DMC Digital

Which AI is best for which marketing job?

Saba Karimi — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:10:44 +0000

With so many AI tools available, there is too much chatter around “which AI is best?”. For digital marketing, the more useful question according to us is which AI is best for which marketing job?.

We did a current 2026 scan across market-share data, AI-search studies, marketer surveys, SEO platforms and image/video benchmarks. This provided us with enough evidence to build a fairly useful AI-for-digital-marketing stack.

Finding the right tool in this fragmented market

The latest Statcounter worldwide data for August 2026 shows:

AI platform	AI chatbot referral share
ChatGPT	79.4%
Gemini	10.9%
Perplexity	4.31%
Copilot	2.79%
Claude	2.57%
DeepSeek	0.02%

I wouldn’t go with the absolute share because these percentages without context make no sense.

Statcounter reported that in April 2026 ChatGPT was at 76.85%, Gemini at 9%, Perplexity at 7.73%, and Claude at 2.66%. Gemini had risen from only 2.31% a year earlier.

Similarweb’s May 2026 data paints a similar picture when measuring web visits rather than referrals:

ChatGPT: 53.9%
Gemini: 27.9%
Claude: 9.2%
DeepSeek: 4.1%
Grok: 2.4%
Perplexity: 1.3%
Copilot: 1.3%

Similarweb specifically describes Gemini’s traffic as accelerating sharply, Claude having a significant 2026 growth spike, while Perplexity peaked around October 2025 and subsequently declined.

For a marketing agency like DMC, we would divide AI into 8 jobs

Most of the work we do can be put into these milestones

Research → Strategy → SEO/GEO → Writing → Analysis → Creative → Video → Automation

And the best tool needs to be analysed for each of these job categories.

Our current 2026 working matrix

Marketing task	Primary tool	Secondary tools
Strategic thinking	ChatGPT / Claude	Gemini
Long-form content	Claude	ChatGPT
Content ideation	ChatGPT	Gemini, Claude
Live web research	Perplexity	ChatGPT, Gemini
Research synthesis	Claude	ChatGPT
Google/SEO ecosystem	Gemini	ChatGPT
SEO/GEO strategy	ChatGPT + Semrush/Ahrefs	Gemini, Claude
AI visibility monitoring	Semrush / Ahrefs	ChatGPT, Gemini
Data analysis	ChatGPT	Claude, Gemini
GA4/GSC analysis	Gemini + ChatGPT	Claude
Technical SEO	ChatGPT	Claude, Gemini
Schema generation	ChatGPT	Claude
Content rewriting	Claude	ChatGPT
Brand voice	Claude	ChatGPT
Campaign ideas	ChatGPT	Claude
Paid media analysis	ChatGPT	Gemini
Google Ads ecosystem	Gemini	ChatGPT
Image generation	ChatGPT / Midjourney	Firefly
Brand-safe commercial images	Adobe Firefly	ChatGPT
Social creative concepts	ChatGPT	Midjourney
Video generation	Veo / Runway / Kling	Sora where available
Talking-head video	HeyGen / Synthesia	—
Presentations	ChatGPT / Gamma	Claude
Meeting/document knowledge	NotebookLM	Claude
Coding/automation	Claude / ChatGPT	Gemini
AI visibility research	ChatGPT + Gemini + Claude	Perplexity
Competitor intelligence	ChatGPT + Perplexity	Gemini
Google ecosystem research	Gemini	ChatGPT

In terms of comparing individual AI tools – major ones being ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, read through our following analysis.

ChatGPT — probably the best general-purpose agency AI

For an agency environment, we would currently put ChatGPT in the generalist/operating system category. It’s not because it beats every competitor at all the tasks, it’s because of the way it analyses the prompts and gives output. Based on our analysis on various prompts, we feel that output of chatGPT is a combination of

research + reasoning + data + coding + writing + image generation + file analysis + automation + workflow integration.

ChatGPT can sit across the entire workflow.

And the current market data still shows it massively ahead in overall usage.

Gemini — this is the one I would watch most closely

I think Gemini is actually more strategically important to marketers than its current chatbot share suggests. Its popularity is increasing beyond generating images.

And the primary reason is that Google controls so much of the marketing ecosystem:

Search
AI Overviews / AI Mode
YouTube
Google Ads
GA4
GSC
Chrome
Android
Maps
Gmail
Docs
Drive

The distribution advantage is enormous. Similarweb says Gemini’s growth accelerated sharply after Google pushed it deeper into Search and its broader ecosystem.

There’s another interesting data point: G2’s 2026 AI Search report finds ChatGPT dominant overall, but Gemini becomes considerably more competitive as users move from discovery toward consideration and decision-making.

For SEO specifically, we have made Gemini part of the standard workflow.

Gemini particularly interested us due to it being Google product, it definitely has advantage to improve his learning model:

Google ecosystem analysis
Search behaviour
GSC/GA4-related work
YouTube research
SERP/AI Overview analysis
Google Ads
Search intent
structured data extraction
large datasets
multimodal analysis
Google Workspace workflows

Claude

I have been loving Claude. I would probably put Claude closest to ChatGPT for actual intelligence work.

Its particularly useful territory is:

reading → reasoning → editing → synthesising → writing.

Tom’s Guide’s September 2026 awards named Claude its best AI chatbot, specifically highlighting reasoning, constructive criticism, writing/editing and productivity capabilities.

And G2’s research found Claude more than doubled its share over seven months, while the competitive landscape beyond ChatGPT is becoming much more fragmented.

