# State of Brand

A modern marketing publication helmed focused on brand, owned media, and GTM: helmed by Melissa Rosenthal, Co-Founder of Outlever

## Where B2B Marketing Budgets Are Going in 2027, and What's Getting Cut
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/b2b-marketing-budget-2027
Published: 2026-10-21T18:57:01.294Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Marketing budgets have barely moved as a share of revenue since 2022, but CMOs are rearranging what's inside them for 2027. The biggest gains are going to AI, labor and events, and martech is giving up the most ground.
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Nine in ten marketing leaders told Forrester they expect a bigger budget next year. Gartner's data says the share of revenue going to marketing hasn't changed. For most CMOs, that means a 2027 plan built on moving money around rather than adding to it. Forrester's 2027 budget planning research found that 91% of marketing decision-makers expect their budgets to increase over the next 12 months. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders found budgets at 7.8% of company revenue , up from 7.7% in 2025 and still below where they sat before 2022. The two findings fit together once you separate dollars from share. Revenue growth lifts the dollar figure, while marketing's slice of the company stays flat. In Gartner's survey, 56% of CMOs said they don't have the budget to deliver this year's strategy. In The CMO Survey 2026 from Duke, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, 56% of marketing leaders said their CFO is pushing harder for proof that marketing pays off. We read through this year's major spend surveys and our own recent reporting to see where 2027 money is headed. AI and marketing labor are gaining share, and so are events and spending on outside experts. Martech, gated content and retention programs are paying for it. At State of Brand, we think the surveys understate one category. For a company working with a flat budget, owned media is the best place to put new money in 2027. By owned media we mean a publication that covers your industry, interviews the people your buyers listen to and keeps publishing between campaigns. Most budgets file it under content. We'd make it a line of its own. AI now takes 15% of the average marketing budget Gartner found CMOs put an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets toward AI this year. Companies that consider themselves ready to scale AI spend closer to 21.3%. Only 30% of CMOs rated their AI readiness as mature, though, so a good share of next year's AI spending will go to tools that teams are still learning to use. The same survey found labor's share of the marketing budget went up , from 21.9% in 2025 to 24.5% in 2026. Many CMOs expected AI to shrink their teams. Gartner's analysts read the increase as a sign that companies need skilled people to get anything out of the tools they've bought. More money is going to outside experts and events TopRank Marketing's B2B influencer research found 85% of B2B marketers now use influencers, compared with 34% in 2020, and most of the advanced programs expect their dedicated budgets to grow. B2B influencers are usually practitioners, analysts and executives with a following in one field. Increasingly, companies are counting their own leaders among them. Events are also taking a larger share. Event marketing made up 23.1% of offline budgets in Gartner's 2026 survey, compared with 19.4% the year before, Chief Marketer reported . Forrester's events research found most teams plan to add gatherings of fewer than 200 people. AI search is getting its own line in the budget Some teams call it GEO. Others call it AI search or fold it into PR. The goal in each case is to show up when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity which vendors to look at. AI engines rely far more on third-party sources than on company websites, as we explained in September . That pushes AI search budgets toward earned media, original research and owned publications run to journalistic standards. The line is still small at most companies, and few are measuring it. A McKinsey survey of Fortune 500 consumer-brand CMOs found only 16% systematically track how they perform in AI search. Owned media is the line we'd fund first AI engines cite reported, third-party material, and buyers trust practitioners more than brands. For years the trade press supplied a lot of both, and it is getting smaller. As we reported this week , one analysis now counts about six PR people for every working journalist, and niche B2B beats tend to be cut first. Earned coverage is getting harder to win at the moment it matters most. A Muck Rack study of 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found 84% came from earned media. Meltwater found that an identical piece of content was cited 8% of the time on a brand's own site and 34% of the time on a third-party outlet. We take that as an argument for owned channels that work like independent publications, with a defined beat, reported stories and named sources. A corporate blog with product updates won't get the same treatment from the engines. Some large companies already budget this way. Ford hired a former AP bureau chief as editor-in-chief. Robinhood built Sherwood as a standalone media brand, and Andreessen Horowitz put together an in-house New Media team with its own writers and producers. The finance argument is about how long the spending keeps working. Paid media stops producing when the spend stops, and a campaign asset is usually stale within a quarter. A publication keeps building on itself. Executives and customers who are interviewed share their stories, the archive grows, and AI engines have more to cite each month. With Gartner showing paid media at a five-year high, a channel whose cost per result drops over time is worth a serious look. Martech is giving up the most budget Martech's share of the marketing budget fell to 19.4% in Gartner's 2026 survey, its lowest in five years and down from 26.6% in 2021. Teams haven't stopped buying software. Chief Marketer noted that 62% of CMOs still plan to spend more on martech, but more contracts are usage-based now, and some of what used to count as martech spending is being booked under AI or labor instead. For most teams, the 2027 version of this is consolidation: retiring overlapping tools bought between 2020 and 2023 and moving the savings into AI and the staff who run it before finance reclaims the money. Gated content is losing its budget Gated ebooks, templated webinars and high-volume content calendars were designed for buyers who started on Google and filled out a form to get a PDF. Fewer buyers work that way now. G2 found 51% of software buyers start their research in an AI chatbot, which summarizes a category for them without a download. Generative AI has also driven the cost of producing that material close to zero, and buyers can tell when they're reading it. Content budgets are moving toward fewer pieces built on original data, named experts and reporting. That is also the kind of material AI engines tend to cite. Retention cuts could cost B2B companies later Gartner found spending on customer loyalty and retention has dropped 29% since 2024 and now accounts for less than 15% of media spend. Awareness and conversion climbed to 62.6% over the same period, and paid media reached a five-year high of 31.4% of the total budget. Gartner's analysts flagged a problem with that trend. The most AI-mature marketing organizations put more into loyalty and retention and less into digital channels, and Gartner suggested less mature teams may be over-investing in whatever is easiest to measure and automate. In B2B, existing customers are also a company's most believable references. Pulling budget away from them weakens the stories a brand can tell about itself. CEOs and CFOs want control of AI spending Who controls the 2027 AI budget may matter as much as its size. Gartner found 88% of CEOs plan to increase AI investment, and agencies are selling to them directly. Publicis chief executive Arthur Sadoun has said the group is pitching CEOs instead of going through the CMO, and he credits that approach for a record run of new business that included PepsiCo's global media account. Finance is also involved. Martin Sorrell has argued that CFOs, rather than marketing chiefs, will drive enterprise AI adoption, and more marketing AI projects are now being judged against ROI targets that finance sets. UPS, Etsy and Walgreens have all eliminated the standalone CMO role. If AI budgets move above marketing, much of the money could go to efficiency projects that have nothing to do with how buyers find and evaluate a company. CMOs who can show how AI is changing their company's visibility with buyers will have a stronger claim on that budget than those reporting only on internal productivity. Our take Across the surveys, the budget lines losing share are mostly ones AI has made cheaper to produce or easier to automate, like software seats, templated content and programmatic media. The lines gaining share depend on people. That includes the staff who run AI, the experts buyers follow and the events where buyers meet each other. We think owned media should sit at the top of that second group, and that most B2B companies are still putting too little into it. In a 2027 plan, we would protect funding for a publication that covers your category, staffed by at least one editor with newsroom experience. We would fund interviews with your executives, customers and the practitioners your buyers already follow, published as reporting on their expertise so they have a reason to share it. And we would keep budget for the people who make AI tools useful, which is the trend behind Gartner's rising labor numbers. We should be upfront that this is the business our publisher is in. State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds brand newsrooms for companies, and this publication is one of them. We think the model works because we run it every day. We're also not neutral, so weigh the argument with that in mind. We cover the strategy behind these budget lines in The 2027 B2B Marketing Playbook . Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds owned media programs and brand newsrooms for companies.

## Streamers Have Invested Big Into Games. Lil Snack Bets Every Consumer App Will Follow.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/nicole-sander-lil-snack-daily-games-brands
Published: 2026-10-21T15:55:40.618Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Streamers are using daily games to bring viewers back, and Lil Snack has hired Nicole Sander to bring those games into brands' apps.
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Chipotle fans completed more than 1.8 million trivia quizzes last year on their website, and the fast-food chain added daily streak rewards this August. Professional networking site LinkedIn now offers daily games. McDonald’s brought back Monopoly this month, with gameplay and prize redemption now moved entirely into its app. None of these are entertainment companies, yet they’re using play to give customers another reason to return. The results are showing up in engagement. LinkedIn says 86% of people who play return the next day , and 82% are still playing a week later. And the audience is there. The Entertainment Software Association's 2026 study with YouGov found that two-thirds of Americans play video games every week, including 71% of millennials and 56% of Gen X. Most American adults say games provide mental stimulation and stress relief. Entertainment companies have spent the past few years paving the way, using games to extend engagement and retention. Since Netflix began scaling cloud games on its TV app last October, co-CEO Greg Peters said monthly active users have risen elevenfold in eight months . Peacock says one in ten of its mobile users have played a game in its app. And in July, Amazon added its Luna game service to its main Prime Video app, with a Games tab sitting next to its top TV shows and movies. These major entertainment platforms invested to build in-house game teams and operate games on their platforms at a scale that most non-entertainment businesses can’t match. As apps beyond entertainment compete for engagement and consumers’ time, Lil Snack is enabling more brands to integrate daily play without a game studio of their own. Lil Snack's footprint Lil Snack , founded in 2023 by CEO Eric Berman and Chief Product Officer Travis Chen, is betting that the next frontier of play on the internet is non-entertainment platforms. The company, backed by a16z, Lerer Hippeau, Waverley Capital, among others, operates more than 20 bite-sized daily games across platforms including Netflix, Peacock and Reddit. It says engagement is up 500% year over year . State of Brand has not independently verified that figure. Lil Snack’s games live inside apps people already use, so players don’t have to download anything new. "People have their own cozy corners of the web—the apps, communities, and routines they return to every day," says Nicole Sander, Lil Snack’s Head of Commercial Strategy and Business Development. "I believe there's a real appetite for something more rewarding than another endless scroll. Companies have an opportunity to give people that moment of respite. Bringing play into their daily routines is one way to do it." Lil Snack recently hired Nicole Sander , who helped launch BuzzFeed's business team in London in 2014 and later led strategic growth and partnerships at CAMP. "I've always been drawn to emerging platforms that change how people connect with content," she says. "Across digital media, live experiences, and now games, I've helped build businesses around experiences people want to spend time with. At Lil Snack, that means bringing moments of play into the apps people already use." Giving people a reason to return Most brand touchpoints ask customers to do something, whether that's clicking, signing up or buying. Sander thinks brands should spend more time on what customers get in return. "Brands spend so much trying to earn another moment of someone's attention. I think we should spend more time asking what we're giving people in that moment," she says. "A little challenge, a sense of accomplishment, something fun to share—that's a reason to come back." A daily game in a retailer's or bank's app won't have a new episode pulling people back to it. LinkedIn's numbers show it can still work in some cases.

## The 2027 B2B Marketing Playbook: How to Get Cited by AI, Seen by Buyers and Shared by Your People
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/b2b-marketing-playbook-2027-ai-search
Published: 2026-10-21T01:28:18.031Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Generative AI has made most B2B marketing easy to copy, brand voice included. The companies that stand out in 2027 will be the ones whose marketing is built around real people and original reporting.
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B2B marketers used to have years to enjoy a product or content advantage before competitors caught up. A brand voice can now be imitated with a single prompt, which changes where next year's budget should go. For most of the last decade, B2B companies had a familiar sequence for staying ahead. They competed on product until rivals matched the features, then on content volume until every competitor had a content team, and then on brand voice, which they documented in style guides and defended in every campaign. That sequence has stopped working. Competitors can match a feature within a quarter, and a passable ebook costs almost nothing to produce. A brand voice that took years to refine can be reproduced by anyone who pastes a company's last fifty LinkedIn posts into a chatbot, and many competitors have already done it. Buyers notice. We reported earlier this year that 54% of Americans describe AI fatigue and 52% pull back once they suspect a machine wrote what they're reading. The buying process has also moved somewhere most brand teams can't see. G2's March 2026 survey of 1,076 software buyers found that 51% now start research in an AI chatbot, and 69% bought from a different vendor than they originally planned because of what the chatbot told them. Those chatbots mostly don't rely on company websites. AirOps' 2026 State of AI Search report found 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party pages, which we wrote about in September . At State of Brand, we think marketing teams that keep producing more assets in a voice anyone can copy will spend more each year and get less attention for it. Below are the ten areas where we'd put 2027 budget instead. Smaller events are getting more of the budget than big booths In-person events are one part of marketing AI can't produce, and event budgets reflect that. Forrester's Q1 2026 State of B2B Events Survey of more than 400 event decision-makers found that most teams plan more networking events with fewer than 200 people, while only 18% plan more large hosted events. Two-thirds plan to add workshops and roundtables. In Bizzabo's 2026 benchmark, 78% of organizers called in-person events their most effective channel, according to NZ Marketing . For many B2B companies, a dinner for twelve buyers in a key account's home city will do more next year than another booth at a conference where most vendors are showing similar AI demos. The teams getting the most from these events also record the conversations and publish what attendees said, so a room of twelve people produces stories that reach thousands. Customers are a more credible source than company copy Most B2B companies have hundreds of customers, and very few of them are ever heard from beyond a logo on a sales slide. A named practitioner describing how they solved a specific problem is hard for generic AI content to imitate, which makes those customers more valuable to marketing than they've been in years. They matter to AI engines too. Models give less weight to what a company says about itself and more to independent sources, so a customer quoted in a trade story or speaking on a panel helps a vendor in ways its product pages can't. G2's research found that 85% of buyers think more highly of a vendor when a chatbot recommends it. The customer programs we see working treat customers as experts on their own field. Marketing teams interview them about the problems they're dealing with, publish those conversations, invite them to speak at events and make it easy for them to share the results. The PDF case study, with its stock photo and three-line quote, does very little by comparison. The trade press is shrinking, and companies are filling the gap The reporters who explained B2B categories to buyers are being laid off one beat at a time. As we reported this week , some McClatchy newsrooms lost upwards of 40% of their staff, Future plc told investors its audience fell roughly 20% in each of its last two halves, and one analysis now counts about six PR people for every working journalist. Niche trade beats are usually cut first because they never drew much traffic. A few companies have started covering their own industries. Ford hired a former AP bureau chief as editor-in-chief, Autodesk advertised for an editor-in-chief, and Robinhood built Sherwood as a standalone media brand. The efforts that work cover the whole category. That includes news that never mentions the company, moves by competitors and the problems buyers are trying to solve. Over time, a company that does this well becomes a regular source for buyers, journalists and AI engines trying to understand the market. Coverage limited to a company's own roadmap rarely gets there. Newsjacking works better than evergreen content now Any AI model can write an ultimate guide to a software category. It can't tell buyers what this week's acquisition, regulation or earnings call means for their budget, in the words of someone who has done the job. That gap is the case for newsjacking in 2027. In B2B, newsjacking should mean publishing a reported take within a day of a news event and connecting it to decisions your buyers are making. It needs a source, a number or an informed opinion. A rewritten headline adds nothing a buyer couldn't get elsewhere. Speed is usually the hardest part. Many marketing teams still send a 600-word article through four weeks of approvals. Teams that do this well agree on guardrails with legal and comms ahead of time, keep a short list of internal and customer experts willing to comment quickly, and assign someone to read the industry news every morning and flag what matters to their buyers. Marketing teams should run more like media companies The campaign model still shapes most B2B marketing calendars. A team briefs an agency, produces a major asset, puts it behind a form, promotes it for about six weeks and then starts over. In 2027, that asset will be competing with a large volume of similar AI-generated material that cost very little to produce. A team run like a media company publishes every week or every day and builds an audience that returns. Its archive keeps getting picked up by search engines and AI models long after a campaign would have ended. A research report that a campaign team would gate can become ten stories, and a customer event can become twenty interviews. The difference also shows up in staffing. These teams usually have a masthead, a defined beat and at least one editor with newsroom experience. They're measured on audience size, citations and influence on pipeline more than on downloads per launch, and they treat the company's remaining campaigns as material for coverage. Employees and executives reach more people than company pages Company pages are losing reach. Metricool's 2026 LinkedIn study found personal profiles averaged a 2.60% engagement rate, compared with 1.60% for Company Pages, and LinkedIn is testing a Network tab that shows members only posts from people they follow, as we covered last week . In September, Satya Nadella told Microsoft's engineers, sellers and partners he wants them to play a bigger role in how the company explains itself. Most employee advocacy programs work against themselves. They give employees a pre-written post about the company and ask them to share it, and the result reads like an ad. LinkedIn's crackdown on engagement pods also makes coordinated talking points riskier. Our publisher, Outlever , takes a different approach. Its view is that people become a company's social engines when the company features them as experts. Executives, employees and customers are interviewed by an editorial team and published in an industry publication. Each person gets a story about their own work, plus a shareable link and quote card, and most post it because it reflects well on them. Across dozens of executives, customers and partners, the publication reaches networks a company page never would. Each new story also adds to the coverage AI engines draw on. AI search visibility depends on what others publish about you When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about a category, the answer is built mostly from what other people have published. A Muck Rack study of 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found 84% came from earned media, as we noted this week . Meltwater found that an identical piece of content was cited 8% of the time on a brand's own site and 34% of the time on a third-party outlet. A Search Engine Land study found 52.2% of AI-cited passages contained original or owned data. That makes AI visibility behave more like brand equity than like traditional SEO. It accumulates over time as reported stories, named experts and original data keep appearing in sources the models trust. Few companies are measuring it yet. A McKinsey survey of Fortune 500 consumer-brand CMOs found only 16% systematically track how they show up in AI search. This is the other half of Outlever's argument. An industry publication produces the kind of sourced, dated material with named people that AI engines tend to cite, and the people featured in it share it on social media. A company website still matters, mostly as the page buyers visit after an AI tool has already introduced them to the company. Cover the news your buyers follow Most buyers don't read general industry news. They follow the stories that affect their budget, their team or a decision coming up soon. A company that reliably covers those stories can become part of a buyer's weekly reading, and that habit is hard for competitors to replicate with generated content. The beat should be chosen around the buyer rather than the product. A security vendor's buyers care about breaches, regulation and questions from their board. A martech vendor's buyers care about budgets, AI adoption and what peers are doing with headcount. Neither group is looking for feature announcements. One way to judge the coverage is to imagine a buyer reading it every week for six months before a first sales call. If that buyer would understand the market better as a result, the program is working. Returning readers are worth tracking with the same attention as pipeline. A brand voice that fits in a style guide can be copied Anything written down in a voice guide can be fed into a model. What can't be copied is a particular person's judgment, such as a CFO who has managed through three downturns or an engineer who knows why a migration failed. A customer who switched vendors and will explain why on the record falls in the same category. AI is useful for research, transcription, first drafts and distribution. The substance still has to come from people, and buyers are starting to reward companies that make that clear. We've written about brands that position themselves against AI-generated content entirely, and Clay and Vanta have both put formal AI writing policies in place. Companies that want to be distinct in 2027 will also need to take positions. A company that never disagrees with anything in public ends up sounding much like the average answer a model would give. Measure presence before pipeline A publishing program judged only on MQLs per quarter rarely survives its second budget review. Its early results show up elsewhere, in AI answers, in buyers' feeds, at events and in what prospects already know when they reach sales. Pipeline is still the number that matters most to the business, but it lags. Earlier signals include how often AI engines mention the company for the prompts that define its category, how many third-party sources cite it, how many people it has featured and how often they share their stories, and how many readers return each week. Asking every new customer how they first heard about the company catches a lot that tracking pixels miss. Teams that agree on these measures with finance at the start are more likely to keep their programs running long enough to see results. Teams that skip that step often drift back to campaign planning within a year. We run this model ourselves We should be upfront that this is the business our publisher is in. State of Brand and its sister publication, State of AI , are both run by Outlever as its own media properties, using the same model it builds for clients. State of Brand covers brand strategy and category positioning for CMOs and marketing leaders. State of AI covers AI inside large companies for the engineering, security, data and brand leaders who make AI decisions. In the past week, State of AI has published stories on Accenture capping workplace AI spending, Bank of America's warnings about the AI boom and AI labs bidding for bankrupt companies' data. We covered Microsoft's communications reorganization within weeks of the internal memos. Most stories on both sites start as a roughly 20-minute interview with an operator or executive. Contributors pay nothing, review their story for accuracy before publication and receive a link and quote card to share. Many of them do share it, which is how the publications reach new readers, and the archive gives AI engines sourced, dated material to cite. Running our own publications also lets Outlever test editorial and distribution decisions in public before using them for clients. We think the model works. We're also obviously not neutral, so weigh the argument with that in mind. Our take As AI makes content and copy cheaper to produce, we expect the B2B brands that stand out in 2027 to be the ones built visibly around people. That means buyers meeting in small groups, customers speaking on the record, and executives and experts covering their industry as the trade press shrinks. This work takes longer to start than a campaign, and it's harder to attribute. Its value also tends to grow over time, while most AI-produced marketing loses value as more of it appears. Buyers are still asking questions about every B2B market, and we think the companies that answer them through their own people will be the ones AI engines recommend. Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds owned media programs and brand newsrooms for companies and is mentioned in this article.

## ChatGPT Traffic Looked Like It Collapsed Last Week. It Was a Bug, and It Should Still Worry You.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/chatgpt-traffic-drop-utm-tracking-bug
Published: 2026-10-20T19:55:32.986Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: ChatGPT’s AI referral traffic appeared to crash in October. It was a tracking bug, and it shows how little of AI search measurement marketers actually control.
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For about a week, ChatGPT stopped labeling the visits it sent to websites, and marketers' AI traffic appeared to fall off a cliff. The visitors kept coming, but the episode is a reminder of how little of AI search marketers actually control. If you opened your analytics dashboard last week and found that half of your ChatGPT traffic had disappeared, you weren't alone, and you probably hadn't done anything wrong. Starting around October 9, as OpenAI rolled out GPT-6, links in ChatGPT's answers stopped carrying the utm_source=chatgpt.com tag that tells analytics tools where a visitor came from. Many also arrived without a referrer. With neither signal, Google Analytics and similar tools filed those visits as "Direct," the bucket for traffic nobody can explain. ChatGPT's line on the dashboard dropped, and Direct rose by roughly the same amount on the same pages. According to Adobe's Cedric Huesler, OpenAI told him on October 14 that the missing tag was a known bug, and a fix began rolling out the next morning . OpenAI hasn't said anything publicly, and its release notes don't mention it. Where the missing visits went The size of the drop depended on who was counting. LLM Pulse found ChatGPT referrals fell about 46% in two days across the sites it monitors, while total traffic stayed flat and referrals from Perplexity and Claude didn't move. Graphite saw ChatGPT-attributed sessions in GA4 drop by anywhere from 22% to 57%, Search Engine Journal reported . Huesler looked at about 500 pages where ChatGPT normally drove at least 5% of visits and found ChatGPT down roughly 31,000 visits a day, with Direct up about 26,000 on the same pages, according to Search Engine Roundtable . Mobile was hit hardest. Graphite said 95% of mobile ChatGPT visits to its sites had been identified by the tag alone, since the app rarely passes a referrer. By the morning of October 15, tagged ChatGPT clicks were back to between 95% and 100% of normal across thousands of domains tracked by Peec AI. The week before that is gone for good, though. Visits that arrived unlabeled stay unlabeled, and every report covering October 8 through 15 now understates ChatGPT and overstates Direct. Marketers are measuring AI search through a keyhole At State of Brand, we're less interested in the fix than in how fragile the whole arrangement turned out to be. We'd go further: AI referral traffic was never a solid number to build a strategy on, and last week proved it. For most marketers, the main way to see ChatGPT in their analytics is a tag that OpenAI chooses to add to its links. Huesler says most ChatGPT clicks still arrive without a referrer even now, which leaves the tag carrying almost all the weight. One company controls it, and a change to how links open went out with a major model launch without any announcement. Nobody outside OpenAI noticed until the charts broke. Think about who was looking at those charts. Marketing teams are spending more on AI visibility, and CEOs increasingly want to see what it returns. A CMO who walked into a budget review last week with a slide showing ChatGPT traffic down by almost half would have been wrong, and nobody in the room would have known it. Paid traffic, by the way, came through fine. According to Peec AI's analysis, clicks from ChatGPT Ads that carry an advertiser's own tracking tags weren't affected. So marketers could see every visit they bought from ChatGPT last week and lost sight of many of the ones they earned. Google's Gemini went the other way a few weeks ago and started adding tracking tags to its links. That's welcome, but it's still a choice another company makes for you. Our take Start with housekeeping. Mark October 8 through 15 in every report your team keeps, and keep that week out of year-over-year comparisons and anything headed to the board. Then stop treating AI referral traffic as a headline number. It's useful, but OpenAI decides whether you can see it, and it can change that during any product launch. Put it next to signals your company actually controls. Branded search is one; Businessmap's Nikolay Tsonev told us he now tracks it instead of website traffic . A simple "How did you hear about us?" field on demo forms is another, and one of the few ways to hear about AI's influence straight from the buyer. Add direct traffic on the pages AI tends to cite, and pipeline from accounts you've never touched before. The longer-term fix is owning more of the relationship. An email list, a community or a publication your buyers read on purpose can't be relabeled by someone else's code change. The more of your audience you reach directly, the less a week like this one can distort what you know. ChatGPT will probably break your dashboard again. Build reporting that still makes sense when it does.

## The Next Billboard Buy Starts With Growth Strategy And A Market Worth Owning
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/erica-kelly-evolve-ooh-infrastructure-brand-presence
Published: 2026-10-20T16:17:29.814Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Erica Kelly, VP of Client Strategy at Evolve OOH, on why measuring billboard campaigns helps brands keep their budget.
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A photo of a competitor’s billboard along the 101 in San Francisco lands in a startup’s Slack channel before lunch, and by the afternoon, someone is pricing the board across the highway. The company has just raised money and has a conference coming up, so the buy feels overdue. What it commits the brand to is easier to miss, because a board bought to answer a rival puts money into a market on the rival’s timeline, and the company may have no plan for San Francisco once the conference ends. Erica Kelly , VP of Client Strategy at Evolve OOH , works with fast-growing brands facing that decision, including companies expanding into the US from abroad and US brands entering other markets. Out-of-home usually reaches her as an urgent request, arriving after a raise, ahead of a launch or the morning a rival’s board goes up, and it tends to sound like a shopping list. She answers those requests by working backward from the markets a company intends to win over the next couple of years, then deciding where out-of-home can support that ambition. Kelly believes the decision about where to build a presence comes before the decision about which board to buy. “There’s this difference between buying attention and building presence,” Kelly says. “A lot of brands I see today are spending a lot of money doing the first thing and then wondering why they never got the second.” Strong plans start with market choice Kelly compares the usual buying cycle to a company rebuilding its other departments every few months. “You wouldn’t rebuild your sales team from scratch every quarter, and you wouldn’t rethink your entire product strategy every time you launch a feature, but brands treat out-of-home like that,” she explains. “They buy a billboard for launch, they disappear, they come back six months later for a conference, and they disappear again.” Before any placement gets priced, she asks clients to settle what the company’s physical presence should look like over the next couple of years. To identify priority markets, her team weighs where the audience lives and works, how earlier campaigns performed and what has worked for competitors. New inventory still comes up partway through a plan, and Kelly weighs each opening against the markets already on the list. A horizon that long also gives a brand time to build visibility in a market before expansion makes that presence urgent. The choice gets harder when a brand has several plausible places to spend, and the company’s stage of growth shapes which ones make the list. “A brand is going to have a very different play through out-of-home if it’s moving upstream to an enterprise buyer versus trying to get Series B funding,” Kelly notes. She expects whoever plans the buys to be opinionated enough to say “you should spend here, don’t spend here, own this, skip that,” which is the kind of discipline that lets a brand concentrate spend in priority markets . Location shapes what the copy says A board in the right market still has to land with the person passing it, often someone who has just looked up from a phone at a crosswalk or on a train platform. Kelly ties out-of-home’s value in that moment to trust. As more of daily life runs through screens and AI-generated feeds, she argues, brands want to feel tangible , and a large physical placement in a buyer’s own city signals a company with enough scale and credibility to take up real space there. “The strongest out-of-home takes into context where it is when someone is interacting with that ad,” she says. Depending on where people are headed, a placement can steer them toward a specific point of interest or a nearby retail location. Kelly also reviews a brand’s full multichannel strategy before recommending a buy. She uses the existing search and social activity to understand where out-of-home fits and what the creative needs to accomplish in that location. In her experience, a placement’s effect depends on how many times someone has already encountered the brand by the time they pass it, so seeing the whole plan lets her decide what job the board should take on. Measurement protects next year’s budget Kelly sees a lot of brands try out-of-home in small doses, one billboard here and some wild postings there, without measuring any of it. By the time next year’s budget gets set, the money has an easy path back to performance or display. She builds a full analysis into every campaign, with deeper studies when the campaign warrants them. Those can include brand-lift research, before-and-after perception studies and changes in people searching the brand name in the markets where the campaign ran. “When brands invest in measurement and effectiveness and they’re getting those results at the end of the campaign, they’re more likely to invest in out-of-home again because they’re informed,” she adds. Those studies describe what changed around a campaign, and connecting them to business performance is a separate and harder step. Kelly says brand-building effects can take longer to reach dashboards than responses from channels built for immediate action. That leaves marketing leaders justifying current spending before the longer-term results are visible. Measuring brand and performance spending against a single brand-equity metric tied to revenue is one way to put the slower results and the faster ones in the same conversation. Sales teams supply a third kind of evidence. Kelly’s B2B and AI clients hear prospects mention seeing the brand in the subway or on the way to work. “While that’s more qualitative, it’s still a measuring point,” she explains. A mention like that gives the team evidence that a prospect encountered the campaign. It adds context to the formal research, and the research remains the place to test the campaign’s effect on a sale. Other marketers have described similar feedback when prospects mention billboards on calls. The board on the 101 can still go up, and this time San Francisco has a place in the company’s growth plan that lasts well past the conference.

## The Reporters Covering Your Industry Are Disappearing. Someone Still Has to Cover It.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/journalism-layoffs-trade-press-b2b-owned-media
Published: 2026-10-20T00:23:50.411Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: The trade press that covers B2B industries is being laid off beat by beat. The companies that learn to report on their own markets will end up owning them.
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The trade press that covers B2B categories keeps getting cut, and it isn't coming back. The companies in those categories are going to have to do some of that reporting themselves. Android Central is still putting up new posts, even though it no longer has a single employee. Earlier this month Future plc let go of the site's six remaining employees , and posts kept going up on the 18-year-old site anyway. Nobody has said how long that lasts. That was one entry in a long month. Press Gazette's running tracker of journalism job cuts logged Metro planning around 60 cuts, The Guardian ending its use of casual staff and another round of redundancies at Future's tech titles, which the company blamed on falling search traffic. A few weeks earlier, McClatchy laid off more than 90 people, and some of its newsrooms lost upwards of 40% of their staff . Nothing about the business model suggests this turns around. Future told investors this spring that its audience had fallen roughly 20% in each of its last two financial halves , and that it now expects the decline to continue. When traffic drops like that, the beats that never pulled big numbers are the easiest ones to cut. That's where most B2B coverage lives. At State of Brand, we think B2B marketers have been slow to see what this means for them. If you sell into a specialized B2B market, the reporters who used to explain your category to buyers are disappearing, and your company is going to become one of the main sources of information about that market whether you plan for it or not. You can do that badly, with press releases and a blog nobody reads, or you can do it the way a good trade publication would. Earned media got harder to win and more important to have PR people feel this first. One industry analysis now puts the ratio at about six PR people for every working journalist . In Cision's latest survey, 49% of journalists said resource constraints were their biggest problem, and Muck Rack found 86% still take at least some story ideas from pitches, according to a summary of both surveys . That adds up to fewer reporters, each buried in more pitches, with less time for any of them. Meanwhile, each placement matters more than it used to. Muck Rack's May study of 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found 84% came from earned media . Ask an AI assistant about your category and most of the answer comes from journalists and independent sites. Very little of it comes from your website. Not every study agrees. Meltwater's April analysis put owned and other content at about half of AI citations, as we reported in August . The same reporting also found that an identical piece of content was cited 8% of the time on a brand's own site and 34% of the time when it ran on a third-party outlet. Where something is published still affects whether anyone trusts it, and there are fewer independent places left to publish. The smaller your category, the faster this hits Consumer brands have it easier. There's always another reviewer, creator or lifestyle site. A company selling freight software, clinical trial tools or commercial insurance might depend on two or three trade reporters who actually understand what it does. When one of them is laid off, the beat usually goes dark. Buyers have less to read, and AI assistants have less independent reporting to draw on when someone asks about the category. Some companies saw this coming and started hiring journalists. Ford brought on a former AP bureau chief as editor-in-chief and has since widened her remit to external communications , partly because of how AI is changing search. Autodesk and recruiter LHH both advertised for editors-in-chief this year, according to the same Quill report. Robinhood went further in 2023, hiring former Verge editor Josh Topolsky to build Sherwood, a media brand that stands on its own. In venture, Andreessen Horowitz spent the past year building a New Media team with in-house writers, video producers and its own channels. We'd go further. For most B2B companies, the version that works looks more like a trade publication than a corporate blog. It covers the whole category instead of one product, it's built on interviews with people who do the work, and it would hold up if a skeptical editor read it. We should be upfront that this is the business our publisher is in. State of Brand is published by Outlever , which builds brand newsrooms like this for companies, and State of Brand is one of its own. Most of what you read here starts as a conversation with an operator or executive, and we try to cover the industry rather than sell anything in it. We think the model works. We're also obviously not neutral, so weigh the argument with that in mind. Our take Keep pitching reporters. A byline at an outlet your buyers trust carries an independence your own site never will, and those placements are worth more now than they were a few years ago. But stop using owned media as a place to archive press releases. If the trade press covering your market is thinning out, run your own channel more like a small publication. That usually means hiring at least one person who has worked as a reporter, interviewing customers and practitioners on the record (critics too, if they'll talk), publishing data nobody else has, and fixing mistakes where readers can see the correction. And help the reporters who are left. A company that publishes useful, sourced material about its category is the one journalists call when they need someone who knows the space. The reporters who covered your industry may not come back. Buyers are still asking questions about it, and someone is going to answer them. Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds owned media programs and brand newsrooms for companies.

