We sat down with five marketing leaders across industries and org sizes to have a deep discussion about what’s really going on behind the data in our recent Voice of the CMO Report.
Becky Owen
CMO | Billion Dollar Boy
For years, word of mouth has been the king for brand discovery, but social media now reigns supreme. UK consumers most commonly discover new brands via social media (40%), followed by recommendations from friends and/or family (37%) and online searches (37%).
Brand discovery through creators is still as strong as ever. But brands can easily get overwhelmed with all the different ways that they can engage creators, but we’re seeing a huge push to find their fans and create user-generated content around them. So our approach with our clients is to build tiered infrastructure — from a brand perspective, helping them productize creator content and build systems around it.
It’s about more than audience size now, too. We’ve seen some pushback around focusing just on that, so we focus on finding the people with the right size audience. Influencer marketing was the girl next door who tells me she loves this mascara, and she’s talking on YouTube about it. Because she looks like me, she has the same income as me, and she’s choosing to spend her hard won cash on this mascara, I trust her. That’s where influencer marketing was born. It was the everyday person in my feed telling me what they use, and their life was shared with mine, which is now that’s the family and friend thing — we still have that, but with smaller talent.
As their audiences grow, people start to think: is this a real product, or did your manager set this up? Did your PR team say that you need to start moving into this vertical for career longevity so they negotiated this for you? Have you even met the brand? People start to become a little bit more skeptical. A bigger audience is obviously great for awareness and if I’m a mega fan, I’ll do whatever you say. But real advocacy still lives in what that girl or boy next door who looks like me and earns my salary is telling me.
That’s why TikTok Shop has taken off — it’s almost like a reversion. Anyone now can promote a product, and a lot of the people that are selling products on TikTok Shop are exactly what influencer marketing used to be 14 years ago. The powerful part is that it’s somebody just telling me about the jeans that they bought, and if customers feel connected to people that they’re hearing recommendations from, they’re more likely to purchase.
So when we’re talking to brands about organic, word-of-mouth advocacy, we’re asking who the fans are. Who are the people that are most loyal to your brands? Who are the people that are already turning up and how do you turn them into a UGC micro creator? How do we create a strategy around them to amplify that loyalty and turn it into advocacy?
We also want to build long-term partnerships between brands and ambassadors, which requires brand community managers to understand who their community is, how they engage with them, how are they reaching them, how are they then creating opportunities to have a two way conversation. Gymshark is one brand that does this really well. They’ve managed to capture this moment with their loyal community, and find ways to give back to them and genuinely care about their audience.
Conversely, we’ve seen some backlash when brands stretch into new territories and it feels like they forgot their original audience who have been loyal to them for years. So having a developed community strategy that grows that seed of friends and family advocacy really allows brands to get that pure influence. It’s also a wonderful way to reward those that are loyal to you.
The research reveals that while there is an overwhelming industry consensus that AI cannot be ignored, consumers don’t necessarily share CMOs enthusiasm. Not only are UK consumers almost twice as likely to have mixed feelings about AI (31%) than they are to be excited and optimistic (16%), there is also a clear disconnect between the extent to which CMOs use Generative AI and how comfortable consumers are with it.
I have a hundred ways to think about this. First off, because of the AI hype, people believed that “made with AI” was a strategy in itself — if it was made by AI, that’s our marketing play, because in 2023, it was novel. In 2025, it isn’t a strategy. Look at the now infamous Coca Cola advert vs the new Apple logo. Using AI isn’t interesting anymore, and we’ve seen a massive recalibration — we went absolutely crazy for it, and now we’re over it. This always happens — the pendulum swings one way and it’s got to swing back before it nets out in the middle.
Marketers are guilty of that because we thought “made with AI” was the content strategy. But we found in a lot of our research and councils that audiences are drawn to effort. It’s so clearly distinguished — people went mad over the new Apple logo because they showed the creative
But there are many incredible creators that we work with that tell us how effortful AI is. It’s just a democratization of tools that were once only accessible if you had a million dollars to pour into it. A filmmaker called Omar Karim said when we got the camera phone, we suddenly didn’t have a ton of Steven Spielbergs. We democratized the ability to film, but we didn’t get a ton of incredible filmmakers. It’s the same with AI — we democratized a means of production, but we’re still not going to get a load of Pixar houses popping up. There has to be craft and intention there. I think we all thought that with AI we’re all going to become creative geniuses and we can maybe cheat consumers a bit. But now consumers have recognized, if you’re not putting effort into creating this content, why should I put effort into engaging with this content?
We researched consumer sentiment on AI, and in 2023, 60% of people preferred AI content. In 2025, it’s 26%. People are over it. There’s just been too much careless content in our feeds that doesn’t reward us. Bad use of AI is really easy to spot. Good use of AI should be hard to spot. But everyone using it should be transparent and everyone should have a reason for why it was necessary. Otherwise, it just feels like a cheat code.
Omar Karim was a copywriter. He says that AI has enabled him to unlock creative stuff that was locked in his head that he couldn’t get out any other way. But he’s great with words. He now just has a new medium to express himself.
Another example is virtual influencers. I’ve been studying them for around six years, and there hasn’t been an influx of them with the use of AI. Virtual influencers work when they feel like a story and a character. For instance, Lil. Miquela is a story — she has an ecosystem, she has a brother, she has a family, she gets upset. So it’s simply a new form of storytelling where the story and the craft still matter. The characters that are getting brand deals are the ones that have a whole team behind them writing their narrative. AI might be speeding up some of their production processes, but they’re still there, creating a narrative that you can read on their Instagram feed like a comic book.
But on the other side, we’re seeing more digital twins and companies that offer digital twin services. There’s a lot of questions around it. I think one of the most interesting things is that if you’re creating a character, that’s a third party you’re totally removed from. The risk is that because you’re turning your likeness into an easily replicable image that anyone has access to, you dilute your brand. If you’re everywhere for everyone, you’re nothing. So as creators become AI cameos of themselves, which is what Sora promoted famously with Jake Paul, they dilute their brand equity.
Looking ahead to 2026, what would need to change — either in the technology itself or in how consumers perceive it — for AI to move from a behind-the-scenes efficiency tool to something you’d confidently put front-and-centre in your brand communications?
I think AI and brand trust are connected. We’re seeing an increasing trend of brands valuing community. We’ve recently had so many brands coming to us wanting to build their creative community, to create touch points, and have a genuine human element to it. And they’re putting seven-figure budgets behind it.
So it’s the pendulum swinging back towards human-ness again, because we’ve gone so synthetic, but there’s going to be a focus on humanity and craft until AI is totally normalized.
Internally, a lot of CFOs etc have given directives to their marketing team to use AI to drive efficiency. The risk is that we’re on a potential trajectory to ‘slopvertising ’because there’s the myth that one click builds a brand when in reality it creates a sea of sameness. But then I think we’re also just going to have a few more cases where we really realized we can’t productize craft.