At DMC, we use Claude heavily for:

content audits
long documents
brand guidelines
editorial review
thought leadership
strategy documents
rewriting
tone
qualitative research
competitive positioning
analysing large quantities of text

For example:

Give Claude 200 pages of competitor content and ask:

Identify the recurring claims, positioning patterns, evidence gaps, tone differences and areas where our client could establish a differentiated point of view.

That’s very much Claude territory.

Perplexity – maybe?

I had taken the Perplexity 1 year subscription, but just couldn’t see the value.

Perplexity has a fundamentally different strength, it’s great as a research engine, especially for:

finding sources
finding obscure sources
rapidly exploring a topic
source comparison
current information
competitor research
market research
finding statistics
finding original studies
discovering pages you didn’t know existed

And there are several important “other” players

There are at least five other AI engines worth tracking.

A. Grok

Grok is interesting because of its relationship with X and real-time social information.

For marketing, that potentially makes it useful for:

social listening
cultural trends
emerging conversations
X/Twitter research
breaking topics
consumer sentiment
real-time conversation analysis

Definitely try it for social intelligence.

B. NotebookLM

This one is often overlooked because people don’t think of it as a “marketing AI.”

I’d use NotebookLM for:

Client onboarding

“What are this client’s major products, differentiators, audiences and restrictions?”

Research

“What do these 15 reports collectively say about the market?”

Strategy

“Where do these reports disagree?”

Content

“What claims can we safely make based on the supplied sources?”

It’s particularly useful where source-grounded answers matter more than general web knowledge.

What to use for images?

ChatGPT Images

Best for integrated marketing workflow, editing, prompt-based creative production and increasingly sophisticated general-purpose images.

Midjourney

Still extremely relevant for:

art direction
campaigns
conceptual imagery
fashion
premium aesthetics
moodboards
highly stylised visual work

Adobe Firefly

Particularly relevant for commercial/enterprise environments where Adobe workflow and content provenance/licensing considerations matter.

What about videos?

This is evolving ridiculously quickly.

The major players I’m watching are:

Veo
Runway
Kling
Sora
Pika
HeyGen
Synthesia

Current 2026 testing has Runway, Veo and Kling particularly prominent, with different strengths around cinematic quality, audio, clip duration and production workflows.

DMC Digital’s AI Tool Stack

Layer 1 — Core intelligence

ChatGPT

Strategy
Analysis
Data
SEO
Coding
Automation
Content
Creative
Research

Layer 2 — Google intelligence

Gemini

Search
GSC
GA4
YouTube
Google ecosystem
AI Overviews / AI Mode

Layer 3 — Editorial intelligence

Claude

Long-form
Editing
Brand voice
Content analysis
Research synthesis

Layer 4 — Research intelligence

Perplexity

Live research
Sources
Competitive intelligence
Discovery

Layer 5 — Knowledge intelligence

NotebookLM

Client documents
Research repositories
Reports
Interviews
Internal knowledge

Layer 6 — Social intelligence

Grok

X
Emerging conversations
Social trends
Real-time cultural signals

Layer 7 — AI visibility

Semrush / Ahrefs / Profound / Otterly / Scrunch

AI mentions
Citations
Share of voice
Competitor visibility
Prompt tracking
Source attribution

Layer 8 — Visual

ChatGPT Images + Midjourney + Firefly

Layer 9 — Video

Veo + Runway + Kling + HeyGen

What are the AI tools you are using at your agency?

The post Which AI is best for which marketing job? appeared first on DMC Digital.

The Innovation Stack for Digital Marketing

Khushi Kanungo — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:13:44 +0000

The Innovation Stack for Digital Marketing

Why “creative” isn’t the only place brands can innovate

For years, marketing innovation was treated as synonymous with creative — a punchier ad, a bolder campaign, a viral video. But the brands that consistently outperform their category rarely win on creative alone. They win because they’ve rebuilt something structural: how they earn attention, how they organize their teams, how they turn data into relationships, or how they price and package what they sell. This framework breaks digital marketing innovation into ten distinct types, grouped into three clusters — Foundation, Offering, and Experience. Each type below follows the same structure: the default most brands settle into, and the break from it that counts as genuine innovation. It’s less a checklist and more a diagnostic — most brands are strong in one or two types and stagnant everywhere else. The real breakthroughs come from combining three or four types at once, not perfecting a single one. It’s the same lens we bring to every client engagement at DMC — the goal isn’t more activity, it’s finding the combination a brand hasn’t tried yet.

FOUNDATION

The internal systems that determine how marketing creates value.

Value Model — How marketing earns its keep The default is treating marketing spend as a cost center measured campaign by campaign. Innovation here rethinks how marketing activity converts into revenue — shifting from one-off spend to always-on performance loops, building affiliate or creator-commission structures, or productizing content itself (paid newsletters, branded tools, ticketed events). The strongest value models challenge an industry’s unquestioned answer to “what do we pay for and how do we measure it back.”
Ecosystem & Partnerships — How you multiply reach without owning it The default is treating every channel and capability as something the brand must build in-house. Innovation here means structuring co-marketing alliances, creator networks, and platform integrations as ongoing, mutually-invested relationships rather than a single transactional media buy — borrowing trust and distribution a brand hasn’t earned alone, on terms built to compound instead of expire.
Team & Talent Structure — How you organize the people doing the work The default is a fixed department chart where each function touches a campaign once and hands it off. Innovation here reshapes that structure — in-house creator pods, hybrid agency-client “embedded” teams, fractional specialist networks — so work moves faster and better than the traditional chart allows. It’s often invisible to the audience but usually the real reason one team ships ten campaigns while another ships two.
Process — How the work actually gets made The default is the quarterly campaign cycle: long lead times, a single big launch, minimal room to adapt once it’s live. Innovation here replaces that with agile sprints, always-on content engines, and real-time trend response — the “special sauce” that lets a brand move at the speed of culture instead of the speed of its own bureaucracy.