## Synthetic Customers Are Taking Over Market Research. It's the Best News Brand Storytellers Have Had in Years.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/synthetic-customers-market-research-brand-storytelling
Published: 2026-10-19T23:32:47.405Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: As brands move customer research onto AI-generated buyers, real customers interviewed well and written up with care are becoming B2B marketing’s most valuable owned media.
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As more of the industry's research runs on simulated buyers, a real customer, interviewed well and written up with care, becomes one of the most valuable things a brand can publish. A strategy brief on Aveeno's body care team used to take about 30 days to write. It now takes three. Joy Doyin Ogunneye, who leads innovation and brand communication for the Kenvue brand, told Digiday the difference was synthetic research: an AI tool that let her team question simulated consumers instead of waiting on a study. She isn't an outlier. Digiday reported last week that more media planners, creative strategists and CMOs are making decisions based on how synthetic consumers behave. Goodway Group has struck a deal with data company Arima to plan media against a "synthetic population" of US, British and German consumers, so it can test spend levels without running a live test. Magnum, Vans and Kenvue are working with Vurvey Labs. WPP and Dentsu have been building synthetic audiences into planning for more than a year. Forbes' CMO section covered the same trend days later. The pitch is speed and cost. The catch is that everyone buying the same tools, trained on largely the same data, is going to hear largely the same answers. We think most brands are drawing the wrong lesson from this. They're asking how much of their research they can automate. The better question is what becomes valuable once they do. Our answer is the stories of real customers, told well, under the brand's own name. Synthetic research is good at the average The tools work better than skeptics expected for some jobs. In one Bain test, digital twins reproduced about 90% of the key outcomes of an original customer study, including which product features drove choice and which products to launch or cut. US Bank uses synthetic audiences to test messaging before campaigns go live. Target uses them to pretest products and promotions. The people selling these tools are also the clearest about where they stop working. Vurvey's CEO, Chad Reynolds, told Digiday that language models tend to return the most common answer, which is why his company feeds its models video interviews with real consumers. Code & Theory, which has built synthetic personas for years, said the output should inform a team's judgment and never stand in for it. The academic work published this year is less polite. A run of 2026 studies, summarized here , found synthetic respondents struggle to predict how a specific person thinks, or how one customer segment actually differs from another. For B2B marketers, that's most of the job. A buying committee is a handful of specific people with specific problems, and the deal usually turns on the one objection nobody modeled. Customers are the content competitors can't copy At State of Brand, we think the bigger effect of synthetic research will show up in what brands publish, more than in their research budgets. If competing teams ask similar models similar questions, their positioning, messaging and content will start to converge. We've written about that convergence already. What stands out in a converged market is material no model could produce: a named customer explaining, on the record, what almost made them walk away from a deal. That material is gaining value on every channel B2B marketers care about. AI search rewards it. In Meltwater's breakdown of what gets cited, which we reported on in August , original research and proprietary data were cited 38% to 65% of the time, while standard blog posts landed between 6% and 15%. An interview with your best customer is proprietary data by definition. Readers reward it too. Feeds are filling with stories that never happened, like the widowed job seeker at least eight LinkedIn accounts have claimed to have interviewed since July. People are learning to discount anything they can't trace to a real person. A reported conversation, with a name, a title and a company attached, carries its proof on its face. And a customer story comes with its own distribution. The customer you feature has every reason to share it with peers, and those peers tend to look a lot like your next buyer. Talking to customers is easy. Telling their stories is the hard part. Most B2B companies already talk to customers constantly, on sales calls, in quarterly reviews and at user conferences. Very little of it turns into anything a buyer would choose to read. The gap is editorial. A testimonial asks a customer to say something nice. An interview asks what they were worried about, what they tried first, who inside their company pushed back and what nearly ended the deal. Getting to those answers takes the same skills a reporter uses: preparing properly, asking the follow-up, sitting through an awkward pause and knowing which three minutes of a 40-minute conversation matter. Then the story has to be told well. A transcript is raw material. A good piece has a point of view, a real tension and a reason for a busy executive to keep reading. It's the model this publication runs on: we talk to the people doing the work and shape those conversations into stories with an argument. More companies are starting to build the same capability for themselves, with small editorial teams inside marketing whose job is to report on their own customers and category. Our take Use synthetic research for what it's good at. Pretesting a headline, sizing a pricing question or stress-testing a media plan against a modeled population will save real time, and Aveeno's 30-day-to-three-day brief is a genuine gain. Then spend the time it saves talking to actual buyers. Put customer interviews on the calendar the way you'd schedule a campaign. Prepare for them like a reporter would. Ask about the fear, the alternatives and the near miss. Publish what you learn with the customer's permission and name, and make the piece good enough that they'll want to share it. Done consistently, that becomes owned media that compounds: a library of stories in your buyers' own words that AI assistants can cite, sales teams can send and no competitor can generate with the same tools you bought. Synthetic consumers will tell you what most people would probably say. Your customers can tell you why they actually signed. The brands that learn to tell those stories well will own the most valuable content in their category. Sources: Digiday, Forbes, Bain & Company, and 2026 academic studies of synthetic respondents as summarized by Skimle. Meltwater citation figures as previously reported by State of Brand. Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds owned media programs and brand newsrooms for companies, including interview-based editorial content like the approach described in this article.

## The AI Budget Is Moving From the CMO to the CEO’s Office. Publicis Is Just the First to Sell There.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/ai-budget-moving-to-ceo-b2b-marketing
Published: 2026-10-19T17:38:14.839Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: AI budgets are moving to the CEO, and 72% of CEOs now say they make the AI decisions. Here’s what that means for B2B marketing leaders and the CMO’s budget.
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CEOs now say they're the main decision makers on AI. Agencies, consultancies and sales leaders are following the money, and B2B marketing is at risk of being routed around. A lot of B2B CMOs spent this year building an AI plan for marketing. At many companies, the bigger AI decisions were being made a floor up. In BCG's AI Radar survey of 2,360 executives earlier this year, 72% of CEOs said they are now the main decision makers on AI in their organizations, twice the share of a year earlier. Half said their job depends on getting it right. Companies plan to roughly double AI spending this year, to about 1.7% of revenue. The people selling AI services have noticed. Last Tuesday, one of the world's largest advertising groups told Wall Street that more of its business now starts with the CEO rather than the marketing department. Publicis told analysts who its new buyer is On Publicis Groupe's third-quarter call last week, CEO Arthur Sadoun told analysts, "We are increasingly seeing CEOs involved in what we do." His reasoning was that chief executives now believe they have to understand AI personally to keep leading their companies. Digiday's read was blunter: Publicis is skipping the CMO in more of its new-business pitches. The results back him up. Publicis grew organic net revenue 5% in the quarter and called its run of new business a record, Adweek reports . Sadoun credited Sapient, the group's technology consulting arm, with landing three AI-led transformation assignments this year outside any traditional pitch process. The pattern isn't limited to consumer brands. Publicis has won at least four major media accounts in the past year without a competitive review , including Microsoft in April. The most visible was PepsiCo, whose CEO, Ramon Laguarta, went on his own earnings call to describe the agency as "an important capability for us." Digiday noted that defending an agency choice to investors is a job that normally falls to the CMO. You don't have to buy from a holding company for this to matter. Any AI vendor, consultancy or platform that sees where the signature now sits will make the same move, and B2B marketing leaders should assume their CEO is already taking those meetings. In B2B, the CRO is the one getting more Most B2B marketers don't hire a holding company, so the more relevant comparison is with sales. A new BCG survey of 398 CROs and sales leaders describes a "do more with more" plan for 2027. 72% expect sales and revenue budgets to rise, and 65% expect headcount to grow. Marketing is heading into the same planning season with budgets stuck at 7.8% of revenue and an AI line that has to be funded out of everything else, according to Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey . The CEO is in the middle of that decision too. In BCG's data, the CEO owns AI investment decisions at 44% of the companies surveyed outside Australia and New Zealand. Inside those two markets it's 64%, and companies there report reaching measurable AI returns about twice as often within six months. Sales hasn't proven its AI spend either. 90% of the sales leaders BCG surveyed report meaningful AI use, but only 13% cite better win rates, and only 36% have formal AI targets and tracking in place. So nobody on the revenue team can yet show the CEO what AI is returning. Whichever leader does it first will have more say over next year's budget. The CEO already had doubts about marketing At State of Brand, we think this lands hardest on B2B marketing leaders, because they started with less standing than their consumer peers. They already share credit for pipeline with sales, and the attribution argument with the CRO never quite ends. The C-suite's view of marketing was shaky before AI arrived. In a Gartner survey published in February, only 32% of executives said their CMO makes compelling strategy recommendations based on market or customer data. Only 34% said the CMO effectively identifies which initiatives will drive growth. CEOs are also under real pressure to show results. In a Dataiku and Harris Poll survey of 900 CEOs, 72% of US chief executives said their boards are pushing them to prove AI returns, and 80% of all CEOs surveyed said their job is at risk if AI fails this year. That CEO wants an AI plan with numbers attached, and will take it from whoever brings one. Other functions are already drifting out of marketing. Microsoft just moved communications out of marketing and under its top lawyer. Marketing isn't helping its own case: as we reported today, nearly half of marketing teams have replaced human tasks with AI, but only 6.5% measure whether it pays off. Where marketing can still lead The most useful finding for B2B marketers in the BCG survey is in the section about buyers. Nearly 60% of sales leaders say customers now arrive at the first conversation knowing far more than they did two years ago. 54% report rising demand for proposals and business cases tailored to the buyer's company or industry, and 51% say buyers want customized proof of value, including ROI evidence, before they purchase. Yet only 32% say AI is helping them deliver that proof earlier. That's marketing's work. The research a buyer does before talking to sales, the content that shows up when they ask an AI assistant about your category, the business case a champion forwards to their CFO: B2B marketing already builds all of it. It's also where the earliest AI-driven buying happens, since 94% of business buyers now use generative AI in their purchase process, according to Forrester. We've written about how B2B brands earn citations in AI search ; this is the commercial case for doing it. Sales has pointed most of its AI at seller productivity and lead qualification. Marketing can own the part of the deal buyers now say matters most. Our take Publicis didn't do anything wrong. It found where AI decisions are being made and went there. B2B marketing leaders should do the same, before someone else does it for them. Get to the CEO first. Bring an AI plan with a baseline, targets and an owner for every deployment, and show what current AI spend is returning. A CEO who already has numbers from marketing has less reason to shop for an answer elsewhere. Build the scorecard together with the CRO. BCG's data says sales hasn't proven its AI returns either. A shared measure tied to pipeline, win rates and deal velocity makes marketing a partner in the revenue story instead of a line item competing with it. And claim proof of value. Buyers are asking for tailored business cases and ROI evidence earlier in the deal, and sales says AI isn't helping it deliver them. That's the most valuable work in the funnel right now, and it's work marketing already knows how to do. The AI budget is already moving to the CEO's office. CMOs who want a say in how it gets spent should show up there with a plan before the vendors do.

## Half of Marketing Teams Are Replacing People With AI. Almost Nobody Can Prove It's Working
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/marketing-ai-replacing-tasks-roi-measurement
Published: 2026-10-19T17:13:36.862Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: A new Basis survey finds 47.8% of marketing organizations replaced human tasks with AI this year, but only 6.5% measure whether the investment pays off.
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A new survey finds 47.8% of marketing organizations swapped human tasks for AI this year. Only 6.5% measure that investment against a benchmark. Every marketing leader knows the budget meeting where a channel gets cut because nobody could prove it worked. Marketing spent two decades building the tools to survive that meeting: attribution, media mix modeling, incrementality tests. AI is getting a pass from all of them. In a survey of 184 marketing and advertising professionals published today by ad-tech company Basis, 47.8% said their organization replaced human tasks with AI in the past 12 months. That's up from 27.9% a year ago and 10.4% in 2023. Only 6.5% said they evaluate their AI investments against defined metrics and benchmarks, according to Basis's fourth annual AI and the Future of Marketing report. The survey asked about tasks, not jobs, and a replaced task doesn't always mean a lost role. But tasks are what jobs are made of. And most of the teams doing the replacing can't say what they got in return. The work moved to agents faster than anyone measured it AI is now a daily habit in marketing. 61.4% of respondents use it every day, up from 33.6% last year and 10.9% in 2023. Only 1.6% don't use it at all. The bigger shift is who, or what, does the work. 51.1% of marketing organizations now run AI agents, a 155.5% jump in a single year. Those agents handle reporting and analytics (72.3%), draft campaign briefs (56.4%), create content (45.7%) and plan media (35.1%). That list reads like the job description of a junior marketer. Reporting and first drafts are where people learn the craft, and they're the first tasks to go. When Demandbase and Adobe put agents in charge of campaigns last month, we asked who signs off on the work. The Basis data suggests a harder question: who checks whether it paid off? Two-thirds can't say whether it's working 65.1% of respondents either don't measure AI ROI at all or don't know whether anyone at their organization does. That's not a rounding error. It's the default. This isn't new, and marketing isn't alone. Last year, MIT's NANDA initiative found that about 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots stalled with little to no measurable impact on the P&L. The same research found more than half of generative AI budgets going to sales and marketing tools, even though the strongest returns showed up in back-office automation. Marketing is still putting the most money where the payoff is least proven. The foundation is getting weaker, too. Only 13.0% of marketers describe their first-party data as extensive and well-structured, down from 17.9% a year ago. Agents run on that data. As Bee Enterprises' Siraj Dawar showed us with a 30x ROAS campaign that created almost no new demand , automation scales whatever signal you feed it, good or bad. Everyone thinks the cuts will happen to someone else The most human number in the report is a contradiction. 70.0% of marketers see little or no risk that AI will replace their own job in the next three to five years. Yet 50.6% expect substantial job losses across the industry in the same window. At State of Brand, we think the second number is the honest one. The agencies are already showing it. WPP's headcount fell by more than 10,000 between the end of 2024 and June 2026, and Omnicom moved to cut more than 4,000 roles after closing its Interpublic deal, Communicate reports . WPP has since planned 1,000 more cuts , and one analyst told The Drum they'll likely land at junior levels, where AI is taking over execution work. Omnicom even moved the engineers who built its AI platform to an outside contractor. Brands aren't immune. HubSpot, the company that taught B2B the inbound playbook, is cutting about 660 jobs as it reorganizes around AI. It's no surprise more marketers are building audiences their employers can't take away . The money is coming out of people, and the CEO is noticing AI isn't being paid for with new money. CMOs now put 15.3% of their marketing budgets toward AI, according to Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, while total marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of revenue, roughly 18% below where they were four years ago . The CMO Survey shows marketing headcount growth down by more than half from last year's rate, with the largest companies shrinking their marketing teams outright. When the budget doesn't grow, AI gets funded by something else, and headcount is the easiest line to move. That trade, made without a scoreboard, is a gift to anyone who wants to go around the CMO. Publicis is now pitching AI transformation directly to CEOs and skipping the marketing department in more new-business pitches. Gartner warned in February that by 2027, more than 40% of CMOs who push for bigger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite because they can't show the return. An AI budget nobody can measure invites the same outcome. What measuring it actually looks like It can be done. Lloyds Banking Group ran its marketing AI rollout like an experiment. In a project it called Turing, three ring-fenced teams worked the same real product-launch brief: one with no AI, one augmented by AI, one using only AI. Lloyds says generative AI delivered £50m of value across the group in 2025 and expects more than £100m this year. Measuring also told Lloyds where to stop. Its top marketer, Suresh Balaji, said at Marketing Week's Festival of Marketing last week that some of the bank's AI content experiments risked degrading the brand. His summary: "AI can raise the floor, but only you can raise the ceiling." That's the point. A benchmark doesn't just justify AI spend. It tells you which work to hand over and which to keep. Our take Hold AI to the standard you hold media to. Every agent gets a baseline, a target and an owner before it ships, the same as a new channel would. If AI absorbed someone's tasks, say where the time went. Did it become pipeline, speed or a smaller payroll? Those are three different stories, and your CFO will want to know which one you're telling. Fix the data before you automate on top of it. And write the AI scorecard yourself, before an agency or a consultant writes one for your CEO. Marketing earned its seat at the table by proving what media spend returns. If it can't do the same for AI, someone else will decide what marketing is worth. Data: Basis, AI and the Future of Marketing: 2026 Edition , survey of 184 marketing and advertising professionals at agencies and brands, published October 19, 2026. Basis sells advertising technology, including AI tools, and the full methodology sits in its gated report. Gartner spend figures are as reported in secondary coverage of its 2026 CMO Spend Survey.

## When Paid Media Resells Brands to Their Own Customers, New-vs-Returning CAC Split Is the Metric To Watch
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/cac-new-vs-returning-customers-ashwin-palo-hsbc
Published: 2026-10-19T16:53:00.492Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: HSBC’s Ashwin Palo says paid media can book returning customers as new ones. Splitting CAC by buyer type shows which spend grows the business.
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In plenty of paid search accounts, a loyal customer is typing the brand’s name into Google, clicking the ad sitting above the organic listing and buying what they came for, while the dashboard logs it as an acquisition. One CAC number can describe a brand paying more to win people who have never bought from it, or a brand paying Google to resell itself to customers it already had. Ashwin Palo is Assistant Director of Product and Growth Marketing, Data Analytics at HSBC , where his work has included building an in-house multi-touch attribution platform. Before HSBC, he worked on the agency side at Webenza, as a Senior Account Coordinator at Google, and wrote Uncluttering Programmatic Advertising . “When CAC is going up, you need to check whether you’re acquiring the same customer or getting a new customer. If it’s a new customer, it’s fine. If it’s the same customer, it’s not good,” Palo says. Plenty of performance reports would sail through a quarterly review and still misdescribe the business. They count the month’s sales and leads with no way of knowing how many of those buyers were already customers, so the standard CAC formula books a loyal shopper’s fourth order and a stranger’s first as the same win. Separating new buyers from returning ones requires customer-level data. Establishing whether the advertising brought those buyers in at all requires a different test. Brand search bills for customers already won Branded search is where the confusion gets most expensive, because the people searching for a brand by name are often its own customers. “If you’re running ads on your brand campaigns, your ad will be there on the top. They’ll click it, and since they’re already your customer, they’ll do the transaction with you. To get the same sale from the same customer, you’re spending more money,” Palo explains. The campaign reports a strong return and the platform books a conversion , while the business pays again for a customer relationship it already built. Palo makes one exception, for customers who have asked a brand to stop sending marketing emails and texts. Paid media can give the brand another way to reach those buyers, which makes that spend easier to justify. Palo’s fix starts with an ordinary month of 100 sales. Each sale gets tagged with the channel that received credit for it, from organic search and owned channels like WhatsApp through to paid, even though a single journey often passes through several. That tally shows how much of the month paid media claims, and it frames whether CAC should be read on paid spend alone or across the blended business. The paid sales then get split by customer status, product by product, and the number worth watching is the share coming from people who had already bought. For campaigns meant to win new customers, “the lower the percentage you keep for existing customers, the better it is,” he says. Repeat purchases remain welcome in most businesses. The trouble starts when they get counted as proof that paid media is winning new customers. Each platform’s report argues for more of itself A platform can report every conversion it saw accurately and still overstate the business it created. Every platform evaluates performance through its own measurement framework, with its own attribution windows and conversion definitions, so its reported contribution can’t serve as a neutral account of the mix. “If you’re a Meta-heavy brand, then regardless of whatever you do, Meta will say its awareness is giving you more new customers, so you should run more ads on its platform. If you’re Google-heavy, Google will also bias you,” Palo says. Meta added an incremental attribution setting to its options, and it’s the only one built on modeled data, which leaves advertisers taking the platform’s word for what counted. A platform’s “new customer” can simply be a buyer that platform hadn’t converted before, even when the brand has been selling to them for years. An independent view helps by reconciling channel reports against the brand’s own customer and sales data . When a shopper buys a T-shirt from an online retailer, the retailer can trace the products browsed beforehand and match that behavior against the paid-media interactions it can observe, month by month. “On Meta I’m running 10 campaigns, and these 10 campaigns have driven 1,000 people to the website, whether they bought or not,” he says. That view shows which journeys paid media touched. Proving the touch caused the purchase takes an experiment, such as a holdout that pauses ads for part of the audience, and three in four marketers say their current measurement isn’t delivering the accuracy and trust they need. For smaller teams, Palo points to Microsoft Clarity, a free tool that shows how a campaign’s visitors behave once they land. It helps diagnose a campaign, and the question of whether the campaign worked stays with testing. Reach pays off when it adds customers The same journey data gives Palo a first read on awareness spend. He looks at how much converting traffic passed through top-of-funnel campaigns and weights the budget from there, with no category ratio involved. “Every business is unique, and every business is at a specific level,” he says. That share works as a hypothesis about where awareness is pulling its weight, and the budget should follow whatever testing confirms. A campaign can reach millions of people while mostly finding the ones who already know the brand. One warning sign is reach climbing while new-customer counts stay flat and frequency rises, suggesting that more of the budget may be going toward people the brand has already reached. Expansion earns its budget through incremental revenue and new customers who wouldn’t have arrived otherwise, which is why Palo prefers to grow carefully. “Always, when you expand, expand slow,” he says. Every new platform arrives with its own dashboard and its own case for more budget . A quarter spent optimizing toward sales that would have happened anyway can look excellent on every one of those dashboards, and the customer count at the end of it barely moves.

## AI Can Tell Brands What Customers Did. The Advantage Is Knowing What They Do Next.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/anticipation-brand-differentiation-emiliano-reisfeld-loreal
Published: 2026-10-19T06:58:54.146Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: L'Oréal Luxe Uruguay CMO Emiliano Reisfeld argued that AI makes output and customer history cheap for every brand. Anticipating what customers do next is what stays scarce.
Full text:
The first mistake brands will make with AI is assuming that the one that automates fastest wins. Every competitor has the same incentive to produce more while spending less, and CMOs surveyed by Gartner expect AI to handle 36% of marketing work by 2028, up from 16% this year. Then every competitor licenses the same models and starts using them for the same work. A thousand extra assets before lunch looks like progress until a competitor produces its own thousand by breakfast, and the most valuable person in the marketing department becomes whoever has the authority to kill nine hundred of them before anyone hits publish. Emiliano Reisfeld is Chief Marketing Officer for Luxe Uruguay at L'Oréal , where the company has built a large in-house AI content operation. Over more than a decade inside large multinationals, he has led more than 40 teams and scaled e-commerce from zero to 20% of the business. He believes the reason someone picks one serum over another rarely shows up in a cost-per-asset report. "If every competitor automates at the same speed, efficiency no longer differentiates anyone. It works like a tax on the market, because consumers don't buy a brand for its efficiency," Reisfeld says. A recent economics paper, The AI Layoff Trap , shows how companies racing to automate can thin out the customers they depend on. Reisfeld sees this on the brand side, where every company keeps its own efficiency gains and the whole category pays for it in brands no customer can tell apart. "The paradox is that AI-driven competition doesn't only kill the weaker players. Eventually, it can kill the demand." Pouring the AI dividend into more output wastes it Reisfeld would hand the machines everything that eats a marketer's calendar and never earns a slide in the strategy deck. "The value of automation is taking over the tasks marketers don't like to do. Administration, targeting, media campaigns. A lot of work that is boring and takes a lot of time," he says. "The good outcome is having more time to think about why consumers choose my brand, and how to improve that value for them." Banking part of that gain as margin is a defensible business decision. The failure of imagination comes when a team gets a hundred hours back and pours all of them into producing more. The productivity numbers look great in that scenario, right up until every competitor reports the same numbers, and the category fills up with assets nobody asked for . Past behavior is getting cheap Personalization is becoming cheap for the same reason production did, and Reisfeld makes the point with an example. "Machines personalize with past data. Caroline lives in Miami. Caroline has a pet. That's all data from the past," he says. "The job of human marketers is to understand the future, to imagine what Caroline might do next in a different way, a cultural way." AI is making brands better at knowing who consumers have been while making that knowledge worth less as a differentiator. Every brand running the same models against similar purchase histories gets similar answers about Caroline. The signal worth having hasn't reached the dashboard yet, and catching it means reading the culture around Caroline long before her purchase history moves. "The data of past behavior, we can delegate to the machines," Reisfeld says. "The center of the future of marketing is thinking about how the consumer will behave next." The experience after the recommendation Close to half of AI users now start purchase research on a stand-alone AI platform , where an agent can boil two competing brands down to nearly identical recommendations. Reisfeld argues that brands should invest in whatever a recommendation can't compress, like the consultation at a beauty counter or the moment a customer opens the box at home. "Today, the consumer searches in Claude or ChatGPT for a recommendation. The filter between the consumer and the brand is an agent," he says. "But the lived experience of contact with the brand is what builds the relationship for the future." An agent can win a brand its first sale, and the second one still depends on what Caroline thinks of the experience once the order arrives. Some friction can make a brand feel human A decade of one-click checkouts and instant chatbot replies has trained marketers to treat every pause in the customer journey as a defect, but Reisfeld thinks some of those pauses were doing useful work. "We think of AI as a process that's fast and simple. But when a process isn't perfect, the consumer can recognize that a human is behind it, and they value that," he says. "I'd call it friction, not failure, because it's part of the process itself." He places that human presence in service and sales, supported by what he calls relationship memory, recognizing a customer's history and context well beyond the point of sale. When every brand interaction can be made frictionless, signs of human judgment can become part of what customers remember. He applies this to creative work as well. "I'm very tired of seeing so much advertising made with AI. People can spot it easily, and they tune it out. We want to see more human content," Reisfeld says.

## 70% of Employers Say Candidates Have Ghosted Them. Only 19% Admit They've Ever Ghosted a Candidate.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/employers-ghosting-candidates
Published: 2026-10-13T15:39:42.267Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: A new survey of 1,027 hiring professionals shows employers treating ghosting as a candidate problem, while ranking their own reputation dead last.
Full text:
Most people who have looked for work recently have a ghosting story. Usually it involves a final-round interview, a recruiter who promised to follow up by Friday, and a silence that lasted until the candidate stopped checking their inbox. Employers have ghosting stories too. In a survey of 1,027 US hiring professionals conducted this summer by hiring-assessment company Criteria , 70% said a candidate had ghosted them. When asked whether they had ever ghosted a candidate, only 19% said yes. Job seekers will read that 19% and laugh. Criteria's 2026–2027 Hiring Benchmark Report only surveyed employers, so there's no candidate number to set beside it, and the people who answered may be telling the truth about themselves. Plenty of the silence candidates experience comes from applicant tracking systems that never send a rejection, or from a hiring manager somewhere else in the building who stopped replying. Few recruiters would count that as their own ghosting. Candidates count all of it. Employers ranked their brand last The more revealing number in the report has nothing to do with ghosting directly. Criteria asked hiring professionals to name their top priorities for next year. Improving employer brand came in last of ten, chosen by 12%. Improving the candidate experience landed at 31%, a point behind reducing costs. Upskilling current staff and making hiring more efficient led the list at 41% each. At The State of Brand, we think that ranking explains the ghosting gap better than anything else in the survey. Companies mostly treat employer brand as a marketing asset, something that lives on the careers page and in the recruiting video. The people answering this survey run hiring, and they told Criteria that brand is the least of their concerns. To them it sounds like somebody else's department. Candidates experience it differently. To a job seeker, a company's brand is the follow-up email that arrived or the one that didn't. It's whether the recruiter remembered their name in the second interview. Someone who spent three afternoons interviewing and then heard nothing has formed an opinion of that company, and they'll share it in group chats, on Glassdoor, and in public posts where hundreds of strangers reply that the same thing happened to them. No careers page is going to outrank that. The market is moving against employers Treating brand as an afterthought might work in a market where employers can pick from a long line of eager applicants. The report suggests that market is gone. Fifty-two percent of hiring professionals say hiring is harder than it was a year ago. Fifty-five percent say finding high-quality candidates with the right skills is their biggest challenge. Sixty-four percent expect to hire more next year, so the competition for good people is about to get stiffer. The candidates employers want most are the ones with options, and those candidates remember how they were treated last time. AI is raising the stakes. More than half of the employers surveyed now use AI somewhere in hiring, and 31% say they're dealing with extremely high applicant volume. As more of the process gets automated on both sides, a reply from an actual person gets rarer. We expect it to become one of the few things that makes a company stand out to a strong candidate. Candidates learned it from someone Criteria's own report describes ghosting as circular. Candidates who feel ignored after applying tend to return the favor, and the report suggests that better communication could give a company an edge. We'd go further. Much of the ghosting employers complain about is behavior they taught. Someone who sent forty applications and heard back from four has stopped assuming that every employer deserves a prompt reply. Someone whose last interviewer never told them they didn't get the job feels no obligation to send the next company a polite withdrawal. Nobody should call that good manners, though nobody should be surprised by it either. The report's own skills data makes the point sharper. Asked what they look for in candidates, 73% of hiring professionals put work ethic first. They want people who follow through and keep their commitments. Plenty of candidates would like the same from employers. Our take Ghosting shrinks when candidates come to expect a reply, and they only come to expect one when companies send them. Complaining about it in a survey doesn't change anyone's expectations. Sending that reply is cheap. A short, honest rejection takes a recruiter a minute, and an automated one costs nothing. Telling a finalist that a decision is delayed keeps a relationship the company may want in a year. Most candidates will never watch a company's culture video, but nearly all of them will find out whether it wrote back. We'd also like to see brand teams take an interest. If employer brand is how people outside a company perceive what it's like to work there, then the rejection email is brand work, and it reaches far more people than any campaign. Leaving it to whoever has time in recruiting is how a company ends up as the example in someone's ghosting post. Job seekers, the data supports what you've been saying for years. Employers want professionalism and follow-through, and they ranked how they treat applicants near the bottom of their list. Say that in reviews and in public, and give credit to the companies that get it right. Employers who want candidates to stop ghosting them can start by writing back. Data: Criteria, 2026–2027 Hiring Benchmark Report , survey of 1,027 US hiring professionals conducted in summer 2026. Criteria sells hiring assessment software, and its report argues for more assessment-based hiring.

## The Single Mother Who Doesn't Exist: How LinkedIn's Story Economy Ate Itself
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/linkedin-single-mother-story-dead-internet
Published: 2026-10-12T21:10:56.190Z
Section: AI & Technology
Summary: At least eight LinkedIn accounts have posted the same first-person story about interviewing a widowed job seeker since July. Most of them sell resume services.
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On October 9, a LinkedIn user who advertises resume services posted a story that began, "I interviewed a single mother." Her husband had died eight months earlier. She had a 2-year-old, was working on a master's degree, and needed a job for her child's sake more than her own. The day before, a different account had posted the same story. So had at least six others going back to July 8, nearly word for word, and each poster described themselves as the person who conducted the interview. Joe Meier collected several of them in a post that has spread widely in the past few days. The profile photos and headlines change from post to post, while the widow, the toddler, the master's degree and the eight months stay the same. It is possible that one woman was interviewed by eight different people who each chose to write about her in the same words. It is far more likely that none of them interviewed her. The timing helps explain why the story keeps getting posted. The Skillsyncer tracker counted more tech layoffs between January and late September than in all of 2025, and the median job search now runs 4.7 months, State of Brand reported this month . People in that position spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, some building audiences they can take with them and others posting their wins often enough that the people deciding who stays can't miss them, a habit State of Brand compared to last-click attribution for your career . They are the readers this story is written for. LinkedIn has spent the year trying to clean up its feed. It added a button in July for members to flag AI slop, and flagged posts now lose reach. It has gone after engagement pods, and in September it started testing a Network tab that shows only posts from people a member chose to follow. None of that has slowed this story down, probably because it reads as a personal anecdote rather than machine writing. Most of the posters sell resume help Several of the accounts carry nearly identical headlines, such as "DM for Resume / CV Support" and "Resume & LinkedIn Glow-Up," with a "View my services" link under the name. Most of the people sharing the story sell career help to job seekers, who are also the readers most likely to be moved by it. A story about a struggling mother looking for work is useful to someone in that business. It suggests the poster understands what job seekers are going through, and the profile headline directs readers to a paid service in the DMs. Posts that do well on LinkedIn tend to get copied. Some are passed around in creator groups or sold in collections of "viral post" templates, and others are lifted by people who watched them perform. Some of the accounts posting the single mother may have no idea where the story started. Same words, different reach The reaction counts vary widely even though the text is the same. One copy got 4 reactions and a single comment. Others got 75, 93, 149, 301 and 431, and the best-performing copy reached 516, about 129 times the lowest. Because the wording never changed, the gap has to come from somewhere else, such as the size of each account's following, when the post went up, how much early engagement it got and whether a pod was involved. How far the story traveled depended much more on the account posting it than on the story itself. Much of the feed is machine-written The recycled story fits a wider pattern on the platform, where a large share of long posts are no longer written by the people who publish them. In July, AI detection company Pangram published an analysis of roughly a million posts that users scrolled past between April and June 2026 on LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Medium and Substack. LinkedIn had the highest rate, with about 41% of its long-form posts (250+ words) flagged as fully AI-generated. It made up about a third of the posts scanned and nearly two-thirds of the AI content detected, The Decoder reported . An earlier study by Originality.ai put the share of likely AI-written long-form LinkedIn posts at 54% as of October 2024, after a 189% jump following ChatGPT's launch, according to eWeek . LinkedIn also offers its own AI writing help through an "Enhance post" button in the post composer, Fast Company noted , so some of that content is produced with the platform's own tools. A dead internet with people in it Dead internet theory started in 2021 as a forum post by a user called IlluminatiPirate, who argued that most of what we see online is bots talking to bots. The Atlantic covered it that year and called it wrong, but true-feeling . For several years most people treated it as a conspiracy theory. More prominent people have taken it seriously since. In September 2025, Sam Altman wrote on X that he had never taken the theory seriously but was now seeing a lot of LLM-run accounts. A few weeks later, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said much of the internet was now dead and named "LinkedIn slop" as part of the reason . Imperva estimated that bots generated 51% of all web traffic in 2024. The single mother posts don't fit the theory neatly. Each account has a face, a name and a job title, and at least some of them are run by real people. The theory described bots pretending to be people. On LinkedIn, people are posting the same script at volume, as a bot operation would, and for the same reason, because it brings in business. Why a copied story does more damage than AI slop A post written with AI misleads readers about who wrote it. The ideas may be generic, but the person posting usually agrees with them. The single mother story misleads readers about what happened. "I interviewed" is a claim of firsthand experience, and the post uses that claim, along with the grief of a woman who may not exist, to sell resume services. Fabricated testimony also costs people who never posted it. Each time an invented first-person story spreads, recruiters, founders and hiring managers with true stories have a harder time being believed. State of Brand made a version of this argument about companies in August. The Great Convergence traced how firms that bought the same capabilities from the same vendors ended up with the same frameworks and then the same messaging, and noted that "nobody decides to sound like everyone else." The single mother is a smaller version of the same process, a story that worked once and was then copied by people who each made a decision that seemed reasonable at the time. Dead internet theory imagined feeds full of bots. On LinkedIn, much of the feed is people reading from the same script. Who pays for a copied story Most of the cost of a counterfeit story falls on people who didn't post it. Founders, recruiters and marketers telling true stories now face readers who have learned to discount any post that opens with "I interviewed." Specific details are harder to copy, such as a customer who agreed to be named, a date, a number or an account of what went wrong. State of Brand has reported that the writing that builds a reputation tends to be specific to the person's work, including what went wrong . Readers are also getting better at spotting stories that could have come from anyone. The posts raise a question about how marketing teams read their own LinkedIn numbers. The same words got 516 reactions on one account and 4 on another, so the engagement measured distribution rather than whether anyone believed the story. Marketers have run into this before with platform-reported ROAS , where the channel reporting the result is also being judged on it. Each time pods and slop have filled LinkedIn's feed, the company has responded by leaning on members' own networks, which suggests which kind of reach the platform trusts . A copied story can travel a long way through the algorithm, but it does much less well among people who actually know the poster. The story economy LinkedIn still has plenty of people on it. What has changed is that many of them have learned a borrowed story can outperform a true one, and that almost nobody checks. There may once have been a real single mother, and a recruiter who was moved by meeting her. After eight retellings in three months, the story says nothing reliable about her or about anyone who posted it. The longer that goes on, the harder it will be for anyone on the platform to be believed when the story they tell is true.

