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Eight ways to stay discoverable when search, social and AI stop sending people your way

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The free routes that used to bring creatives their next commission are closing one by one. It’s been happening for some time. And now AI is pretty much destroying the web as we know it. Here’s how to keep being found – and, increasingly, recommended – without a marketing budget.

For many happy years, getting found was something any creative freelancer or studio could do on the strength of work alone. A website that ranked for your craft. A post that travelled far and wide and carried your name back to your profile. A share that turned a random person into a client. None of it really cost anything except for a bit of time and effort. And all of it was the pipeline to paid work.

Oh, how things change. Organic search has fallen off a cliff. Social media rewards quantity over quality. And the latest? Conversational, agentic AI is now pulling all the shots.

And with today’s big news that Pinterest is shifting away from traditional search, it’s clear that none of us can out-optimise this on our own. The good news is that the shift rewards a handful of things independent creatives can still build: a direct audience, a distinctive name, and a reputation the new systems can read and recognise as important. Exhausted? Yes, so are we. But here’s where to put your energy.

1. Build an audience you actually own

I’ve been saying it for over a decade – since Meta ruined Facebook for publishers in 2016 – build your own audience. That’s because every follower you have is rented. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest get to decide who sees your work, and the goalposts can change overnight.

An email list is the one audience you get to control. It’s a list of people who chose you, and you can reach them directly, whenever you want. So start a simple newsletter, even a short monthly one, and make signing up the clearest call to action on your website. (Our guide to creating a newsletter people actually want is a good place to begin.) A few hundred people who want to hear from you is worth more than ten thousand followers a feed decides to throttle, and it’s how plenty of creatives are winning work after quitting social media altogether.

2. Become a “category of one”

Don’t roll your eyes, but AI discovery rewards a “good enough” match to a brief, which flattens everyone into interchangeable options. The defence is to be “uninterchangeable”. So sharpen the one thing you do that nobody else does in quite the same way. That could be a material, a subject, a voice. You want to be known by name rather than retrieved by attribute. The creatives who survive this current massive shift are the ones a client specifically asks for, because a specific name is the one thing an algorithm can’t substitute.

3. Get cited, named and talked about

As someone who worked in PR for two decades, this next tip warms my heart. Because I know public relations is having a golden hour moment. That’s because if you still want to be found, recommendation engines lean on signals they can read: who’s mentioned in other people’s work, who turns up on lists, in interviews, in the press, and in collaborations.

It means that being talked about is more valuable than being optimised. Forget staying in your comfort zone. Say yes to the guest piece, the podcast… even the scary panel on stage that you’ve been avoiding. Pitch yourself for round-ups in your niche. Every place your name appears alongside your craft is a breadcrumb the systems – and the people – can follow back to you.

4. Make your site easy for a machine to understand

If an AI is going to represent you, it has to be able to read you correctly. That means not blocking AI crawlers on your site. And it means spelling out, in plain language, what you do, who you do it for and what makes your work yours. Don’t just have images and a one-word ‘work’ tab. Name your projects, your clients and your disciplines in actual words. Add alt text to every image. You’re not gaming anything here; you’re making sure that when a system describes you, it gets you right rather than second-guessing.

5. Show the process and the person

A generative answer can summarise a style, but it can’t reproduce the human genius behind it. That’s your advantage. In which case, share the process: the sketches, the dead ends, the “why” behind every decision, and the story of a commission. Content about process, along with a real point of view, builds the kind of trust that turns a browsing visitor into a client, and it’s exactly the material an AI can’t copy from pages that already exist.

6. Make referrals easy to give

Word of mouth is, and always will be, the most powerful marketing channel. And it’s still how most independents get their best work. Don’t leave it to chance. Tell happy clients you’d welcome an introduction. Keep a tidy one-line description of what you do that someone can paste into a message without having to think. Stay in touch with people you’ve worked with so you’re the name that comes up when they’re asked, “Do you know anyone good who can…?”

7. Turn up in real rooms

“In real life” is back, baby. Events, meet-ups, talks and communities – they’re all back on the table after those weird post-pandemic years. Like word of mouth, networking is hugely powerful. A conversation at a portfolio night or a face remembered from a meet-up leads to commissions that no number of impressions or page views can match. You don’t need a stage, but turning up consistently where your peers and potential clients gather will eventually deliver results.

Just remember to enjoy yourself and make friends, first and foremost. Don’t go in with the hard sell, as there is nothing more off-putting.