OFFERING

What the brand actually puts in front of an audience.

Channel Mix — Where you show up The default is following the audience to wherever competitors already are. Innovation here means identifying under-crowded channels before they’re obvious — a niche forum, a newsletter ecosystem, a gaming platform — and building a genuinely native presence there before the crowd arrives. It’s a first-mover advantage with a short shelf life: the value decays as the channel matures, which is exactly why it counts as innovation rather than best practice.
Content Format — What you actually make The default is a single asset repurposed across every channel in the same shape. Innovation here asks a sharper question: is there a fundamentally different container for this idea — interactive content, shoppable video, AI-generated personalized variants, serialized storytelling — not just a different execution of the same old one?
Campaign Mechanics — How a campaign is built to work The default is a campaign the audience simply watches. Innovation here changes the underlying mechanic — gamification, UGC-driven challenges, real-time/reactive formats — so the audience finishes the campaign rather than receives it. The mechanic, not the creative dressed on top of it, is what makes it spread or convert.

EXPERIENCE

How the audience feels engaging with the brand over time.

Community & Engagement — How strangers become a group The default treats every campaign as a fresh audience acquisition problem, starting from zero each time. Innovation here builds owned communities — Discord servers, member programs, ambassador networks — that compound instead of resetting with every algorithm change, shifting the relationship from “audience” to “membership.”
Personalization & Data Experience — How generic becomes specific The default is one message broadcast to everyone in a segment. Innovation here uses AI-driven segmentation, dynamic creative, and first-party data loops to make every touchpoint feel tailored rather than mass-produced. Done well, it’s invisible to the user — it just feels like the brand “gets” them, rather than reading as personalization for its own sake.
Brand Voice & Culture — How you sound and what you stand for The default is a tone that could belong to any brand in the category. Innovation here is a point of view and cultural fluency distinct enough to be recognizable without a logo. It’s the hardest type to fake and the easiest to get generically wrong — but when it’s genuine, it’s the type competitors can least easily copy.

Innovation is a pattern, not an event

None of these ten types is innovative on its own terms — a value model, a channel, a community are just parts of doing marketing. What makes any one of them count as innovation is the same thing across all ten: a deliberate break from the default an entire category has quietly agreed to stop questioning. That’s also why this framework resists being used as a scorecard. Chasing a perfect 10/10 usually produces ten shallow initiatives instead of one real advantage. The brands that actually pull ahead tend to pick two or three types, break the default hard in each, and let the combination do the work no single type could do alone — a Value Model shift paired with genuine Community ownership, say, or a Channel Mix bet backed by real Personalization. Used this way, the framework becomes less a checklist and more a shared language for a team: “we have a process problem, not a creative problem” reframes a lot of stuck campaigns, and “which default are we still following without noticing?” is usually a better first question than “what should the next campaign be?” The brands winning right now aren’t necessarily making better ads. They’re innovating in places their competitors aren’t even looking — which is usually the first thing we help a new client find.

The post The Innovation Stack for Digital Marketing appeared first on DMC Digital.

The Death of Discovery: How Google is Reshaping the Web into a Walled Garden

Saba Karimi — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:43:16 +0000

When Google went public in 2004, Larry Page famously stated that a well-functioning society requires “abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information”. For decades, Google was the go to search engine of this vision, acting as a gateway that directed users to the “open web”, a vast ecosystem of merchants, publishers, and universities. By providing lists of hyperlinks, Google empowered users to act as their own curators, scrolling through results to evaluate and select authoritative sources. Google’s search results were really relevant, hence, it took no time to overtake Bing, Yahoo and other smaller search engines. It did give rise to search engines like duckduckgo but then AI came around and we barely see duckduckgo coming up in traffic sources now.

That era of freedom to click a URL and read through it is rapidly ending. When AI came along, Google could not resist and is now retreating from its role as a gateway and, in the process, may be imperiling the very open web it once helped build.

From Gateway to Gatekeeper

Google’s recent pivot toward an “answer engine” model fundamentally changes the internet experience. With the introduction of “AI Mode,” Google has replaced the traditional list of hyperlinks with conversational responses generated by Gemini.

This shift is not a mere UI change; it’s a strategic insulation of the user. As researchers have noted, users are now spending significantly more time within Google’s AI ecosystem—one to nine minutes longer per session than with traditional search. A study by Growth Memo found that in 75% of sessions, users never left AI Mode to visit an external website at all.

For businesses and publishers, this is “Google Zero”, a term recently coined and familiar by most of the digital marketers. It’s the phenomenon where traffic from Google plummets to nothing because the user no longer needs to leave the platform to find their answer. The impact is measurable: data from Cloudflare indicates that human traffic to business websites in sectors like finance, publishing, and retail has dropped nearly 40% between June 2025 and April 2026.