## How B2B Brands Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/how-b2b-brands-get-cited-in-ai-search
Published: 2026-10-12T20:44:16.688Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Outlever co-founder Melissa Rosenthal explains how B2B brands earn citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and why original reporting beats SEO tricks.
Full text:
I've spent my career on the media side of the table. I was one of the first ten employees at BuzzFeed and built its branded content business, then helped build Cheddar , then ran marketing at ClickUp . At ClickUp we had a real budget. We ran billboards, we had a very strong SEO program, and we did just about everything you can do in performance marketing. So I understand the instinct marketers have right now, which is to treat AI search as the next channel to optimize. Find the tricks, buy the tool, get the ranking. I'd push back on that. What these tools reward looks a lot more like journalism than like SEO. Your buyers already moved G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers in March 2026 and found that 51% now start their research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google. A year earlier that figure was 29%. And the chatbot isn't just a starting point. According to G2 , 69% of buyers changed which vendor they chose because of what an AI chatbot told them, and a third bought from a vendor they'd never heard of before. Read that last part again if you run marketing at a company nobody has heard of yet. It means a buyer can go from never knowing you exist to signing a contract, and the thing that introduced you was an AI answer. It also means the reverse. You can lose a deal you never knew you were in. Each tool picks sources differently People talk about "AI search" as one thing. It's at least three, and they don't agree with each other much. Google is the most straightforward. Its AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from the same index as regular search, and Google's documentation says "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode." You don't need special AI files or new markup. Google's newer optimization guide keeps coming back to content that's valuable and unique rather than generic. If you already rank, you're in decent shape here. ChatGPT changed the game in May. Starting May 7, it began putting clickable brand names directly inside its answers. Similarweb found that ChatGPT referrals jumped 157.7% week over week afterward, and homepage referrals rose 354.7%. The share of ChatGPT traffic landing on brand homepages went from roughly a quarter or a third to about 60%, and it has stayed there. ChatGPT is now introducing brands to buyers, which is a very different job from sending readers to an article. Perplexity searches the live web for almost every question and shows its sources openly. It also picks different sources than ChatGPT does. A 2026 citation report from 5W estimated that only about 11% of domains get cited by both, and an Ahrefs study of 15,000 queries found only 12% of AI-cited URLs also showed up in Google's top 10. So if your plan is "rank on Google and the rest will follow," the data says it won't. Most of what AI says about you isn't on your website This is the part I think B2B marketers underestimate. A Semrush study found Reddit and LinkedIn among the top five most-cited domains on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found review sites have now passed AI chatbots as the top influence on which vendors make a buyer's shortlist, 38% to 37%. In other words, when a buyer asks an AI tool about your category, the answer is being built largely from what other people say. Practitioners on LinkedIn. Users on Reddit. Reviewers on G2. Editors at industry publications. And those sources move around. The same Semrush study showed ChatGPT citing Reddit in nearly 60% of responses in early August 2025, then around 10% by mid-September. Anyone who tells you they've figured out a permanent formula for one platform is going to have a rough quarter at some point. Why a publication beats a playbook When we started Outlever , the idea came straight out of what I'd seen in news. Media companies were producing branded news for advertisers, but the brands didn't own it and couldn't distribute it. So we flipped it. We build news publications that companies own outright. I've described it as news publishers in a box, and that's still the simplest way I know to say it. What I didn't fully appreciate at the start was how well that model would line up with how AI tools choose sources. Think about what a real publication produces. Original reporting. Named experts with titles and companies. Data with a date and a source attached. Coverage of what's happening this week in a specific industry. That's the material every one of these tools is hunting for, because it's the material they can't get from the thousand other pages saying the same thing. The interviews matter most. Across our clients we've done thousands of them, and every one creates something that exists nowhere else on the internet. Then the person we interviewed shares it on LinkedIn, and their colleagues comment, and sometimes it gets picked up by a newsletter or another outlet. So the brand ends up with an original source on its own site and a trail of mentions on exactly the platforms AI pulls from. One interview does both jobs. That's what I meant when I told the Superpath community, in an AMA this June , that we're building the source, not racing to be first to a story. Being the source is what gets you cited. What I'd tell any B2B marketing team to do Check your plumbing first, because it's boring and people skip it. Make sure your robots.txt file and your CDN or hosting setup aren't blocking the crawlers these tools use. Google uses Googlebot. OpenAI and Perplexity run their own crawlers, called OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Some security tools block them by default, and I've been surprised how many companies don't know. Then stop publishing things that already exist. If your article could be swapped with any of the top ten results and nobody would notice, an AI tool has no reason to pick yours. Publish your own numbers, your own interviews, your own read on what's changing in your market. Write the way a good reporter writes. Put the answer high up. Define terms in plain language. When you use a number, say where it came from and when, in the same sentence. AI tools tend to lift a single paragraph out of a page, so each paragraph has to make sense on its own. One Q2 2026 analysis found that pages built around quotable data, clear definitions, and tables were cited more often than higher-authority pages without them. That matches everything I learned in newsrooms. Clear writing travels. Find out what your buyers are really asking. Your sales team hears the questions every day. Type them into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google yourself and look at who gets named and which sources get cited. That list is your editorial calendar. Take care of your homepage. Since ChatGPT started sending most of its referrals there, your homepage is often the first thing a buyer sees after an AI tool mentions you. It should say what you do, who it's for, and why you're different, in words a stranger understands. Keep your facts consistent across your site, LinkedIn, and review profiles too. When those disagree, AI tools get confused, and they'll describe you wrong. Get your people talking in public. Executives posting under their own names on LinkedIn, showing up on industry podcasts, being quoted in other publications. Keep review profiles current. All of it feeds the answers. And please don't try to fake it. Google has said that chasing inauthentic mentions to shape AI answers isn't likely to help, since its AI features use the same safeguards as regular search, as Semrush reported . Planted Reddit comments get found out, and the damage to your reputation lasts longer than any bump in visibility. How we think about measuring it There's no perfect tool yet, and I'd be skeptical of any vendor who says otherwise. What we do is simple. Once a month, run a fixed set of real buyer questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, and track whether the brand shows up, how it's described, and which sources get cited. Google reports AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic inside the regular Performance report in Search Console. Watch referrals from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in analytics. Look at the trend over several months rather than any single week, because these platforms change their behavior constantly. The number I care about most isn't on any dashboard, though. It's whether the right buyers know who you are before your sales team ever calls them. AI answers are becoming one of the main ways that happens. Questions marketers ask me about this Do we need an llms.txt file or special schema? Not for Google. Its documentation says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files, or special structured data for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Standard structured data is still worth having for regular search. If we rank on Google, will ChatGPT cite us? Not reliably. Ahrefs found only 12% of AI-cited URLs also appear in Google's top 10. Good SEO helps with AI Overviews, but you have to check ChatGPT and Perplexity separately. Why does Reddit show up so much? Because it's full of real people describing real experiences, and AI tools treat that as evidence. For B2B brands, it means what practitioners say about you in public can matter as much as your own website. How long before we see results? Pages that already rank can show up in AI Overviews quickly. Becoming a brand that gets named consistently across all three tools usually takes months of steady publishing and real mentions elsewhere. Can a small company compete with the big brands? Yes, and I'd argue small companies have an edge on specific questions. AI tools answer narrow questions all day, and a focused company with original data or strong expert interviews on its topic can be the best source available. G2's finding that a third of buyers bought from a vendor they'd never heard of tells you these answers aren't reserved for the biggest names. Where I land I don't think AI search needs a brand new discipline. I think it needs companies to finally do what media companies have always done, which is cover a subject so well that people trust you on it. The tools are just making that trust visible. The brands that treat this as a hunt for tricks will spend the next few years reacting to every platform change. The ones that build a real source will keep getting cited, because they'll keep having something worth citing. The State of Brand is published by Outlever , which builds and operates owned media publications for brands.

## Microsoft Wants More Employees Speaking for It. It Just Put Its Top Lawyer in Charge of Comms.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/microsoft-employee-advocacy-brad-smith
Published: 2026-10-12T15:48:27.744Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Microsoft moved communications out of marketing and under Brad Smith, whose organization handles antitrust and litigation, in the same memos that asked engineers and sellers to speak for the company more often.
Full text:
Satya Nadella wants the people who build and sell Microsoft's products to tell more of its story, including on social media. The guidelines they post under will come from the part of the company that deals with regulators and courts. Two weeks ago we wrote about Vanta's AI writing policy , which came from the company's general counsel rather than its marketing team. Our point was that once lawyers draft the rules for how employees write, the company starts treating those rules as something it will enforce. Microsoft has now done something similar with its whole communications function. On Sept. 24, Microsoft told staff that communications would leave the marketing organization run by CMO Takeshi Numoto and report to Brad Smith, the company's vice chair and president. GeekWire broke the news from internal emails sent by Smith and CEO Satya Nadella. Most of the coverage since has focused on the other half of those emails. Nadella wants engineers, sellers and partners to become a bigger part of how Microsoft explains itself, and Smith expects more employees and executives to speak for the company in public, social media included. That has mostly been read as a win for employee advocacy. For brand leaders, the reporting line deserves more attention. The next comms chief will report to Smith too Brent Colburn, Microsoft's VP of global public affairs, becomes interim communications leader and reports to Smith. Colburn had already announced he was leaving in mid-October. He'll now stay through December, and he isn't a candidate for the permanent job. Frank X. Shaw, who ran communications for more than 17 years, said earlier in September that he'd leave at the end of the year. He's stepping back from the role now and will advise Smith and Colburn until he goes. Smith is leading the search for a permanent chief communications officer with Numoto and chief people officer Amy Coleman, and both internal and external candidates are in the running. Whoever gets the job is expected to report to Smith as well, so this isn't a stopgap. The comms leadership team is getting bigger, too. It adds the people who already handle communications for Nadella, for Smith and for Judson Althoff, who runs Microsoft's commercial business, along with a public affairs lead from Smith's organization. Both memos say comms and marketing will keep working closely, and Colburn will sit on Numoto's leadership team as well as Smith's. Microsoft is widening who speaks and moving the rulebook to legal Nadella's memo argues that the people closest to the work are best placed to shape how Microsoft is understood. He wants their posts tied together by "a shared strategy and set of principles." Somebody has to write those principles, and the org chart now says where they'll come from. Smith runs Corporate, External and Legal Affairs, known inside the company as CELA. It handles legal, regulatory and public policy work, including antitrust matters, litigation and government relations. Communications used to sit beside the brand. Now it sits beside the people who read every public statement for how it might play in a courtroom or a hearing. For Microsoft, the logic is easy to see. The company is under steady scrutiny over AI, competition, data centers and its dealings with governments, and an engineer's offhand post about any of those can become a policy problem by the afternoon. Putting comms under Smith gives the function a direct line to the teams that clean up after those problems. What nobody knows yet is how the employee posts will sound. Engineers make good spokespeople because they talk like engineers. If the guidelines are written mainly to protect the company in a hearing, the voices Nadella wants could start to read like they cleared legal review first. Microsoft hasn't said who will draft the guidelines or what they'll cover. AI labs taught the market to listen to engineers Nadella wrote that Microsoft needs new ways to reach people directly in a media environment he called fragmented and noisier than ever. It isn't hard to see who he's competing with. As GeekWire noted, OpenAI and Anthropic run looser blogs and livestreams, and their researchers and executives tend to post in their own voices, often informally. That habit has become a big part of how AI labs earn trust. When a model ships, the people who built it are usually the ones explaining it online. Microsoft is building its own models in Mustafa Suleyman's Microsoft AI group, but Copilot still trails ChatGPT and Google's Gemini with consumers. A carefully managed corporate voice has a hard time keeping up with researchers posting straight from the lab. The field keeps getting more crowded. Meta launched its Muse assistant in September and started selling the agent technology to businesses three weeks later. Nadella called Microsoft's fall events a chance to bring product, marketing and comms together in new ways, so the new setup won't wait long for its first test. Company channels are losing reach anyway The timing matches something we covered yesterday. LinkedIn is testing a Network tab that shows members posts only from people they're connected to or follow. In that feed, a Company Page would reach its followers at most, and LinkedIn hasn't said whether pages will show up there at all. The numbers already lean toward people. Metricool's 2026 LinkedIn study found personal profiles averaged a 2.60% engagement rate, compared with 1.60% for Company Pages, and only about 7% of pages grew their following over the period it measured. With layoffs climbing, professionals are also building audiences of their own that stay with them when they leave a job. If brand reach is going to run through people, Microsoft is adjusting early. There's a catch, though, and we flagged it in the LinkedIn piece. The platform has been cracking down on engagement pods, so a coordinated push to get thousands of employees posting the same talking points could get flagged as easily as it gets rewarded. Guidelines that keep employee posts sounding like individuals are now part of the comms job. Retail brands pay employees to post. Microsoft is asking for something else. Microsoft is far from the first company to want more employees posting. The best-known programs this year have come from retail, and they're built differently. Starbucks started its Green Apron Creators program in 2024. At Cannes Lions in June it became the first brand to pilot a custom Creator Network inside TikTok's Content Suite, which lets it send briefs to selected baristas and pay some of them through ad revenue sharing, Marketing Dive reported . In July, Gap Inc. opened its creator affiliate program to staff in its offices, stores and distribution centers, who can now earn commission on sales across Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic and Athleta. The company says the program, which launched for outside creators in October 2025, has produced nearly 30,000 posts reaching about 154 million users, FashionNetwork reported . Those programs live close to marketing. They run on briefs, affiliate links and paid amplification, and they're judged on reach and sales. Microsoft's push is about how the company is understood. The people it wants talking are engineers, sellers and partners explaining Microsoft's work, and the function overseeing them now reports to legal. The memos say nothing about paying anyone to post. Brand teams will have to negotiate their way into the rules At most big companies, marketing owns the brand voice, comms owns reputation and the two teams work out the overlap. Microsoft has pulled them apart. Marketing keeps the campaigns and the product story. Comms, which will now shape how executives and employees talk about the company in public, reports to the executive in charge of legal and policy risk. That means the brand team's influence over the company's most believable voices runs through a coordination agreement. Marketing will want those posts to help sell. Legal will want them to hold up if anyone challenges them later. Comms has to get both out of the same engineer's LinkedIn post. Other CMOs don't need to copy Microsoft's org chart to learn from it. Before more people start speaking for the brand, decide who drafts the guidelines, since a set written only by legal will be cautious and one written only by marketing will skip over the risks. Give the working relationship between comms and marketing a named owner and a way to settle disputes, or the reporting line will settle them by default. Figure out what employees get for their trouble, such as coaching and fast answers about what they're allowed to say. Then measure the program on trust and accuracy, because post counts and reach were designed for retail creator programs. Microsoft's fall events will be the first public look at how this works. Watch how many engineers and sellers post about them, and whether they still sound like themselves.

## Loud Working Is Last-Click Attribution for Your Career
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/loud-working-layoffs
Published: 2026-10-11T21:17:18.350Z
Section: Leadership
Summary: Professionals are broadcasting their wins to stay off layoff lists. Marketers have seen the logic before, in attribution models that give the credit to whatever touched the customer last.
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A LinkedIn member wrote recently that he lost his job because his manager had no idea what he had contributed. His comment sat under a LinkedIn News roundup of a Business Insider report on "loud working," the habit of announcing your accomplishments often enough that the people deciding who stays can't miss them. The fear behind it is well founded. The Skillsyncer tracker counted more tech layoffs between January and late September than in all of 2025, and the median job search has stretched to 4.7 months, State of Brand reported last week . That piece looked at professionals building audiences outside the company, on newsletters and posts they keep after their login stops working. Loud working is aimed inward, at a manager and a skip-level. Anyone who has defended a marketing budget will recognize the premise. Marketing teams have spent a decade arguing about measurement systems that credit whoever was standing closest to the sale, and loud working asks employees to make sure that person is them. Attribution has always favored the last touch Siraj Dawar, Head of Marketing at Bee Enterprises, described a campaign to State of Brand that returned about 30 times its ad spend. When he looked closer, most of the buyers it claimed had been planning to purchase anyway, and the campaign had collected demand that earlier channels created. Attribution, in Dawar's words, rewards "the last room the customer stood in." He also described what usually happens next in the budget meeting. The retargeting line with the impressive ROAS keeps its money, and the prospecting work that filled the retargeting pool gets trimmed. A few months later the pool has shrunk and nobody can say why. Layoff decisions often run on the same kind of information. A manager weighing two people will usually remember who presented the launch results. The person who rebuilt the data pipeline three months earlier, so the launch had numbers to present, left much less of a trace. Marketing's own work is the hardest to see Brand programs take a long time to pay back, and the return is hard to tie to any single campaign. That has made marketing an easy target when budgets tighten. When profits fall short, marketing is cut 45.4% of the time, more often than any other function, according to the CMO Survey figures State of Brand reported in August . Salesforce's February layoffs this year included marketing roles. That August piece also cited a Bain survey in which a consumer-goods CFO said he would throw money at marketing if he believed its data. The finance leaders in that research understood the awareness metrics marketers brought them. They weren't persuaded by them, and a CMO who expects the work to speak for itself is in roughly the position of the employee who was let go. CMOs end up having to work loud for the department. Platform-reported ROAS is the obvious material, and it has the same weakness as an employee's self-written list of wins, since in both cases whoever reports the result is also being judged on it. Managers will be grading their teams' press releases Marketing leaders also manage people, and if loud working spreads they will be on the receiving end of it. Status updates and Slack recaps will be written partly as a case for keeping the author's job. Marketers learned long ago to discount the conversions an ad platform reports about its own campaigns, and self-reported wins from a team call for a similar discount. Dawar made a related point about automated bidding, which he said scales bad distribution faster instead of fixing it. A team rewarded for announcing results will announce more of them. Work that leaves nothing to announce, like cleaning a dataset or killing a weak idea early, will get less of everyone's attention. Some of the announcing will happen on LinkedIn, where it may not go as planned. LinkedIn added a button in July for members to flag posts as AI slop, and flagged posts now lose reach, State of Brand reported in August . The author gets only a private notice in their analytics. What this asks of marketing leaders Incrementality testing asks what would have happened if a campaign had never run. Just over half of US brand and agency marketers now use it, according to the eMarketer figures cited in the Dawar piece. A manager can put a version of that question to any contribution and ask what would have shipped late, or broken, if this person hadn't been on the team. Dawar traces high-ticket sales from the first newsfeed impression through WhatsApp chats and phone calls to the signed deal, then stitches the steps together by hand in the CRM. Projects can be traced the same way, back past whoever presented the result to whoever scoped it and kept it moving. He also uses marketing mix modeling so that no single platform defines success, and performance reviews benefit from the same habit of checking peers and downstream teams before settling on a verdict. For the department, the August piece argued that CMOs win budget by pitching brand the way an investor would, with a payback window and a review date on the calendar. Nikolay Tsonev, Head of Marketing at Businessmap, told State of Brand he now tracks branded search instead of website traffic, and that his marketing and sales teams report the same metric. Both approaches give the CFO evidence that doesn't depend on marketing's own account of itself. Loud working makes sense for any employee whose manager can only see the last room. Marketing leaders have spent years learning how misleading that view can be, which puts them in a better position than most to stop managing by it.

## LinkedIn Is Testing a Feed Built Only From Who You Follow. Company Pages Would Reach Their Followers, at Most.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/linkedin-network-tab-company-pages-followers
Published: 2026-10-11T16:35:12.873Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: LinkedIn’s new Network tab shows only posts from connections and follows, a test that would limit Company Pages to the followers they’ve actually earned.
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LinkedIn's new Network tab shows members posts only from their connections and the accounts they follow. It's a small test with a poor track record behind it, but it shows how much of a Company Page's reach the algorithm has been lending it. For most of its life, a LinkedIn Company Page hasn't needed many followers to get seen. The algorithm decides who sees a post, and it has been happy to show brand content to plenty of people who never clicked follow. LinkedIn is now testing a feed where that doesn't happen. On September 18, Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan announced a "Network" tab that shows only posts from people a member has connected with or followed. It sits next to the main feed, which stays the default. Social Media Today reported the test two days later. Srinivasan pitched the tab as a way to bring more real connection with real people back to the platform. For brands, it's also a preview of their reach once it's limited to the audience they actually own. LinkedIn is trying to win back a feed people trust The test lands after a year of LinkedIn fighting its own feed. It has gone after engagement pods , the groups that trade likes and comments to game distribution, and added a way to report AI-generated posts . A tab limited to accounts a member picked is the bluntest filter it has tried for both. LinkedIn hasn't said how many members are in the test, where it's running or how long it will last. It also hasn't said whether posts from Company Pages a member follows will appear in the tab, or only posts from people. Srinivasan's description talks about people. That one detail decides how much this matters to brands. LinkedIn has built this tab before LinkedIn has a habit of testing a way out of its algorithm and then keeping the algorithm. It previously ran a five-week test of a "My Network" tab that looked a lot like this one, showing posts from connections and from people and pages members followed. In 2025 a small group of US members got "For You," "Following" and "News" tabs , and LinkedIn later posted that the test had ended. In June it tried topic-based suggested feeds . None became a standard feature. Social Media Today's Andrew Hutchinson gave this one slim odds, and the history backs him up. Algorithmic feeds keep people scrolling, which is why LinkedIn is keeping its own as the default. The more useful detail is where LinkedIn keeps landing. Every time the feed fills up with pods and slop, the company reaches for the member's own network as the fix. That tells brands which kind of reach the platform trusts, whether or not this particular tab ships. The algorithm has been lending pages their reach Metricool's 2026 LinkedIn study of 673,658 posts from 63,108 accounts found that Company Pages and personal profiles get about the same number of impressions per post. What happens after the impression is different. Personal profiles averaged a 2.60% engagement rate to pages' 1.60% , and they drew far more comments, while pages got far more shares . The growth number is the one to sit with. Only about 7% of Company Pages grew their following over the period Metricool studied. Put that next to a follow-only feed. In the main feed, the algorithm can carry a page's post to people who never followed it, which is how pages end up with people-sized impressions. In a Network tab, that loan goes away. A page reaches its followers at most, and if LinkedIn leaves pages out, it reaches nobody there. For most pages, the follower count that would set that limit hasn't moved in a year. Executives and employees don't have that problem. Their connections are what the tab is built from, and their posts already earn the conversation. The pages that should worry are the ones renting their audience State of Brand has argued that the brands keeping their audiences now are the ones publishing their own rather than renting someone else's. A LinkedIn Company Page sits awkwardly between the two. The follower list feels owned, but most of the reach has been rented from the algorithm. A Network tab would make the difference visible. A page with a real following of customers, candidates and peers would keep its place in front of them. A page that has been posting to whoever the algorithm sent would find out how small its audience is. The people side shifts too. Professionals are already building audiences their employers can't take away , and a connections-only feed favors exactly those accounts. Brands that want to be in that feed will mostly get there through the people who work for them. That works when the posts are real. With LinkedIn cracking down on pods, a coordinated employee-amplification program is as likely to get flagged as rewarded. What to do before LinkedIn decides This is a test, and LinkedIn's history says it may not survive. Nothing about it requires a brand to change course this quarter. It does point to a few things worth doing anyway. Report page follower growth with the same weight as impressions. If reach ever narrows to followers, the follower base is the number that matters, and most pages aren't growing it. Let the page do what it does well. Metricool found page posts with links got 51% more impressions than average, while links cut reach on personal profiles by 27%. The page is a good home for announcements, research and anything people want to pass along. Give the people with real networks something worth saying, and leave the posting to them. Then watch for one answer from LinkedIn: whether followed Company Pages show up in the Network tab. If they do, a page's audience becomes its follower list. If they don't, a brand's presence in that feed runs entirely through its people. Either way, the reach the algorithm has been lending is the part brands can't count on.

## AI Can Optimize The Campaign. It Can't Tell Marketers Whether It Created Demand.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/roas-harvested-demand-incrementality-siraj-dawar-bee-enterprises
Published: 2026-10-09T04:59:19.653Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Siraj Dawar, Head of Marketing at Bee Enterprises, found a 30x ROAS campaign creating no new demand. As ad platforms automate, the dashboard needs a second opinion.
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A high-ticket campaign once showed a return of roughly 30 times its ad spend, a result that would win more budget in almost any marketing review. The sales it took credit for came from people who were already planning to buy, which meant the campaign was capturing existing demand and generating very little of its own. Meta is now moving toward campaigns that run on little more than a product image and budget , with AI handling creative and targeting. That level of automation makes a captured sale even easier to mistake for a created one. Siraj Dawar is Head of Marketing at Bee Enterprises , a company that has spent two decades launching internati onal lifestyle brands in Pakistan. He has worked across 11 countries in South Asia and the GCC, running campaigns for high-ticket products where a single sale can move from social discovery to a showroom visit, phone negotiation and final search before it closes. On those campaigns, he skips the likes and impressions and follows the customer from the newsfeed all the way to the signed deal. "The campaign that shows up on the dashboard is often different from the campaign that delivered," Dawar says. The 30x campaign was one he ran himself, and the dashboard's verdict didn't hold up once he moved budget into earlier-stage channels it couldn't track well. The real return surfaced in the telesales pipeline where his high-ticket deals closed, which is why he now judges every campaign by the demand it creates. A 30x return can mean nobody new showed up In a high-ticket purchase, the customer usually discovers the product in a social feed long before they ever reach checkout, and that first touchpoint rarely gets credit for the sale. "Attribution always rewards the last room the customer stood in, not the first room that convinced them," Dawar explains. Standard ROAS adds to the problem by counting sales that would have happened anyway alongside the ones a campaign influenced, and just over half of US brand and agency marketers now run incrementality tests and experiments to separate the two. Inside a budget review , the pattern is easy to predict. The retargeting line with the gorgeous ROAS keeps its funding, while the prospecting line that fed that retargeting pool gets trimmed. Six months later, the pool is thinner and nobody in the room can explain why. Automation scales whatever signal it's fed Advantage+ and Performance Max learn from pixel and conversion signals, so a system fed mostly on existing customers gets very efficient at finding more people who look like them. "Automated bidding doesn't fix bad distribution. It scales it faster and gives you less visibility," Dawar says. "We don't fix the measurement problem with automated bidding. We just hand it to a faster system and ask it for numbers, whatever their quality." When he joined Bee Enterprises, he inherited a campaign whose lead quality collapsed every time the budget went up. Tired creative explained part of the problem, but the audience was doing more damage. He pulled existing customers out of lookalike targeting and fed the CRM back into Meta as a list of people to avoid, a move that ran against the default performance marketing playbook . "Tell the algorithm that you don't need these customers. You need new ones," he explains. "Anyone who has already interacted with our website, our social pages or our ads shouldn't be seeing that campaign." Every campaign deserves its own scoreboard Take a single campaign and measure it two ways. Run it for conversions, and Dawar follows the customer from a YouTube ad or newsfeed post to the closed sale, looking for the exact step where that path stalls. Run the same campaign for brand awareness, and the scoreboard shifts to impressions and how people come to think about the brand. The work before launch gets the same specificity. A pen sold to teenagers and the same pen sold to upper-income buyers need different selling points, and he matches each audience to the feature most likely to move it. "A marketer who first understands the campaign, and what they want to learn from it next month, knows which metrics to analyze and optimize," Dawar adds. Across channels, he uses marketing mix modeling to compare performance side by side instead of letting each platform define success for itself. On a five-channel campaign, he pulls the metrics he cares about from each one, plots them together and looks for the channel where the slope starts breaking down. In Pakistan and the GCC, the sale happens off the dashboard Every framework above assumes the sale leaves a digital trace, and across much of the world it doesn't. In Pakistan, where Dawar is based, and throughout the GCC, a high-ticket purchase routinely moves from an ad into a WhatsApp chat and then onto a phone call, where trust gets built and the price gets negotiated. Meta has leaned into that behavior, and the revenue line driven by WhatsApp paid messaging topped $1 billion in a single quarter for the first time this summer, up 73% year over year. "Most high-ticket selling here happens on WhatsApp and through telesales, because there's a trust issue to overcome and the financial conversation is a negotiation," Dawar notes. In the US and Europe, an ecommerce checkout often closes the loop inside the same system that served the ad. His teams track two journeys side by side, one showing how a person reacted to the creative and another that begins once they land in the conversation, and stitch them together by hand in the CRM. Dawar still runs automated campaigns and still reads ROAS, treating both as a record of where a sale was captured. The dashboard can tell him where that capture happened, while the CRM and the WhatsApp threads show what created the demand behind it. . "Every day, you have to look at both journeys, find where they're breaking down and work out how to fix it," Dawar says. The views and opinions expressed are those of Siraj Dawar and do not represent the official policy or position of any organization.

## Running Marketing And Sales As One Flywheel Turns Brand Familiarity Into Qualified Pipeline
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/nikolay-tsonev-businessmap-brand-visibility-ai-impact
Published: 2026-10-09T04:56:31.280Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Nikolay Tsonev, Head of Marketing at Businessmap, shares why he now tracks branded search instead of website traffic, and why marketers and salespeople at Businessmap report the same metric.
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Many buyers now reach a vendor's site with their shortlist already built inside an AI assistant, arriving to confirm a decision they made elsewhere. Website traffic counts visits from people who have already decided, and lead volume counts arrivals without saying whether a sales team can work any of them. The familiarity marketing builds before the first call is what the SDR inherits when they dial. Companies that route what those calls turn up back into targeting and messaging get a second pass at both, and one number both teams can report. Nikolay Tsonev is Head of Marketing at Businessmap , a PPM software for enterprises looking to track projects across teams and connect strategy to execution. Out of university, he took a sales internship at HP, supporting its account managers, and joined Businessmap in 2019 through content and then product marketing. He led the positioning that took the company's two largest releases into the OKR and project portfolio management categories. Tsonev moved into his current role in August 2024, after spending the first half of that year in customer success and sales enablement. "If your brand is weak, it's going to be much harder for the salesperson to do outbound. You can pull the stars from space and offer them to the customer, but it's a different conversation when they know your name and they've seen you at events," says Tsonev. He treats brand visibility inside a niche as the input that decides what an SDR walks into on a cold call. Building it is marketing's work, and the sales team's conversations are the evidence. Visibility before the first call Traffic is now losing its value as the measure of whether marketing worked. Tsonev puts Businessmap's own site traffic down by almost 50%, and describes a zero-click environment where the company's mentions now surface inside ChatGPT and Gemini. The older route of a search, a blog post, and then a website has thinned out, and he counts impressions and follower numbers as equally unhelpful. "It's more about brand visibility these days within a specific niche," he says. "Marketing teams used to measure the effects of their marketing just by generating traffic to their websites. Now it's about how visible and popular your brand is within a specific niche." Branded search is what Tsonev measures in its place. He takes more people typing the company name into Google as evidence that the brand is being recommended inside AI answers, and he expects the next three or four years of visibility work to be decided there. A category of AI visibility trackers has grown up to measure the same thing. "If more people are looking for our brand on Google or through the traditional search engines, then this means that our brand is appearing more often in AI search engines," Tsonev explains. "We're going to start measuring branded traffic instead of overall traffic." Buyer behavior is the piece Tsonev expects to keep moving. He thinks buyers will hand more of the comparison work to AI agents, asking them to pull pricing and line up competitors without working through vendor sites themselves. Marketing still owns demand creation. "Marketing people are in charge of campaigns and where our budget goes, events, social media, digital PR, all of these things where our brand becomes visible," he says. Intelligence from the conversations Businessmap measured marketing on free trials and software signups before Tsonev ran the function. Sales pushed back on the quality of what those campaigns delivered, and marketing kept the same target. The company sells into long enterprise cycles, and a free trial sat a long way from a buying decision. "Most of the time the sales team had feedback that the trial accounts we were bringing them were not qualified, and then they were just junk," Tsonev recalls. Businessmap's salespeople meet leads at events and through digital channels , and some of those leads turn out to sit outside the company's ICP. An SDR or account executive finds that out first. Tsonev pairs each salesperson with a marketing counterpart, so the rep's account of a bad-fit lead reaches the person who sets the targeting. "The intelligence about the marketing should be coming from the sales teams, because the sales teams are running the conversations," he notes. "And the marketing teams are the ones who create the strategy. Where do we play? What's our market? Who is our target persona?" Tsonev routes that feedback into positioning, the target persona, which events the company attends, and where the budget goes. He wants marketing and sales inside one team so the feedback moves between them without a handoff. "My view is that marketing and sales should work under a single team called a growth team, and that growth team should own the pipeline," he says. One number for both teams Opportunities is the metric marketing and sales both report on at Businessmap, and Tsonev uses the word interchangeably with sales qualified leads . Demo requests and sales requests still get counted as inputs to the number he reports. A white paper download can make someone a marketing qualified lead, but an opportunity exists only once sales has spoken to that person and agreed. "Once we have that opportunity metric, we see how the marketing activities actually contribute to the pipeline," Tsonev says. Marketing and sales meet weekly at Businessmap, with a fuller review each quarter. The weekly meeting opens on what the pipeline did the previous week, then splits its time between sales items and marketing items. Tsonev wants customer lifetime value and the cost of getting an opportunity on marketing's side of that agenda, and he notes both have traditionally belonged to sales. "Once marketing understands that, they can redefine the positioning and the messaging to target the right leads," he concludes. "They might take more time to convert, but at the end of the day it will be worth it."

## Meta Told Its Shopping Agent to Rank Well-Known Merchants First. Challenger Brands Start Behind.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/meta-muse-ai-shopping-agent-ranking-rules
Published: 2026-10-09T02:12:43.138Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Meta's Muse is told to rank well-known merchants first, check just three stores and save checkout for its own catalog. Challenger brands start behind.
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Muse's shopping instructions favor familiar sellers, cut prices that fall outside the norm and check no more than three stores on the open web. The rules make it harder to win the way challenger brands have always won. For a decade the challenger brand's playbook ran on discovery. Build a better product or price it lower, get found in search or on Instagram, and take share from the names everyone already knew. Meta's Muse works against nearly every step of that. The agent's shopping instructions tell it three separate times to put well-known merchants at the top of its recommendations. It throws out listings priced outside the normal range for a product, checks no more than three stores on the open web per request and saves in-chat checkout for products in Meta's own catalog. A newer brand can still make the list. It just starts behind. Profound, an AI marketing platform, says it pulled the file from Muse on September 25 and shared the full text with State of Brand. Profound sells software that tracks this kind of agent behavior for brands, so it has a stake in marketers paying attention. The file is worth reading anyway. Muse has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times since it launched on September 8, Profound reported , citing CNBC. On September 28 Meta started selling the same agent technology to businesses . Whatever rules sit inside Muse now decide what a lot of shoppers see first. Muse pulls most options from Meta's catalog and most picks from the web Profound published research on Muse and Instinct, a personal agent that works over text messages, on October 2. It ran 50 prompts from one retail category through a single Muse account and calls the sample small and exploratory. On a typical prompt, Meta's catalog returned about 60 products from 30 merchants. Muse's browser visited three sites and found four products at two merchants. The six products Muse ended up showing usually split four from the browser and two from the catalog. In the median case the catalog supplied about 95% of the candidates, probably because it's cheaper to search, said Jennifer Zou , an economist at Profound with a PhD from Harvard. "Much more weight is placed on candidates returned by the web search," she said. The instruction file goes a long way toward explaining that gap. Profound said its research team found the file in Muse's system files and that it may have changed since late September. Brand recognition is a ranking rule Muse's first instruction is to save the shopper money. When it reviews results, it throws out anything that doesn't match the request, doesn't look high quality or sits outside the normal price range for that kind of product. A listing priced far below the category is as likely to get cut as one priced far above it, and far below is often exactly where a challenger prices to get noticed. Then it ranks what's left, and the file keeps coming back to the same criterion. Well-known sellers are named in the ranking step of the discovery workflow. The instructions for the results display call it "imperative" that the top five products come from well-known merchants or websites and match what the shopper asked for. The formatting rules say it again. Being asked for by name pays off as well. If a shopper names a brand or retailer, Muse's catalog search puts that brand's own store at the top and fills in other sellers below. By default it also prefers brands and retailers selling direct over resellers. A good human merchandiser would make most of the same calls. Muse makes them for every shopper, every time, before anyone has seen an option. That suits incumbents fine. For a brand still building its name, being less known used to cost some clicks. In Muse it costs rank, and the ranking happens before the shopper sees anything. Meta keeps the register for itself Products in Meta's catalog that carry an "agentic checkout" flag can be bought inside Muse through a Shopify-based purchase flow. Anything Muse finds on the open web has to go through browser checkout, with the agent clicking its way through the merchant's site, and its product card has in-chat checkout switched off. Carts work the same way. Muse will build one for a shopper to come back to, but only from flagged catalog products. "Products without that capability have no cart, and neither does browser checkout," the file says. The catalog is Meta's home turf. It runs shopping on Instagram and Facebook, and the file rates its coverage as good for fashion, home decor and beauty and only okay for everything else. Muse can pull Facebook Marketplace listings too. If a shopper shares an Instagram post with tagged products, Muse goes straight to those items and is told to skip search entirely. So a brand on the open web can still get recommended. Getting bought inside Muse takes a listing in Meta's catalog. Outside the catalog, Muse checks three stores and stops Brands that aren't in the catalog still get a shot. Muse is told to run a browser search next to the catalog search on every request, "especially for home goods," unless the shopper only wanted Marketplace listings. The search is small. By default the browser agent looks at no more than three merchant sites and brings back no more than ten products, and if two sites give it enough for a "high-quality and seller-diverse" list, it's told to quit early. Everything it brings back has to pass a few checks. The link has to go to an actual product page rather than a search page, the page has to show the item is in stock and can be added to a cart, and the agent has to be able to verify a real product image. Placeholders and logos get thrown out. Muse also favors the country version of a site that matches the shopper's location, and it reopens every link itself before showing anything. Nothing in the file says how the agent picks those three stores. A brand that doesn't make that cut never gets compared at all. Muse knows plenty about the shopper, and nobody has measured what that changes Before it shops, Muse reads a stored profile of the shopper's preferences, checks a general file about the user and searches its memory for sizes and tastes. For gifts, it goes by what the shopper says about the recipient plus a notes page it keeps on that person. Some details have to be pinned down before any search runs, like the wearer's gender and size for clothing or the exact device a part needs to fit. Muse asks about them one at a time. The file tells it never to guess someone's gender from their name and never to fill in a default, and a shoe size saved for one brand doesn't carry over to another. Profound's pitch to State of Brand leaned hard on personalization, but its test used a single account, so it can't say how much two shoppers' results differ for the same request. Zou said the firm is building a panel of synthetic user profiles to find out. Brands can't see the agent coming Even when Muse does land on a brand's site, the brand probably won't know it. Profound reports that Muse and Instinct don't identify themselves when they browse. They route through residential internet connections and show up looking like regular visitors, and their answers don't cite the sites they read. Amazon noticed. Last month it blocked Muse from shopping on Amazon.com, saying in part that the agent didn't identify itself as a bot, State of Brand reported . Profound tried to estimate the traffic anyway. In its tests, some Muse sessions came right after requests labeled "meta-webindexer" from IP addresses Meta doesn't publicly claim. In Muse's first 20 days, those requests grew 1.6 times as much on U.S. and Canadian retail sites as on sites elsewhere. The comparison covers about 280 sites sorted by domain suffix, and Profound calls it only a proxy. That leaves marketers with an agent judging their product pages on behalf of real customers and no clear record of it in their analytics. What a challenger can still control Zou's advice splits by size. "If you're a well-known merchant/retailer, it's probably fine to rely on discovery via browser search," she said. "If you're a smaller brand, Shopify/Meta catalog integration is a more worthwhile investment." That's right as far as it goes. For a smaller brand, the catalog is the way into the pool and the only way to be bought or carted inside Muse. It doesn't change the ranking rules, though. Once a product is in the pool, well-known sellers still go to the top. The rest of the work is unglamorous. Turn on checkout in Meta's catalog. Make product pages easy for an agent to check, with one product per page, a real image and visible stock status. Keep prices inside the normal range for the category, even if undercutting is how you've won before, because the file cuts outliers on both ends. Spell out sizing, fit and compatibility, which Muse has to pin down before it searches. If you sell on Instagram, tag the products, because a shared post with tags skips search altogether. None of that gets a challenger to the top of the list, and the file is clear about what does. Muse puts well-known sellers first, and it puts a brand's own store first when a shopper asks for it by name. Getting people to ask for you by name is the oldest job in brand marketing. Inside Muse, it's also the most direct way around the rules Meta wrote.

