This week’s update covers why AI still misses key brand moments, how buyers now move between search and AI before deciding, smarter ways to make retargeting emails pay off, Meta’s push to clean up creator discovery, and why customer experience has become the most reliable growth lever going into 2026. The common thread? Clarity, connection, and joined-up thinking beat channel tricks every time.
AI Still Doesn’t Get the Joke (or the Brand)
There’s a growing gap between what algorithms can measure and what people actually remember. This piece looks at brand moments that matter to humans but barely register in automated systems. Emotional relevance, cultural timing, and subtle signals of trust are hard for machines to score. As AI becomes more involved in ranking and recommendation, these blind spots matter more.
From a practical standpoint, this creates a tension for marketing teams. If you only fund work that shows immediate, machine-approved signals, you risk stripping out the very things that make a brand recognisable. Brand work has always been harder to justify in spreadsheets, but that doesn’t mean it stopped working. It just means the feedback loop is slower and less tidy.
My view is simple: use AI as a tool, not as a referee. Measure what you can, but don’t let dashboards talk you out of common sense. If customers remember you, talk about you, and come back, something is working even if the system can’t fully explain it.
This is exactly where Content Direction matter. If you want to build brand messages that resonate with real people while still supporting commercial goals, it’s worth a conversation about content and communications planning.
Your Buyers Aren’t Choosing Between Search and AI
Buyer behaviour no longer fits neatly into one channel. People still use search engines, but they increasingly rely on AI tools to summarise options, sanity-check decisions, and speed things up. That means influence now happens before the click, and sometimes without a click at all. Ranking well is useful, but being clearly understood is critical.
The risk for marketers is assuming visibility equals influence. You might rank well and still lose the sale if your message is vague or easily misrepresented when summarised elsewhere. Clear positioning, structured explanations, and repeatable messaging are now part of search performance, not just brand work.
The action here isn’t to chase every new AI feature. It’s to tighten your story. Make sure key pages answer real questions clearly and consistently. If a human can’t quickly explain what makes you different, neither can a system acting on their behalf.
This sits squarely in Search Strategy and Content Clarity. If your search performance looks fine but pipeline results don’t match, it may be time to reassess how your message is landing across both traditional search and AI summaries.
Retargeting Emails That Actually Earn Their Keep
Promotional email retargeting still works, but only when it’s done with intent. This article focuses on using behaviour-based signals to trigger timely, relevant follow-ups rather than sending generic reminders. Abandoned carts, product views, and past purchases are all cues that should shape what gets sent and when.
Too many campaigns fail because they treat email as a broadcast channel. The result is noise, fatigue, and poor returns. When timing and relevance are right, retargeting emails can outperform ads, especially during promotions when decision windows are short.
The key is discipline. Segment properly, reduce message clutter, and give each email one clear job. If everything is urgent, nothing is. A smaller number of well-timed emails will usually beat a larger batch of generic ones.
This is a strong use case for CRM and Email Automation. If promotions are important to your revenue mix, tightening retargeting workflows is often one of the fastest ways to improve results without increasing spend.
Meta Wants Creator Marketing to Grow Up
Meta is pushing creator discovery in a more practical direction by leaning on engagement and performance signals rather than surface-level popularity. Instead of hunting manually for creators who “feel right,” brands are being guided toward people already connected to their audience and likely to perform in paid formats.
This shift matters because creator marketing has been messy for a long time. Too many partnerships are built on hope rather than evidence. By tying discovery more closely to real engagement data, Meta is nudging brands to treat creators as part of a broader media plan, not a side experiment.
That doesn’t mean results are guaranteed. It does mean fewer blind bets. Creator activity should still be tested, measured, and reviewed like any other channel. Creativity matters, but accountability matters too.
If you’re thinking about creators as part of paid or organic social, this fits naturally into Social and Paid Media Strategy. Done properly, creator partnerships should support real outcomes, not just fill content calendars.
Customer Experience Is the Strategy Now
Customer experience has stopped being a support function and become a growth driver. This article reinforces what many teams are already seeing: customers don’t care about internal handovers or channel boundaries. They experience the brand as one continuous interaction, whether that’s intended or not.
What holds many organisations back is structure. Teams optimise their own areas, but nobody owns the full journey. That leads to friction at the moments that matter most, like decision, purchase, and renewal. Fixing individual touchpoints helps, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem.
Growth now comes from coherence. When data, messaging, and service expectations line up, trust builds faster and loyalty follows. That’s harder work than tweaking a single channel, but the payoff is longer-term and more stable.
This is where Customer Experience Strategy and Analytics come together. If growth has plateaued despite solid channel performance, the issue is often the experience between those channels.
Annnd That’s a Wrap
Across all five stories, the pattern is clear. The tools are getting smarter, but they reward clarity, consistency, and joined-up thinking. AI can speed things up, but it doesn’t replace judgment. Channels still matter, but how they work together matters more. For marketing leaders, the question isn’t “What’s the new tactic?” It’s “Is our message clear, is the experience coherent, and are we measuring the right things?” Get those right, and the rest becomes easier to manage. If any of these themes are showing up in your own challenges, it’s probably worth a proper conversation rather than another quick fix.
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