The Erosion of Agency and Authority

At DMC Digital, we view this as a critical failure of the open web ethos. When Google summarizes information into a conversational output, it removes the user’s agency to explore, evaluate, and choose. Instead of a diverse set of experts, publishers, or merchants, the user is presented with a single, Google-filtered answer which takes up most of the space on the screen that you read the answer, feel satisfied thinking Google has recommended it and don’t scroll further down.

This environment is increasingly becoming a “walled garden,” a trend Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has warned against for years. While tech giants like Meta and Apple have long restricted their ecosystems, AI has drastically accelerated this trajectory, prioritizing internal data retention over public utility.

Even the Wikimedia Foundation, a cornerstone of the open web, has reported an 8% decline in human visitors over the past year, as bots aggressively scrape their data to train models that subsequently replace them in search results.

The Rise of the “Pay-to-Play” AI

The landscape is becoming even more complex with the arrival of sponsored placements in AI answers. As tracked by industry tools like SE Ranking, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode now display ads against high-intent prompts. This means that the answers provided by AI are no longer just summaries; they are potentially commercially curated outputs where competitors can “pay their way” into the conversation.

For marketers, this creates a new layer of invisibility. If you aren’t monitoring the ads appearing in AI responses, your competitive analysis is effectively incomplete.

Moving Forward in a Post-Discovery World

Google claims it is still sending billions of clicks to the web and that reports of traffic decline rely on “flawed methodologies”. However, the reality for publishers like Vox Media, which recently explored selling its sites due to the “decimation of search traffic”, suggests that the industry is already reacting to a new economic model.

The lesson for brands and publishers is clear: relying solely on traditional search traffic is no longer a viable long-term strategy. To survive in the era of “Google Zero,” businesses must:

Build Direct Relationships: Pivot toward owning your audience via newsletters, apps, and direct-to-consumer platforms.
Adapt to AI Visibility: Recognize that AI Search (including AI Overviews and AI Mode) is the new battlefield. Standard SEO fundamentals remain the foundation, but tracking presence in AI-generated answers is now mandatory.
Monitor the Competitive Landscape: As sponsored placements in AI answers become the fastest-growing ad surface, monitoring who is bidding against your brand in AI responses is essential.

The web was built on the premise that the best content should rise to the top through the collective choices of real people. If we lose the ability to scroll, evaluate, and choose, we lose the very internet that empowered the digital age.

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Social Media Platform Reporting Is Coming to Google Search Console: What It Means for Brands and Why Strategy Matters More Than Ever

Nihar Taranekar — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:30:14 +0000

For years, Google Search Console (GSC) has been the go-to platform for understanding how websites perform in Google Search. From indexing issues to keyword visibility and click-through rates, it has helped marketers optimize their search presence with actionable insights.

Now, Google appears to be expanding that ecosystem.

Google is gradually rolling out a new Platform Properties and Social Channels Insights within Google Search Console. While the feature is currently available only to a limited set of users, it signals an interesting shift in how Google may be thinking about the relationship between search and social.

Although the rollout is still in its early stages and details remain limited, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: the lines between SEO, content, and social media continue to blur.

Why This Update Matters

Search behavior has evolved dramatically over the past few years.

Users no longer discover brands exclusively through search engines. They encounter businesses through social platforms, creator content, videos, AI generated search experiences, and traditional search results, all within the same customer journey.

Google has been acknowledging this shift for some time. Social profiles already appear prominently in branded search results, and Google frequently indexes content from platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and X when it considers them relevant.

Bringing social platform reporting into Google Search Console could represent another step toward providing marketers with a more connected view of their online presence.

Rather than treating social media as a completely separate channel, Google is now actually encouraging businesses to think about digital visibility as an integrated ecosystem.

What We Know So Far

Google has slowly rolled out the feature.
It is not yet available to all Google Search Console users.
The report appears to surface information related to your connected social media channel for Instagram, Youtube, TikTok and X.
Google has not announced a full public rollout timeline.

Beyond the Feature: The Bigger Strategic Shift

While new reporting features are always interesting, the bigger story isn’t the report itself.

It’s what the report represents.

For years, many organizations have managed SEO and social media as separate disciplines – SEO teams focused on rankings, while Social teams focused on engagement.

Google is trying to reward organizations & content creators that connect these functions rather than operate them independently.

The future of digital marketing isn’t channel optimization. It’s visibility optimization.

What Smart Brands Should Be Doing Today

Whether or not you have access to the new GSC report, this is a good opportunity to evaluate your broader digital strategy.

1. Audit Your Social Presence

Ensure every official social profile is:

Complete and up to date
Consistently branded
Linked from your website
Actively maintained

Google increasingly recognizes official profiles as trust signals.

2. Build Content That Travels Across Channels

One high quality piece of content shouldn’t live only on your website.

Repurpose it into:

LinkedIn thought leadership posts
Short videos
Infographics
Industry discussions
Newsletter content

Integrated content strategies generate significantly more long-term value than isolated campaigns.

3. Measure Visibility, Not Just Traffic

Leading organizations also measure the following, besides just impressions & clicks:

Brand discoverability
Share of search
Social visibility
Branded search growth
Content engagement
Authority signals across platforms

The objective is to understand how your brand performs throughout the entire digital ecosystem – not just on Google (or any other search engine).

4. Break Down Channel Silos

Marketing teams often optimize channels independently.

Instead, ask questions like:

Are our social campaigns supporting SEO goals?
Are high performing blog topics being amplified through social media?
Is our content strategy aligned with how users actually discover information?