8. Don’t rent your whole presence from one place

Remember the old saying, Don’t put your eggs in one basket? It applies here. If a single platform is your entire shop window, one change to its rules can harm you enormously. Spread your presence across things you own and things you earn – your website and newsletter list, plus a couple of channels and the press and communities you show up in. The aim isn’t to be everywhere all at once; it’s to make sure no one switch, algorithm tweak or new AI layer can take away every route to your door at once.

In summary

None of the above is a quick fix. But don’t panic. The creatives who stay discoverable through this enormous revolution won’t be the ones who chased the algorithm the hardest; they’ll be the ones who built something that’s truly their own… a name worth knowing, a direct line to the people who love your work, and a great reputation that travels on its own accord.

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Sourced from CREATIVE BOOM

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Who really wants a fully joined-up customer experience?

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By Sam Anderson,

The agency world is filled with visions of perfectly joined-up customer journeys. With the help of strategists, creatives and experience specialists, we look at the origins and plausibility of that vision.

’360° views of consumers…’ ’Perfection at every touchpoint…’ ’Fully joined-up customer journeys…’ Listen to the goals of marketers and their clients right now and it’s easy to get the picture of a single big dream: a technology-enabled, universal stitching-together of just about everything to provide faultless flows through streamlined brand worlds.

But whose dream is this? Where does it come from? And is anyone getting anywhere close to realizing it?

Better is better

As M&C Saatchi London’s chief data strategy officer James Calvert says, a version of the joined-up dream is quite natural, thanks to a “general, though not always stated, belief that when you have things working together, performance will be better,” and that, ”if we make everything look like it’s all part of the same thing, it’ll work better”.

Seems true enough. But as Avery Hennings, lead experience specialist at The Marketing Practice, puts it: “We can all sit here and say that a joined-up experience is better than a fragmented one… what we’re missing is the ’why’.”

It’s not customers who are leading the charge; certainly, words like ‘joined-up experience’ aren’t on many of their lips. And a quick poll of our assembled experts suggests that it’s not always clients who are demanding fully joined-up customer experiences either. “Sometimes we hear about a ‘2025 vision for a connected journey’ coming from the very top,” says Ogilvy Experience’s strategy director Michael Crewe. “But then the people you’re working with on a day-to-day level all have different metrics and different targets that they’re working towards. It can be difficult to look at it end-to-end because their goals don’t make sense together, so when we’re trying to join it up, we’re not building something that’s truly connected, but using rubber bands and sticky tape to try and stitch things together”.

Often, it is agencies that become evangelists for what some would call ‘joined-up thinking,’ thanks to what Journey Further’s conversion director Jonny Longden calls, simply, a “disconnect between strategy and execution”. Customers might not be in the streets demanding joined-up thinking from the brands they buy, but as DPDK’s chief creative officer Michael Vromans has it, “they’ll let you know when it’s not good“. He says: “Great design is the absence of ripples; it’s hard to discern when it’s seamless, but it’s easy to point out when it’s not”.

According to our panel, the roadblocks in the way of seamlessness won’t surprise many: siloed organizations, failure to understand what customers really want, creaky old decision-making processes, failures to understand timescales of change. As Jacob Harris, partner at Known, says: “The long-term effects of the joined-up customer journey are well-studied, but you show this to a client at the start of a project and no one wants to wait for that. There’s this interesting balance between what they want to drive now versus what you can show them that exists in their categories before you can even get into understanding the customer”.

Joining up what?

‘Joined-up’ is all well and good, but it will of course mean something different for every brand – not least because joined-up consistency will be straightforward for smaller brands that show up in one place, but rather more complicated for global brands that show up everywhere.

Hallane Hill, content lead at Optimizon, argues that the key is convenience: “Consumers want convenience as they move between digital and physical interactions with brands. Their shopping experience needs to be the same at every single touchpoint.” Kristie Naha-Biswas, Assembly’s head of strategy, agrees, adding: “It’s about finding those opportunities to connect online and offline, and adding that extra connected experience so that consumers have what they need when they’re researching or shopping.”

For Calvert, the joining up isn’t worth much unless it’s joined by another value: simplicity. “Sure, people will let us know when there’s a problem or if something feels confusing, but what they’ll never say is, ‘why don’t you consolidate your apps and make that better?’” Joining up, in other words, goes beyond simply fixing the problems that customers tell you about; it can also mean trimming back elements of the overall experience that aren’t pulling in the right direction.

