is a conversation worth joining.

By 

Ryan Hawkins is a dedicated growth hacker, specializing in empowering startups and small businesses to thrive in competitive markets. Leveraging innovative, data-driven strategies, Ryan uncovers untapped growth opportunities for these businesses, helping them stand up to larger competitors. His focus isn’t on personal success but on the milestones achieved by the businesses he serves, underscoring his belief that every small enterprise can punch above its weight with the right strategies.

More from Ryan Hawkins →

Sourced from GREY JOURNAL

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The Ordinary skewers beauty marketing with luxury supermarket pop-up

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By Adam Woodward

Created by Uncommon Creative Studio, The Markup Marché is stocked with everyday grocery products relabelled with grossly inflated prices

Skincare advertising is full of products promising ‘magic’ results and ‘medical-grade’ formulas, often dressed up in the kind of glossy branding that’s designed to heighten perceived value. But The Ordinary has spent the last few years doing the opposite, dismantling the industry’s marketing machinery in full public view.

The brand’s recent work with Uncommon Creative Studio has consistently challenged beauty’s reliance on pseudoscience and celebrity culture. Last year’s The Periodic Fable campaign turned skincare buzzwords into a fake periodic table of ‘elements with zero science’, while another activation mocked the economics of celebrity endorsements by revealing how much consumers effectively pay for famous faces in beauty ads.

The Ordinary The Markup Marché group shot
All images: The Ordinary / Uncommon Creative Studio
The Ordinary The Markup Marché toilet roll

Now, The Ordinary are taking aim at another industry bad habit: inflated pricing. Running this month across six cities globally, The Markup Marché is an immersive retail activation that transforms ordinary supermarket goods into absurdly overpriced “luxury” items.

Created once again by Uncommon, the pop-up spaces resemble the kind of minimalist concept store currently dominating luxury culture. But the products quickly reveal the joke. A banana is relabelled as an ‘All-Natural Magical Energy-Boosting Bar’ and priced at $175.90, an avocado becomes a ‘100% Natural Glow-Enhancing Vitality Orb’ retailing for $305.90, while a toilet roll is rebranded as a ‘High-Retention Cleansing Cylinder’ costing $96.20.

 

According to research cited by the brand, 20% of UK consumers say they would pay up to £20 more for a product described as ‘magic’, while US shoppers are willing to spend 45% more on identical products if the packaging appears more premium. The Markup Marché turns those statistics into a physical metaphor, with shelves, signage and installations unpacking the pricing psychology behind beauty marketing.

Alongside the store itself, visitors can explore interactive elements including a ‘naming department’, where they can generate exaggerated ingredient labels, and The Jargon Bar, which applies skincare-style buzzwords to juices and drinks.

The Ordinary The Markup Marché, Toronto
The Ordinary The Markup Marché receipt

Nils Leonard, co-founder of Uncommon, said: “We wanted to take the codes the beauty industry relies on – language, packaging, presentation – and apply them to the most familiar products possible. When you see those same tactics used on everyday items, it exposes just how powerful and sometimes absurd those signals of value can be.”

The activation launched in Toronto before being rolled out across London, Paris, Melbourne, São Paulo and Mexico City, extending The Ordinary’s increasingly pointed critique of the industry it operates within. In a market saturated with miracle claims and marketing jargon, The Ordinary’s commitment to openness and transparency remains its sharpest point of difference.

uncommon.studio

By Adam Woodward

Sourced from CREATIVE REVIEW

 

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Aussies Switch Off As SAP Research Exposes Critical ‘Relevance Gap’ In Marketing

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By Melania Watson

Australian consumers are increasingly disengaging from brand communications that fail to feel timely or relevant, as new research highlights a growing gap between marketing intent and execution across Australia.

The 2026 SAP Engagement Index from SAP shows that 58 per cent of Australians say most brand emails are irrelevant, while just 16 per cent report reading subject lines at all.

At the same time, 46 per cent of consumers say they now care less about the brand itself and more about the overall experience, underscoring a shift in how loyalty and attention are being earned – or lost.

The findings come as brands continue to increase the volume of messages across email, mobile and digital channels. However, SAP warns that rising output is not translating into better engagement, with fragmented data systems, disconnected platforms and siloed teams preventing true personalisation from being delivered in real time.

Instead, many so-called personalised messages are arriving out of context – disconnected from live customer behaviour, service interactions or purchase intent – and are therefore being ignored.