What This Means for Marketing Leaders

If Google’s direction continues along this path, digital reporting is likely to become increasingly integrated.

Instead of viewing SEO, social media, content marketing, and brand building as separate initiatives, businesses will need unified measurement frameworks that connect performance across channels.

For marketing leaders, this presents an opportunity to move beyond tactical reporting and focus on strategic decision-making.

The organizations that succeed won’t necessarily be those producing the most content.

They’ll be the ones creating consistent, authoritative, and discoverable digital experiences across every touchpoint.

Our Perspective

At DMC Digital, we see updates like this as more than just platform enhancements – they’re indicators of where digital marketing is heading.

As search evolves, success will depend less on optimizing individual channels and more on building cohesive strategies that align SEO, content, social media, analytics, and brand positioning.

Technology will continue to change.

Algorithms will continue to evolve.

But a well-defined digital strategy remains the strongest competitive advantage.

Looking Ahead?

Ready to Build a Future Ready Digital Strategy?

If you’re looking beyond rankings and want a strategy that connects SEO, content, social media, analytics, and business growth, we’d love to help.

Our consultants work with brands to develop integrated digital marketing strategies that deliver measurable visibility, stronger brand authority, and sustainable long-term growth.

Get in touch today to discover how a data-driven strategy first approach can future-proof your digital marketing efforts.

The post Social Media Platform Reporting Is Coming to Google Search Console: What It Means for Brands and Why Strategy Matters More Than Ever appeared first on DMC Digital.

When Sports Drive Midnight Sales

Saba Karimi — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:54:03 +0000

Why Every Brand Needs a Digital Marketing Strategy During Global Sporting Events

Every Goal Creates a Purchase!

When a football match enters extra time, millions of fans aren’t just glued to their screen, they’re opening food delivery and quick commerce apps because nothing is better than binge eating a Lays packet when your favorite player is taking a penalty shot. The connection between sports and commerce has evolved dramatically over the last decade. What was once limited to pizza orders during the Super Bowl has transformed into a sophisticated ecosystem where every goal, wicket, six, penalty shootout, or halftime break creates measurable spikes in online ordering. For brands, sporting events are no longer just advertising opportunities. They have become high-intent digital commerce moments. With the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2026 already triggering a surge in late-night food delivery across markets like India (surprisingly for a country that doesn’t participate in FIFA but has a huge viewership with people staying aware at 2 AM to watch the match and subsequently ordering food at that time), the importance of combining digital marketing with quick commerce has never been greater.

Sports Are Creating New Consumer Behaviour

Major sporting tournaments fundamentally change consumer routines.

Fans stay awake longer.
Groups gather at home.
People avoid cooking.
Impulse purchases increase.
Social media conversations peak during live moments.

This behavioural shift is exactly what food delivery platforms thrive on. According to a recent Economic Times report, India’s ongoing FIFA World Cup has significantly boosted late-night food delivery demand after years of relatively slow overnight growth. Industry executives attribute this to younger consumers adjusting their sleeping and eating habits to watch matches live. Unlike traditional advertising windows, these moments come with unusually high purchase intent. Consumers aren’t merely browsing: they’re hungry, emotionally engaged, and ready to order.

Why Quick Commerce Wins During Sporting Events

Quick commerce thrives on urgency and sports create exactly that. The adrenaline is not limited to just players on the field but fans watching it on ground or at home, are equally excited. Imagine this scenario:

The match starts in 20 minutes.
Friends arrive unexpectedly.
Snacks are running low.
Drinks are finished.
Ice cream disappears before halftime.

Nobody wants to leave the television, no one wants to miss the start, so they order. This is why quick commerce platforms see increased demand for:

Soft drinks
Chips and snacks
Ice cream
Instant noodles
Frozen foods
Beer and mixers (where regulations permit)
Chocolates
Ready-to-eat meals
Phone chargers
Power banks
Party essentials

The sporting event itself becomes the trigger for immediate purchases.

The Psychology Behind Game-Time Purchases

Sports generate emotional highs and lows. Research consistently shows that emotionally heightened consumers make faster purchasing decisions. It’s a winning goal, why not celebrate it with dessert. Halftime? Let’s order burgers. Penalty shootout? It’s a nerve wrecking moment, where are those Red Bulls? The decision cycle shortens dramatically. For marketers, this means conversion rates often outperform traditional campaigns because consumers already have immediate intent.

FIFA 2026: The Opportunity Is Happening Right Now

The ongoing FIFA World Cup 2026 is already demonstrating how international tournaments reshape consumer behaviour. Late-night football schedules across different time zones have increased nighttime ordering, particularly among younger audiences who are changing their eating habits to watch matches live. Brands that activate campaigns during these viewing windows stand to benefit from:

Higher app engagement
Increased food orders
More impulse purchases
Greater social media interactions
Higher click-through rates

Rather than treating the World Cup as simply a sponsorship opportunity, brands are increasingly viewing it as a digital commerce event. If you are not yet placing your ads on Zomato, Amazon Now, Flipkart Minutes, Swiggy Instamart or Blinkit, then you are missing a prime time opportunity to be in front of the right audience at the right time.

Case Study: FIFA World Cup 2022 and Uber Eats

One of the strongest examples came during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Uber Eats launched football-themed campaigns across multiple countries featuring:

Match-day meal promotions
Scheduled deliveries before kickoff
Stadium-style meal bundles
Push notifications timed around fixtures
Influencer collaborations
Social media content reacting to live match moments

Instead of simply promoting discounts, Uber Eats aligned its messaging with the emotional journey of football fans. The result was increased engagement during match windows while reinforcing Uber Eats as part of the match-day experience.