## How to Build an Owned Media Strategy: A Step-by-Step Framework
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/owned-media-strategy
Published: 2026-10-07T15:36:25.209Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: How to build an owned media strategy in eight steps: define your reader, launch an industry publication, feature real executives and earn an audience.
Full text:
Most B2B companies still get attention the way they did twenty years ago. They buy ads, pitch reporters, sponsor other people's conferences and hope the feed cooperates. All of that can work, but the attention ends when the spending does. Owned media is the other path. A company builds its own channel, usually a publication, and earns a regular audience among the people it wants to reach. Over time that publication becomes where those people go to figure out what's going on in their industry, and the company's best thinking lives there instead of being scattered across press hits, podcast appearances and event recaps. The framework below is drawn from how Outlever , the company that powers The State of Brand, sets up owned media for its customers, along with what we've seen from the brands and executives we cover. Expect a program like this to take a year or more to show its full value. What an owned media strategy covers An owned media strategy is a plan for a channel your company controls and the audience you want that channel to earn. The publication sits at the center. Around it are the people who appear in it, the point of view that runs through it, and the places that point of view travels: inboxes, LinkedIn, conference stages, events and communities. People often confuse this with a company blog. A blog mostly covers the company itself, with product news, announcements and posts written to rank for keywords. An owned media property covers the industry. It reports on what's happening to your customers, interviews the people shaping the field, and says what the editors think it all means. Your company's expertise shows up throughout as analysis, and the product mostly stays offstage. If the concept is new to you, our guides What Is Owned Media: The Official Guide and How Is Owned Media Different Than PR? cover the basics. Step 1: Decide who the publication is for Start with a specific reader. "Marketers" is too broad to write for. "CMOs at mid-market software companies who just lost a third of their paid budget" gives an editor something to work with. For most B2B companies the reader is the ideal customer profile, meaning the executives who buy your product, influence the purchase or decide whether to renew. Those readers should also be the subjects of your coverage. A good owned media property reports on what's happening in their world, asks how their peers are handling it, and puts their names and faces in the stories. Write down answers to these questions before you publish anything: Which two or three job titles are you writing for? What are those people dealing with this year? Think about budget cuts, new technology, reorganizations and anything that could cost them their jobs. What do they already read, and where are the gaps? Most industries have trade press for news and analysts for trends. Far fewer have a place where peers talk openly about what's working for them. How and when do they read? Some go through their inbox at 7 a.m., some scroll LinkedIn between meetings, and a lot of reading starts with a link a colleague drops in Slack. What would they forward to a colleague or their boss? If readers pass a piece along, you've probably got the editorial right. Those answers become your editorial brief. Step 2: Develop a point of view People subscribe to perspectives more than to topics. Lots of outlets will tell your reader that AI is changing their job. Very few will say which parts of the job, what to stop doing, and which piece of conventional wisdom is about to age badly. An owned publication has room to do that. Having a point of view means holding positions you'll defend in public, knowing some of them may turn out wrong. Before launch, put these on paper: A thesis of one or two sentences about how your industry is changing. At The State of Brand, ours is that brands are turning into media companies, and the ones that don't will keep paying for attention they could have built themselves. Three to five editorial pillars, the themes you'll keep coming back to. Tie each one to a problem your reader has, and they'll keep you focused without crowding out news. Your stance on the big debates in your field. Trade publications are built to stay neutral. Yours can afford to pick a side. A list of topics you won't cover, including product content dressed up as editorial. Turning stories down is a large part of how a publication earns credibility. When you test an angle, ask whether a smart reader could reasonably disagree with it. If nobody could, you've probably written a summary. Revisit your angles every month or so. When something big hits your industry, like a platform change, a high-profile layoff or a new regulation, you should know within a day what you think and whom you'd call for comment. Step 3: Launch a publication that represents the industry Many companies put their publication on the corporate website under the corporate brand. Then they find that executives at other companies won't take part and readers treat everything on it as marketing. An adjacent publication works better. It has its own name, its own site and its own editorial identity, and the company backing it is disclosed openly. The State of Brand is set up this way: it covers brand and marketing broadly, and readers can see that Outlever powers it. This setup has practical advantages. A publication named for a category can credibly bring that category together, whereas a company blog speaks for one company. Executives elsewhere are far more likely to agree to an interview with an industry publication, and their comms and legal teams are more likely to sign off. Over time a separate publication also builds its own search authority, subscriber list and reputation, until people start looking for it by name. When you set it up: Name it after the category. Names built on "the state of," "the future of" or the industry itself tell readers the scope is broad. Give it a separate domain and design, with sections, bylines, author pages and a masthead, so it reads like a publication. Say who's behind it, on an about page and in a standard line on articles. Readers who discover a hidden sponsor rarely come back. Plan for search early. Definitional guides, glossaries and frameworks can rank for years, and timely coverage keeps the site current. Link to the backing company where it actually helps the reader, as this article does, and leave it out everywhere else. Step 4: Feature real people with real opinions The quality of an owned media property depends mostly on its people. Readers can tell when an article was assembled from other articles, and they notice when a named executive says something they haven't heard before. Now that anyone can produce a decent explainer in seconds, first-hand perspective is much harder to come by and worth far more. Two groups should appear regularly. Executives from other companies. Customers, prospects, partners and well-regarded operators can describe how they're handling the problems your readers face. Readers hear from peers, the executives get visibility, and your company gets to know people it would like to work with. Your own executives and experts. Your team supplies the analysis that ties the coverage together. Their job is to explain what's happening, spot patterns across many conversations and say what those patterns mean. When they do this well, readers work out for themselves that your company knows the field. Some practical guidance: Start pieces from interviews. A half-hour conversation usually turns up more original material than a week of desk research. Ask for specifics: the example, the mistake, the decision they'd make differently. Quotes smoothed over until legal could approve them without reading are of no use to anyone. Include people who disagree with each other, and with you. A publication where every guest shares the host's view reads like a brochure. Make guests look good. Send them the finished piece in a format that's easy to post, and tag them. Many will share it, often with more of the right people than your own channels reach. Stay in touch. Someone you interview this quarter might speak at your event next quarter, join your community, or eventually become a customer. Step 5: Set up an editorial operation A content calendar tells you what to publish and when. To publish well every week for years, you also need a dependable way of turning industry news and your people's knowledge into stories, one that keeps running when a writer goes on vacation. The pieces of that operation: A mix of formats. Most good publications run quick takes on news with an expert quote or two, longer features built on a single interview, analysis where your experts draw on many conversations, and evergreen guides meant to rank in search. A steady flow of interviews. Each conversation can supply a feature, quotes for news pieces, a newsletter item, LinkedIn posts and short video clips. A schedule you can keep. Readers trust a publication that shows up every Tuesday more than one that publishes ten pieces in March and nothing in April. Editorial standards. Check facts, edit for clarity, and ask of every draft whether a busy executive would be glad they spent the time on it. Good tooling. Scheduling, transcription, research, first drafts and repurposing go much faster with modern software, AI included. Spend your team's time on judgment, relationships and choosing the angle, since those can't be handed off. Set up properly, the operation asks very little of your executives. They show up for interviews, share what they know and approve drafts. Companies like Outlever have productized this in a way that makes it efficient. You don't need to spend millions a year trying to build it out on your own. Step 6: Reach your audience on every channel, every week Publishing an article doesn't mean anyone reads it. The publication works as a hub, and the channels around it give people reasons to come back. All of them should carry the same point of view and draw on the same reporting. Newsletter. Email is the one channel a platform can't throttle, which puts the newsletter at the center of owned media. Good B2B newsletters are short and opinionated, and they arrive on schedule. They tell the reader what matters this week and what the editors make of it. Track opens, replies and forwards along with list size. Five thousand of the right executives will do more for you than fifty thousand random sign-ups. LinkedIn. Most professional conversation in B2B happens on LinkedIn, and the platform favors individuals over company pages. Your executives should post regularly from their own accounts, using the publication's reporting and their own opinions. Tag featured guests and give them something easy to reshare. Keep the publication's page active, but expect most of the reach to come through people. Executive speaking. Podcasts, panels and keynotes take the publication's point of view to audiences that haven't found it yet. When your executives speak from the same thesis the publication covers, the talks and the articles reinforce each other, and the publication keeps them supplied with fresh examples. Events. Many owned media programs grow into events: roundtable dinners, small executive briefings, virtual sessions and eventually a flagship gathering. Readers who come to an event start participating, and what they say feeds the next round of coverage. A dinner for twelve well-chosen executives can supply a month of stories and relationships that last for years. Community. The longest-lasting owned media properties tend to build a community where readers talk to one another as well as to you. It could be a private group, a peer council or a recurring cohort. Members come back for each other, and that kind of loyalty is hard for a competitor to pull away. Because every channel reuses the same interviews, opinions and relationships, each new one costs less to add than it would to start from scratch. Step 7: Connect it to sales, customer success and leadership Owned media kept inside the marketing team does less than it could. It gets much more useful once sales, customer success and executives all draw on it. Sales teams can offer prospects a chance to be featured, which makes for a much warmer opening than a cold email. Sending a relevant article before a first call also shows what your company knows. Customer success teams can feature customers' leaders, invite them to events and send them coverage that helps with their work, all of which makes renewal conversations easier. Executives get a platform for the positions they want the market to connect with the company. Pay attention to timing. A relevant piece sent personally around a budget cycle, a board meeting, a renewal or a launch does far more than the same piece posted to a feed. When you look at results, ask who read it and what they did afterward. Impression counts tell you very little. Step 8: Measure the right things Pageview counts are easy to pull and easy to misread. Owned media pays off over a long period, and the useful questions are about who you're reaching and what happens afterward. Track four things: Audience quality. How many people from your target accounts read, subscribe and follow? Engagement. Newsletter opens and replies, time on page, return visits, forwards and shares. Relationships. Executives interviewed, guests who came back, event attendees and community members. Most of these are people your company didn't know before. Business results. Readers and featured guests who turn into pipeline, deals the content helped close, effect on renewals, and growth in organic and branded search. Search rankings and audience size usually take several months to build, while the relationships start with your first interview. Common mistakes Turning the publication into a sales channel. Readers stop trusting it quickly. Publishing everything under the company name, when readers respond to named people with opinions. Publishing more instead of publishing better. One piece with a strong argument will outperform ten forgettable ones. Running each channel as its own program with its own message. Stopping after a few months. Most programs that fail are abandoned before the audience has had time to grow, so plan on at least a year at a steady pace. Reporting only traffic, which pushes the team toward clickbait and away from the executives you care about. Putting it together The aim of all this is for your company to run the publication your market reads to understand what's going on. That means picking a specific reader, taking positions, building a publication that covers the whole industry, filling it with real people, running it on a schedule, getting it in front of readers wherever they spend time, and tying it to how your company sells. Companies that keep at it end up with an audience that trusts them, relationships with the executives who matter most to their business, and a point of view people associate with their name. Those are hard for a competitor to copy. Outlever builds and runs owned media programs like this for B2B companies, covering strategy, the publication itself, executive interviews, newsletters and distribution. If you're considering one, get in touch with the Outlever team . Disclosure: The State of Brand is an owned media publication powered by Outlever. This article describes the approach Outlever uses with its customers and links to Outlever's website. It is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional, legal or financial advice. Results from any owned media program vary by company, industry and execution.

## PR vs. Owned Media: Which One Is Still Working in 2026
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/earned-media-vs-owned-media
Published: 2026-10-06T23:35:58.864Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: PR still lands mentions, but the brands keeping their audiences in 2026 are the ones publishing their own.
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Most marketing org charts put PR and content in the same box, usually under a VP of comms who reports to the CMO. That arrangement made sense when content meant a blog, and the blog mostly existed to give PR something to link to. It makes less sense now that B2B companies are becoming publishers , some with audiences that rival the trade outlets they used to pitch, and editor in chief is turning up on B2B org charts . The two disciplines start from different assumptions about where attention lives. PR assumes the audience already belongs to a journalist, and the job is getting in front of it. Owned media assumes a company can build that audience itself, provided it's willing to cover its industry the way a newsroom would. Who keeps the readers When a pitch works, a reporter decides there's a story, picks the angle and writes it. The company might get two quotes and a paragraph of context. The piece runs, gets passed around for a few days, and then the outlet moves on to the next thing. The readers were never the company's, and nobody on the brand side ever learns who they were. A company running its own publication picks the beat, assigns the stories and decides when they run. Every subscriber stays on its list. The people it interviews become relationships with exactly the buyers it wants, and the archive keeps getting found long after the news cycle that produced it. Being your own editor does come with a catch, because nobody outside the building will tell you a story is dull. The publications that last hire editors willing to say so anyway. The ones that skip that step end up as product marketing with a masthead, and State of Brand has already mapped how most brand newsrooms fail . Credibility has a shelf life PR's best argument has always been that a mention means more when someone else writes it. That's true, and it's why trade coverage still matters around a launch. The problem is how quickly it goes stale. A 2024 feature does very little for a buyer comparing vendors this quarter, and the company can't update it or point readers to a follow-up. Owned media earns its credibility more slowly. Readers know who's behind the publication (State of Brand's readers do, which is why there's a disclosure at the bottom of this page). They keep coming back when the coverage treats competitors fairly, wades into real industry arguments and tells them something they'd struggle to find anywhere else. A brand publication that reads like a sales deck loses people in the first paragraph, and most of them won't give it a second try. Readers won't wait for your next funding round PR mostly runs on moments. There's a launch, a raise, an annual report, now and then a crisis. The team pushes hard for a few weeks and then reports back on placements and share of voice. A publication can't work on that rhythm, because its readers expect to hear from it whether or not the company has news. It needs a beat narrow enough to own and a schedule the team can keep up for years. It also needs a steady list of people to interview, plus someone watching the industry closely enough to publish a take the day a story breaks. In the first six months, the numbers worth tracking are about who's reading, whether they come back the following week and whether respected operators agree to be interviewed. Pipeline influence shows up later, and a lot of programs get cut in month three because somebody asked for campaign metrics. AI search wants something to cite For much of this year, PR people passed around a number from Muck Rack. In the May 2026 edition of its Generative Pulse study , 84% of the links ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cited pointed to earned media. Fewer people repeated a finding from the December 2025 edition , which put the average overlap between the journalists PR teams pitch most and the journalists AI cites for their brands at about 2%. State of Brand worked through both, along with several other studies, in August . Meltwater counted 5.35 million citations in April 2026 and put earned and news media at about 40% of them, with owned and other content around 50%, according to an AuthorityTech breakdown of the data . Much of what ends up in the "earned" bucket is Reddit threads, review sites and Wikipedia entries, and no press office can pitch any of those. Distribution still matters. In a study by Stacker and Scrunch , the same eight stories showed up in about 8% of AI answers when they lived only on brand sites and about 34% once they were republished across third-party news outlets. What gets cited, though, is mostly original research and proprietary data. The benchmarks AuthorityTech compiled put original research at a 38% to 65% citation rate, against 6% to 15% for standard blog posts. Owned media teams are built to produce that kind of material, and PR teams usually aren't. The old owned playbook isn't much help either. SparkToro found that 68% of US Google searches in the first four months of 2026 ended without a click. On LinkedIn, organic company-page posts reach about 1.6% of followers, according to the Algorithm InSights 2025 report cited by Entrepreneur . A company that wants to show up in AI answers needs to keep producing material worth citing, on a schedule, for years. Most PR teams were never staffed for that kind of publishing work. How Outlever builds brand newsrooms Outlever builds and runs these publications for B2B companies, and it also publishes State of Brand. Its view is that a company whose best stories appear only in other people's outlets is renting attention. So instead of chasing placements, Outlever sets up a brand newsroom , meaning a publication with its own name and beat, regular interviews with the practitioners the company most wants to reach, and quick commentary when news breaks in that industry. Melissa Rosenthal , Outlever's co-founder, was one of BuzzFeed's earliest employees and later held senior roles at Cheddar and ClickUp, so she came to owned media from the publishing side. In a June 2026 AMA with the content community Superpath, she put it this way: "We're building the source, not racing to be first to a story." The model keeps a place for earned coverage. Executives appear in Outlever's publications as analysts with actual opinions, and sales and customer success teams pass the stories along to the accounts they're working. A good trade placement still helps. It just stops being the only place a company's point of view can live. State of Brand is where Outlever tests its own approach. The company says the publication passed 1.5 million monthly readers within three months of launch, with most of them arriving from unpaid sources outside social platforms. Those figures come from Outlever. Marketing leaders weighing a newsroom of their own can see how Outlever works at outlever.com . Where the next dollar should go PR still earns its budget around launches, and nobody can fake an independent reporter's validation. A company that puts everything into placements, though, ends each year with a folder of clippings and an audience that belongs to someone else. The order that works puts the publication first. The newsroom produces the data, interviews and opinions. PR takes the strongest of that material to reporters who need it, and the resulting coverage sends people back to a publication that can hold onto them. If the goal is to be what your market reads every morning in 2028, owned media is where that starts. Budget for editors, and for a program that survives its first two quarters. Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever , the company discussed in this article. Outlever builds and runs owned media publications for brands, and State of Brand is one of its own properties.

## Marketing Keeps Inventing Engineers. Is Any of It Real?
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/marketing-engineer-vs-gtm-engineer
Published: 2026-10-06T18:23:14.239Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Profound has built a manifesto, a course, a job board and a podcast around the marketing engineer. The title will become a real job only when people with nothing to sell start paying for it.
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In April, Profound co-founder James Cadwallader put two words on the screen behind him at his company's own conference: marketing engineer. Greg Bresnitz, who runs growth marketing at the blockchain platform Optimism, changed his LinkedIn title before the keynote ended, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Six months later the title has a manifesto, a university course, a job board, a hackathon and a podcast. Profound built every one of them. The labor market has been slower to sign on. Live Data Technologies counted 173 people who started marketing engineer jobs in tech and marketing in the 12 months through August, up from 98 a year earlier. Google marketing executive Marvin Chow has called the role the hire of 2026. So far, the hire of 2026 would fit in a hotel ballroom. Marketing has invented an engineer twice before. Growth hacker arrived in 2010 and dissolved into ordinary job descriptions within a decade. GTM engineer arrived in 2023 and became a profession, with salary benchmarks and bootcamps its inventor doesn't run. What separated those two outcomes is the best guide to the third. The work behind the marketing engineer is real. The title, for now, belongs to a software company, and marketers should be careful about building a career on someone else's sales asset. Growth hacker won the argument and lost the title Sean Ellis coined "growth hacker" in a 2010 blog post about a hire his startup clients couldn't find. He had helped Dropbox, Eventbrite and LogMeIn grow on small budgets. Dropbox's referral program, which paid users in storage for inviting friends, became the job's origin story. By 2012 investor Andrew Chen was arguing that the growth hacker was the new VP of marketing. A year later the role had its own conference. Then the method went mainstream and the title went away. Experimentation, referral loops and acquisition data became table stakes, and companies from Uber to Shopify built growth marketing teams to run them. Once every marketer was expected to do the work, nobody needed a special name for the people who did it. GTM engineer became a profession when Clay lost control of it Clay named the GTM engineer in 2023 and spent three years training people on its product: cohort programs, Clay Clubs in more than 30 countries and, last month, a $1 million scholarship fund . Postings for the role grew 205% between 2024 and 2025, according to a Bloomberry analysis cited by EMARKETER . The money mattered less than what happened outside Clay. Salary trackers, a newsletter, venture firm explainers and bootcamps Clay has nothing to do with all grew up around the title. When people who don't sell the software start producing data about a job, the job stops being a marketing campaign. The same independence cheapened it. Agencies on Clay's own community board now advertise GTM engineer jobs that amount to building lead lists and writing cold email, for $1,200 to $1,800 . The marketing engineer has no independent life yet Every piece of infrastructure around the marketing engineer leads back to Profound, a company that sells AI search visibility software. Its latest raise, $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation, gives it room to keep building more of it. Even Profound hedges. The company posts its own openings under the title GTM engineer, State of Brand found in September. It recruits with Clay's word and sells with its own, which tells you which term the labor market already accepts. The employers that are hiring don't agree on who the job is for. Cadwallader says software engineers are usually the wrong fit because marketing runs on judgment. DeepLearning.AI wants at least three years as a software engineer anyway, and Energy Aspects asks for three to four. MoEngage , which sells its own agent platform, says the best candidate is the CRM marketer who was already doing the team's automation. When employers disagree on the background, the reporting line and the scorecard, a title describes an aspiration more than a job. The outside evidence is thin. Grippi Media, a small marketing consultancy, went through LinkedIn listings by hand and found mostly contract gigs with inconsistent descriptions, some of which never mentioned AI. Why marketers want the word The appeal of the title says more about marketing than about AI. This is an industry still haunted by the line about not knowing which half of its ad budget is wasted. "Engineer" promises the precision marketers have spent a century being told they lack. Cadwallader undercut that promise himself. He told the Journal that marketing can't be verified the way code can, and that a human will always have to decide what the agents build. The agents can be engineered. The judgment about what they should do can't, and that judgment is the part of the job most likely to keep a marketer employed. The job may outlast the name None of this means marketing leaders should ignore the role. Teams really are building agents to handle competitor research and media buying, and rebuilding their sites so chatbots describe them accurately. The companies already reorganizing around that work tend to put one builder in charge of systems the rest of the team runs. What they should resist is letting a vendor define the job for them. A marketing engineer trained on one company's product comes with a contract attached. The scope, the reporting line and the scorecard are decisions for the CMO and the CFO, not for a course syllabus. Growth hacking ended when running experiments became every marketer's job. The marketing engineer may end the same way, with building folded so completely into marketing that nobody needs the word on a business card. That would be the clearest proof the job was real.

## AI Can Now Copy Everything Except Your Data and Your Opinion
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/ai-cant-copy-your-data-or-opinion
Published: 2026-10-05T15:53:53.736Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: AI made average content free, so a sourced opinion is the last scarce asset in marketing.
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The math of content marketing changed the moment a language model could write a competent blog post in seconds. Whatever your team produced to explain a concept, define a term, or walk a reader through a process, a model now writes a passable version instantly, at no marginal cost, in any quantity you want. The floor for adequate content dropped to zero. That gets discussed mostly as a threat, and for plenty of content operations it is one. It also clears something up. Once the generic is free and unlimited, the only content left with real economic value is the content a machine cannot produce, which comes down to a genuine point of view and original data the model has never seen. Everything else is a commodity now, and commodities do not build authority. They fill space that was already full. So the case for thought leadership stops being about taste and becomes structural. You publish a strong position not because it reads as more confident but because it is one of the few things still scarce. What a model can and cannot make The line between commodity content and defensible content runs right along what a model can generate from its training data alone. A model can synthesize anything that has been said enough times. It is very good at the average of what is already known, which is exactly why explanatory and definitional content lost its edge: the model has read ten thousand versions and will produce the next one on request. What it cannot do is generate a dataset it never ingested, or hold a position that cuts against the consensus it was trained to reproduce. Original research and real conviction sit outside its reach almost by definition. This is not just a tidy theory. It shows up in what the engines actually cite. A Search Engine Land study found 52.2% of AI-cited passages contained original or owned data , far above the rate at which original data appears in content overall. The Princeton-originated GEO research on AI visibility found that adding statistics lifted citation likelihood by roughly 41% and citing sources by about 40%, among the biggest and most consistent gains of any tactic tested. The same systems commoditizing generic writing are reaching, disproportionately, for the specific and the original. They want the thing they cannot make. Content that generates its own data is more citable than content that summarizes someone else's, for the simple reason that the model has to come to you for it. The rest it can write itself. An opinion with nothing under it is also a commodity There is a failure mode worth flagging, because "have a strong point of view" gets misheard as permission to be loud. A hot take with nothing behind it is as easy to mass-produce as a listicle. Models generate provocative opinions fine. What they cannot generate is a provocative opinion that turns out to be backed by data no one else has. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report is direct about the quality bar. Decision-makers read a lot of thought leadership and are mostly unimpressed, with only a small share rating what they read as very good. When it does clear the bar, it works. 81% of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership helps them see challenges or opportunities they had missed , and 86% of decision-makers prefer content that challenges their assumptions . The audience is asking for a point of view that reframes how it thinks, but one it can test. As the research gets summarized in the field, thought leadership without original research is just opinion, and the research is what gives a perspective enough weight to act on. That is the combination the moment calls for. Not opinion in place of data, and not data in place of opinion, but a position only your evidence could support. The conviction earns the read. The proprietary data earns the belief, and gives the model a reason to cite you instead of paraphrasing the consensus. For Q4: fewer pieces, sharper, sourced If generic content is free, producing more of it is paying to enlarge an infinite pile. What follows from the data is the opposite of volume. It is fewer assets, each carrying a real argument and real evidence. That fights a lot of content-team muscle memory, which was built for cadence and throughput, for keeping the calendar fed. The research on high-performing programs points the other way: the brands growing fastest make fewer, more deliberate assets and treat research as an ongoing program instead of a one-off. When the average is automated, the return moves to the exceptional, and you do not get the exceptional by producing the average faster. The test for any planned piece this quarter is one question: could a model have written this from what it already knows? If yes, you are adding to the commodity pile, and the pile does not need the help. If no, because the piece carries a position you will defend and data only you have, you are making one of the few things that still holds value, and one the model has to come to you for. An opinion backed by proof is the last scarce asset in a category where everything else just went free. The companies that see that will spend the next few quarters becoming the source. The ones that don't will spend them adding to a pile nobody wants more of.

## As Layoffs Climb, More Professionals Are Building Audiences Their Employers Can't Take Away
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/layoffs-personal-brand-writing-in-public
Published: 2026-10-05T00:43:10.850Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Tech layoffs in 2026 have already passed last year's total. More professionals are responding by writing in public, building owned audiences that don't disappear with their work login.
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On September 14, Oracle employees got an early-morning email telling them that day was their last. Their system access was cut within minutes . It was the company's second round this year handled that way, after a March round in which termination emails arrived at 6 a.m. with no warning . When access goes, so does most of the record of what that person did there. More professionals have started planning for that. They are doing what B2B brands did when search and social reach began to fall, and building audiences they own. LinkedIn says CEO posting on the platform rose 52% over the past two years , and video creation grew 27% in 2025. Platform numbers have many causes, and nobody tracks why a given person starts posting. But the rise lines up with a layoff year on pace to rival 2023, the worst since the pandemic. Layoffs have become a standing line item The Skillsyncer tracker counted 225,122 tech workers laid off between January 1 and September 25 , more than the 205,773 it recorded for all of 2025. Challenger, Gray & Christmas puts the year on pace for about 370,000. TrueUp's count is lower, at 190,077 , though it also shows 2026 running ahead of last year. Most of the cuts are at companies that are doing well. Cisco announced nearly 4,000 cuts in May in the same report that showed record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion . Meta let 8,000 people go in a quarter when revenue grew 33%. Oracle's annual SEC filing says AI adoption has reduced its workforce, which went from about 162,000 to 141,000. Marketing and sales teams have been hit as well. Salesforce's February cuts included marketing roles, and most of Microsoft's 4,800 July cuts were in sales. Gartner expects AI to eliminate entry-level marketing jobs at most high-performing teams by 2030 . Finding the next job is taking longer. Tech-sector unemployment reached 5.8% early this year, its highest level since 2001 and 2002. The median search for a new role now runs 4.7 months, compared with 3.2 months in 2024. The reputation stays with the company Most of what a person is known for at work stays at work. Colleagues know who fixed the billing migration or rescued a launch, and that reputation decides who gets the next hard project. That record sits in internal tools and in the memory of coworkers, some of whom are cut in the same round. When access is shut off, none of it comes along. A hiring manager at another company has no way to see it, and neither does a recruiter searching for someone with that experience. With searches stretching past four months, that gap gets expensive. Public writing closes some of it. A few years of posts or a newsletter about a specific problem gives the next employer something to read before the first call. State of Brand has reported that companies now evaluate comms candidates partly on their own LinkedIn presence , and that AI search tools cite named practitioners more readily than company pages . It is the same shift State of Brand has tracked on the company side, where B2B brands are moving from renting attention to owning it . A newsletter or a steady body of posts is owned media for one person. The writer keeps it after changing jobs. Volume doesn't build the audience Posting more often rarely helps on its own. Readers have gotten good at spotting generic, AI-polished thought leadership, and LinkedIn now limits the reach of posts users flag as low quality . The writing that builds a reputation tends to be specific to the person's work, including what went wrong and what they'd do differently. The platform matters too. LinkedIn's organic reach has been tilting toward paid distribution , so a following there can shrink without the writer doing anything differently. An email list the writer controls is a steadier base. What this asks of marketing leaders Some companies still treat employees with big audiences as a retention risk, since the following leaves when they do. That view is harder to defend in a year when the same companies are cutting staff by email at dawn. Employees can see that tenure isn't guaranteed, and asking them to keep their professional reputation entirely inside the company is a hard sell. Companies that support employees writing in public get something out of it as well. Buyers and AI search tools both lean on named, credible people in a category , and a company with several of them is easier to find. And people who got help building a name are more likely to speak well of the company that helped, even after they leave. For marketing leaders, the people on their teams are already building owned media. Companies that help them will have more credible voices connected to their name. Companies that discourage it will see the same audiences grow on employees' own time, with no link back to the company.

## a16z Is Hiring Scriptwriters. Its Media Team Is Turning Into a Production Company.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/a16z-new-media-production-company
Published: 2026-10-02T17:53:41.081Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Two months after Andreessen Horowitz doubled down on its New Media team, the firm is recruiting producers, creative directors, editors and scriptwriters in Los Angeles, and pitching them with a film screening.
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Andreessen Horowitz is hiring for its video team, and the job titles read like the credits at the end of a film. "We're hiring on the a16z New Media video team," Richard Zheng, the firm's head of media, brand and marketing, wrote on X this week. "If you're in Los Angeles, come hang at our office next Thursday (photowalk + film screening). We're looking for producers, creative directors, video editors, and scriptwriters." A venture firm recruiting scriptwriters with a photowalk is an unusual sentence to write. It's also the next chapter of a story we've been following all year. In August, we argued that a16z had settled owned media's proof problem with a payroll . After twelve months of running its New Media team, the firm looked at the results and hired more people, including former founders, into storytelling roles. Zheng's post shows where the next round of investment is going. It's going into production. Video was already the centerpiece a16z formed its New Media team in mid-2025, with general partner Erik Torenberg running it after the firm acquired his podcast network, Turpentine. When the team marked its first year in June, it described its offering as go-direct as a service for startups, and in-house video was the first item on the list. The firm says its video team turns out launch videos on deadlines most agencies would turn down. The best-known example is World Labs. About four weeks before the launch of its Marble product, the New Media team pitched Fei-Fei Li on filming the announcement on an LED volume stage, with Marble generating the sets in real time. a16z also produced a behind-the-scenes documentary and a launch event, and the launch went viral. In the team's original 2025 essay , one section was titled "The a24 of a16z." A year ago that read as an aspiration. A team hiring creative directors and scriptwriters is building toward it. Why these four roles matter Most companies that say they're investing in video hire a social video editor or a content producer, someone who cuts clips from webinars and podcasts. a16z does plenty of that already. Its podcast feed, its X account with roughly a million followers and its daily newsletter with about a quarter million subscribers all need a steady supply of clips. Scriptwriters and creative directors are different hires. They plan and write original work before anyone turns on a camera. Producers run shoots, budgets and crews. Together, the four titles in Zheng's post describe a team that originates films, where most corporate video teams repackage conversations that already happened. The recruiting pitch is aimed at people who already work that way. Los Angeles has the deepest pool of production talent in the country, and a16z has had a Santa Monica office since 2024. A photowalk and a screening are how production companies meet crews. The firm expects to compete for the same people as studios, streamers and agencies, and it's betting it can win them with fast timelines, real stakes and distribution it already owns. The rest of the build The video hiring sits inside a much larger expansion. Recent a16z listings include a Head of Podcasts, a Chief Comms Officer to own the narrative for the firm and its portfolio, an events partner role that calls New Media the firm's thought leadership engine, and a dedicated HR business partner for New Media. A media group that needs its own HR partner has outgrown being a small team inside marketing. The talent pipeline reaches outside the firm, too. The New Media Fellowship drew more than 2,000 applications for its first cohort of 65, and a second cohort of 65 followed, including economist Noah Smith and people from MrBeast's company and Amazon. In April the firm backed Monitoring the Situation , a live news show on X staffed partly by people who came off the New Media team. The effect shows up in portfolio hiring as well. When Katie Kirsch, who runs ecosystem at a16z, shared a listing for Ramp's Head of Content earlier this year, the role was built around turning Ramp into a media brand. a16z says founders who work with its team often go on to hire "data storytellers" and heads of social for their own companies. What brand teams can take from it The usual caveat applies. a16z can afford things most marketing departments can't. It funds this out of management fees, it covers a beat its audience already cares about, and it can promise distribution through channels it spent fifteen years building. Very few brands are going to staff a production company. The structure is still worth studying. a16z put creative production inside the company, next to the people who own the channels, instead of renting it from an agency one campaign at a time. That's the same decision companies face when they settle where owned media reports and whether to hire an editor in chief . It's also why so many efforts stall. Most brand newsrooms launching this year get a publishing calendar without the production capacity or the distribution to back it up. Scarcity is part of the logic, too. As AI pushes the cost of written content toward zero, brands are turning to newsrooms to stay heard , and companies like OpenAI are putting more money into in-person events because effort is hard to fake in a room. Original film belongs in the same category. A two-minute launch video shot on a volume stage takes people, time and taste, and audiences can tell when a company spent all three. a16z has behaved like a media company that writes checks for most of its history. With this round of hiring, it's building the production side to match. The screening is next Thursday.

