TLDR Marketing 2026-09-17

Don't be sloppy. When others choose AI overload, put people back into every stage of your pipeline.

Vidyard's Video in Motion report shows you how the marketing teams that still engage buyers are using video to drive human connection. These 8 plays are driving:

• 300% higher click-through rates
• 27% higher engagement
• 38% higher win rates

Get your video playbook

Google is reducing publishers' opportunities to earn search traffic as AI features take up more space. New sports features bring play-by-play updates and fantasy recommendations directly into Search. OpenAI is reportedly restricting some competitor ads in ChatGPT. Meanwhile, 41 of the 50 biggest US news sites saw traffic decline year over year. Several publishers have linked traffic losses to AI Overviews and AI Mode, while some are responding by investing more in direct audiences and reducing reliance on search.

Traditional ads are losing attention as consumers tune out repetitive, sales-heavy formats. 88% of Gen Z and millennials ignore most ads, while 85% stay loyal to brands that feel genuine. Activity-based campaigns offer a different approach by motivating people to participate rather than simply buy. 65% of consumers say they're more likely to engage with or purchase from brands that motivate people to get active.

Test 1700×1080 landscape for larger covers, 1200×1500 portrait with bolder text, or two-slide carousels that display at full width. Focus on formats that maximize in-feed visibility and drive engagement with your audience.

Instead of chasing high-volume keywords, map prompt journeys around the final recommendation a buyer wants, then create content around the decision factors that inform it. LLMs can route users from broad questions to specific recommendations, so owning the highest-volume prompt matters less than being cited for the factors behind the purchase decision. Start with bottom-funnel prompts, map adjacent questions, and build content that answers them.

Most brands treat Reddit as a risk to manage. Rachel Duffy, Head of Community at The Times and The Sunday Times, built a different playbook: earning moderator trust, learning subreddit culture, and knowing when to speak up. Join her and Standing on Giants on September 22.

SAVE YOUR SPOT →

Agency leaders will discuss some of the newest ways that YouTube can make a brand and their agency successful on YouTube. They'll cover new ad formats and strategies, measurement tactics, and ways to tie advertising campaigns into other YouTube efforts from the brand, including organic and creator initiatives. The free webinar takes place today at 10 AM PT.

Meta's new subscription service prices creator and business tools from $2.99 a month for basic app access up to $499 for its top professional tier, with the $49.99 Advanced plan unlocking year-ahead scheduling, bulk uploads, and shared account access without password sharing. Paid tiers also boost visibility directly, through higher search placement and more prominent follow buttons, not just productivity tools. The core apps and Meta AI stay free, and none of the tiers remove ads.

Job title confusion runs in both directions. Companies without a creative background borrow a senior-sounding title off a template instead of defining the actual work, while designers themselves inflate titles because freelance clients rarely check credentials. Underneath the confusion, the jobs barely move: a designer executes one piece of visual communication, an art director keeps a whole project's output feeling like one brand, and a creative director sets the point of view behind it. Only company size decides how many people that work gets split across.

Americans are increasingly hearing that AI data centers are draining the country's water supply, but the national scale of the problem is far smaller than viral claims suggest. US data centers consumed about 228 billion gallons of water in 2023, yet that amounted to only 0.015% to 0.2% of total US water withdrawals, compared with 43% for agriculture. A viral claim that every ChatGPT question consumes a bottle of water also misrepresented research that estimated 500 milliliters could be consumed across roughly 10 to 50 GPT -3 responses. Water use can still create serious local concerns, but misinformation and misleading comparisons are turning a site-specific resource issue into a broader narrative about AI infrastructure threatening the US water supply.

Creator-economy sentiment toward AI has shifted in about a year from dread to a hunt for leverage, with most creators now treating AI output as a rough starting draft rather than a finished product. That shift is showing up in contracts: some brands now ask for access to creators' AI prompts, while creators are starting to write their own AI-use clauses back to protect their voice. Adoption itself splits by gender, since women are 22% less likely than men to be regular AI users at work and more likely to worry it looks like cutting corners. The recurring conclusion is that audiences still connect to the person behind the work, not the tool that helped make it.

Equity and debt issuance are surging, market value is concentrated in a few major tech stocks, and earnings expectations look increasingly unstable.

Rather than talking up the brand, creators would review original builds made in Perplexity's own tools, instead of promoting them.

A guide to how much B2B freelancers are charging in the UK.