Case Study: Zomato and Cricket Marketing

Although centred around cricket rather than football, Zomato has repeatedly demonstrated how contextual marketing drives engagement. During IPL seasons, Zomato consistently leverages:

Real-time memes
Live score references
Match-specific discounts
Player-related social content
Push notifications tied to game moments

Rather than interrupting the sporting experience, the brand becomes part of the conversation. This real-time marketing approach has helped Zomato maintain exceptionally high engagement on social media while driving incremental orders during live sporting events.

Case Study: Swiggy Instamart and Match Essentials

Swiggy’s quick commerce business has increasingly focused on occasion-based shopping rather than routine grocery replenishment. Major tournaments create ideal demand for:

Chips
Cold drinks
Ice cream
Instant snacks
Disposable plates
Party supplies

Instead of marketing individual products, campaigns often revolve around “match essentials”—positioning the service as the fastest way to avoid missing a moment of the game. This aligns perfectly with the psychology of live sports, where consumers value speed over extensive product comparisons.

Why Digital Marketing Becomes Critical

Many brands mistakenly believe sports marketing means buying expensive sponsorship rights. But digital marketing has changed this. Now, it’s easy for brands to participate without being official sponsors. Successful strategies include:

Real-Time Marketing

Posting within minutes of major match moments.

Search Marketing

Optimising for keywords like:

Match snacks
Football party food
Late-night delivery
Quick grocery delivery
FIFA watch party

These capture users actively searching during tournaments. If you are not selling food or essentials, you can always bank upon running your ads on apps that do.

Local SEO

Restaurants can optimise Google Business Profiles with:

Late-night hours
Match-day offers
Delivery availability

This improves visibility when nearby customers search for food during games.

Push Notifications

Timing matters. Instead of generic offers, send: “Kickoff in 30 minutes. Order now before the rush.” or “Penalty shootout? Dessert is on us.” These messages match the customer’s emotional context.

Social Media

Sports create endless opportunities for:

Memes
Polls
Predictions
Live commentary
Fan-generated content

Brands that react quickly often outperform those relying on pre-scheduled campaigns.

SEO During Sporting Events

Sporting events also create temporary but massive search demand. Examples include:

Best food for football night
Late-night delivery near me
Snacks for FIFA party
Grocery delivery open now
Pizza offers during World Cup

Brands producing relevant landing pages and blog content before tournaments can capture this seasonal traffic while competitors rely solely on paid ads.

The Future: AI, Personalisation and Predictive Commerce

The next evolution combines AI with live sporting data. Imagine:

Automatic discounts after your favourite team wins.
Push notifications triggered by halftime.
Personalised recommendations based on previous match-day orders.
Dynamic pricing based on demand forecasts.
AI-generated creatives reacting instantly to live scores.

As predictive marketing matures, sporting events will become even more integrated into digital commerce strategies.

DMC’s take

Sporting events are no longer just moments of entertainment—they are high-intent commerce opportunities. Whether it’s FIFA, IPL, the Olympics, or the UEFA Champions League, fans increasingly rely on food delivery and quick commerce platforms to enhance the viewing experience. The brands that succeed are those that understand one simple truth: Consumers don’t stop shopping when the game begins, they shop during the game and even at the end of game. For businesses, this means digital marketing should not be an afterthought during major sporting events. It should be the strategy that connects consumer emotion, real-time engagement, and instant commerce. Because sometimes, the biggest winner on match day isn’t the team lifting the trophy—it’s the brand that arrives at the customer’s doorstep before halftime.

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Google’s Official Position on GEO and AEO Just Changed

Saba Karimi — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:21:04 +0000

For the past 18 months, the digital marketing industry has been flooded with new acronyms. GEO. AEO. LLMO. AI SEO. Almost all our clients are panicking and asking us “are you doing everything that needs to be done for GEO and AEO?” Agencies have launched new service lines, traditional SEO offerings have changed and digital agencies have new pages on their website saying “AI SEO”. Consultants have promised proprietary frameworks. Entire conferences have emerged around “optimizing for AI, practically everyday I get a new email that promises to be a game-changing webinar for mastering AEO and GEO.” Then Google quietly released something that may reshape the conversation entirely. In May 2026, Google published its first dedicated guidance on optimizing websites for generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Buried within that documentation was perhaps the clearest statement Google has made so far about GEO and AEO: From Google’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. Read the guidelines here – https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide This is something that we have been saying since a long time, core principals of SEO still hold true, nothing has changed their, if your website is SEO compliant then it’s AI SEO compliant as well, mainly what’s changed is the way you write, it needs to be simple, baby style so that it can be understood by the AI engines. While traditional search engines became smart, AI engines are still young and they need simple language to reach the smart level.

Google Says GEO and AEO Are Not Separate Disciplines

Google’s new AI optimization guide directly addresses the growing popularity of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). According to Google’s documentation, both terms describe efforts to improve visibility within AI-powered search experiences. However, Google explicitly states that these activities remain part of traditional search optimization rather than separate disciplines. This matters because much of the industry narrative has suggested that AI search requires entirely new strategies. Google disagrees. The company argues that the same foundational signals that have historically helped content succeed in Search remain critical for AI-generated answers:

High-quality content
Strong technical SEO
Crawlability
Indexability
Authority and trust
User-focused experiences

In other words, Google is telling marketers that AI visibility is built on SEO fundamentals, if anything, it’s a downgraded version of traditional SEO.