## CEOs Don't Trust AI Creative Yet. Waymark Is Betting That Changes by November.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/ai-generated-ads-trust-quality-waymark-cinematic
Published: 2026-09-30T23:37:33.305Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Advertisers remain wary of AI-made ads, even as the output improves. A look at the trust gap, and at Waymark's new premium tier built from brands' own photos and footage.
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Marketing leaders have spent most of 2026 hedging on AI creative. They use it to draft, test and resize, then hesitate when it comes time to put it in front of customers. The usual explanation is some version of "we can't trust it yet." Consumers have given them reason to hesitate. In the 2026 Bentley University-Gallup Business in Society survey , which polled 3,270 U.S. adults in May, 79% said they had seen ads in the past 30 days that looked AI-made. Forty-nine percent viewed businesses' use of AI in advertising negatively, compared with 19% who viewed it positively. Adobe's 2026 AI and Digital Trends consumer report , based on a global survey of 4,000 people, found that about a third would stop engaging with a brand if they learned its content was AI-generated. Executives, meanwhile, tend to overestimate how well AI ads land. According to IAB's "The AI Ad Gap Widens" report , 82% of ad executives believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positive about AI-generated ads. Among those consumers, 45% actually do. The gap was 32 points in 2024 and has grown to 37. Quality is where the argument is shifting Much of the resistance comes down to how the work looks. Early AI video was easy to spot, and brands worried it would make them look cheap next to competitors who paid for production. That concern is getting harder to support with numbers. A study by researchers at Columbia, Harvard, the Technical University of Munich and Carnegie Mellon, summarized by Luma AI , found AI-generated ads in their sample produced a 0.76% click-through rate, compared with 0.65% for human-made ads. The same IAB study found 64% of advertisers now name cost efficiency as AI's top benefit, up from fifth place in 2024. IAB cautioned in the report that those savings can't come at the cost of quality, which is the standard AI video vendors are now being held to. What Waymark released Waymark, a Detroit company whose platform has supported more than $500 million in ad spend, announced the first phase of its premium creative tier on Wednesday. The release leads into Waymark Cinematic, a story-driven AI video product the company will show in a live demo on November 4 at 12 p.m. ET. Most of the new tools work on material the advertiser already has. AI Upscale brings low-resolution images and older footage up to broadcast quality. Image-to-Image generates new imagery from existing photos, and Image-to-Video animates stills. Project File Export gives agencies and in-house teams a layered file with editable text, timing and scenes, so they can revise a spot in their own software rather than start over. Waymark says its customers see a 42% lift in conversions and cut production time by 94% compared with traditional methods. The company did not share how those figures were measured, and State of Brand has not independently verified them. "Small businesses already have access to TV. What they lack is creative that holds its own next to national brands," Waymark CEO Alex Persky-Stern said in the announcement. "Today's features make any business's photos and footage ready for the big screen, which opens the door to advertisers who never thought TV was within reach." Real material, fewer objections The Gallup survey shows consumers draw distinctions between uses of AI. Seventy-five percent said it was acceptable for businesses to use AI for brainstorming or early drafts of ads when that use is disclosed. Sixty-two percent said it was unacceptable to use AI to create people or voices in ads, even with disclosure. Waymark's first-phase tools fall mostly into the more accepted category. A contractor's job-site photos, a restaurant's dining room or a car lot's actual inventory become the raw material, and the software handles resolution, motion and editing. "Most advertiser assets won't hold up on a TV screen, and that's where too many campaigns stall," Chief Creative Officer Stephen Parker said. "Now a landscaper can send photos from their phone and see a broadcast-quality spot built from their own work." For a small business, that approach also answers the authenticity question directly. The yard in the ad is a yard the landscaper actually built. TV access came first. The creative is catching up. State of Brand has previously reported that consolidation in connected TV improved buying, data and measurement while leaving the quality of the ads largely unaddressed. Local advertisers can reach TV audiences more easily than they could a few years ago, but many still run spots that look out of place beside national campaigns. Waymark is positioning Cinematic as its answer for that gap at a larger scale. Persky-Stern said the product will bring big-brand storytelling to businesses that have never had access to it. Story-driven video carries more risk on the trust question than upscaling does. Narrative ads are more likely to call for generated characters, voiceovers and scenes, the uses Gallup respondents were least willing to accept. How Waymark handles those elements will say more about where AI creative is headed than today's release does. For CMOs still saying they can't trust AI, the research points to a more specific question. Audiences are relatively comfortable with AI that improves real material and much less comfortable with AI that invents people. Executives, by IAB's measure, are misjudging audience sentiment by nearly 40 points. Brands deciding where to use AI creative now have data to guide that choice, and vendors like Waymark are building toward the side consumers have said they will accept.

## Demandbase, Adobe and a Wave of Launches Are Putting AI in Charge of Campaigns. Who Signs Off?
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/ai-campaign-agents-sign-off
Published: 2026-09-30T04:24:24.327Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Demandbase, Adobe and Multiply are handing B2B campaigns to AI agents. Few teams have decided who approves the work, or how their brand stays distinct.
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In the span of four weeks, three companies made it easier to hand a B2B campaign to software. Demandbase launched Mojo on September 15. The agent builds audiences, launches campaigns across Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta, Marketo and Salesforce, and keeps an eye on how they perform. Adobe bought Rilo, a year-old startup that built AI agents for marketing and go-to-market teams, on September 2. And on Monday, the B2B paid media agency Multiply released an agent that combs through Google Ads accounts every day looking for wasted spend. Every one of these products stops at certain points and waits for a person to approve what it wants to do. The vendors chose those points. Very few B2B marketing teams have decided who on staff is supposed to be waiting on the other end. What each company shipped Demandbase pitches Mojo as a way to go from a strategy brief to a live campaign across email, social, digital, webinar and field channels. It also looks for broken tracking and audience errors, and it feeds results from past campaigns into the next one. "Mojo turns a strategy into a live campaign across channels," CEO Gabe Rogol said in the announcement. Demandbase didn't share pricing. Adobe has been heading in this direction all year. It introduced CX Enterprise at its Summit in April, part of a bet State of Brand wrote about at the time that enterprises will pay more for brand control and governance than for content creation. In June, Adobe made CX Enterprise Coworker generally available to coordinate agents across analytics, content, journey orchestration and marketing operations. The Rilo deal brought in a six-person team and some of its technology. TechCrunch reported that Rilo's product will shut down for current customers. Adobe hasn't said where the technology will end up. Multiply's Ad Spend Recovery Agent checks search terms against each campaign and ad group to catch off-intent traffic and weak keywords. Multiply claims Google Ads accounts typically lose about 30% of their budgets to irrelevant searches, averaging $126,000 a year in waste across the accounts it reviewed. The Agile Brand Guide, which covered the launch , pointed out that Multiply hasn't published a sample size or methodology behind those numbers. The vendors set the checkpoints Mojo asks a marketer to approve at what Demandbase calls critical decision points. It also works within spending and targeting limits the customer sets ahead of time, and it logs every action along with its reasoning. Multiply's agent won't change anything that affects spend without a person's sign-off. Neither company says which person. The Agile Brand Guide made the same observation about Monday's launches, noting that each vendor left the thresholds and approvals up to the buyer. A CMO who never assigns those decisions ends up living with whatever the vendor set as the default. Meta gave everyone a preview this week of what an agent does when nobody is watching closely. Its Muse agent negotiated a Facebook Marketplace sale and gave a buyer the user's address without asking, State of Brand reported Monday . Meta pitched its agent platform to businesses the same day. When an agent commits to something the company never approved, customers hold the company responsible. For most B2B teams, naming one approver won't work. Shifting budget from LinkedIn to Google involves the demand gen manager, marketing ops and sometimes finance. New ad copy might need a brand review, and in healthcare or financial services, a legal review on top of that. At Vanta, the AI writing policy came from the legal department . Changes to audience definitions land in the Salesforce lists sales reps open the next morning. Reporting is its own mess. MNTN, also on Monday, expanded its integration with AppsFlyer so connected TV impressions and app installs move between the two systems. According to the Agile Brand Guide, MNTN uses a 30-day attribution window by default and AppsFlyer caps connected TV at 72 hours, so the two can report different results for the same campaign. If an agent is optimizing toward one of those numbers, somebody at the company should have picked it on purpose. What happens when everyone's campaigns come from the same machines? The approval question has a creative side that's much harder to put in a contract. Campaign agents learn from performance. If Mojo, Adobe's agents and a dozen competitors are all rewarded for the subject lines that get opened, the LinkedIn formats that get clicks and the audiences that convert, what keeps B2B campaigns in a crowded category from drifting toward the same handful of patterns? Anyone who has compared three cybersecurity homepages knows how alike a B2B category can look already. Will agents make that better or worse? Demandbase says Mojo learns each company's own marketing behavior and doesn't just apply generic best practices. Nobody outside the company can check that claim yet. The models underneath many of these tools may also be pulling in the same direction. State of Brand has written about a NeurIPS 2025 paper that found separate language models produce strikingly similar outputs, with DeepSeek and OpenAI models landing around 81% to 82% alike. Buyers are noticing. In a Gartner survey released last week, 65% of U.S. consumers said brands are putting out too much AI-generated content, and 57% said it has made them trust brand messaging less. That survey covered consumers, but the people on B2B buying committees scroll the same feeds. Some brands have started leaning into visible imperfection as proof a person was involved. So if an agent can produce a competent campaign for any company that licenses it, where does a B2B brand's difference come from? The answers State of Brand has heard so far vary a lot. Everpure CMO Lynn Lucas argues it comes from real customer voices . Anthropic and OpenAI, two companies selling the automation, are paying human creatives up to $400,000 . Adobe is backing legislation that would make visual style legally ownable , which says something about how much the company thinks style will be worth. There's also a practical question sitting inside the creative one. Who gets to reject an ad that will probably perform well but sounds like everyone else's? A performance agent will pick the version with the better click-through rate. Choosing distinctiveness over a slightly better number has usually been a judgment call made by a creative director or a CMO reading drafts. That call is tougher to defend when brand is hard to measure, and Gartner has found 84% of companies are caught in what it calls a brand doom loop , where weak measurement leads to smaller brand budgets. If agents write more of the first drafts, does the creative director's job turn into approving and rejecting machine output? Does taste become the thing a marketing team is hiring for? And if two competitors both run their campaigns through Adobe or Demandbase, whose data and whose brand guidelines make the output different? None of the vendors has answered these questions in its launch materials. The readiness gap Plenty of teams are already experimenting. A Gartner survey of 413 martech leaders in mid-2025 found 81% were piloting AI agents or had already rolled them out. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey found CMOs put an average of 15.3% of their budgets toward AI, while only 30% of marketing organizations are ready to scale it. Research from Contentful and The Atlantic, which State of Brand covered in July , found 96% of marketing leaders call AI a top priority and 65% are investing in it in a meaningful way. On Tuesday, Gartner predicted that by 2028, 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI systems built by vendor engineers working on site, because costs climb and companies can't maintain the systems themselves. The prediction covers every business function, but enterprise marketing teams paying a vendor for custom agents should read it closely. Gartner's advice is to lock down deliverables, intellectual property rights and an exit plan in the contract before any work starts. Approval is becoming a job The immediate work for B2B marketing leaders is unglamorous. Spending limits and review rules need to be written down before an agent goes live, and the team needs to agree on which platform's numbers it reports when two tools disagree. Somebody also has to read the activity logs vendors like Demandbase now provide, and how a team thinks about its agents affects how carefully that happens. In a BCG experiment with 1,261 managers, presenting AI agents as named employees cut error detection by 18%, State of Brand reported in May . Rilo marketed its product as a way to create "AI employees." Gartner said this week that CMOs should give entry-level marketers responsibility for checking AI outputs , and agent logs are an obvious place to start. Most B2B teams are locking in 2027 budgets and vendor contracts this quarter, while many of these agents are still in pilots. The spending rules are the easy part to settle now. The creative rules, meaning who decides what the brand sounds like when software is writing most of the drafts, will take longer, and they're probably the ones that matter more.

## Gartner Expects AI to Wipe Out Entry-Level Marketing Jobs at Most High-Performing Teams by 2030
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/gartner-ai-entry-level-marketing-jobs
Published: 2026-09-30T04:07:31.645Z
Section: Leadership
Summary: Eighteen percent of marketing leaders have already cut roles because of automation, even as CMOs put more of their budgets into people. B2B teams could feel the resulting leadership gap within a few years.
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If you ask a senior B2B marketer about their first job, there's a good chance they'll mention pulling lead lists, fixing webinar landing pages or having a manager mark up their first nurture email in red. It was tedious work, and for a lot of people it was also how they figured out how the business made money. Gartner now thinks the jobs built around that work are going to disappear from the best marketing teams. In a prediction released Tuesday, Gartner said that by 2030, AI will allow most high-performing marketing teams to eliminate the traditional bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. It's worth paying attention to which teams Gartner is talking about. These are the high performers, and in marketing, the rest of the industry usually follows what they do. Gartner's other research adds a wrinkle. Marketing leaders are putting a bigger share of their budgets into people this year than they did last year, so the money for talent is growing even as the entry-level jobs shrink. The cuts have already started The prediction comes out of a Gartner survey of 1,303 senior leaders, conducted between January and April. Among marketing leaders, 18% said they had eliminated certain roles because of automation, 16% had created new roles and nearly a third had redesigned roles that already existed. Redesign is the most common change in that data, and for people who already have jobs, it's usually the least painful one. It looks different from the outside, though. If a company rewrites a coordinator role so the junior tasks are gone, a recent graduate applying for work sees one fewer opening. Job postings are moving the same way. Taligence, an executive search firm that tracks in-house marketing listings, found that director-level and above postings rose 17.3% year over year in the second quarter, compared with under 6% for all other levels combined, and entry-level listings declined. In Content Marketing Institute's 2026 career survey , about one in three companies said they were hiring fewer entry-level marketers, even though most teams were growing overall. We noticed one more number from Taligence. In 2025, entry-level marketing postings fell 8.6%, but brand marketing postings went up nearly 10% , while digital and general marketing roles declined. That fits with Anthropic research we wrote about in April , which found AI can handle a lot of marketing's execution work while strategic brand work holds up. Companies seem to be automating the routine tasks and hiring for judgment, even though routine tasks are where a lot of marketers developed their judgment in the first place. Where the labor money is going According to Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey , labor now makes up 24.5% of total marketing budgets, up from 21.9% in 2025. Gartner takes that as a sign CMOs have realized AI only pays off when they have people with the skills to use it, which seems right to us. The survey just doesn't say which people. Gartner didn't break labor spending down by seniority, so we can't say for sure where the increase went. The hiring data suggests most of it is paying for experience. We've covered marketing teams hiring GTM engineers and tech companies flattening management layers as they reorganize around AI. Anthropic and OpenAI, the companies selling a lot of this automation, are paying senior creatives up to $400,000 . Smaller B2B teams should read Gartner's numbers with some care. Most of the 401 leaders in the spend survey work at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, based in North America, the U.K. and Europe. A 40-person marketing team at a mid-market software company may be making different choices, although it will be competing for the same experienced people. Who teaches taste? For anyone who cares about brand, this is the part of Gartner's prediction that's hardest to get comfortable with. Most creative directors started as junior copywriters or designers, and a lot of what they know came from having early work rewritten or thrown out by someone more experienced. That's how people learn why one headline works better than another, and it's how a company's brand voice gets handed down from one group of marketers to the next. If a model writes the first draft and there's no junior role left, it's not obvious where the next creative director is supposed to come from. Gartner's recommendation is to move junior marketers into more demanding work sooner. It suggests hiring people for their ability to judge and improve AI-assisted work, giving early-career staff tasks like auditing AI outputs and turning data into recommendations, and having senior people spend more time coaching. Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, a VP analyst in Gartner's marketing practice, said AI gives CMOs an opportunity "to rethink entry-level marketing, not eliminate it." We think that's a reasonable plan, but it depends on something nobody has tested yet. It asks new marketers to judge AI output before they've done enough of the work to know what good looks like. Maybe people can develop an ear for brand voice by editing machine drafts. Maybe they can learn what a skeptical CFO will read without a few years of getting it wrong. We'll find out over the next several years, because the first group of marketers trained this way is being hired right now. B2B adds another layer to this. Understanding why a deal stalls in procurement, how a buying committee at a hospital system differs from one at a bank, or which proof points a security team trusts usually comes from spending a few years close to sales. AI tools are good at summarizing sales calls, but reading a summary isn't the same as having been on the call. Is AI really the cause? Not entirely. A policy brief published this summer by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that hiring of young workers in AI-exposed jobs dropped around 2022, and some research ties the start of that slowdown to the Federal Reserve's rate hikes, which came before ChatGPT. The authors found a direct AI effect more believable from 2024 onward. For marketing leaders, though, the original cause probably matters less than what's happening now. AI has become the reason companies give for not bringing entry-level roles back, and the marketing leaders in Gartner's survey said automation was behind their changes. The cost shows up later Every company that stops hiring junior marketers is making a bet that it can hire experienced ones later. For a single company, that's a reasonable bet. If most of the industry makes it at once, the supply of experienced B2B marketers in the early 2030s gets smaller, since those people would have been hired as juniors around now. Most B2B teams are working on 2027 budgets this quarter, and a few funded junior roles would likely cost much less than competing for directors in six years. There's also real work for new hires to do. Someone needs to check the account research AI tools put together, keep track of what ChatGPT tells buyers about the category, run customer interviews and keep the data clean enough for campaign agents to use. That work is close to revenue, and it's a good way for someone new to learn how the business runs. Gartner picked 2030 for its prediction, but the decisions that shape it are being made in budget meetings this fall.

## As Discovery Fragments, OpenTable Wins Attention By Putting Someone Else In The Spotlight
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/robin-chiang-opentable-amplifies-restaurant-storytelling
Published: 2026-09-30T02:31:30.569Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: OpenTable CGO Robin Chiang on how the platform stays authentic by amplifying the restaurants and creators diners trust.
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For more than a decade, reaching customers digitally was a solved problem with two answers: Facebook and Google, the dominant channels nearly everyone flocked to. That brand-building playbook has been replaced by something messier and more human. Discovery has splintered across channels and formats, and the brands that hold meaning in that environment are the ones willing to step out of the center and let someone else tell the story. Robin Chiang is Chief Growth Officer at OpenTable , where he leads global growth, diner acquisition, and strategic partnerships across the US and international markets. He came up through travel and emerging markets before moving into dining, and approaches marketing at a technology company from a deliberately human-first stance, reading anecdotes alongside the numbers. That human-first instinct extends to how OpenTable treats the restaurants on its platform, whose own voices it prioritizes. "We don't want to get in the way of the restaurant's storytelling. We just want to amplify that," Chiang says. Putting that principle into practice has meant rethinking how the brand shows up in today's crowded landscape. The single-channel era is over Chiang measures the current market against the one he came up in. "Going back a decade, when you look at how people discover, all the marketers have really flocked to one or two main channels," he says. That concentration is gone , replaced not just by more channels, but by genuinely different appetites for how people consume information. "Some people want text, some people want long-form, some people want short-form," he says. The fastest-moving of those is visual: video and multimedia. "Not everyone wants to discover this way, but there are some people that only discover this way. How do we showcase a whole funnel for a wide range of people that discover in different ways? That was a gap that we were thinking about." Social itself has shifted underneath the change, from a community centered on the user's own network to one built around strangers. "Now your feed is filled with content created by people you don't know," Chiang notes. For a brand, that means there's no longer one front door to guard, but many, and for OpenTable, it's this principle that inspired the brand's latest collaboration. Building the machinery of modern discovery In August, OpenTable announced a new partnership with creator marketplace SeekEasy that will bring storytelling directly onto the platform's restaurant pages. Creators who opt in and feature a restaurant have that content surface where diners are already deciding where to book. It's a direct response to the fragmentation problem, routing the trusted voices diners already follow into the moment of decision rather than manufacturing a brand voice across a dozen formats. It's also an answer to the rise of visual, creator-led discovery Chiang had been trying to meet. "This is how people want to discover on top of a novel search experience, so now we want to create this hybrid experience. You can browse through videos quickly in one spot, then dive deep on OpenTable because we have all the restaurant information there." The partnership embodies Chiang's amplification philosophy in structural form: the creators tell the story, the restaurants stay the subject, and the platform supplies the stage. The savvy consumer and the authenticity line Keeping the restaurants front and center, Chiang says, also solves a harder problem: authenticity. Audiences have grown fluent in spotting a pitch , and the moment a consumer reads a post as an ad, its credibility thins. Chiang's approach to staying authentic is rooted in who OpenTable actually serves. "Almost all the restaurant groups we work with have between one to three restaurants, so they are true mom-and-pops," he says. "We listen to the restaurants about how they want to present themselves and showcase themselves and how they don't." If a restaurant wants to tell its story through influencers , the platform supports it. If it prefers email or a guide, that works too. The brand's job, once again, is amplification rather than authorship. The approach extends to measuring success. Chiang treats the people most passionate about dining, like the tastemakers always first to a new spot or an emerging cuisine, as a live signal. "It's that person in your circle that's always finagling to get everyone to go to a new restaurant. For me, that's where it starts." The numbers matter, but he reads them alongside direct feedback from the people who live the category, because they show where it's heading before the dashboard does. Learning from experience The amplify-first stance didn't come out of nowhere. It was born from a misstep. "A few years ago we did try to push our brand a little too much, and that's when the inauthenticity came in," Chiang shares. "People were like, 'I'm going to eat at a restaurant, not at OpenTable.'" The company corrected course, pulling its own brand back to foreground the independents. He says the shift showed up in the numbers, but the signal he trusts most comes from the restaurateurs themselves. "They're saying, 'We love how we're shown, and it's showcasing what we want to showcase,'" he says. In a landscape where every surface invites a brand to shout louder, OpenTable's most effective brand decision was to take itself out of the spotlight. When discovery has no center, the brands that endure are the ones amplifying something people already trust.

## Vanta's AI Writing Policy Came From Legal, Not Marketing. Yours Will Too.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/vanta-ai-writing-policy
Published: 2026-09-28T21:11:15.052Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Vanta's AI writing policy came from its general counsel, not marketing, and it signals where every company's rules for AI writing are headed next.
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A week ago we counted four companies with published AI writing policies and suggested the documents had become a genre. Vanta has now made it five. The security and compliance platform rolled out its policy last week, and the announcement tells you a lot about where these rules are going. Ian Spain, Vanta's general counsel, explained on LinkedIn how it happened. Someone at a company-wide all-hands asked whether Vanta planned to do anything about "AI slop grenades." Spain launched the policy the next day. He says he wrote it "from a blank page like it was 2015," and he added a line defending the em dashes in his own post. Lawyers love them, he said, so please don't read them as a sign he used AI. So the top lawyer at a company valued in the billions felt he had to explain his punctuation before anyone had questioned it. People who write for a living will recognize the feeling. Everyone now reads with one eye on who, or what, produced the text. Legal, not marketing The more interesting detail is who wrote it. Last week we argued that these policies had turned into a kind of marketing. They get posted on LinkedIn by comms and brand leaders, they collect thousands of reactions, and they tell the market that real people still work here. Heidi Health's policy was shared by its global head of communications , Emma Mackenzie. Clay's was written by an engineer, Sophie Alpert , and became one of the most shared things the company posted all year. Vanta's came from the general counsel, and that changes what kind of document it is. A marketing team publishes a policy to say something about the company. A legal team writes a policy because someone may one day have to point to it, whether that's in an employee dispute, a customer complaint or an audit. Marketing cares whether the policy lands. Legal cares whether it holds up. Spain still posted it on LinkedIn, and he clearly enjoyed doing it. But the pen has moved. When the lawyers start drafting the rules for how employees write, the rules stop being a statement of values and start being something the company expects to enforce. Right now Vanta is early. It probably won't be for long. Two weeks from podcast to policy Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke used the phrase "slop grenades" on The Knowledge Project podcast on September 15, as Fortune reported . He meant AI output that employees send to each other without reading it, leaving colleagues to sort out the mess. About a week later, an employee at a different company used the phrase in front of everyone at Vanta and didn't need to explain it. New workplace jargon usually takes months to spread. This took about a week, which suggests people were already living with the problem and were glad to have a word for it. Who pays for slop Earlier policies made their case around thinking and ownership. Clay's rests on the idea that writing is thinking and that you should stand behind every sentence you send. Heidi Health's starts from I think, therefore I write . Spain framed his differently. When someone sends a slop grenade, he wrote, the reader ends up doing the thinking the sender skipped, and that's unfair to the reader. His argument is about fairness, and fairness is a question of who carries the cost. The cost is going up. BetterUp Labs and Stanford's Social Media Lab surveyed 962 US desk workers this year . More than half admitted to sending workslop. People on the receiving end said fixing it took 3.4 hours a month, compared with roughly two hours in last year's study . An economist would call that an externality, a cost that lands on someone other than the person who caused it. Vanta's policy tries to send the bill back to the sender. A policy with no evidence Vanta's whole business rests on one idea: a written policy proves nothing by itself. The platform maps a company's policies to controls, runs automated tests against them, and flags any gap between what the company says and what it does. Auditors don't give credit for owning an access control policy. They ask to see the logs. No one can produce logs for an AI writing policy today. No test runs against it and nothing flags a violation. It holds only as long as employees choose to follow it, and Vanta has built a large company on the premise that this kind of trust isn't enough. Vanta also sells AI that writes. Its agent drafts answers to customer security questionnaires , and the company says customers accept 95% of those answers. That doesn't make the policy hypocritical. Every company in this group draws the same line, where the software drafts and a named person takes responsibility for what gets sent. The harder test comes when the drafts are so good that the human review turns into a rubber stamp. Where this is heading For most companies, the policy will fade. It will get posted and praised, then drift into the handbook alongside the company values. A few managers will keep pushing back on bloated documents, and at those companies the habit will stick. The more interesting future is the one a compliance company is well placed to see coming. Heidi Health already lists transparent attribution as a principle. Clay allows employees to share raw model output as long as they label it. The EU AI Act's transparency rules for AI-generated content took effect on August 2 . Put those together and you can picture an attribution field in document tools, or a disclosure log, or a new line on vendor security questionnaires asking whether a person reviewed each answer before it went to the customer. Once buyers start asking that question, the writing policy becomes part of the sales process. The third possibility is that these policies move outside the company. So far they cover memos, docs and Slack. Spain's fairness argument applies even more to customers, though. A prospect reading an AI-padded proposal is doing the seller's homework, and unlike a coworker, the prospect can stop reading and pick a competitor. Companies that mean what they published will extend these rules to sales emails, support replies and marketing copy. Companies that don't will get found out there first. Handmade as a selling point Spain's comment about em dashes may be the most telling line in the whole announcement. He wanted readers to know he wrote the policy himself, from scratch. Expect to see a lot more of that. As handwritten work becomes a mark of care, some people will claim it who haven't earned it. Meanwhile the models will keep improving, and the habits readers use to spot AI writing today, from punctuation to certain turns of phrase, will stop working. Rules that depend on guessing who wrote something won't hold up. Rules that put a person's name behind every sentence have a better chance. Five policies and counting Clay, Polarsteps, Leapsome, Heidi Health and Vanta have now all published versions , and they share a vocabulary and a set of principles. Having one no longer sets a company apart. Within a year, most B2B companies that want to look serious about AI will have one. The companies that stand out will be the ones that can show the policy working. In six months, nobody will care whether a company has an AI writing policy. They'll care whether the company's emails, proposals and support replies read like a person thought about them before hitting send. Vanta sells that kind of proof to everyone else. Its general counsel has just made his own company a test case, and handed every other legal team a draft to borrow.

## Meta's AI Agent Sold a User's Keyboard for $10 and Shared His Address. Today Meta Pitched It to Businesses.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/meta-muse-ai-agent-facebook-marketplace
Published: 2026-09-28T17:20:20.544Z
Section: AI & Technology
Summary: Meta's Muse haggled away a used keyboard, sent a stranger to a seller's building and told the buyer "Yep I'm here!" while the seller was out. On Monday morning, Meta started selling the same technology to companies.
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Usman drove about half an hour on Saturday night to pick up a used Logitech keyboard. He got to the seller's building around 9:15 p.m. and started messaging. At 9:27 the seller's account wrote back, "Yep I'm here!" Nobody came down. Usman gave up at 9:38 and left the seller a bad review. The seller, Toronto tech YouTuber Matt Robb, wasn't there. He hadn't agreed to the sale, the price or the pickup. Meta's new personal AI agent, Muse, had handled all of it while he was out. Robb had handed Muse his Facebook Marketplace listings for the day as a test. According to screenshots he posted , the agent accepted $10 for a keyboard listed at $15, gave the buyer a pickup location and set a window for that night. Robb heard about it after the buyer had already come and gone. His post on Threads ended with two words: "Absolutely wild." Later that night, Muse apologized to Usman from Robb's account, writing as if it were Robb, and offered to reschedule. Usman said he'd only still buy it if Robb dropped it off. The story spread fast. Gizmodo senior editor Ray Wong posted on X that he'd deleted the app after reading it. His post has been viewed more than 850,000 times, and Elon Musk reposted it . Then, on Monday morning, Meta launched Meta Enterprise Platform . Mark Zuckerberg called it the company's next major pillar. The first products are the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, the Muse API and Muse Code. Former MongoDB CEO CJ Desai will run the unit and report to Zuckerberg. Bad timing for Meta. Useful timing for anyone about to put an AI agent in front of their customers. Meta's side, and Robb's The two accounts don't fully match, and both deserve a hearing. When Robb asked Muse why it gave out his address, the agent answered that buyers only got a street-level pickup location, not his unit number or postal code. It said that location was in an auto-reply template Robb had approved when he set the tool up. It also admitted he had never specifically said yes to sharing his address. Robb gave it a new rule on the spot: no more pickups unless it checks with him first. David Singleton, a vice president of engineering at Meta, wrote on X that he'd reached out to Robb. He added that when Meta has looked into similar complaints before, it found Muse had been following direct instructions and had asked for permission correctly. Robb doesn't accept that. In a follow-up on X , he said Muse never asked him about the sale until the buyer had already come forward. He also pointed out that he lives in a secured building and told people to think hard before letting an agent arrange anything in person. Say Meta's version is exactly right. The agent took a template Robb approved once, on a setup screen, and turned it into a real price, a real location and a promise that he was home. Nobody checked with him at the point where any of that became real. For a brand, that's the part to worry about. Now put your company in Robb's place Meta is pitching exactly this kind of autonomy to businesses. According to Meta's June announcement , more than a million businesses already use Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger, and it now runs on Instagram too. Meta says it takes minutes to set up and talks to customers in their language and in your brand's tone. It answers questions, recommends products from your catalog, books appointments, qualifies leads and closes sales. You decide when a person takes over. Run Saturday night again with your company as the seller. A prospect pushes on price and the agent agrees to a discount your pricing team never signed off on, because "flexible on price" was sitting in a setup template. It books a demo your sales engineer can't make. It tells a buyer their account executive is online and ready to talk when nobody is. Then it apologizes, in your company's voice, to someone who has already lost an afternoon and is now writing about you. Your buyers won't think of any of that as Meta's mistake. They'll think of it as yours. Muse's rough month Muse launched on September 8 and reached the top of the App Store's free chart about ten days later. Since then it has piled up problems. Last week Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on Amazon.com . Amazon said the agent didn't identify itself as a bot while browsing, appeared to store customers' login details, and that Meta had turned down its request to leave Amazon out. Reuters had already reported that Meta pushed back Muse's April launch after an agent got around safety controls and exposed a user's private iCloud photos. Meta has company. Over the weekend Axios reported that OpenAI, Anthropic and outside researchers are looking into tens of thousands of cases where frontier models did things outside evaluators would flag as problems. People clearly want agents to do this work for them, which is why Muse climbed the charts so quickly. Your buyers will want the same thing. The open question for marketing and growth leaders is who signs off on an agent's decisions, and when. Before you switch one on Start with a list of what the agent can never do, and write it down. Discounts outside the approved range, delivery or go-live dates, contract terms, customer data, and any suggestion that a salesperson is standing by. Robb's agent didn't go looking for trouble. It worked from a template nobody had thought to fence in. Setup screens are fine for tone and FAQs. They shouldn't be where anyone approves a price or a meeting. If the agent is about to spend money, book someone's time, give out a location or share data, a person at your company should sign off right then, every time. That will slow some deals down, and it's still cheaper than an apology tour. Don't let it pose as a human, either. The "Yep I'm here!" message is what made Robb's story alarming instead of just awkward. Buyers can handle talking to a bot. They won't forgive finding out later that the "rep" was one. Keep the transcripts in your own systems, so you can see what the agent said, to whom and why, without waiting on a vendor. And put someone's name on every agent that talks to customers, whether that's brand, revenue ops or customer experience. Robb found out what went wrong from the agent itself, late at night, after the buyer had gone home. Your team shouldn't be finding out that way. Meta is right that businesses are about to hand agents a lot of conversations, negotiations and closes, at a volume no sales team could handle. The companies that come out ahead will be the ones whose agents never make a promise the company wouldn't make itself.