Despite this, consumers are still responding positively when relevance is achieved. The research found that 60 per cent of Australians value localised content, 54 per cent appreciate highly personalised engagement, and 56 per cent want personalised product recommendations, indicating that attention is still available for brands that can deliver it in the moment.

“The divide we see isn’t creativity or ambition,” said Sara Richter, CMO of SAP Engagement Cloud. “When customer, operational and content systems don’t talk to each other, engagement becomes guesswork. That problem only grows as we move towards agent-driven shopping, where relevance is decided instantly.”

Richter said the core issue is no longer strategic understanding of personalisation, but operational execution – with many organisations unable to act on live data quickly enough to influence customer experience while it still matters.

The challenge is becoming more pressing as artificial intelligence reshapes how consumers discover and evaluate products in real time. SAP’s research suggests that brands unable to respond dynamically risk becoming invisible in increasingly automated, intent-driven environments.

That shift is also reflected in SAP’s expanding partnership with Google Cloud, which is focused on helping marketers unify customer data and activate insights faster across SAP CX systems and AI tools such as Joule with Gemini Enterprise. The integration is designed to allow brands to move from insight to action in real time, rather than reacting after engagement opportunities have passed.

“For marketers, this isn’t about sending more messages,” Richter added. “It’s about using AI to turn live signals into meaningful experiences at scale. Brands that can do that will stand out; those that can’t will increasingly be ignored.”

In the retail sector, Freedom Furniture points to the operational complexity driving the need for more advanced systems. “When you’re managing 70,000 products and customers expect tailored experiences across every touchpoint, AI-driven enterprise-wide solutions aren’t optional – they’re operational,” said Federico Jalil.

“The scale of what customers demand has simply outgrown traditional tools and human effort alone.”

Feature image credit: Sara Richter.

By Melania Watson

Melania is B&T’s senior reporter, covering all things martech and adtech across the industry. When she’s not chasing breaking news, she’s chatting with industry leaders to discuss the big changes in the marketing, advertising, and media landscape. She kicked off her journalism career in 2022 at TV3 in New Zealand as a digital reporter and producer, later moving into a technology reporter role that brought her to Sydney. Driven by a desire to push herself into a new niche, she joined B&T at the start of 2026.

Sourced from B&T

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7 Ways Leaders Can Use AI To Strengthen Their Personal Brand

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By William Arruda

Most leaders think they know how they’re perceived. They know their intentions. They know their accomplishments. They know what they want people to think about them. But your reputation doesn’t live inside you. Your personal brand lives in the hearts and minds of others. And now, increasingly in AI systems.

AI Is A Powerful Personal Brand Builder For Leaders

AI can become a surprisingly powerful tool for growing your brand. It can act almost like a reputation mirror, helping leaders identify patterns, strengths, inconsistencies, differentiators, and even blind spots that are difficult to see on their own. It helps leaders build and express the authentic leadership qualities that are essential for leading in our tech-infused workplace.

1. Use AI to Become Self-Aware

Having a strong and recognizable brand is essential for leaders. It helps the people they lead understand and trust them. Focusing on clarifying and expressing your brand is part of your job as a leader. The most successful leaders are self-aware. That means self-reflection and external perception are aligned. Sao Paulo based Personal branding and AI expert Paulo Moreti put it this way, “AI exists to transform subjective perceptions into strategic data, allowing leaders to use technology to scale their presence and influence. This ensures that they are never replaced, but rather empowered.”

2. Use AI to Clarify What Makes You Different

Your personal brand starts with clarity. AI can help you uncover patterns in your experience, strengths, values, communication style, and accomplishments. It can help you describe your unique promise of value. AI can provide the external perspective, identifying themes across your resume, bio, LinkedIn profile, testimonials, results from 360 surveys, and past content. And once you become truly self-aware, you can prompt AI to help you understand your brand differentiation. You can even ask AI to compare your positioning against others in your field by analyzing positioning, communication style, visibility, audience, and differentiation.

3. Use AI to Strengthen Your LinkedIn Presence

Most leaders know LinkedIn matters. They know LinkedIn can be an exceptional reputation builder, but they struggle with what to say and how to say it. AI can dramatically speed up the process. To prevent yourself from sounding like a regurgitated version of all the people who share your job title, craft your own draft profile. Then ask AI to:

  • Improve your Headline and About section so they are more on-brand and differentiated from your peers
  • Generate post ideas based on your expertise and unique point of view
  • Turn meetings, presentations, or articles into content you can use in your LinkedIn profile and posts

In addition to taking the lead with the content drafts, don’t automatically accept all the improvements and suggestions your AI tool provides. Review all content and refine it to ensure it’s completely you.