The Data Suggests Google May Be Right

Independent research is increasingly showing that AI search systems are not selecting sources randomly. A large-scale academic study examining more than 55,000 queries found that domains cited within Google AI Overviews were generally higher quality than the average search result. Researchers also found that nearly 30% of cited sources did not appear among traditional first-page rankings, suggesting that AI systems evaluate content using additional signals beyond classic rankings. The takeaway? AI search is not replacing SEO. It is expanding the criteria used to determine which content deserves visibility.

The Biggest GEO Myth Google Just Debunked

One of the most important sections of Google’s new guidance addresses common GEO tactics currently circulating online. Google specifically pushed back against several popular recommendations, including:

Creating separate AI-only pages
Excessive content chunking solely for LLMs
Deploying special schema solely for AI visibility
Treating llms.txt as a ranking factor
Building content primarily for AI systems rather than users

Google’s position is simple: if a tactic doesn’t improve the user experience, it is unlikely to provide sustainable value. For many organizations investing heavily in AI-specific optimization checklists, this should trigger a serious reassessment.

What AI Search Actually Rewards

If GEO isn’t about technical tricks, what influences AI visibility? Google’s guidance repeatedly emphasizes content that is:

Unique

Commodity content is increasingly vulnerable. When dozens of websites publish nearly identical articles, AI systems have little reason to choose one source over another. Imagine when 100 sites claim to share top 10 digital marketing trends, it will be challenging to pick one site to rank above the rest. Google specifically highlights the importance of providing unique value and original information which it has always done even with traditional SEO.

Evidence-Based

AI systems prefer content that contains:

Statistics
Research
Expert insights
First-party data
Original findings

This is one reason original studies continue to outperform generic content in AI-generated citations.

Structured and Clear

AI models must be able to understand content quickly. Content that clearly answers questions, defines concepts, compares options, and provides step-by-step guidance is easier for generative systems to interpret and cite. Research into citation behavior across AI platforms found that highly structured content consistently showed greater influence within generated responses. This doesn’t mean that you need to redo the whole content, just try and restructure it better so that it actually answers a real problem than fluff.

The New Metric Marketers Should Be Tracking for AI success

Historically, SEO success was measured by rankings. Then everyone started to shift towards clicks. With AI search, now we have zero-click visibility. Google AI Overviews now appear for a meaningful percentage of searches, especially question-based queries. One recent study found AI Overview activation rates approaching 65% for question-oriented searches. As AI-generated answers expand, marketers need to monitor:

Brand mentions
Citation frequency
Source inclusion
AI visibility share
Branded search demand

There are tools that are learning to show this data, like SEMrush shows SOV% (share of voice), however, it’s not clear what that is and how reliable it is. Point to note is that the organizations that win may not always be the ones receiving the most traffic. They may be the ones becoming the source behind the answer.

Why Google’s Warning About AI Manipulation Matters

Perhaps the most overlooked development happened shortly after Google’s AI optimization guidance. Google updated its spam policies to explicitly target attempts to manipulate AI-generated answers and recommendations. Tactics commonly described as recommendation poisoning can now be treated as spam violations. Google is drawing a line between:

Optimizing content for AI understanding
Manipulating AI outputs

The first is encouraged but the second may carry penalties. For marketers, this reinforces a familiar lesson: sustainable visibility comes from creating better content, not exploiting loopholes and spamming the Internet with tons and tons of spinned content and hoping to get it ranked higher because you included 2 keywords more than the other authority site.

The Future of SEO Isn’t GEO. It’s Better SEO.

The industry has spent the last year debating whether GEO will replace SEO. Google’s answer is simple – it won’t. What is changing is how search engines evaluate authority, usefulness, and trustworthiness in an AI-driven environment. The winners will be websites producing:

Original research
Unique expertise
Verifiable information
Strong brand authority
Content that genuinely helps users

Google’s new guidance isn’t a rejection of GEO or AEO. It’s a reminder that AI search still depends on the same thing search has always depended on: Being the best source of information available. The core principle of SEO still hasn’t changed and if you stick to it, be it AEO, GEO or some new acronym that comes a few years later, you would still be able to nail it.

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Attribution Is Breaking: Why Digital Marketing Measurement May Collapse in 2026

Saba Karimi — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:58:03 +0000

As cookies disappear, AI agents reshape customer journeys, and privacy regulations tighten, marketers are losing the ability to answer the industry’s most important question: “What actually caused the sale?”

Everything can’t be measured

For nearly two decades, digital marketing operated on a powerful promise (even we used this to sell our services to clients who relied on traditional advertising to switch to digital): “Everything can be measured.” Clicks, impressions, conversions, ROAS, CAC, multi-touch attribution, digital marketing became deeply dependent on tracking technologies that connected user behavior across platforms and devices. But now, marketing attribution is entering what many analysts describe as a structural crisis. Third-party cookie deprecation, privacy-first operating systems, fragmented customer journeys, AI-powered search interfaces, and increasing regulatory scrutiny are fundamentally weakening marketers’ ability to determine which campaign actually drives revenue. The consequences are enormous:

CMOs struggle to justify budgets,
performance marketers lose optimization accuracy,
finance teams question ROI reliability,
and brand marketing regains strategic importance because not everything can be directly measured anymore.

Justifying why clients should keep investing in digital or focus on which platform is becoming increasingly difficult.