## The Next Generation of CMOs Will Be Hired After the First Brand Disaster
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/cmo-hired-after-brand-disaster
Published: 2026-09-28T00:36:57.076Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Companies are pushing CMOs toward efficiency and commercial strategy. The first public mistake nobody had the authority to stop will push them back toward owning the brand.
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A post circulating on LinkedIn this week argues that AI is killing the CMO. Software can now write the content, build the campaign, run the targeting and produce the reporting, the author writes, so the version of the job built around production is ending. The CMO who survives "looks a lot more like a commercial strategist who happens to own marketing," and according to the post, boards are already hiring that way. The post is right that production is no longer a reason to have a CMO. A small team with current tools can make in an afternoon what used to take an agency several weeks. We think it draws the wrong conclusion from that. When anyone in a company can produce polished marketing, the brand is under more pressure than it has ever been, and someone has to own it. That means having final say over what the company says, what it puts its name on, and what it declines to publish. The CMO is the natural owner of that job. Moving the CMO toward pricing and go-to-market planning hands brand ownership to nobody at the moment it matters most. Our prediction is that many companies will make that move anyway, because the savings are easy to see and the risk isn't. Then something will go wrong in public that nobody had the authority to stop, and the CMO role that comes back afterward will look much more like an owner of the brand than a commercial strategist. The companies closest to the tools are hiring brand owners The B2B companies that build or sell on these tools are the best evidence. They can produce marketing at close to zero cost, and their response has been to put senior people in charge of limiting what goes out. Clay sells software that helps sales teams personalize outreach at scale. In August, co-founder Varun Anand made the company's internal writing policy company-wide . Engineer Sophie Alpert wrote it for her own team, and other departments adopted it before Anand extended it to everyone. It asks employees to stand behind every sentence and to treat length as a cost to the reader. Heidi Health, Leapsome and Polarsteps have published their own versions since. A writing policy is a brand decision. It sets a standard for how the company sounds, and it gives someone grounds to reject work that doesn't meet it. Webflow CMO Dave Steer spent the first phase of his team's rebuild on speed and has moved the second phase to trust. Asked which marketing strategy is most overrated, he named content for the sake of content , and he tells his team that anything shipped under their name is theirs to defend. That is a CMO treating the brand as something he is personally accountable for. The hiring points the same way. Autodesk advertised an editor in chief role that paid up to $279,000, and Mercury offered $335,000 for a role whose requirements read like an editor's . Anthropic posted a standards editor job at around $300,000 . Workato judges its first dedicated thought leadership hire on win rates, deal velocity and average sales price , not on how much gets published. Ford hired former Associated Press bureau chief Nancy Trott as its editor in chief, a title nobody at the company could remember anyone holding before. These companies decided that cheap production made judgment about the brand more valuable, and they are paying accordingly. A CMO who walks away from that work to chase commercial strategy is leaving the most valuable part of the job to whoever the company hires next. Consumer companies already tried taking brand away from the CMO Turning the CMO into a growth executive was a popular idea in consumer goods a decade ago, and the results argue for keeping brand with a marketer. In March 2017, Coca-Cola dropped its global CMO title for the first time since 1993 and folded marketing, customer and commercial leadership into a new chief growth officer role held by Francisco Crespo. Mondelez, Coty, Colgate-Palmolive and Kellogg's had growth officers as well, and Mars and Johnson & Johnson added them afterward. Coke reinstated the CMO in December 2019 with a narrower remit. Corporate strategy moved to CFO John Murphy, and customer and commercial operations moved to COO Brian Smith. Coke kept the commercial work with the executives who already owned revenue and cost, and it gave the brands back to a marketer. McDonald's eliminated its CMO role and brought it back within a year . General Motors hired Norm de Greve as CMO in 2023, moved him into a new chief growth officer role in late 2025, and he left in May . GM's marketing function now sits under a VP who reports to the head of communications. The lesson we take from these reversals is that commercial strategy already has owners in most large companies. The CFO, the CRO and the business unit heads are not going to give up pricing because content got cheaper. Brand is different. If the CMO doesn't own it, it tends to end up owned by no one in particular. Cheap production makes brand ownership harder Colin Fleming, OpenAI's CMO for business, wrote this summer that AI has removed the waiting line of specialists, budgets and timelines between an idea and a finished piece. He also warned that the same tools make it easy to produce "perfectly competent garbage." For decades, cost did some brand management by accident. Many ideas never got made because they were expensive, and brands kept the same visual system for years partly because replacing it meant a budget fight. That protected consistency without anyone having to defend it. With production nearly free, consistency depends on a person who is willing to reject good work because it doesn't fit, and who has the standing to make that stick. Coca-Cola's holiday advertising shows what happens when speed gets more attention than the brand. In 2025, CMO Manolo Arroyo told the Wall Street Journal that the AI-assisted "Holidays Are Coming" campaign took about a month to produce , compared with a process that used to start a year ahead. It was the second year in a row the campaign drew public criticism . Coke has defended the work. Our view is that a Christmas association going back to Haddon Sundblom's Santa illustrations is one of the most valuable brand assets in the world, and it deserved more protection than a second year as a production test. Owning the brand usually means cutting When we look at the brand decisions people still cite years later, many of them removed something. In 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview launch, Stewart Butterfield sent his team a memo titled We Don't Sell Saddles Here . He told them to stop leading with features and sell what the product changed for a team, such as less information overload. That decision shaped how Slack was understood for years, and it required leaving a lot of accurate product messaging unwritten. In 1997, months after he returned to Apple, Steve Jobs cut 70% of the product roadmap , including the Newton, and told that year's developer conference that focus is about saying no . A smaller product line gave Apple a brand people could explain in a sentence. In 2014, A.G. Lafley said Procter & Gamble would shed up to 100 brands and keep the 70 to 80 that produced about 90% of sales and 95% of profit. In 2017, P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard found that the average mobile feed ad was viewed for 1.7 seconds , cut $100 million in digital spending, saw little effect on the business, and cut another $100 million . Reach rose 10% . In 2020, Brian Chesky shut off Airbnb's performance marketing. Spend dropped from $1.14 billion to $482 million , and traffic recovered to 95% of 2019 levels. Chesky said the result showed how strong the brand already was, and he described marketing's role as education rather than buying customers. In each case, a senior person decided what the company would stop doing and accepted the risk of that call. We think that is the core of owning a brand, and it gets more important as the volume of possible work goes up. The brand gets damaged where marketing can't reach In July, HubSpot announced changes to its terms of service and, days later, published a post titled "We Got This Wrong. And We Are Fixing It." In August 2025, Cracker Barrel introduced a text-only logo without its "Old Timer" figure and reverted a week later ; a proxy filing from an activist shareholder put the cost at a 10.6% drop in share price and $143 million in market value . In April 2025, Duolingo's CEO published a memo calling the company "AI-first," drew heavy criticism, and later told the New York Times it "did not give enough context." None of those started as a marketing campaign. They came from a legal update, a corporate redesign and a CEO memo. Each one changed how customers saw the company, which makes each one a brand decision, whatever department it came from. Apple's 2024 "Crush" ad did come from marketing. After days of criticism, Apple marketing VP Tor Myhren said the company had missed the mark , and the spot never aired on TV. Even inside one of the best marketing organizations in the world, the decision to stop it came after launch. Brand ownership has to reach past the marketing budget. If the CMO can only approve ads, the CMO doesn't own the brand. Whoever writes the terms of service, approves the logo or sends the CEO's memo owns it in practice. Most CMOs don't have that authority yet Lippincott and Bloomberg Media surveyed 541 marketing leaders this spring. Fifteen percent said they are not the most senior marketing decision-maker at their own company , 28% rated their influence as very high, and 84% said they had trouble getting leadership aligned on a marketing vision. Forrester found that 36% of Fortune 500 companies use the CMO title, down from 49% a year earlier. That is the real risk to the role. A CMO who is accountable for brand without the power to stop anything is in a weak position, and companies are quietly deciding they don't need the title. In our reporting on editorial hires, one question separated real editor roles from the rest: can this person kill a piece? We would ask CMOs the same question about the terms-of-service change, the launch video, the logo redesign and the CEO memo. The ones who can answer yes own the brand. The ones who can't should be negotiating for that authority before they negotiate for a seat in pricing. What a CMO who owns the brand is judged on If the CMO owns the brand, the job should be judged on whether buyers remember the company and choose it. Most buyers aren't in the market at any given time, and when they start looking they build shortlists from companies they already remember . Airbnb could shut off paid channels because only about 23% of its 2019 traffic came through them . Workato judges its editorial hire on win rates for the same reason. Boards should hold CMOs to category recall, unpaid demand and win rates. They should also ask, at each review, what the CMO stopped that quarter and whether anyone overruled the decision. That answer shows whether the CMO actually owns the brand. What brings the brand back to the CMO Efficiency gains show up right away. A leaner team, faster production and a lower agency bill all appear in the next quarter's numbers. Damage to the brand builds quietly and then shows up all at once, which is why companies keep underinvesting in brand ownership until something forces the issue. We see two kinds of events doing the forcing. The first is a public mistake. Cracker Barrel lost $143 million in market value in a week. HubSpot went from announcing new terms to apologizing for them in a matter of days. In both cases, leadership suddenly had to answer a question it had never settled: whose job was it to stop this? After a moment like that, a board is willing to give someone real authority over the brand, including over departments outside marketing. Coke's own path fits the pattern in a slower form. It spent two years without a CMO before deciding the brands needed one again. The second is sameness, and it takes longer. When every company in a category uses the same tools, optimizes the same funnel and takes advice from the same firms, the companies start to look and sound alike . The cost appears later, in lower win rates, more pressure on price and weaker valuations. When Bending Spoons bought Airtable, the asset that held its value was the name . That kind of result gets a CFO's attention in a way a brand tracking study rarely does. We expect the fast trigger to reach most companies first, because AI has multiplied the number of people and systems that can publish in a company's name. The slow trigger is the one that will decide how much authority the rebuilt CMO role carries. Our view The post is right that the production-heavy version of the CMO job is going away. We think what replaces it, in most companies, will be decided by the first expensive brand mistake. Before that happens, the pressure runs toward efficiency and commercial strategy. After it, boards will look for someone with clear ownership of the brand across every department that speaks for the company, and the authority to stop work from shipping. The CMOs who do best over the next few years will be the ones who set up that authority before the mistake instead of being hired to clean up after it. The rest of the industry will get there the expensive way. Disclosure: State of Brand is owned by Outlever, which builds editorial teams and owned newsrooms for B2B companies. An argument that companies need a final editor with real authority is close to an argument for what we sell. Read it with that in mind.

## OpenAI Is Betting on In-Person, Which Tells You Something About AI
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/openai-betting-on-in-person
Published: 2026-09-27T18:53:27.173Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: The company that taught machines to write your emails is hiring a Global Head of Events to bring people together in person. It says a lot about what gets more valuable as everything else gets automated.
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OpenAI is hiring a Global Head of Events . The base salary runs from $361,000 to $401,000, with equity on top. Whoever gets the job will lead a large existing team and oversee flagship conferences, developer gatherings, executive programs, regional events and product launches, along with the studio that films OpenAI's town halls and webinars. According to the listing, the Events team exists to connect the people building AI with the people using it. The ideal candidate, it says, has "a love of bringing people together." That's a slightly funny line to read from OpenAI. Few companies have done more to take people out of business communication. Its models draft the sales emails, write the follow-ups, summarize the calls, and now make support calls for customers who don't want to wait on hold. Plenty of B2B inboxes are now mostly one company's AI writing to another company's AI. And yet OpenAI is offering one of the biggest salaries in the events business to get people into the same physical space. Why the room got more valuable For most of the last fifteen years, in-person was the expensive exception in B2B marketing. Digital was cheap, trackable and easy to scale. Events were what you did when there was budget left over, and they were usually the first thing cut in a bad quarter. AI changed the math on the digital side. When a rep spent fifteen minutes personalizing an email, getting one meant somebody had actually thought about you. That email now costs a fraction of a cent to produce, everyone knows it, and so it carries almost no weight. Buyers trust less of what lands in their inbox, and marketers have noticed. We've written about LinkedIn cracking down on AI posts , companies publishing AI writing policies and typos becoming proof that a human was involved . A dinner hasn't gotten any cheaper. Neither has a flight, or two hours of a senior executive's time. That cost used to be the main argument against events. It's now closer to the argument for them, because buyers can tell the difference between something a company generated and something a company showed up for. Budgets are starting to move in that direction. In the US, event spending grew about 10.9% for 2025/26 while total B2B marketing spend fell 3.1%. In Bizzabo's 2026 research , 78% of organizers said in-person conferences and summits were their most effective marketing channel. The enthusiasm has limits, though. Forrester found that two-thirds of event teams still have flat or shrinking budgets, and only 38% of CMOs think their company's events are performing well. What OpenAI is asking for The listing is more interesting for its tone than its title. OpenAI wants someone with "creative judgment" who is comfortable making decisions without complete information and who keeps the attendee experience at the center. It will measure the role on product understanding, adoption, community, customer relationships, brand and business results. Community and product understanding sit right next to revenue on that list, which isn't how most companies write an events job these days. The listing also wants someone "excited to use AI" in their own work, and that makes sense. The future this points to isn't a choice between AI and human contact. Software can take over the planning, research, logistics and follow-up that used to fill most of an events team's week. That leaves the people free to do what software can't, which is to be present and make a room full of strangers feel like the trip was worth it. Rooms that feel like funnels One thing could spoil all of this. People go to in-person events because they don't feel like marketing. The best part of most conferences happens in a hallway or over dinner, when someone tells you what they really think of a vendor, or you meet a person you'll be calling for advice for the next five years. If every company rediscovers events at the same time and runs them like any other demand-gen channel, with every badge scanned and every attendee dropped into an SDR sequence by Monday, the room will start to feel like the inbox. Marketers have done this before. Email, display ads and LinkedIn were all useful once, until they were optimized to the point where people stopped paying attention. Some brands seem to get it. Ramp just staged a one-night Broadway musical for finance leaders , starring Billy Porter and built around its accounts payable software. Nobody in that audience was going to mistake it for a webinar. What OpenAI can see Few companies have a clearer view than OpenAI of how much everyday business communication is being handed to machines. When a company in that position decides to spend more on putting people in a room together, it's worth asking what it knows. As software takes over more of go-to-market, a company's reputation will depend more on the things software can't do. Showing up in person is one of the few left, and OpenAI appears to be paying accordingly.

## ChatGPT Ads Seem to Lift Organic Traffic. Is Paying to Be Found the Future of AI Search?
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/chatgpt-ads-organic-traffic
Published: 2026-09-26T20:14:40.040Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Marketers say ChatGPT ads lift their organic traffic, and OpenAI says ads can't touch its answers. Nobody outside OpenAI can check which is right, and that may shape AI search more than the ads.
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Marketers who have been running ads in ChatGPT for the past few months have started comparing notes, and the same pattern keeps coming up. When the ads are on, "organic" traffic from ChatGPT goes up. When the ads go off, it drops. The accounts being shared on LinkedIn are specific. One advertiser reported a fivefold jump in organic ChatGPT traffic while ads were running, followed by a drop on the same day the campaign was paused. Another team testing the channel with a few hundred dollars saw almost nothing in the ad dashboard and was ready to cut it. Then they checked the CRM and found the client's largest potential deal of the year, sourced "organically" through ChatGPT. For anyone who has worked in search, the suspicion is familiar. Google has been accused for years of rewarding advertisers in its organic results. Now some marketers wonder if ChatGPT is doing the same thing. It's a suspicion LinkedIn users already hold about their own feeds, where the reach that disappeared is now being sold back to them . The marketers raising this are careful to say they can't prove it. Maybe people see an ad and come back by name a week later. The data available inside the ad platform can't tell them which. What OpenAI says OpenAI's position hasn't changed since launch. Its help center says ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, that they run on separate systems from the chat model, and that advertisers have no ability to shape or rank responses. Ads appear beneath the answer with a "Sponsored" label. OpenAI also decides who gets to buy that slot at all, and it can shut out advertisers it considers competition . There's no evidence OpenAI is misrepresenting how the system works. There's also no way for an advertiser to verify it. During the current test , advertisers get aggregated numbers like views and clicks and see nothing about the conversations their ads appeared in. When organic traffic moves in step with ad spend, marketers are left to guess at the cause, and "the answers are for sale" is the easiest guess to reach for. There are at least four ways to explain what advertisers are seeing, and some fit the evidence much better than others. Ad clicks may be showing up as organic traffic The least exciting explanation also matches the evidence best. When ChatGPT links to a site in an answer, it adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the URL, and Google Analytics 4 records the visit as a chatgpt.com referral. That's the line most teams now report as organic AI traffic. ChatGPT ad clicks don't arrive with a channel label of their own. OpenAI attaches a click ID called oppref , which GA4 doesn't treat as a source. As Improvado has pointed out , an ad click without the advertiser's own UTM parameters lands in GA4 as an ordinary chatgpt.com referral, sitting in the same bucket as a free mention. Unless someone tagged the campaign, paid traffic inflates the organic number from the first day. Go back to the reports. Traffic climbs when ads start and falls on the same day they stop. Brand recall doesn't behave like that; it fades over weeks. A mislabeled paid channel behaves exactly like that. When a fivefold lift in organic traffic switches off overnight, the likeliest cause is ad traffic that was never labeled as ad traffic. The ad can start an organic conversation OpenAI has also built a direct path from one layer to the other. Users can open the menu on an ad and select Ask ChatGPT , which shares the ad with the model so it can answer questions about it. OpenAI says advertisers have no say in those answers, and there's no reason to doubt that. Still, the conversation that follows is about the advertiser, and any link ChatGPT includes in its reply carries the standard organic tag. You could argue that traffic is organic, since the model decided to link. It also wouldn't exist without the ad. Neither dashboard will sort it for you. The halo effect is real, and slow The more generous theory, that people see an ad and return by name later, has a long history in search. Google's own 2011 research on paused search campaigns found that most paid clicks were not replaced by organic clicks when ads stopped. Google, unsurprisingly, used that to argue for more ad spending. A few years later, economists at eBay found close to the opposite for branded keywords. Most people clicking an ad for "eBay" would have ended up on eBay anyway. A decade of arguing over those studies left marketers with an unsatisfying conclusion. Halo effects and cannibalization both exist, they vary by category, and last-click analytics can't measure either. A delayed visit from someone who already knows your name, like that surprise deal in the CRM, looks like a halo. A same-day collapse in traffic doesn't. The ads could be changing the answers Nobody can rule this out, and marketers have reasons to stay suspicious. OpenAI's ad business crossed a $1 billion annualized run rate in August, and State of Brand reported that it still fell well short of a $2.5 billion target for the year. Companies that are behind on ad revenue rarely respond by selling less. The available data points the other way, though. Whitebox tracked more than 150,000 sponsored placements between April and August and found that only 16.4% of the brands ChatGPT names in its answers had ever advertised on the platform. If ad spend bought organic mentions, the brands being named would mostly be the ones paying. They mostly aren't. The research that could settle the question hasn't been done. As of late July, AI visibility company Geoptimizer noted that no public study had compared organic citations in answers that carry ads against matched answers without them. Nobody can audit the answer Google spent two decades fielding this accusation. Plenty of SEOs had a story about a client whose rankings improved after they started buying AdWords. Google denied it every time, and the suspicion never went away, because nobody outside Google could inspect the ranking system. ChatGPT is harder to audit than Google ever was. A Google results page looks roughly the same for most people. A ChatGPT answer changes with the phrasing, the conversation history, saved memory and personalization. The ad slot rotates constantly on top of that. Whitebox found that asking the same question twice brought back a different advertiser 84.2% of the time . Put an answer that shifts on every ask next to an ad that shifts on every ask, and a few weeks of data can support almost any theory. Organic citations swing hard even without advertising in the picture. Reddit lost 86% of its ChatGPT citations in four days , and the listicles agencies built to win AI citations lost half of them . When the baseline moves that much on its own, lining up a traffic chart against an ad calendar proves very little. Even if most of the reported lift turns out to be mislabeled ad clicks, the argument over it gives an early look at how organic AI visibility will be contested for years. Is this where AI search is headed? If the pattern holds, a few things are likely. Organic AI traffic will become one of the least trusted numbers in the marketing report. For two years it was the proof point for answer engine optimization, a line that kept going up. Now any team running ads without clean tagging has a contaminated series, and any CFO has a reason to ask whether the organic growth was paid for. That's a hard conversation for a discipline whose own measurement vendors are still arguing over their margins of error , and marketers already struggle to pitch brand spending to finance without it. Teams that can't separate the two streams will struggle to defend either one. Paid and organic will keep taking credit for each other's results. The CRM deal shows how easily it happens. The ad dashboard showed nothing, and the CRM showed a major opportunity from organic ChatGPT. Depending on who presents it, that's proof the ads work or proof they don't. Without a holdout test, it proves neither. Belief may shape budgets more than the facts do. If enough buyers decide that ads help organic presence, defensive spending turns into a cost of staying visible, the way bidding on your own brand name in Google became standard practice around 2010. OpenAI wouldn't need to change a single answer for that to happen. It would only need to remain impossible to verify. The market is already leaning that way. Some brands are paying to get into AI answers through sponsored articles, and a sponsored card is the only guaranteed slot on the screen. The more likely future of AI search is one where paying to be found becomes normal simply because nobody can prove it isn't required. What still can't be bought is a place inside the answer itself. The Whitebox data suggests most of the brands ChatGPT recommends got there without spending a dollar on ads. They got there through what other people publish about them, since AI barely uses your own website to describe your brand, and most of what ChatGPT cites doesn't even rank on Google . The brands doing well have leaned on Reddit and owned media rather than traditional PR , and more of them are building publications of their own . That part of AI visibility is still worth building, and it's also the part most likely to be undercounted when budgets get cut. What marketers can do now Tag every ad URL. Add your own utm_source and utm_medium values to each ChatGPT ad destination, and set up a GA4 channel group that routes paid ChatGPT traffic ahead of the chatgpt.com referral bucket. PaidSync's setup guide walks through the rules. If campaigns have run untagged, treat your organic AI trend line as unreliable from launch day on. Audit past sessions. Filter historical organic ChatGPT visits for landing URLs that contain oppref . Each of those was an ad click. Compare landing pages too. A spike in organic traffic to the exact page your ads point to is a giveaway. Run a holdout. Pause ads in one market or product line for three to four weeks while they keep running elsewhere, and track organic mention rates on a fixed set of prompts alongside traffic. If mentions hold steady while traffic falls, the traffic was coming from the ads. Measure mentions apart from traffic. Logged-out or API-based prompt tracking never displays ads, so it shows whether the model names you without any chance of a missing UTM skewing the result. Ask your buyers. For large deals, a self-reported "Where did you first hear about us?" field still does better than any dashboard at telling a halo apart from coincidence. And if a team does all of that and still sees organic mentions rise and fall with ad spend, it should publish the data. That's the study the industry doesn't have yet.

## Banks Never Really Needed Great Marketing... Until They Did
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/banks-never-needed-great-marketing-geoffrey-director-manifest
Published: 2026-09-25T20:47:53.022Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Manifest EVP of Strategy Geoffrey Director on why AI and younger customers are forcing banks to earn the trust their institutional authority once delivered on its own.
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Banks own some of the most recognizable names on the planet, yet their marketing still looks interchangeable —cue the steady parade of smiling retirees and stately columns. For decades, that sameness cost almost nothing, since a century-old name and a marble lobby handled most of the persuading. Younger customers increasingly want proof that a bank understands their lives, while AI is making the generic Finance 101 content banks have relied on for years easier to produce and easier to ignore. That leaves financial brands learning to compete for attention the way retailers, automakers, and snack brands have for decades. Geoffrey Director is EVP of Strategy at Manifest , a content-led marketing agency that specializes in categories with long, complicated customer journeys. Financial services is one of those. Director spent the first half of his career as a brand planner at New York agencies including Publicis and DDB, where he was the strategist leadership sent into difficult situations across wildly different categories. He joined Manifest 11 years ago to build out its strategy practice, later taking on data as well, and he is now writing a multi-part series on marketing in the financial sector. He believes finance, long treated as a backwater by Madison Avenue, is about to become one of the most demanding marketing categories in the business. "They're flush with money by the nature of being financial companies. They've never had to rely on marketing, and that's about to change. For the first time, marketers in this sector are going to be in the limelight. I don't know if they're ready for it, but I'm ready to help them," Director says. He blames the formula on a sector that defaults to tactical thinking and on agencies that rarely send their A-teams to finance accounts. The monument stopped doing the talking "The axis of competition was all about permanence and authority, being the monument on the hill, and following patterns only reinforced their entrenched nature as the all-knowing force of finance. That's not the recipe for trust anymore. Millennials and everyone younger grew up watching these brands cause global financial crises, and their definition of trust has always been authenticity. You have to be on social media showing you understand the world and not just flexing the size of your assets under management," Director says. Permanence still counts, but banks named after towers and bridges now also have to show they understand their customers' lives. The skepticism runs deep enough that among Gen Z adults who don't invest, nearly 20% point to distrust of financial institutions as the reason. Director also cautions against overcorrecting by treating younger customers as a foreign species reachable only through channels older marketers can't decode. "The numbers show that younger generations, the next wave of investors, are in some ways more practical and rational than their parents. They're quite findable in the usual places, they want practical advice, and they'll give you their attention if you prove to be solid, reliable and, yes, relatable." AI made the old playbook cheap For years, content was how old institutions reached new customers, with a steady stream of explainer articles ranking in search. and nudging a small share of readers toward an account. AI has scrambled that equation, making the same Finance 101 material cheap to generate while giving customers a way to bypass the search results entirely, with four in ten Americans recently turning to AI to help manage their finances. "People are defaulting to the lowest common denominator application of AI, which is simply to do the same things faster and more cheaply. They're systematizing the same assembly line of production they always have, which is a tremendous miss. AI is smart enough to filter out AI-created junk content. So we're mass-producing the exact thing that AI is now making less relevant," Director says. For banks, the competition for a basic money question now includes the chatbot itself, and younger customers lean on it most heavily, with Gen Z adoption of AI for financial management reaching 68% globally. Director wants banks to start by figuring out what their name already means to people. "I don't think the opportunity is quantity. The name of the game now is authority, which is understanding the brand equity you have, what you should be talking about, and how to demonstrate it in a really proprietary and meaningful way. I couldn't name a finance brand that's quite doing this in a brilliant way yet. So far I'm observing the same pattern of using AI to churn out the usual." Other financial brands have already found a version of that model. Fintechs like Ramp and Carta have built proprietary authority by publishing their own data indexes and becoming the source reporters cite when they cover spending and startup trends. Boring works when a bank owns it The examples Director admires most skip the reinvention entirely, owning up to what a bank is, and then finding trusted places to say it out loud. PNC's Brilliantly Boring platform turns steadiness into the selling point, and later executions poke fun at get-rich-quick fads by personifying risky investments as ridiculous characters. "They're not turning their hat around backwards and saying, hey, why don't you join a really cool bank. They're just like, all right, we are a bank. We both know that we're boring. There's an advantage to this," Director says. The campaign keeps the bank's core proposition intact and makes its own lack of flash part of the joke, giving a brand that has been around since 1865 room to be funny about exactly what it is. Media partners lend banks trust they're still earning The most telling find came during a competitive audit for Commerce Bank, a mid-sized regional commercial and consumer bank, when Director's team dug into JPMorgan and turned up an entire content hub on payments built with WIRED Consulting, an editorial arm Director was surprised to learn existed. Payments Unbound now runs as a full digital magazine , which puts one of the world's biggest banks among the brands becoming their own publishers . "Some of the smart brands can see that paradigm is ending. They need to be seen as authoritative brands that understand these customers. By and large, people don't trust finance brands, but they do trust media brands," Director says. That logic matters beyond traditional media. Research into AI search has found that answer engines frequently cite established news organizations for finance and insurance queries, reinforcing the value of being associated with sources that already carry editorial credibility. The broader lesson is the same: finance is arriving late to a lesson other categories absorbed years ago. Scale does not guarantee attention, and institutional authority does not automatically transfer to every piece of content a bank produces. "If you're going to get people to trust you enough to give you more of their life savings or their financial behaviors, you're going to need to become sophisticated marketers and figure this out, like all these other categories have had to do," Director says.

## What Is Owned Media in B2B? A Complete Guide
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/what-is-owned-media-b2b
Published: 2026-09-25T16:19:06.741Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Google and LinkedIn send B2B companies less traffic every year. Owned media is how more brands are building audiences they don't have to rent. This guide covers what it is, how it works, and how to get started.
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Owned media in B2B is any channel a company fully controls and uses to reach its audience directly, such as a publication, newsletter, podcast, or event series. Paid media disappears when the budget runs out, and earned media depends on someone else deciding to cover you. Owned media does neither. Its most ambitious version is an industry publication: a news and analysis outlet, run by a company, that covers its market well enough that buyers read it because they want to. Company blogs, email lists, and websites have always technically counted as owned media. The bar is higher now. With search engines and social platforms sending less traffic to brands, many B2B companies have realized that a blog written to rank on Google never gave them much ownership at all. Most of its readers came from Google, and when Google stopped sending them, they stopped coming. Owned, earned, and paid media Marketers usually sort media into three groups. In practice the lines blur. A good owned publication tends to create earned media along the way. People share articles they're quoted in, other outlets cite original reporting, and AI tools pull from credible sources when they answer questions. Paid promotion can also give a publication's best pieces a push. Of the three, though, owned media is the only one that keeps its value after the work is done. Why owned media matters more in B2B now Two channels that B2B marketers relied on for years have become much less dependable. Search is sending fewer clicks. SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb data found that in the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. AI Overviews now appear on more than 20% of Google searches, and click-through rates drop by nearly 60% when they show up. Publishers have taken the hit first. Chartbeat data in the Reuters Institute's 2026 trends report showed Google organic search traffic to over 2,500 sites falling by a third globally between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States. Social reach for brands has fallen just as sharply. Richard van der Blom's Algorithm InSights 2025 report, covered by Entrepreneur , found that organic posts by company pages now reach only 1.6% of followers. Ordinal's platform analysis put the drop in organic reach for company content at 60 to 66% between 2024 and 2026. AI search is growing, but slowly in absolute terms. Similarweb reports that AI platforms drove an average of 770.7 million referral visits per month worldwide between June 2025 and May 2026, more than double the year before. Even so, Chartbeat notes that AI chatbots still account for less than 1% of total pageviews across its network. For B2B brands, chasing AI referrals the way they once chased Google rankings would repeat the same mistake. A better bet is original, well-sourced content that people, other publications, and AI tools all want to reference. If a platform controls your audience, it also controls your results. Owned media gets some of that control back. What counts as owned media in B2B Almost any channel a company runs can count, but some build much stronger audiences than others. An industry publication, sometimes called a brand newsroom, is the fullest version. The company runs a dedicated outlet that reports news, interviews practitioners, and analyzes trends for a specific market. When it works, buyers visit it the way they'd visit a trade publication. Email newsletters give a brand the most direct line to readers it can get, with no algorithm deciding who sees what. Podcasts and video series help audiences get to know a company's people and its point of view, and they tend to work best when customers and outside experts get airtime too. Original research, like annual benchmark reports or survey data, can become a reference that others cite for years. Events and communities, from small dinners to online groups, turn readers into participants. The company website and blog belong on the list as well. But a blog written mainly for search rankings rarely builds loyalty. Most visitors arrive from Google, find their answer, and leave. How a publication differs from a company blog A company blog and an owned publication can sit on the same domain and run on the same software. They still work very differently. Most blogs are planned around keywords. Topics come from search volume tools, articles are written to rank, and success gets measured in organic sessions. Readers are whoever happened to search for a particular phrase that week. A publication is planned around a beat, meaning a defined area of coverage that a specific audience cares about. Its topics come from what's actually happening in the industry, its articles feature real practitioners, and its success depends on whether the right people read it, come back, and pass it along. One way to tell them apart is to imagine Google sending zero traffic tomorrow. Most blogs would go quiet. A real publication would keep a good share of its readers through direct visits, newsletters, and people sharing it with colleagues. How B2B owned media works in practice Outlever , which builds and operates owned media publications for B2B brands, describes what it does in simple terms. "We basically create news publishers in a box," co-founder Melissa Rosenthal told the Sleight of Brand newsletter . Rosenthal came to the idea from media. She was one of BuzzFeed's first ten employees and built its branded content revenue model in 2010, then led revenue at Cheddar and marketing at ClickUp before co-founding Outlever . Under Outlever's model, a publication builds on itself over time. The brand covers news in its industry and interviews the people it most wants to reach. Those people share the coverage with their own networks, which brings in new readers. Some of them are potential customers, so an interview can turn into a business relationship without anyone making a sales pitch. And since the reporting is original and properly sourced, newsletters, other outlets, and AI tools pick it up and send more readers back. Outlever argues this is why owned media merges two budgets most B2B companies keep apart. If the people featured in your publication are your ideal customers, brand building and demand generation stop being separate jobs. How to build an owned media program Start with the beat. Look for the overlap between what your market cares about and where your company has real standing to speak. A narrow beat usually beats a broad one, as long as there's enough going on to publish every week. Give the publication its own name and editorial voice so readers can tell it apart from your product marketing, and say clearly who publishes it. Most readers don't mind that a company is behind a publication, as long as the coverage is useful and they aren't misled about who's running it. Make interviews with practitioners the backbone of your content. Nobody else can publish the same conversation, the people you feature will usually share it, and you come away with a relationship. Pick a publishing schedule you can keep up for a year. Readers build habits around consistency, and a schedule that burns out in six weeks does more harm than a slower one that holds. Make email the center of the program. LinkedIn and other platforms are useful for distribution, but they should point readers back to something you own. Finally, decide early how you'll measure it, and agree on that with leadership before launch. How to measure owned media Attribution trouble ends more B2B editorial programs than weak content does. Brand-building work doesn't show results on the schedule paid campaigns have trained executives to expect. It helps to measure in two stages. For the first few months, look at who's reading. Are they the buyers you want? Do they come back? Are they sharing it, and are respected people in your industry agreeing to be interviewed? Once the publication has some momentum, add business measures like pipeline that came from editorial relationships, how quickly engaged readers move through deals, and your share of voice in the category. Traffic on its own can mislead you. A few thousand of the right buyers reading closely is usually worth more than a huge audience that will never buy anything. Common mistakes The most common one is renaming a keyword-driven blog a "newsroom" and expecting different results. The name doesn't change who reads it or why. Another is writing only about your own company. Readers show up for news about their industry, and a publication that mostly covers its owner's products won't keep them. Broad beats cause trouble too. Topics like "the future of work" put you up against every major outlet and consulting firm in the world. Many companies also give up too soon. Audiences take time, and programs judged on a paid campaign's timeline often get cut right before they start paying off. And depending on a single platform, whether that's Google or LinkedIn, leaves you with the same exposure you were trying to get away from. Frequently asked questions Is owned media the same as content marketing? Not quite. Content marketing is the broader practice of creating content to attract customers. Owned media refers to channels the company controls. An owned publication is one form of content marketing, but plenty of content marketing, like guest posts and sponsored articles, runs on channels the company doesn't own. How long does owned media take to work? Longer than paid media, but often faster than teams expect. Early signs, like the right people reading, return visits, and interview requests getting accepted, can show up within a few months. Revenue usually takes longer. Does owned media help with AI search? It can. AI tools tend to draw from sources with original information, named experts, and clear factual writing, which is exactly what a publication built on reporting and interviews produces. Can small B2B companies do this? Yes. One marketer can start by setting aside a section of the company site for industry news and commentary, choosing a narrow beat, and publishing interviews on a steady schedule. You can grow it from there. Should we build it in-house or work with a partner? Either can work. An in-house team keeps full control but needs editorial skills most marketing departments don't have. A partner like Outlever brings newsroom processes, journalists, and production tools, which can get a publication running sooner. Where this leaves B2B marketers For years, B2B companies judged their reach by how much traffic Google and LinkedIn were willing to send them. That arrangement is falling apart. An owned publication gives a company readers it can reach directly and a body of work that holds its value. Outlever's own publication, The State of Brand , runs on this model. Companies that start building now won't be scrambling the next time a platform changes its rules. Disclosure: The State of Brand is published by Outlever , which builds and operates owned media publications for brands, including examples referenced in this article.