Crewe calls this challenge the “effort to understand the entire world of the customer,” but also understanding that “your brand plays only a tiny role in that”.

By Sam Anderson

Sourced from The Drum

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In News

6 Predictions for Creatives in 2019

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With tech speeding ahead, what’s in store for creatives? We asked the pros for their best guess.

With the first few months of 2019 behind us, it looks like the old adage is true: the only constant is change.

For creatives, that’s good news. As organizations look to navigate new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, they are increasingly relying on the help of those who can think creatively, innovate and adapt.

Hoping to get a pulse on where things are headed, we asked a handful of seasoned digital creatives across a variety of disciplines to help marketers, designers, and other creatives spot opportunities this year. And we got what we hoped for—completely different perspectives that all hold equal merit in our consideration of the current landscape.

1. A shift to work that’s less slick, but more impactful
Charlie Weisman, associate director of business development, Big Spaceship

“Looks aren’t everything. A couple of years ago an agency could get by simply making good-looking work. Today every design detail big and small needs to derive from data-driven insights. A proper agency still needs to be able to make beautiful creative, but leading with an understanding of the audience’s culture and behaviors will yield the most effective results. In some cases, this might even mean intentionally trading polish for authenticity.”

2. A concerted effort to break through the ‘sea of sameness’
Rina Miele, creative director and designer, Honey Design

“The biggest change in 2019 is focus, projects used to be all about aesthetics & things were more linear. Lately I feel pushed in other directions, including the use of a multitude of new tools beyond just visual design and the oversimplification of look-and-feel itself. Both are in service of a better user experience, but I feel design is losing its essence, it’s soul. Design is less about art direction than it used to be. This is a new challenge — keeping projects looking different in a sea of sameness. We must stay vigilant in maintaining a brand’s personality and perspective when most products look, feel and interact similarly. It is much more difficult to find that ‘je ne sais quoi.’”

3. A wave of totally new immersive experiences
Bryan Le, group director of design, Huge

“5G [high-speed wireless network technology] will make us consider the mobile experience and the range of application is going to change design significantly.

“5G will be leveraged with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create an evolution of personalized, dynamic content. Speed and bandwidth will change how we capture data and provide experiences. I can imagine applications in retail, critical situations for emergency responders, improvements in logistics and in supply chain operations. Cities will become smarter and communicate directly to people. Design can now fully utilize the environment and the space a person is in, in ways that were only ‘blue sky’ concepts before.”

4. The return of playful, emotionally-driven visual storytelling
David Navarro, executive creative director, Ueno

“We should stop talking about the label ‘digital.’ We’re working in a digital world where technology is part of daily life. The medium matters, but the principles of design scale across different touchpoints. Designers needs to think holistically, medium agnostic, and then apply the specifics to each execution.

“A change I am already seeing this year is intention beyond the systems, where visual storytelling is coming back. With type, editorial layouts, use of sound and motion, micro-interactions create rich experiences. A few years back everything went systematic and templatized. That transformation from chaos to systems was great for the maturity of the industry, we had to catch up to make digital design a real business-oriented medium. Now it’s time to bring the feels back!

“Experiences are at the service of the businesses, but also understand that, as humans, design can be emotional and stimulate the playful brain.

“Let’s bring change. Let’s ‘play’ again.”

5. The end of ‘take all we can get’ data collection
Tina Glengary Cordes, owner and strategist, Ambeti

“We need to get smarter about privacy. Society is creeped out by big tech and big data. That data is rarely used for the users’ good, this data is generally used to benefit the company not the user. Companies using our data isn’t going anywhere, but let’s make sure we get something out of the equation.”

6. A more diverse, inclusive workforce
Mike Ramirez, senior integrated producer, Phenomenon

“The biggest change in digital design in 2019 will be the makeup of the people doing the actual design work. Because of inclusion and diversity initiatives, we will see work across the spectrum that is more informed, accessible, and delightful due to the changing face of the modern designer bringing new perspectives to the work.

“Additionally, brands have a huge opportunity to define the ‘aural identity’ of products and services. The proliferation of podcasts and voice interfaces create an opportunity for brand consistency across existing and emerging consumer touch points.”

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by The Project Twins

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With a life mission to create exceptional experience Dave founded interactive design firm metajive in 1999. Focused on collaborating with his clients and team Dave is always looking for new opportunities to disrupt. When Dave isn’t working he’s trying to catch a few waves.

Sourced from 99U

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