4. Use AI to Support Thought Leadership Content Creation

The internet is already flooded with generic, AI-generated content. The goal is not to contribute to AI slop. It’s to amplify your perspective, expertise, and lived experience. To grow your brand, you must create content that’s unique and valuable to your audience. You cannot offload that task solely to AI. But you can use AI as your muse, editor, and proofreader. With AI you can:

  • Turn voice notes into articles
  • Repurpose presentations into posts, newsletters, videos, and articles
  • Generate outlines for articles or presentations
  • Brainstorm stories, hooks, titles, and examples
  • Transform one idea into multiple content formats. This helps with both visibility and consistency.

AI works best when it enhances human insight rather than replacing it. It struggles with originality and lived experience. That’s why you need to be part of the equation.

5. Use AI to Become More Visible Without Spending All Day Online

One of the biggest barriers to personal branding is time. Many leaders know they should be more visible, but visibility often gets pushed aside by meetings, deadlines, and daily responsibilities. Despite all the ideas you have for articles and videos and your desire to “be out there,” work can take up so much time that your visibility is limited. Ask AI to:

  • Create content calendars, and batch content creation
  • Draft networking messages and follow-ups (that you refine)
  • Summarize articles or industry trends into your own perspective
  • Prepare comments for strategic engagement on LinkedIn

Visibility becomes easier when AI partners with you to make it happen.

6. Use AI to Improve Your Communication Skills

Leaders are communicators, and communication is one of the most powerful ways to strengthen a personal brand. In fact, communication shapes your reputation faster than almost anything else. To enhance your communication skills, use AI as a coach, sounding board, editor, and mentor. AI can help refine communication. But trust, warmth, energy, and authentic presence still come from the human being delivering the message. Work with your favorite AI tool to:

  • Practice presentations with AI feedback
  • Improve storytelling
  • Customize elevator pitches for different people and groups
  • Adjust your tone for different audiences
  • Get feedback on clarity, warmth, confidence, and conciseness

AI can coach communication, but authentic delivery still matters most. And that’s up to you.

7. Use AI to Build a More Human Brand

Ironically, AI is increasing the value of humanity at work. As tech becomes more capable, the qualities that make leaders truly valuable and memorable become more human. Qualities like empathy, authenticity, presence, encouragement, and connection help leaders motivate and engage their teams. AI can help leaders communicate more effectively with their people, but humanity is still what creates trust. Only you can inspire people, create belonging, and make others feel seen. AI can help you accentuate your humanity:

  • Use AI to remove jargon and robotic language
  • Analyse whether your content sounds authentic
  • Create more empathetic communication (especially for those challenging emails)
  • Spend less time formatting and more time connecting
  • Focus on stories, experiences, values, and POV

As your peers flood the world with uninspiring, AI-generated content, humanity becomes your differentiator.

Use AI To Scale Your Reputation, Not Replace Yourself

The goal of integrating AI into your personal branding activities is to become more efficient while remaining in the process. The more information AI has about your goals, voice, values, expertise, and communication style, the more effectively it can support you. When you engage with AI as a collaborator, you keep your voice, opinions, and personality intact, and enhance trust and credibility while expanding your reach. The leaders who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who use AI to become clearer, more visible, more connected, and most importantly, more human. Because in an increasingly algorithm-shaped world, humanity is becoming the ultimate differentiator.

Feature image credit: Getty

By William Arruda

Find William Arruda on LinkedIn. Visit William’s website.

William Arruda is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and personal branding pioneer. He helps organizations boost engagement and impact through personal branding. Watch his complimentary session on upgrading your LinkedIn profile, network, and thought-leadership strategy.

Sourced from Forbes

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Reputation Versus Visibility: Why Perception, More Than Presence, Determines Influence

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By Jon Michail

Visibility makes you seen. Reputation determines whether you are chosen. That’s the difference most individuals, brands and even CEOs don’t understand. They believe that if they’re talked about enough, blogged about enough, tweeted about enough, they will be powerful. But getting seen is merely amplification. Sure, it drives exposure. Sure, it escalates reach. Sure, it puts your name into motion. But it doesn’t drive what others think of you when they see it. Reputation does. And outside social media, in the real world, perception is what actually governs results.

To put it simply, people don’t just react to visibility. They react to what that visibility represents. That’s why the reputation versus visibility discussion is not just about branding. It is about influence and understanding the difference between just sitting at the table and having real influence there.