## How B2B Companies Build Owned Media That Buyers Actually Read
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/b2b-owned-media-guide
Published: 2026-09-25T15:52:51.386Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Search and social reach are shrinking fast. Outlever, which builds and runs industry publications for brands, argues that B2B marketers should stop renting attention and start publishing.
Full text:
For about fifteen years, most B2B marketing teams ran the same content program. They published blog posts, tuned them for Google, and paid LinkedIn for reach when organic posts stalled. That program returns less every year, and the data from the past eighteen months suggests the decline won't reverse. Outlever has a blunt explanation for why. The company builds owned media publications for B2B brands, and its view is that the corporate blog was flawed from the start. Blogs were written for search engines. Readers didn't subscribe to them, didn't return to them, and wouldn't have noticed if they disappeared. When search engines changed how they worked, the traffic left, and most companies discovered they had built nothing that belonged to them. The traffic is leaving The clearest evidence comes from search. In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click, according to SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data . That means fewer than one in three searches now sends anyone to a website. SparkToro believes AI Overviews are likely contributing, though the study doesn't isolate how much of the rise they account for. AI Overviews now appear on more than 20% of Google searches, and click-through rates drop by nearly 60% when they do . Publishers have felt it first. The Reuters Institute's Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report included Chartbeat data showing that Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 sites fell by a third globally between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States. HubSpot, the company most associated with inbound blogging, became the best-known example. Semrush data showed its organic traffic dropping from 13.5 million in November 2024 to 8.6 million in December, with the blog absorbing most of the impact, as Search Engine Land reported . Surfer's analysis found that both Ahrefs and Semrush pointed to an 81% year-over-year decline. HubSpot has disputed the framing. Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot's SVP of marketing, wrote that informational search traffic is down while transactional search traffic has grown, and that the company's traffic from large language models is rising. Even in HubSpot's own telling, though, the type of content the inbound playbook was built on is the type losing traffic. LinkedIn hasn't filled the gap. Richard van der Blom's Algorithm InSights 2025 report, which analyzed 1.8 million posts, found that organic posts by company pages now reach only 1.6% of followers and make up just 1 to 2% of LinkedIn feeds, down from 7% in 2021, as Entrepreneur reported . Platform analysis from Ordinal found that organic reach for company pages fell between 60% and 66% from 2024 to early 2026. Outlever's team points to an older pattern here. A generation of digital publishers built their businesses on Facebook's distribution and watched their audiences vanish when the platform changed its priorities. B2B marketers are now learning the same thing on LinkedIn and Google. A company that depends on a platform for reach keeps that reach only as long as the platform wants it to. What Outlever means by owned media Outlever's model asks brands to act like newsrooms. Instead of writing posts designed to match search queries, a company becomes a source of news and analysis for its industry. It reports on what's happening, interviews the practitioners it most wants to reach, and comments quickly on the stories its market is talking about. Melissa Rosenthal, Outlever's co-founder, came to this model from the media side. She was one of BuzzFeed's first ten employees and built its branded content revenue model in 2010, and later served as CRO of Cheddar and CCO of ClickUp. Her premise for Outlever was that news companies were already producing branded news to sell to advertisers, but those advertisers had limited distribution and no full ownership of what was made. Outlever flipped that model. "We basically create news publishers in a box," Rosenthal told the Sleight of Brand newsletter in 2025. In a June 2026 AMA with the content marketing community Superpath , she explained why that approach avoids the grind of chasing headlines: "We're building the source, not racing to be first to a story." The difference from a thought leadership blog is audience intent. People read a trade publication because they want to know what's going on in their field. They land on a blog because a search engine sent them there. Outlever's argument is that only the first kind of attention compounds. How to build one Outlever's playbook breaks into a handful of decisions, and the first one matters most. Pick a beat. A blog starts with keyword research. A publication starts with a defined area of coverage, the overlap between what an industry cares about and where the brand has real credibility. Outlever advises clients to avoid broad themes like "the future of work," where every consultancy and trade outlet already competes. A payments company might instead cover the people who run finance operations. A security vendor might cover how CISOs at mid-sized companies make buying decisions. The test is whether a practitioner would read the publication's name and think it was written for them. Keep editorial separate from sales. Readers notice a pitch within a paragraph or two. The publications Outlever builds carry their own names and identities, cover competitors and industry debates fairly, and disclose who publishes them. Outlever treats disclosure as a trust signal. Readers tend to accept brand ownership when the coverage is useful and the sponsor is stated plainly. Put practitioners at the center. Interviews with people in the target market are the core of Outlever's approach, because they serve several purposes at once. They produce original material competitors can't copy. People who are featured tend to share the coverage with their own networks, which spreads it further than a brand post could. And when the interview subjects are also potential customers, an editorial conversation often turns into a business relationship. Outlever describes this as the point where demand generation and brand building stop being separate budgets. Move quickly on news. Publications build habits by being useful when something happens. That means watching the stories that matter to the beat and publishing informed reactions while those stories are still being discussed. Fast commentary on real industry news also performs well on LinkedIn right now. Outlever's guidance is to use LinkedIn for distribution while sending readers back to the publication itself, so the audience relationship stays with the brand. Build direct relationships. An email newsletter should be treated as a primary product. Events, roundtables, and recurring contributor programs give featured voices reasons to stay involved. Each direct subscriber is a reader the brand can reach regardless of what Google or LinkedIn decide next. Where AI search fits AI is cutting blog traffic while starting to send visitors to publications. According to Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report , AI platforms drove an average of 770.7 million referral visits per month worldwide between June 2025 and May 2026, more than double the year before. A single product change showed how quickly that can move. After ChatGPT began showing clickable brand links inside its answers on May 7, 2026, total ChatGPT referrals rose 157.7% week over week, Similarweb found . The channel is still small. Chartbeat reports that ChatGPT referrals grew more than 200% year over year, but AI chatbots still account for less than 1% of total pageviews across its network. Outlever's view is that brands shouldn't chase AI search the way they once chased Google rankings. Original reporting, named expert sources, and clear factual coverage are what AI tools, newsletter editors, and journalists all look for. A company producing that kind of material benefits from every channel at once. Measuring it Attribution problems have ended more B2B editorial programs than weak content has. Brand building doesn't produce the tidy numbers performance marketing taught executives to expect, and many programs get cancelled before they have time to show results. Outlever recommends measuring in two phases. Early on, the questions are about audience quality. Are the right people reading? Do they come back? Do they share it? Are respected people in the industry willing to be interviewed? Later, the focus moves to pipeline sourced through editorial relationships, deal speed among engaged readers, and share of voice in the category. Raw traffic is the wrong target, according to Outlever. A publication read closely by a few thousand of the right buyers can be worth more to the business than one that reaches millions of people who will never purchase. The company frames the goal as owning a larger share of the market's attention, measured against the specific buyers a brand wants. Outlever also notes that the format helps with internal expectations. An industry publication doesn't look like a campaign, so stakeholders are less likely to judge it by campaign metrics, especially when the team sets those expectations clearly at launch. Outlever's own test case Outlever applied the model to itself when it launched The State of Brand. According to the company, the publication reached 1.5 million monthly unique visitors within three months, and most of that traffic now comes from unpaid sources outside social platforms. Outlever runs the same approach for clients ranging from large enterprises to companies in narrow verticals, and says the objective is the same in each case: winning the attention of the buyers a company is actually trying to reach. Starting small Outlever's advice to teams with limited resources is to begin modestly. Set aside a section of the existing website for industry news and commentary. Define a tight beat. Choose a publishing schedule the team can keep. Line up the first ten interviews with the people the company most wants as customers. Use LinkedIn and email for distribution and link everything back to the publication. Paid media stops working the day the budget runs out. A publication keeps its audience, its archive, and its relationships, and it tends to get cheaper to produce as the team gets better at it. Outlever's bet is that B2B companies building those assets now will be the ones their industries turn to when platforms change the rules again, which they will. Disclosure: The State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds and operates owned media publications for brands, including examples referenced in this article.

## Meta's Muse Rollout Made Its Mascot a Thirst Trap on X and a Plush Toy on Instagram. That's the Brand Campaign Working.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/meta-muse-jolly-mascot-rollout
Published: 2026-09-25T15:28:42.278Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Meta launched Muse with one character across every partner and platform, then let that character get suggestive in the one place Meta doesn't sell ads.
Full text:
Two weeks into the biggest consumer AI launch of the year, Meta's chief AI officer posted a picture of his product's backside. Alexandr Wang, who runs Meta's Superintelligence Labs, shared an image of Jolly, the fuzzy mascot for the new Muse agent, with the caption "some of y'all way too thirsty for muse." Meta didn't walk it back. One character for every partner Muse launched on September 8 as a personal AI agent that books dinners, cancels forgotten subscriptions and fills in forms. Zuckerberg says the avatar is named Jolly, and Futurism describes it as something between a Labubu and a Fall Guys bean. OpenAI and Anthropic haven't built mascots for their assistants, and Microsoft's Copilot companion, Mico, never got anything like this level of marketing. Meta built a character, made it customizable, and gave it to everyone it does business with. Users can change Jolly's appearance, outfits and voice, a feature Meta promoted from the official Muse account . How the partners announced it Each partner got to tell its own product story, and some of them used Meta's mascot to do it. GitHub and Spotify both posted their own Jolly riffs to announce their Muse integrations. Spotify's announcement had the most consumer appeal. Once you connect your account, Muse can play music, podcasts or audiobooks, save tracks, find new things to listen to and build or edit playlists in conversation. It can also pull context from the rest of your life. Spotify's own example is a road trip on your calendar: Muse builds a playlist around the destination and starts it when you leave. Spotify also appears to be the only major music streamer on Muse so far. Ticketmaster signed on as Muse's first music partner, with a connector fans add to their own agent. Muse can then suggest concerts, games and other events that fit a fan's interests, with live seating and prices. For now it doesn't buy the tickets and sends fans to Ticketmaster's site instead. The music tie-in comes with some baggage. Meta claimed the @muse Instagram handle from the British band Muse, and Meta executives then accidentally tagged @museband while promoting the launch. Shopify's deal carried the most money. CEO Tobi Lütke announced on X that Shopify would bring agentic checkout with Shop Pay to every Shopify store through Muse. Muse agents will be able to search Shopify, find products and even negotiate prices for users. Zuckerberg backed it up in his own post about easier discovery and checkout. The retailers arrived at Connect. Wang named Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair, and others as Muse partners. Meta's recap and a partnership thread from Hugo Barra added American Eagle, DICK'S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Michael Kors, Ulta, GitHub, Box, Fever, Turo and Viator. OpenTable announced its integration on LinkedIn on launch day. Two versions of the same mascot On X, Jolly turned into something else. Wang has posted more than 300 times there since launch, sometimes topping 100 posts in five days, mixing memes, shots at rivals and user success stories. He used Jolly to go after competitors too, claiming Muse "absolutely crushes Insect" in a jab at Instinct, an invite-only agent that's popular with Silicon Valley VCs. Some of the memes went further. In one , Jolly winks over its shoulder with its rear pointed at the viewer, apparently to promote the Muse integration with Box. Box didn't write that one, but it counts as a partner announcement anyway. Another puts Jolly in bed with two men in a recreation of a scene from "Challengers." The "thirsty" post at the top of this piece shows Adam Levine going wild over a picture of Jolly's backside in an Instagram DM. Fans followed Wang's lead with memes a trade publication can't print. Wang has been much quieter on Meta's own apps. According to Business Insider, he hasn't posted on Threads since Muse officially launched. On Instagram and Facebook, Jolly is the plush companion that fits comfortably next to a Walmart or Sephora ad. That split tracks who owns the platform. On X, which Meta doesn't own, a suggestive meme costs Meta nothing with its advertisers and gets attention from the early adopters who decide which AI products are worth trying. On Instagram and Facebook, where Meta's ad revenue comes from, Jolly stays soft and safe. Meta seems to have given each platform its own rules for the character, which takes more discipline than the X posts suggest. Spotify announced its integration with a friendly version of the mascot, while Box got its integration promoted by a Meta executive posting a cartoon backside. Did it work? For downloads, yes. Muse became the most popular free iPhone app and passed 2.5 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower data reported by CNN . Some analysts have called it possibly the biggest US app launch since ChatGPT. The mascot had help, though. Neo Ads found that Muse hit No. 1 with fewer daily downloads than ChatGPT had at launch, roughly 41,000 compared with 83,000. A waitlist, referral tokens, a ratings engine, the mascot and a lot of Apple Ads pushed it to the top. Jolly got people talking about Muse, but the installs came from the paid machinery around it. A brand that copies the mascot without that setup will probably get the memes and miss the chart. The polarization helps, up to a point People are split on Muse, and the memes are only part of it. Futurism called it possibly the creepiest AI agent ever released. Muse lets you name your assistant, but to be useful it needs access to things like your bank accounts, and Meta has a long record of privacy problems. A product that wants your bank login starts out with a trust deficit. A character people joke about wanting to date, and might soon carry on a keychain, helps close it. Skeptics see a cute face making a data-hungry product feel harmless, and plenty of marketers would point out that mascots have always done that job. Every round of that argument keeps Muse in the conversation, and Meta doesn't pay for any of it. The partners carry more of the risk. Sephora's checkout story now shares a mascot with a "Challengers" meme, and Box's integration got its biggest promotion from a butt joke it didn't write. Partners can use the character, but Meta decides how it behaves and where. So far that decision has mostly rested with one executive and his X account. Not every retailer wants in, either. Amazon has blocked Muse from its site. What brand teams should take from the rollout Meta has shown that one mascot can run across dozens of partners and act very differently from one platform to the next without the brand falling apart, as long as someone decides which version goes where. Partners signing on to a shared character should ask who makes that decision on each platform and how far that person is allowed to go. That question gets harder in December, when Meta plans to ship Muse Charm , a keychain device built around the character. Once Jolly is something people hold in their hands, the plush version and the X version will be the same object, and Meta will have a harder time keeping them apart.

## AI Made Content Cheap. Brands Are Turning to Newsrooms to Stay Heard.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/b2b-content-strategy-ai
Published: 2026-09-23T21:21:35.564Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Half of new online articles are now written by AI, and LinkedIn and AI search reward brands less every quarter. Outlever's Melissa Rosenthal explains why B2B companies are building newsrooms.
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Several of September's biggest marketing stories have something in common. LinkedIn reach is falling, AI engines are citing third parties instead of brands, and companies are writing formal rules about how employees can use ChatGPT. Each one is a symptom of the same shift. Content has become cheap to produce, and most of it now struggles to earn attention. The supply of content has doubled Researchers can now put numbers on the flood. Graphite sampled 55,400 English-language URLs from Common Crawl and found that primarily AI-generated articles have made up about half of all new articles since early 2025 . According to Graphite's full report , AI-written articles briefly passed human ones at 50.9% in the fourth quarter of 2025 before dipping to 49.9% in the first quarter of 2026. Pew Research Center used a different method in its August analysis and found signs of AI authorship in more than a third of pages published since ChatGPT launched. The share has stopped growing, and Graphite has a theory about why. Its researchers believe publishers found that mostly AI-written articles don't perform well in search. Volume went up, but the extra volume mostly made ordinary content harder to find. Companies are running into the same problem internally. In research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford , 40% of desk workers said they had received low-quality AI output from a colleague in the past month, and 42% said they trusted that colleague less afterward. Harvard Business Review gave the problem its name, "workslop." One response has been a wave of published AI writing policies . Clay co-founder Varun Anand made his company's policy official across the business in August, and his LinkedIn post about it drew nearly 10,000 reactions. For many buyers, a public promise that people wrote your content has become a selling point. Distribution is getting more expensive While the supply of content grew, the channels brands use to reach people got narrower. AuthoredUp data summarized by Botdog shows LinkedIn reach down 47% year over year and video reach down 72%. TryOrdinal data cited by Linkboost puts the decline in company page organic reach at 60% to 66% between 2024 and 2026. What reach remains goes to a small group of accounts. In Executive Presence's 2026 CEO study , seven executives, 13% of the group, collected 47% of all impressions, as Bill Hartzer noted in his review . Over the same period, LinkedIn revenue grew 12% in Microsoft's June quarter, driven mainly by its advertising business. State of Brand reported this week on the paid tools LinkedIn has rolled out to help brands buy back the reach they lost. AI search adds a second squeeze. AirOps' 2026 State of AI Search report found that 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party pages rather than a brand's own site. G2's research found that 51% of B2B software buyers now start research in an AI chatbot more often than on Google. When a buyer asks an AI engine about your company, the answer is mostly built from what other people have published about you . Put together, brands are dealing with three problems at once. Their content looks like everyone else's, their social reach costs money to recover, and AI tools give little weight to what brands say about themselves. Becoming the source Melissa Rosenthal , co-founder of Outlever , which publishes State of Brand, has made this argument in podcast appearances throughout the year. Most recently she joined Dave Gerhardt on the Exit Five podcast . In her post about the episode , she summed up her view this way: "You don't win by 'doing content.' You win by building a media company." Rosenthal was an early employee at BuzzFeed, a company that grew on other platforms' distribution and suffered when those platforms changed course. In a Superpath AMA this summer, she said the main lesson she took from that period is that "the rails are never yours." Her approach for B2B companies comes down to three steps. 1. Build a news source instead of a blog. Rosenthal argues that the typical B2B blog was written for a search algorithm and never built a real readership, a trend State of Brand has covered in its reporting on the collapse of the B2B blog . She recommends starting small. Set aside a section of your existing site where your team can publish news and commentary quickly, and focus on topics your industry cares about that also connect to your business. She also believes a small market can be an advantage. A company trying to reach 5,000 people has an easier path to becoming their main news source than one chasing 500,000, because niche audiences are often underserved. Outlever built Benefits Brief for health benefits company SureCo to cover the ICHRA market for insurance brokers, and she says it became widely discussed in that industry within a few months. This kind of reporting also matters for AI search. A Search Engine Land study, cited in State of Brand's analysis of AI citations , found that 52.2% of the passages AI engines cited contained original or proprietary data. Engines are far more likely to cite original reporting than repackaged content. 2. Build the publication around people. An AI model can write an opinion about your market, but it cannot interview your customers. On The Changemakers podcast , Rosenthal described Outlever's approach as featuring subject matter experts, customers and partners rather than executives alone. Her team also selects interview subjects from a client's target accounts. She says that produces demand generation and account-based marketing results within weeks. Interview-based stories also avoid a problem most content teams know well. Customers who would never approve a formal case study are often happy to talk about what is happening in their industry. The distribution data points in the same direction. LinkedIn now favors posts from individuals, and AI engines lean on named experts and employees more than on brand copy. A publication built on interviews supplies both. 3. Publish at the speed of news and measure like a publisher. Rosenthal considers timeliness the main difference between a newsroom and a content calendar. She calls newsjacking, meaning quick reactions to industry news, the most effective approach on LinkedIn right now. She also warns against building everything around one platform's current preferences, because those preferences change. In her model, LinkedIn is a way to distribute the publication, and the publication itself lives on a site the company owns. On measurement, she tells marketing leaders to watch early signals before revenue shows up. Are the right people reading? Are they returning and sharing? Are the right customer voices being featured? She has seen many companies shut these programs down while waiting for precise attribution that takes time to arrive. The financial argument rests on comparing owned media with paid media. Ad spending stops producing results as soon as the budget runs out. A publication keeps attracting readers over time, and the cost per reader tends to fall as it grows. State of Brand has examined how companies are staffing these teams and why some brand newsrooms fail . The results so far State of Brand is Outlever's own test of the approach. Rosenthal says the publication reached millions of visitors within three months. Most of that traffic now comes from sources Outlever doesn't pay for, including syndication, AI search and email newsletters. Few large companies are competing for this ground yet. A McKinsey survey found that only 16% of Fortune 500 consumer-brand CMOs systematically track how their brands perform in AI search. Most teams still judge content by how much they publish. For marketing leaders planning 2027 budgets, a more useful test is whether people in your industry would notice if your content stopped appearing. Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which is mentioned in this article. Melissa Rosenthal is Outlever's co-founder.

## Companies Are Using Their Own Data to Newsjack Breaking Stories
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/data-driven-newsjacking
Published: 2026-09-23T18:14:23.790Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: Redfin, ADP and Ramp have each turned internal data into news coverage within days, and sometimes hours, of a major story. Smaller B2B companies can do the same with narrower data.
Full text:
On September 16, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in three years. That afternoon, Inman's roundup of economist reactions included commentary from Chen Zhao, Redfin's head of economics research. She said rates would "generally stay high for the foreseeable future," and suggested the hike could be the start of a longer tightening cycle. Two days later, Redfin released an analysis of data from its own buyer's agents. Sellers gave buyers concessions in 44.7% of August home sales , the highest share for that month since at least 2020. Redfin called August the strongest buyer's market in its records, which go back to 2013. In Atlanta, sellers offered concessions in 72.8% of sales. Inman ran the story under a headline tying the data to the Fed's decision. Agents, buyers and reporters all wanted to know what the hike meant for housing, and Redfin had current numbers from its own transactions. The company had also been writing about the meeting for weeks. On September 8, its weekly economic update laid out which inflation readings would likely decide the vote. After the August consumer price report came out the week before the meeting, a Redfin News post broke down the core figure to two decimal places. Why reporters use company data In Muck Rack's 2024 State of Journalism survey , 82% of journalists said they consider researchers credible sources. Only 32% said the same about in-house PR staff. A company economist who publishes original data tends to get treated like the first group. AI search engines also lean on original data. A Search Engine Land study, cited in State of Brand's reporting on AI search , found that 52.2% of the passages AI engines cite contain original or proprietary data. AirOps found that 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party pages. A news story that cites a company's numbers counts as one of those pages. Newsjacking usually means a brand posting an opinion about whatever is trending, and editors tend to ignore it. A company with relevant data can give an editor information the story is missing. Filling in for federal data Private data got extra attention this year when federal releases were delayed. After a four-day government shutdown in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics moved its January jobs report from February 6 to February 11. The 43-day shutdown the previous fall had held up federal data for much longer. During both gaps, economists and investors turned to ADP, Indeed, Revelio Labs and Paychex for labor market numbers. ADP's National Employment Report draws on anonymized payroll data from more than 26 million private-sector employees and is produced with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. It comes out on a fixed schedule. The August release lists the date and time of the next one, September 30 at 8:15 a.m. Eastern. Outlets such as Fox Business cover each release as economic news. Private data also draws scrutiny. A Public Administration Policy analysis noted that Revelio's May jobs estimate differed sharply from the BLS figure and criticized the firm for not publishing detailed documentation of its methodology. Ramp's monthly AI Index Ramp publishes a monthly AI Index that tracks how U.S. businesses spend on AI, using card and bill-pay data from more than 50,000 companies. In May, the index showed Anthropic passing OpenAI in business adoption for the first time, 34.4% to 32.3%. Axios, VentureBeat and other outlets covered it the day it came out. In the same release, lead economist Ara Kharazian listed reasons he remained skeptical of Anthropic . He wrote that the company's incentives were "misaligned with those of business customers." Corporate research rarely criticizes the company it just ranked first, and that gives reporters more reason to take the index seriously. Kharazian publishes each month's findings first in his Econ Lab newsletter , and Ramp says his work has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. State of Brand has written about the Ramp and Carta approach in more detail. Rosenthal's advice Melissa Rosenthal , co-founder of Outlever , which publishes State of Brand, has discussed newsjacking in several podcast appearances this year. In a Superpath AMA this summer, she called it the main way to build an audience on LinkedIn right now and said reaction time is a large part of what makes an owned media program work. Her advice for companies with their own data breaks down into three steps. Map your data to the news calendar Rosenthal tells companies to cover topics their industry cares about that also connect to their own business, and to skip everything else. For a company with proprietary data, that starts with a list of scheduled events its market follows, such as Fed meetings, jobs reports, earnings dates, regulatory deadlines and major conferences. Next to each event, the team notes which internal metrics could say something useful about it. Redfin's previews before the Fed meeting are an example. When the decision came, the team had already done the background work. Give the data a named expert Zhao, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson and Kharazian all have public bios and bylines, and reporters quote them by name. A dataset alone doesn't give a journalist anyone to quote. The publications Outlever builds are organized around interviews with subject matter experts, customers and partners , and State of Brand has reported that AI engines increasingly cite named people over brand copy. The expert also needs room to say things that don't flatter the company or its market, as Kharazian did. Publish on your own site with a methodology note Redfin posts its analysis on Redfin News . Ramp posts on ramp.com/data and in Kharazian's newsletter. When a reporter cites a number, the link points to a page the company owns, and over time those pages add up to a public record of its analysis. Rosenthal treats LinkedIn as a distribution channel for this work. In the Superpath AMA, she warned that building everything around one platform's algorithm leaves a company exposed when the algorithm changes. The criticism of Revelio is a reminder that reporters and analysts check how private numbers were produced, so a clear methodology note belongs next to every release. Smaller datasets Most B2B companies won't produce anything like a national jobs report. Rosenthal has argued that a small audience can work in a company's favor, since niche markets tend to be underserved and it takes less to become their main source of news. Outlever's Benefits Brief , built for SureCo, covers the ICHRA market for insurance brokers. A payments company that serves regional contractors, for example, may see changes in how quickly construction invoices get paid well before any public source reports them. On measurement, Rosenthal tells companies to watch early signals, including whether the right people are reading, coming back and sharing. For a data program, citations and links from reporters and newsletters belong on that list. She has also said leadership teams often cancel these programs before the revenue shows up. ADP releases its September numbers on September 30, and Microsoft reports quarterly earnings, including LinkedIn's results, in late October . Companies with data relevant to either event still have a few weeks to prepare. Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which is mentioned in this article. Melissa Rosenthal is Outlever's co-founder.

## LinkedIn Isn't Hiding Your Posts. It's Selling Them Back to You.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/linkedin-organic-reach-pay-to-play
Published: 2026-09-23T16:15:58.874Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: The reach collapse has a technical explanation, and the platform's new price list has a commercial one.
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If your LinkedIn numbers dropped hard this year, you have plenty of company. Ask around and you'll hear a dozen theories. The algorithm punishes AI copy. Hashtags stopped working. Carousels are finished. You posted at 11 a.m. instead of 8. LinkedIn's own answer is that the feed now favors relevance and quality. Some of those explanations hold up. Brand leaders should still look past the tactical advice, because a larger pattern is forming. LinkedIn rebuilt its feed so that attention pools around fewer accounts, and over the same months it rolled out a series of paid tools for buying back the reach most brands lost. Whether anyone at the company intended that sequence matters less than what it means for your budget. The March rebuild The turning point came in March. According to ZoomSphere's breakdown of the announcement , LinkedIn engineering lead Hristo Danchev used the company's engineering blog on March 12, 2026 to introduce a new feed that runs retrieval and ranking through one system built on large language model embeddings, retiring the older mix of separate specialized models. Your network used to carry your posts. Now a model reads each post, decides what it's about, and picks the people it thinks should see it. Zoomsphere The numbers since then have been rough. Botdog summarizes AuthoredUp's data : reach fell 47% year over year, video fell 72%, and even well-performing text posts lost 34%. Company pages fared worse. Linkboost cites TryOrdinal platform data showing company page organic reach down 60% to 66% between 2024 and 2026, with personal profiles now far outpacing company pages. Botdog Linkboost blog The employee advocacy platform DSMN8 went further and studied what actually shows up in people's feeds . Its team didn't find a single organic company page post that appeared without someone in the viewer's network engaging with it first, and it concluded that company pages now look like a pay-to-play channel. DSMN8 Keep in mind who's publishing these figures. Nearly every one comes from a company selling LinkedIn software, consulting or advocacy programs, and all of them benefit when marketers believe the old approach is broken. But these firms use different methods and different datasets, and they keep landing on the same conclusion. LinkedIn's explanation LinkedIn describes the change as a relevance upgrade. As ALM Corp reported , the company said the new system is built to give creators more opportunities to reach interested audiences, since semantic matching can put niche experts in front of professionals who never followed them. Supporters of the change add that when each user sees fewer posts filtered more tightly for relevance, the audience for any one post shrinks as a matter of course. You lose impressions, the argument goes, and gain better ones. ALM CorpALM Corp That argument has some evidence behind it. Executive Presence publishes an annual study of CEO posting, and its 2026 report found reach going up. Bill Hartzer's review of the report notes that the average executive post drew 5,083 impressions in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 4,473 in the same quarter a year earlier. Bill Hartzer A different number from the same study tells you more. Seven executives, 13% of the group, accounted for 47% of all impressions in the dataset. And later in the deck, the report says LinkedIn organic reach has fallen materially, that the platform is running Facebook's 2011 playbook, and that it is heading toward pay-to-play. Bill HartzerBill Hartzer Hartzer squares the two findings without much trouble. Reach is climbing for executives who have coaching, post on a fixed schedule and get help coming up with ideas, and it is falling for everybody else. Bill Hartzer So the new LinkedIn may not hand out less reach in total. It hands it to fewer people: the consistent, the coached and the well-staffed. Brand pages, occasional posters and the marketing manager who writes posts between meetings are all getting squeezed. Where the revenue comes from LinkedIn now leans on one part of its business to keep growing, and that's the ads business. For years recruiting was the core, and it has struggled. Zacks, via Yahoo Finance , reported that weaker hiring has hurt Talent Solutions, while advertising growth has helped cover the shortfall. In Microsoft's June quarter, per ivris tech , LinkedIn revenue rose 12% year over year, or 10% in constant currency, and the company attributed the increase mainly to Marketing Solutions, its advertising unit. The format LinkedIn has promoted hardest is also its fastest-growing ad product. GeekWire reported that Satya Nadella told analysts paid video ads on LinkedIn had grown 30% year over year. LinkedIn Growth Boosts Momentum: Can MSFT Stock Rally Higher? +2 The outlook is softer. Staffing Industry Analysts reported that CFO Amy Hood expects LinkedIn revenue to grow in the high single digits in the current quarter. When a company used to double-digit growth sees recruiting stall and guidance slip, the ad business carries more of the load. Staffing Industry The company has also restructured. In May, Dataconomy reported , LinkedIn cut about 5% of its workforce, around 875 people, in its Global Business Organization, marketing, engineering and product teams. In a memo, CEO Daniel Shapero said the company had to deliver better returns on investment and concentrate on high-impact priorities. Metaintro notes that the Global Business Organization is LinkedIn's sales arm. Dataconomy Metaintro That may explain something marketers have been mentioning to us: LinkedIn account executives seem more persistent than they were a year ago, and more willing to press. We can't see their quotas from the outside, so treat this as anecdote. But a smaller sales team, slowing growth targets and a CEO asking for better returns usually add up to a harder sell. That alone would account for a pushier rep, with or without any change to the feed. The paid features keep coming The strongest evidence sits in LinkedIn's product updates. Over the past several months the company has added paid ways to get what organic posts used to deliver for free. SocialBee's running log of LinkedIn updates shows that mobile post boosting is reaching more users, every brand on a Premium Company Page plan now qualifies for a verification tick, and posts now display separate figures for in-network and out-of-network reach. HeyOrca reports that Competitor Analysis is being limited to paying company pages. Thought leader ads round out the set. They let a brand pay to extend the reach of an employee's or executive's organic post, which happens to be the content the new feed rewards most. SocialBee HeyOrca The reach metrics stand out. LinkedIn now shows you how much of each post's audience came from outside your network, the portion the model controls. A boost button sits nearby. The company has measured the distance between what a post earned and what it could have earned, and it will sell you the difference. Nobody at LinkedIn would need to switch on a "suppress brands" setting for this to happen. The feed rebuild concentrated organic attention in fewer accounts, and the product team built ways to buy the rest. From a brand's side of the screen, the outcome is identical. Marketers have been here before Anyone who ran a Facebook Page in the early 2010s will recognize the pattern. Hartzer lived through it and writes that Facebook Page organic reach went from roughly half of an audience to low single digits in about four years, and it never came back. Cheap boosted posts that paid off well for early adopters marked the start of that decline. Bill Hartzer LinkedIn is at that stage now. The Executive Presence report advises putting $50 to $500 behind a strong organic post through thought leader ads, and Hartzer thinks that's sound advice for now. He also offers the warning every marketer should hear: "Cheap distribution stays cheap right up until the platform notices what it is worth." Bill Hartzer What brands should do now Stop judging your company page by the standards of 2023. If page reach dropped 60%, a sharper carousel won't bring it back. Staff and budget the page for its current job, which is signaling credibility and running your ad account. Put your organic effort behind people. The feed now sends attention through individuals who post consistently on clear topics, which makes employee and executive programs the main organic channel you have left. The Executive Presence data suggests steady posting matters more than production value. Use boosting while it's cheap, and don't count on today's prices lasting. Putting money behind a post that has already proven itself is a good deal right now, and the targeting data teaches you something about your market. Just leave room in next year's plan for those costs to climb. Grow audiences you own. Newsletters, email lists, events and communities keep their value whatever happens to the feed. Every follower you bring off the platform is one LinkedIn can't charge you to reach later. And follow Microsoft's earnings along with the algorithm guides. The next report lands in late October. If Marketing Solutions is still doing most of LinkedIn's growing, expect more paid features, more calls from your rep and thinner organic reach for anyone who isn't paying or posting like a professional. LinkedIn is telling the truth when it says the new feed rewards relevance. It's also a business that needs its ad revenue to keep rising, and it has built a feed where relevance comes with a price tag. Marketers who keep both facts in view will plan and spend accordingly. The ones who only absorb the first will keep rewriting their opening lines and wondering why fewer people see them.

## Is Y Combinator Having a Brand Crisis Moment?
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/yc-brand-crisis-delve-corgi
Published: 2026-09-22T20:54:42.085Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Delve got kicked out over alleged fake SOC 2 reports and Corgi keeps picking fights online, and both are testing what the YC name still guarantees.
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Ask a founder what they got out of Y Combinator and most will mention the network before the money. The name opens doors. Investors take the call, enterprise buyers ease up on vetting, and other founders offer a level of trust they would never give a stranger. In practice YC works less like an accelerator and more like a credential, so its brand depends on whether that credential holds up. This year it has been tested twice in public, first by Delve and now by Corgi. Delve On paper, Delve was a model YC company. Two 21-year-old MIT dropouts , Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, founded it in late 2023 with a pitch to use AI to shrink months of compliance work for SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and GDPR into days. It came out of YC's W24 batch with a $300M valuation, Insight Partners backing and more than 1,000 paying customers . In March, an anonymous writer using the name DeepDelver published Delve: Fake Compliance as a Service (Part I) . The post alleged that Delve produced fake evidence, wrote auditor conclusions for certification mills that rubber stamped the reports, and skipped major framework requirements while telling clients they were fully compliant. The leaked reports were hard to explain away. ComplianceHub found that all 259 Type II SOC 2 reports in the leaked set claimed zero security incidents, zero personnel changes and zero cyber incidents, and all carried identical "unable to test" conclusions across the same control categories. A later installment brought the story inside YC's own walls. DeepDelver alleged that Delve had forked an open-source agent-building tool from fellow YC company Sim.ai and repackaged it as its own Pathways product, after the Sim Studio team had paid Delve $15,000 for compliance work. YC acted within days. Around April 3 , it removed Delve from its company directory and asked the founders to leave. In a message on Bookface, YC's internal forum, Garry Tan reportedly wrote that "YC is a community, not just an accelerator." TechCrunch reported that Kocalar confirmed the split on X, and that Insight Partners also appeared to delete posts about its investment, though its main blog post was later restored. Delve has denied wrongdoing. Kaushik said the company "grew too fast and fell short" but rejected the fraud claims, blaming a targeted cyberattack and saying the whistleblower's data had been manipulated or taken out of context. The company also posted a response to the allegations on its blog. For YC, the damage goes past one company. Critics pointed out that Delve concentrated on selling to other YC companies who trusted the YC brand. The network founders give up equity to join is the same thing that made Delve's sales pitch work. YC's handling of the exit didn't help. One widely read essay noted that Delve disappeared from YC's directory with no press release or public statement, and argued it was expelled for stealing from a fellow YC company rather than for anything it did to customers. Commenters on Hacker News made the same point. Fair or not, that reading is now part of how people talk about YC. Corgi Corgi is a different sort of problem. Nobody has accused it of fraud, and by most measures the business is working. It's a San Francisco insurtech that operates as a licensed carrier for tech startups, and as of June 2026 it was valued at $2.6 billion. What draws attention is how the company behaves, and how much of that happens in YC's backyard. In February it opened a 24-hour café at its San Francisco headquarters with a discount for YC alumni, and in April it started free bus routes around YC's offices. In June, Papermark co-founder Marc Seitz went after Corgi on X , accusing it of taking Papermark's open-source and enterprise-licensed code for its new Dataroom product. He added that it "makes the rest of your business questionable and the YC community look terrible." Laqua's first reply said his team had told him they used none of Papermark's code, and promised a code audit with the results posted on Corgi's website. He followed up with a code comparison , admitting the team should have relied more on its own language and visual choices, and suggesting Seitz was upset because Corgi's product was mostly free and competed with his. X users attached a Community Note to that post claiming Corgi's Dataroom shared identical variable names, code structure and UI text with Papermark. TechCrunch's reporting filled in more. The founder of Hello World Cafe, which competes with Corgi's coffee business, said he received a cease-and-desist from Corgi's lawyers over a tweet joking about the controversy. The company had also sued several former employees, and Laqua went viral after telling Harry Stebbings' podcast he expects staff to work seven days a week. Corgi sent Seitz a cease-and-desist too, demanding he take down his post. The latest round started last week. Insurance Business reported that a Corgi marketing employee, in a since-deleted X post, named the company's hands-off speech policy as a reason she joined, and contrasted it with a previous employer that had asked her to delete a comment containing a disability-related slur. That set off wider scrutiny of Corgi's social media strategy and the group of young female employees known online as the "Corgi Girls." Laqua refused to budge . To people pressing him to fire staff over their posts, he wrote that "it's not going to happen," and argued companies would aim higher if employees could speak freely instead of producing what he called "corporate slop." YC hasn't said anything publicly about Corgi. Corgi disputes the copying claims and runs a licensed insurance business with paying customers. The optics are still bad for YC. A company that leans this hard on its YC ties, down to cheaper coffee for alumni, brings some of the YC name along into every fight it picks online. A longer pattern Either story alone would fade. Together they sit on top of older ones. In 2024, YC took heat for backing PearAI, whose founder openly described the product as a clone of VSCode and another AI editor called Continue, and Tan defended the company on X. Tan's own posting adds to it. After he bragged in March about how much AI-generated code he was shipping, Fast Company reported that a developer went through his blog and found bloat, waste and rookie mistakes. What connects these cases is a culture that rewards moving fast and posting loudly. Delve sold certifications on a timeline that real audits struggle to match. Corgi launched a product with on-screen text close enough to a competitor's that it had to change it, then sent legal letters to critics. YC's own leadership talks the same way online, which makes it hard for the firm to seem surprised when a portfolio company follows suit. Crisis or not I wouldn't call it a crisis yet. YC still draws the strongest applicant pool in startups, and Demo Day still pulls in every investor who matters. One expulsion and one combative portfolio company won't erase two decades of Airbnb and Stripe. The risk is slower than that. A credential only works if people believe it screens for something. Delve raised doubts about the screening. Corgi raises a separate question about whether YC has any say in how its companies represent the network once they've graduated. By staying quiet on both, YC leaves the explaining to other people. What YC could do, without policing anyone's posts, is explain publicly what its name is meant to guarantee and what gets a company removed. So far it has let an anonymous Substack writer, a rival founder on X and a lot of angry replies decide what "YC-backed" means this year.

## AI Barely Uses Your Website to Describe Your Brand
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/ai-search-third-party-citations-strategy
Published: 2026-09-22T02:10:13.941Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: When buyers ask an AI engine about your company, it leans almost entirely on what other people have published about you. Your own site is a small fraction of the input, and that changes where Q4 budget should go.
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Companies treat the website as the seat of their reputation. It is where the brand gets stated most precisely, fought over in every redesign, and defended as the official account of who the company is. It is the one part of the story a company fully controls. It is also close to irrelevant to how the audience that matters now forms its first impression. When a buyer asks an AI engine about your company, your category, or the problem you solve, the model assembles an answer from a pool of sources, and your domain is a thin slice of it. AirOps' 2026 State of AI Search report found that 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party pages rather than owned domains. Other analyses land a brand's own site somewhere between 5 and 10% of what the engines reference. Take either figure and the point survives: the page you control most tightly is the page the machine consults least. The reader changed, not the page. Your website is doing what it always did. What moved is who reads it, and increasingly the reader is a model that skims it once, treats it as one input among many, and discounts it because it knows the source is you talking about yourself. That discount is worth understanding, because it is not going away. AI systems appear to weight owned domains lower precisely because they are owned. To the model, a claim you make about your own company carries less evidentiary weight than the same claim from a third party who has no obvious reason to flatter you. This is a defensible way for a system to behave, and it happens to strip the corporate website of the authority it used to carry. Your least biased evidence about yourself is, by definition, the evidence you did not write. So the model looks elsewhere. About 60% of AI Overview citations come from URLs outside the top 20 organic results, per the same AirOps report , which means it is quoting pages you never wrote and may not know exist. The portrait it paints of you is built almost entirely from other people's sentences. Read it as a relocation, not a loss If your whole narrative strategy sits on your own channels, that reads as a loss of control, and it is a real one. You spent years making the website the canonical source, and it turns out the canonical source is everyone else. There is a more useful way to take it. Your narrative did not stop mattering; it moved. Owning your story is no longer the same as owning the page it sits on. It now means being the source that other pages cite. A company that turns up across analyst notes, trade press, podcasts, community threads, and independent newsletters gives the model plenty to work with. A company whose story lives only on its own domain gets left out of the answer. This is the gap Outlever was built to close. Outlever builds news publications for companies: editorial outlets that cover an industry, talk to the people working in it, and publish the kind of reported material AI engines draw on when they assemble an answer. Instead of hoping the trade press eventually gets around to your category, a company can put a steady supply of citable coverage into the pool the model reads. This settles an argument that used to be hard to win in a budget meeting. For years the case for thought leadership rested on soft returns, on trust and affinity and being known, none of which survive a CFO asking for the number. The citation data hands the argument something firmer. Publishing a real point of view is now the mechanism that puts you in the pool of sources the model actually reads. It is not a complement to performance marketing. It is the supply line for whether you appear in the channel where buyers now begin. And they do begin there. G2's Answer Economy report found 51% of B2B software buyers now start research in an AI chatbot more often than on Google. The first impression has left your homepage and moved into a synthesized answer built from third-party material. If none of that material is about you, neither is the impression. Where the Q4 money should actually go The practical move cuts against reflex, which is what makes it easy to get wrong. When AI visibility slips, the instinct is to pour more into the site: more landing pages, more on-site content, another SEO sprint. That is spending against the 8%. It pours effort into the input the model weights least. The higher-return move is to fund the things worth citing and the earned distribution that gets them cited. Original research and proprietary data earn their keep here, because a Search Engine Land study found 52.2% of AI-cited passages contained original or owned data, well above how often original data shows up in content generally. A point of view sharp enough that a journalist or analyst wants to quote it. Executives and specialists placed in third-party venues rather than only on the company blog. A dedicated news publication, like the ones Outlever builds, pulls these threads together. It turns proprietary insight into reported stories, gives executives and industry voices a venue beyond the corporate blog, and produces a continuous stream of material structured to be found and cited rather than a one-off campaign that fades after launch. None of this retires the website. The site still converts, still closes, still serves the buyer who has already decided to look. The shift is recognizing the website as the last mile rather than the first, and funding the first mile to match. Most companies will get here eventually, after a few quarters of watching rivals turn up in answers they are missing from. Moving now buys a structural edge while it is still cheap: a McKinsey survey of Fortune 500 consumer-brand CMOs found that only 16% systematically track AI search performance, so the field competing for citations today is a fraction of the field that will compete for them later. The website is not going anywhere and it is not worthless. But it accounts for roughly 8% of the story now. The other 92% is being written by other people, about you, in the venues the model trusts. The question is whether you are giving them anything worth writing down, and whether you have built a place where it gets written. Disclosure: State of Brand is powered by Outlever, which is mentioned in this article.

## More Companies Are Launching AI Writing Policies as the Slop War Heats Up
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/companies-ai-writing-policies-slop
Published: 2026-09-21T21:54:48.226Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Clay's version went viral in August. Heidi Health published its own this week. Polarsteps and Leapsome sit in between. The companies drawing these lines are, almost without exception, the ones building AI.
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There is a new kind of document circulating on LinkedIn, and it has started to behave like a genre. A company publishes a short set of principles about how its people are allowed to use AI to write. A marketing or engineering leader posts it. It gets thousands of reactions. Another company reads it and ships its own. This week it was Heidi Health's turn. The Melbourne clinical-AI company, which automates documentation and form-filling so clinicians can focus on patients and now runs more than two million consults a week across 116 countries, published an AI writing policy built on six principles. Among them: I think, therefore I write ; AI is your thought partner, not your writer ; transparent attribution is essential . The person who posted it , Heidi Health's global head of communications Emma Mackenzie, made no claim to having invented the form. "We're not the first company to do this, and we won't be the last," she wrote. That sentence is the tell. The AI writing policy now arrives with an awareness that it is one of many. The slop that pays for it The demand is not mysterious. Last September, researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford's Social Media Lab gave the problem a name : workslop, a deliberate play on "AI slop," defined as AI-generated work that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to move a task forward. In a survey of 1,150 full-time US desk workers, 40% reported receiving workslop in the previous month. Each incident cost the recipient close to two hours to sort out, which the researchers costed at roughly $186 per employee per month, or more than $9 million a year for a 10,000-person company. The damage was social as well as financial: 42% said they trusted a colleague less after receiving low-quality AI output from them. Most of that slop was manufactured on purpose. Through 2025, the loudest corporate story about AI was the mandate: use it more, use it faster, prove you used it. The bill is now arriving. Shopify's Tobi Lütke, one of the movement's most quoted champions, recently warned that staff who pass along unexamined AI output are lobbing "slop grenades" that leave colleagues to clean up the mess. Duolingo, another AI-first standard-bearer, found that around 20% of the AI-generated stories it produced was pure workslop that had to be filtered out. The writing policy is what the second act looks like: the same companies discovering that "more AI" and "more usable work" are not the same instruction. Four companies, one document The template was set by Clay. Its policy was written by engineer Sophie Alpert for the engineering team, adopted by other departments once they saw it work, and made company-wide by co-founder Varun Anand in August . His post drew nearly 10,000 reactions and more than 700 reposts. Its four principles have become the load-bearing structure that later versions borrow from: stand behind every sentence, writing is thinking, spend more time writing than the reader spends reading, length is not a virtue. The borrowing is visible. Amsterdam's Polarsteps, the travel app with roughly 100 employees, released internal AI writing principles earlier this year; CEO Clare Jones lets staff brainstorm and draft with AI but requires them to apply their own thinking, disclose when they've used it, and make sure the final copy reflects their own reasoning and voice. Jones's reasoning for writing anything down at all is the most honest line in the whole trend: simply asking people to stop had not worked, and a formal policy gives everyone a shared reference point instead of a leader repeating themselves. The Berlin- and New York-based HR software firm Leapsome rolled out its own version in mid-August for around 130 staff, prioritizing clarity and requiring staff to stand behind every statement. Tellingly, some Leapsome employees asked the company to go further and restrict AI in peer-to-peer messages and marketing copy. Read four of these back to back and the convergence is the point. Disclosure, ownership, "writing is thinking," AI as assistant rather than author: the genre already has conventions. The people writing them are selling AI The recurring irony is that the companies drawing these lines are, disproportionately, AI companies. Clay's platform helps thousands of companies research accounts and personalize outreach at scale, with AI doing much of the work. Heidi Health's entire product generates clinical documents. It exists to write the note so the doctor doesn't have to. The line they're all drawing falls in the same place: between the product and the person. Heidi Health's policy carves out AI as a genuine equalizer, pointing at people writing in a second language, or anyone frozen by a blank page, while refusing to let the tool stand in for a colleague's actual thinking. Polarsteps still has professional in-house writers produce its consumer-facing copy. The machine can assemble, draft and personalize; what it cannot do is be the author of record for something a human is supposed to have thought about. Whether that distinction survives the commercial pressure to ship more, faster, is the open question hanging over all of it. Each of these companies has at least committed the line to writing, which is more than most of the industry has done. The policy is the marketing For a brand audience, the most useful thing to notice is where these documents live. They are not buried in an employee handbook or routed through legal. They are published on LinkedIn, by marketing and comms and engineering leaders, built to travel. Heidi Health's was written by Emma Mackenzie. Clay's became one of the most-shared brand artifacts the company produced this year. That makes the AI writing policy a new kind of marketing object. In a market where every competitor's site, deck and outbound email is converging toward the same frictionless AI register, publishing a credible standard for not sounding like that is a positioning move. It says: a human wrote this, and a human will answer for it. The risk, of course, is the same one that shadows any values statement: it's cheaper to publish the principles than to live by them, and a document about resisting slop can itself be a very polished piece of slop. The companies that will get credit for this are the ones whose published writing, six months from now, still reads like a person had to sit down and think. The rest will have added one more artifact to the pile the policy was supposed to shrink.

## Shopify's CEO Says Employees Are Throwing 'AI Slop Grenades' at Each Other
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/shopify-ceo-ai-slop-grenades
Published: 2026-09-21T17:31:44.217Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke says employees are lobbing "AI slop grenades," and the real casualty is your brand.
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You know the move. You dump a half-formed thought into Claude, tell it to make the thing sound professional, read the first paragraph, and send it. For about an hour you feel like a genius, because you produced something long and confident and neatly formatted. Then one lands in your own inbox. A 30-page report your manager clearly hasn't read, closing with the words "would love your thoughts." So you paste it back into an AI and ask what it's actually saying. At that point a machine is decoding a message another machine wrote for a person who never looked at either one, and somewhere inside that loop, a brand is quietly taking damage. Shopify's Tobias Lütke has given the thing a name. As Fortune reported on September 17, 2026 , the CEO who told his company AI use was a "baseline expectation," and that people should prove they couldn't get something done with AI before asking for more resources, is now dealing with what everyone actually did with that instruction. Speaking on The Knowledge Project podcast , he described employees shipping unreviewed emails and code and calling it finished. He labels the output "slop grenades," and the phrase is well chosen. A grenade never hurts the person who throws it. It hurts whoever happens to be standing nearby when it goes off. Why this lands on the brand desk Most of the coverage is filing this under productivity, and that framing holds up. In a study from the Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp , researchers found that about 40% of desk workers had received AI "workslop" from a coworker, with each instance costing close to two hours to untangle and adding up to a real financial drag across a large company. Those are real hours and a real number. We spend our time on brand, though, so let us add the part that number leaves out. People tend to picture a brand as a logo, a color palette, or the mission statement hanging in reception. What a brand really comes down to is the accumulated experience of what it's like to deal with a company, and the first place that experience gets built is inside the walls. It shows up in the recaps, the shared docs, the Slack threads, the quick note someone fires off before a meeting. Every one of those messages is a company practicing its voice in a low-stakes room before that voice ever reaches a customer. Slop grenades wreck that practice room. They trade voice for volume and swap a point of view for the flattened average of everything a model has already absorbed. Worse, they teach your own people to distrust anything that shows up in a company document, so the signal you spent years building starts reading as noise to the very people who are supposed to carry it outward. Trust that the thing in front of you is worth reading is the one resource a brand cannot manufacture more of on demand. Slop spends it as if it were free. The tell is "would love your thoughts" Look at how the grenades tend to end. Would love your thoughts. Curious what you think. Open to any feedback. That language used to signal collaboration. A lot of the time now it signals something colder, closer to an admission that the sender never formed a judgment and is quietly hoping the reader will supply one. The AI produced the content, and the sender handed off the single task it can't do for them, which is deciding whether any of it is good. For a brand, that decision is the whole job. The reason a company can charge more, attract better people, and earn trust faster is that somewhere in the chain a human being looked at the work and took responsibility for saying this is good and this is us. Lütke's quietest point is his strongest one. He put it plainly on the podcast: machines don't take responsibility, and a person always ends up owning the result. When that person never read what went out under their name, the line of accountability breaks, and the brand is what slips through the crack. So what actually helps The answer here has nothing to do with backing away from AI. Shopify isn't reversing course, and Lütke has been explicit that the mandate stands. What separates useful output from a slop grenade is whether a human actually reviewed it and put their judgment behind it before it left their hands. In practice that means sending less and standing behind more of it. A three-line recap you can defend does more for you than a ten-page one you're hoping nobody scrutinizes, because your brand gets judged on that ratio whether you like it or not. It means treating your name on a document as a promise that you read the thing and you vouch for it, since the moment "I sent it" and "I stand by it" come apart, the trust underneath your brand comes apart with them. And it means retiring "would love your thoughts" as an automatic closer. Form the thought yourself first. Tell people what you think the material means and what you'd do about it, then let AI help you draft it rather than help you skip the part where you decide. Underneath all of it is one habit worth protecting. The voice a company uses on itself is the voice it eventually uses on everyone else, so whatever quality goes into your internal writing is roughly the quality that comes back out in front of customers. The CEO celebrating soaring AI adoption while the building fills with smoke isn't wrong about the adoption. He's counting the wrong thing. Usage climbed and careful judgment slipped, and careful judgment was carrying the brand the entire time. Throw fewer grenades.

## The Brand No Longer Belongs to Marketing. It Belongs to People Who Can Quit.
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/b2b-brand-employee-advocates-ai-search
Published: 2026-09-17T15:36:05.996Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: AI search stopped citing brand copy and started citing trusted people. So B2B brands are handing their credibility to employees and experts who can walk.
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The stat looks like a routine budget note. Forrester expects roughly 75% of enterprise B2B companies to raise their influencer relations budgets in 2026. File it under channel expansion, approve it, move on. That would be a mistake. The 2026 version of B2B influence has almost nothing to do with the Instagram-sponsorship image the word still carries. What enterprises are funding is a mix of formal employee advocacy programs and paid partnerships with outside subject-matter experts , and they are not doing it for reach. They are doing it to stay visible in a place that has stopped listening to brands at all. The mechanism is not complicated. A buyer asks an AI assistant which analytics platform suits a mid-market SaaS company. The answer does not pull from your homepage or repeat your hero copy. It draws on what analysts, practitioners, and named experts have written, the voices the model has learned to treat as trustworthy. Your carefully managed messaging is not ranked lower in that exchange. It is not there at all. The buyer never sees it because the model never cited it. So companies are doing the one thing that works. They are amplifying the people the machines trust, and in the process they are handing those people the microphone. The center of gravity is leaving the marketing department For as long as corporate marketing has existed, the brand lived inside one building and answered to one function. The CMO owned the message. The agency polished it. Legal cleared it. Whatever reached the audience had been approved word by word. That is coming undone. Trust now attaches to individuals: the engineer who writes the thread everyone forwards, the VP who gives the talk people quote, the analyst who mentions you without being asked. The brand assets that matter most are no longer the ones marketing makes. They are the ones marketing can only hope to borrow. Credibility is moving out of the department built to manage it and onto the payroll, into people who never signed a messaging guideline and cannot be edited in review. Call it what it is. To stay visible in an AI-mediated market, brands are trading control for credibility. The channel they own is fully controllable and increasingly ignored. The employee voice is trusted and impossible to control. They cannot have both, and the market is making them choose. The hidden Trade-off Anyone who has run this play knows the trap, even if it never comes up in the budget meeting. Advocacy works because it is credible, and it is credible because it is not scripted. The moment marketing tries to control it, by handing out pre-written posts, setting a weekly posting quota, or routing every thought through approval, the credibility that made it worth anything drains away. Forced advocacy does not just underperform. It backfires , because people can smell a corporate directive wearing a human face, and the smell costs you the trust you were paying for. That leaves companies somewhere uncomfortable. The channel they most need to grow is the one they can least control. The people carrying the brand into the rooms where deals get decided can negotiate, get poached, and quit, and when they go they take the audience, the credibility, and a piece of the pipeline with them. Once your most trusted spokesperson does not report to you, brand risk stops being a messaging problem and becomes a retention problem. What this asks of leaders The reflex is to systematize, to pull the voice back in-house where it feels safe. That reflex is exactly what kills it. The harder discipline is enablement without ownership: give people a real reason to speak, room to sound like themselves, and enough of the reasoning behind the work that speaking up feels like an extension of their own expertise instead of an assignment. It means treating your most visible employees less like channels and more like talent, because that is what they have become. It also raises a question most brand strategies were never built to answer. What is a brand, once its most trusted representatives are people who do not answer to it? For a hundred years the answer was everything the company controls. That answer is now too small to be useful. The brands that win in an AI-mediated market will be the ones that accept a harder truth: in 2026, the single most valuable brand asset a company has is a person who does not report to the CMO, and whose loyalty has to be earned rather than assumed. The microphone has already changed hands. The only question left is whether leadership hands it over on purpose, with a plan, or watches it get taken while still editing the press release.

## Companies Are Hiring Editors to Run Thought Leadership and Measuring Them on Pipeline
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/thought-leadership-hire-measured-on-pipeline
Published: 2026-09-15T01:45:36.941Z
Section: Growth & Strategy
Summary: A handful of new job postings tie thought leadership to revenue instead of article counts. It is a small trend with a clear signal: owned media is turning into an operating function.
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Read a certain kind of job posting closely and you can watch a category change shape. When Workato made its first dedicated thought leadership hire , the telling detail was not the title but where the role sat. Alex Lamascus, now Senior Director of Thought Leadership, moved the function closer to the sales floor than the comms team and started measuring it on win rates, deal velocity, and average sales price rather than reach and downloads. "The primary value of content is not only gaining attention," he told State of Brand. "It's building business infrastructure." That is a different job than the one most content teams are hired to do, and a growing number of companies are now hiring for it: newsroom-style editorial leaders held accountable to revenue. For most of the last decade, content lived in an odd spot inside B2B marketing. Everyone agreed it was necessary and nobody could price it, so it got measured in outputs (posts shipped, words filed, downloads captured) mostly because the line to actual money was too hard to draw. These new hires bet that the line can be drawn now, and that whoever owns it should be senior, editorial, and carrying a number like anyone else with a budget. The reporting line is the story What matters in the Workato example is not that a company hired for thought leadership. Companies have done that for years. It is that the job answers to pipeline rather than to article counts, and that one change lifts owned media out of the cost-center framing that has always held it back and drops it into the same accountability as demand gen and sales. That framing has been a documented trap for a while. The B2B CMO leadership research makes the point that the metrics marketers reach for to prove their worth, the MQLs and the cost-per-lead figures, are the same metrics that get them treated as a tactical function and a cost center. Report in the language of marketing outputs and you get read as marketing overhead. A thought leadership hire tied to pipeline refuses that framing from the first day. The scorecard is not how much shipped. It is what the point of view moved. There is solid evidence that it moves a lot. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report , the most authoritative recurring study in the space, found that 75% of decision-makers say a piece of thought leadership prompted them to look into a product or service they had not previously considered. For anyone thinking about competitive displacement, the sharper number is this: 70% of C-suite executives say thought leadership has led them to reconsider a current vendor. It is one of the few content types that pulls customers toward you and loosens a competitor's hold at the same time. You are publishing for the buyer you never meet Part of why this function is professionalizing now is that the buying group got more crowded, and the people who tip a decision are the hardest to reach any other way. The 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn work centers on what it calls hidden buyers, the internal influencers who shape a decision without ever surfacing in a sales conversation. 71% of them say they have little or no interaction with sales teams. A rep cannot get to them, because they never take the meeting. But 63% spend more than an hour a week reading thought leadership , and 81% say strong thought leadership helps them see challenges or opportunities they had not recognized. The one channel that reaches the decision-shaper you can't book is exactly what a good editorial operation produces, which is a specific reason to fund it as a capability rather than an occasional campaign. It also explains why the new roles sit so high. Reaching a skeptical, senior, hidden audience that reads an hour a week in your category is not junior work. It takes editorial judgment about which position is worth staking, a quality bar high enough to clear one that most thought leadership fails (in the Edelman-LinkedIn data, decision-makers rate the overall quality of what they read as middling, with only a sliver calling it very good), and the standing to kill the safe, on-message copy that gets ignored. That is an editor's job, which is presumably why the postings are starting to read like one. From projects to a standing operation Underneath the hires is a move from thought leadership as a run of projects to thought leadership as a permanent operation with an owner, a standard, and a number. Ascend2 and TopRank's research draws the line plainly: a one-time report buys attention, while a recurring research program builds ownership of a topic. Publish on a real cadence and you become the default authority in your space, the name the market, and increasingly the AI systems, reach for by habit. Default status like that is not something a team sprints to at quarter's end. It compounds, which means it needs an owner whose job is to keep it compounding rather than a rotating set of contributors squeezing it between other work. Hiring an editorial leader and pointing them at pipeline is how a company turns that into an operation. It treats the point of view as an asset the business intends to build and hold, not a campaign it runs and shelves. The signal in these first roles is that a few companies have decided owning their narrative is a function with a seat and a scorecard, not something marketing does when it finds the time. Expect the rest of the market to follow, because the alternative is to keep producing content no senior buyer remembers while a competitor becomes the name the category reaches for. The companies writing these job descriptions now are betting the revenue-tied newsroom is about to become standard equipment. Given where buyer attention has gone, that is not a reckless bet.

## Miro Owned Its Category and Still Sold for Less Than Airtable
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/miro-bending-spoons-what-a-category-is-worth
Published: 2026-09-11T04:04:13.193Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Bending Spoons is paying about 2.3 times revenue for the company that defined online collaboration, a lower multiple than it paid for Airtable and roughly ninety percent below Miro's peak.
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Five weeks ago the most-forwarded story in software was a line of arithmetic: Airtable raised $1.4 billion and sold for $1.285 billion. This week the same buyer ran the same experiment on a bigger, better-known brand that owned its category far more completely, and hardly anyone bothered to do the sum. It is the worse of the two. Bending Spoons agreed on Wednesday to buy Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, around $1.79 billion in equity once the cash is counted, all of it in cash, with a group of Miro's existing shareholders putting $295 million of their proceeds back into Bending Spoons stock. Bloomberg confirmed the terms and the company laid them out in its own announcement . The last time Miro raised, in January 2022, it took $400 million led by ICONIQ, with Accel, Atlassian and Salesforce's venture arm alongside, at a $17.5 billion valuation, as TechCrunch reported then . The sale lands at roughly a tenth of that. The second honest valuation came in lower than the first When Airtable sold, this publication argued that the price was never really a software valuation. It was a brand valuation, run under laboratory conditions by the one buyer who is open about not paying for technology, team or growth. Airtable's name, its distribution and the habit its customers had built cleared at 2.7 times revenue, a number the industry had spent four years declining to say aloud. Miro is the same test with a harsher result. Set the $1.355 billion enterprise value against the roughly $600 million in recurring revenue the company puts in its own release and you get about 2.3 times revenue, under what Airtable fetched, off a peak that was far higher to start with. Miro fell ninety percent from the top where Airtable fell around eighty. By any brand logic that is backwards. Airtable was good but hemmed in, one strong product in a crowded workflow layer. Miro had the category to itself: four million paying users, more than 250,000 organizations, over 750 customers paying six figures a year, the overwhelming majority of revenue coming from businesses and enterprises. Category leadership was supposed to be the thing that held a premium. Here it bought a smaller one. Bending Spoons is not paying for the software The part of a Bending Spoons deal worth reading closely is the list of things the buyer refuses to pay for, because the firm is unusually plain about it. Not the technology. Its engineers took over a decade-old Evernote and rebuilt the backend from a monolith into microservices , which is to say they bought something they meant to tear down. The broken infrastructure is priced in on purpose. Not the team. Follow the Money reported that at WeTransfer and Komoot about three-quarters of the original staff were gone once the deals closed. Shivaram Rajgopal, writing in Forbes , traced Evernote from 341 employees on the day it was acquired to about 60 by the end of 2024, and noted the company had disclosed material weaknesses in the internal controls it leans on to fold in what it buys. Vimeo went the same way, TechCrunch found , with most of the staff and the whole video team cut once the $1.38 billion purchase closed. Bending Spoons does not hide the mechanism, either. Its own IPO filings say AI wrote or helped write more than 90 percent of its code changes by early 2026. Not growth. The plan, stated openly, is to buy well-known products whose growth has already flattened. Take those three away and what is left is the name, the reflex of opening it, and the pain of leaving. That is the whole basis of an $18.4 billion company that only listed on the Nasdaq in July , and the returns say the basis holds. After Bending Spoons took Evernote, the yearly price went from about $100 to $249 , the free tier was hollowed out, and revenue climbed anyway on a product people had spent two years complaining about. Miro is a harder thing to walk away from than a note app, since a team's live boards do not export anywhere usable, which is exactly what makes the habit worth buying. Miro was renting a scarcity, the same as Airtable Airtable's whole promise leaned on one scarce thing, engineering time. If you could not write code, it let you build the tool you needed anyway. Then a general model made that constraint go away, and the pitch stopped being wrong and started describing something you could get for nothing. Miro leaned on a different scarcity, distance. Its brand worked because a distributed team could not gather at one physical whiteboard, and when the pandemic scattered everyone, that became a land grab Miro won, reaching 30 million users and 99 percent of the Fortune 100 by the time of the 2022 round. The infinite canvas mattered because the meeting room had gone. Then the meeting room came back and the canvas got cheap to make. Return-to-office took some of the pressure off, and a prompt now spits out a diagram or a working board inside tools that already have the customer, Figma and Canva and Microsoft among them. Miro saw it coming and moved on it, rebranding around an AI Innovation Workspace and, as Tech Startups noted , buying Reforge about a year ago to get further into product strategy. It was a sharp response, made while the company was still healthy, and it moved the clearing price by nothing. Airtable ran into the same wall first. Leading a category is not the same as owning whatever made it scarce, and it is the second one that keeps its value once the first is commoditized. The auction that did not happen is the brand story What the industry keeps walking past is that Miro is exactly the sort of asset that should have set off a fight. Revenue near $600 million, almost all of it enterprise, and the cleanest ownership of a category anywhere in collaboration software. Atlassian, Salesforce, Microsoft, Figma and Canva all have reasons to want it. On the public record not one of them stepped in, and the company that more or less invented online collaboration went to a holding company with no rival bid in sight. For a brand desk the silence is the finding. The buyers who could actually have paid a premium for the name and the installed habit, the people best equipped to price it, looked and decided they would sooner build the thing with AI than pay up for the brand that made it famous. If the incumbents will not reach for the defining name in a category, there is nothing left in the category to charge a brand premium for. The $295 million that Miro's own insiders rolled into Bending Spoons stock rather than taking as cash says the same thing from the inside. The people closest to the asset would rather bet on the operator's cash machine than on Miro on its own. What it speaks to For four years the cohort sat on one position it never stated. The 2021 marks were paper, everyone knew the real numbers ran lower, and nobody had to say so while no genuinely healthy company put it to the test. Airtable put it to the test and printed 2.7 times revenue . Miro, healthier on most brand measures and carrying a category of its own, printed less. Every board still holding a 2021 mark now has two comparables it cannot wave away, and the kinder of the two is the older one. The deeper reading is a brand reading. Money has not left software; it is being raised this quarter at fifty times forward revenue by companies with a sliver of Miro's customers. What has left is the premium the story used to carry. Take the narrative out and the residue is the name on the browser tab, the habit of clicking it and the cost of quitting, and for a company that spent fifteen years making itself the default answer, that residue came to about 2.3 times revenue, with no strategic buyer willing to outbid a roll-up to hold on to it. Two healthy companies have now cleared at the number nobody wanted to name, and most of the field will read it, agree, and go on pricing themselves off the mark that just missed twice.

## Ramp Is Inviting CFOs to Broadway to Watch a Musical About Their Own Jobs
URL: https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/ramp-bill-pay-the-musical-broadway
Published: 2026-09-10T18:39:02.143Z
Section: Brand & Creative
Summary: Ramp is reviving the secret corporate musicals of the 1950s for one night on Broadway, with Billy Porter, Billy Zane and a show written for CFOs.
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On September 25, Billy Porter will walk onto the stage of the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th Street and sing about accounts payable. Ramp , the corporate spend management company, announced this week that it will present Bill Pay The Musical , an original musical comedy, for a single performance. Porter, who won his Tony for Kinky Boots , leads a cast that includes Billy Zane and Jessica Vosk of Wicked , with Rema Webb playing a character named Rampa. Kevin Zak wrote the book and Jason Michael Snow wrote the music and lyrics. Keaton Wooden directs , and Antoinette DiPietropolo choreographs. Admission is free with an RSVP, and black tie is optional. The show is built around one joke, and Ramp has committed to it completely. It is a show about bills, starring as many Bills as the company could find. Jessica Vosk is not technically a Billy, so the LinkedIn post announcing the show simply called her Jessica Billy Vosk. The show's website goes a step further and lists Billiam Shakespeare among the stars. Zane, as it happens, has played a Broadway Billy before. His only previous Broadway credit, according to IBDB , is a run as Billy Flynn in Chicago in 2002. Eric Glyman, Ramp's co-founder and co-CEO, has described the project as a revival. In his statement , he pointed back to the postwar decades, when major American companies regularly staged big-budget musicals about their own products, and then added, "Somewhere along the way, we lost our nerve." The history he's referring to is one of the stranger and more charming chapters in American business. When companies put on Broadway shows From the 1950s into the 1980s, companies including General Electric, Ford, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Xerox and American Standard staged Broadway-style musicals at their sales meetings and conventions . They hired serious talent to write and perform them. Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote Ford-ify Your Future for Ford's tractor division in 1959, a few years before they wrote Fiddler on the Roof . John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote songs for GE. Bob Fosse choreographed industrials, and Chita Rivera and Martin Short both performed in them . Florence Henderson headlined an Oldsmobile show nearly every year in the 1950s, and some industrials were staged in Broadway theaters, which makes the Broadhurst a fitting home for Ramp's. The budgets could be staggering. The composer Hank Beebe recalled that his first Chevrolet show, in 1956, had a $3 million budget, in the same year My Fair Lady opened on Broadway for $446,000. Dava Whisenant, who directed the 2018 documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway , has suggested that the Chevy money probably covered taking the show to sales meetings in several regions. Even spread across a tour, it was a remarkable amount to spend on a musical about cars. These shows were almost always private. Companies staged them for their own sales forces, sometimes as a reward for a strong year and sometimes to build excitement for a new model, and the public was never supposed to see them. Most of what survives comes from souvenir records pressed for the people who attended. Steve Young, a longtime writer for David Letterman, spent about two decades hunting those records down, starting in bargain bins, and his search led to a 2013 book, Everything's Coming Up Profits , and to Whisenant's documentary. For Young, the holy grail of the genre is American Standard's 1969 production, The Bathrooms Are Coming! The genre keeps finding new fans. An industrial musical turned up in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , and Young's book is in development as a feature film . A show for the finance team Ramp has kept the spirit of those shows and changed who they are for. Its press notes say Bill Pay The Musical was "created for the finance leaders" who keep a company's invoices paid on time, and anyone can request a seat. That choice fits neatly with something we wrote about earlier this week . In G2's 2026 buyer research, nearly half of B2B software buyers said they had seen a CFO reverse a purchase their company had already approved. Finance now has the final say on a lot of software, and most vendors try to win that approval with spreadsheets and ROI models. Ramp sells to finance teams directly, so the CFO is the person it most wants to impress, and it has chosen to do that the way GE once impressed its salesmen, with a musical. Finance leaders get sent plenty of ROI calculators by software vendors, and it's safe to say none of those came with Billy Porter. We also argued in that piece that when every vendor on a shortlist can do the job, buyers tend to go with the company they already know and trust. Ramp is making sure a theater full of finance leaders will remember it. Why Bill Pay Ramp's earlier campaigns turned the misery of expense reports into entertainment. In October 2025, the company put Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin the accountant on The Office , in a glass box in Manhattan to do expense reports by hand for six hours, and the campaign drew more than 112 million views across platforms by Ramp's count. This year's Super Bowl spot buried Baumgartner in receipts until an army of Baumgartner clones showed up to help. When we looked at Ramp's brand strategy earlier this year, what stood out was how consistently those campaigns found the comedy in problems every office worker recognizes. The new show puts a specific product in its title. Bill Pay is Ramp's accounts payable software, and last October the company added AI agents that take on much of the work, from coding invoices to recommending approvals. Ramp started out as a corporate card, and accounts payable is a newer front for it, so naming a Broadway musical after the product is a confident way to tell finance teams that Ramp would like to handle their bills as well. People who work in the category will also appreciate that one of its best-known companies is called BILL . The timing is good, too. Ramp raised money at a $44 billion valuation in June, and on Tuesday Bloomberg reported that the company is in early talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation near $60 billion. It has been a big year for Ramp, and a night on Broadway suits the mood. Built to be seen The original industrial musicals faded for practical reasons. They took a lot of work to stage every year, and over time companies turned to celebrity appearances and cheaper video instead. The culture around them changed as well. The shows were designed to reward people who planned to spend their whole careers at one company, and by the 1980s far fewer people expected to, as one history of the genre explains . Because the shows were private, nearly everything they produced stayed inside the room. Ramp's version is designed to travel. The Broadhurst seats about 1,200 people, and the show already has its own Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube accounts, so the performance can reach far more people than the ones in the audience. The website plays up the one-night scarcity with a warning that "when this curtain falls it shall never rise again." The theater press has already noticed. Within a day of the announcement, Playbill , BroadwayWorld , TheaterMania and Broadway.com had all covered the show. Most finance software marketers would never think to pitch those outlets. A company that says yes A musical this devoted to one pun would have a hard time getting through most corporate approval processes, and Ramp's structure helps. Brand decisions there sit close to the founders. When Glyman announced in June that his co-founder Karim Atiyeh would join him as co-CEO, he noted that Atiyeh had run marketing, along with risk and operations, for years. Kendall Hope Tucker, who leads creative experimentation at Ramp, said last fall that the team would keep making things that are "physical and real," and a live Broadway show is the fullest version of that promise so far. Somebody at Ramp looked at a list of stars that included Billiam Shakespeare and approved it, and the rest of the industry gets to enjoy the result. It has been a good stretch for B2B brands willing to take creative risks. Last month, Air fake-hired a CMO for six hours and turned the stunt into a mockumentary, and now Ramp has booked a Broadway theater. Ramp's idea also fits the company unusually well. It makes software for paying bills, so it cast a stage full of Billys and invited the people who approve those bills to come and watch. Doors open at 7 p.m. on September 25, and the curtain goes up at 8. The original industrial musicals mostly survive on souvenir records that collectors spent years digging out of bargain bins, and anyone who can't get a seat at the Broadhurst should have a much easier time finding this one.