Your Reputation In Relation To Others​

Leaders must shift how they think about reputation. A leader—or an organization—has as many reputations as they have audiences, and the reputation belongs to each of these audiences.

The reality is that when you walk into a room, you are no longer managing a fixed identity for your brand. You are managing the interpretation of your brand by your stakeholders.

That is why being visible without a reputation architecture and management strategy is risky. The second your name, your company or your leadership brand is released to the public, a story will be made. That story could be true, skewed, partial or even opportunistic. Yes, it’ll be shaped by your actions—but also by timing, agenda, competition, media climate and audience bias. Once you go public, you begin to lose control. You stop managing information and start managing interpretation.

Executive Reputation And Corporate Risk

This is where leadership personal branding succeeds or fails. Take, for example, the issue of executive reputation. Highly-regarded leaders can greatly improve a company’s reputation, whereas any bad press related to them has the potential to destroy the firm’s reputation. Leaders’ positions are never neutral.

The business community will never draw a line between the leader and their firm, no matter how much executives want them to. Information about the company alone will not affect results. Perception of the person in charge seeps into perception of the company. And when it comes to reputation management, studies backed by lived experience show that silence does not help. Markets don’t wait or operate based on just proof. They look for patterns and whether things appear to be consistent with what they knew about you before.

And stories spread faster than truth. According to a landmark study, false news spreads more quickly and widely than true news on social media platforms. This means that narrative power can no longer be treated as an optional luxury in strategic communication. With speed favouring speculation, there is now only one sure strategy toward influence—credibility must be established in advance of any crisis.

The Momentum Of Reputation

Perception, left to run its course, will compound into reputation. There is no such thing as a static reputation. Rather, reputation works more like momentum. Each article, tweet, silence, endorsement, image, response and inconsistency between message and action gets filed away by the audience. Most signals add authority to your personal branding. Others subtract from it. Very few get forgotten. That effect becomes exponentially harsher in digital reputation management contexts.

The “2025 Edelman Trust Barometer” report reveals that although business continues to remain the most trusted institution in the world, trust varies considerably by country and audience. This reveals an important truth about trust and credibility today—it is fragile and can always be challenged. Consequently, influence does not reside with the most prominent player in the game—it resides with the most credible one.

Silence is also often seen as a protection mechanism for leaders. While sometimes it may indeed be protective, it’s brief. Silence in crisis communication and its effects on organizational reputation and risk perception reveal that strategic silence can affect an organization’s ability to obtain information from the public. The impact of crisis communication silence is negative in the public’s perception. Simply put, when people do not hear from you, they do not stop judging. That is why one of the biggest mistakes in perception management is believing that the lack of communication means the lack of interpretation.

In today’s hyper-speed AI-driven world, visibility can be engineered in bulk, credibility can be faked (for a time) and misinformation can spread before it is possible for humans to assess it properly. Recently, some government bodies issued warnings regarding the potential impact of deepfakes on the reputation of public institutions. The effect of fake content on public opinion and decision-making processes cannot be underestimated. Things like deep fake videos can lead to distrust in public bodies and their actions. The worst part is that the bodies or entities may not even be aware of what’s going on.

Key Takeaways For Public-Facing Professionals

Leaders, founders and public-facing professionals need to understand the following:

• Visibility is a tactic, whereas reputation is an asset.

• Narrative control is not manipulation. Rather, it is making sure that your presentation matches who you are and what you do.

• Corporate reputations are more than branding. They represent an essential form of strategic infrastructure that impacts perceptions of trustworthiness and strength.

• Modern leadership positioning requires nothing but consistency. Consistency between messaging and behaviour. Consistency between visibility and value. Consistency between promises made and promises kept.

In the end, real influence is a matter of reputation, not visibility. The world doesn’t reward presence as you may think. It rewards perception. And if reputation risk isn’t managed carefully, then it won’t matter if you were seen or heard. Your reputation will make all the difference anyway. In fact, if your reputation is exposed to public interpretation, it is already at risk. Assess it before someone else defines it for you.​

Feature image credit: Getty

By Jon Michail

COUNCIL POST | Membership (fee-based). Jon Michail, Founder/Group CEO of Image Group International, best-selling author of Life Branding & The Authority Personal Branding System. Read Jon Michail’s full executive profile here. Find Jon Michail on LinkedIn and X. Visit Jon’s website. Browse additional work.

Sourced from Forbes

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