How did digital marketing become popular?

Digital marketing’s rise was fueled by measurability. Compared to television, print, or outdoor advertising, digital platforms offered unprecedented visibility into:

user journeys,
click paths,
conversion events,
ad engagement,
and customer acquisition costs.

Attribution models evolved rapidly:

first-touch attribution,
last-click attribution,
linear attribution,
time-decay models,
algorithmic multi-touch attribution (MTA).

All this tracking, data availability, knowing where the revenue is coming from felt superb, which allowed brands to invest more and more on digital advertising. Whatever you were doing could be proved easily. The assumption was simple: “If enough behavioral data is collected, marketing impact can be precisely measured.”

Why Attribution Is Breaking

1. The Death of Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies formed the backbone of cross-site behavioral tracking for years. They enabled marketers to identify users across websites, retarget website users and build attribution reports in analytics dashboard. Now, with so many laws and discussions about privacy happening, browsers and platforms are aggressively restricting the third party cookies.

Major Changes

Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default.
Google Chrome continues transitioning toward privacy-preserving alternatives.
Mobile phone browsers are increasingly limiting advertising identifiers.

According to a 2024 report by Deloitte Digital, marketers are already reporting measurable declines in attribution confidence as cookie restrictions expand globally.

2. Privacy Regulations Are Reshaping Data Collection

Privacy laws are transforming marketing infrastructure. Regulations such as:

GDPR in Europe,
CCPA in California,
India’s DPDP Act,
and emerging global privacy frameworks

are restricting how consumer data can be collected, stored, and shared. This has created an operational friction in terms of lower opt-in rates (you can no longer just add people to mailing list without explicitly asking for permission), fragmented user identities and a legal uncertainty always lurking around in terms of what you can and cannot capture. A 2024 survey by Gartner found that a growing percentage of marketing leaders cite privacy compliance as a major barrier to measurement effectiveness. The core issue is not simply compliance, overall the attribution systems become statistically weaker when behavioral visibility declines.

3. Cross-Device Journeys Are Becoming Invisible

Modern customer journeys are highly fragmented. A user may:

discover a product on TikTok,
research it on YouTube,
compare reviews on Google,
ask ChatGPT for recommendations,
and finally purchase directly through Amazon or a branded app.

And many of these interactions occur:

across multiple devices,
across logged-out environments,
or inside closed ecosystems.

Traditional attribution systems were not designed for this level of fragmentation. As a result:

Marketers are seeing a huge spike in the number of users coming from “direct traffic”
Conversions are not reported correctly, for e.g. platform dashboard would say there were 200 registrations wherein Google Analytics might report only 150.
Customer journeys appear incomplete because sessions are not carried forward across devices and the same user keeps getting tagged as a new user.

This creates a dangerous illusion: “marketers may optimize toward measurable touchpoints while underestimating invisible influence channels.”

4. AI Agents Are Compressing the Customer Journey

One of the least discussed but most important changes in 2026 is the rise of AI-mediated discovery. Consumers increasingly use:

ChatGPT,
Perplexity,
Google Gemini,
and other AI search interfaces

to make purchase decisions. These systems compress discovery, evaluation, and recommendation into a single interaction. Example:

A consumer asks an AI assistant: “What’s the best CRM for small agencies?”
The AI synthesizes multiple sources.
The user directly visits one recommended brand.
The conversion appears as direct traffic.

The original influence layer disappears from traditional attribution systems. It’s getting better with AI agents adding their parameters to the link but that only helps when user clicks from within the chat prompt. This is one of the biggest structural threats to performance marketing measurement.

Empirical Evidence

Several studies now show growing instability in attribution reliability. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Advertising Research found that privacy-driven signal loss significantly reduces the accuracy of multi-touch attribution models, especially in cross-device environments. Research from McKinsey & Company suggests that marketers are increasingly shifting toward:

probabilistic modeling,
media mix modeling (MMM),
incrementality testing,
and first-party data ecosystems.

This is a major shift because it signals a return to statistical inference rather than deterministic tracking. In other words: “marketing measurement is becoming probabilistic again.” Ironically, digital marketing is beginning to resemble traditional advertising measurement models it once claimed to replace.

The Growing Tension Inside Organizations

Attribution breakdown is creating internal conflict across marketing organizations.

Performance Marketing Teams

Need measurable efficiency:

CAC,
ROAS,
conversion attribution,
channel optimization.

Brand Marketing Teams

Argue that:

awareness,
trust,
community,
and long-term perception

cannot always be directly attributed.

Finance Teams

Still expect:

predictable ROI,
measurable contribution,
and defensible budget allocation.

This creates a strategic tension: “How do companies allocate marketing budgets when there is no certainty to the source of revenue?” For many CMOs, this is becoming one of the hardest operational questions in modern marketing.

What Replaces Traditional Attribution?

The industry is moving toward a hybrid measurement future.

1. Media Mix Modeling (MMM)

Brands are revisiting econometric approaches that estimate channel contribution statistically rather than individually tracking users. Example, suppose over 12 months:

Channel	Spend Increase	Observed Sales Impact
TV Ads	+15%	Sales rose 8%
Google Search	+10%	Sales rose 5%
Influencer Campaigns	+25%	Sales rose 12%

An econometric model might conclude:

TV contributed 30% of incremental sales
Search contributed 25%
Influencers contributed 35%
Organic/seasonality contributed 10%

Even though:

no individual users were tracked,
no cookies connected the journey,
and no exact click path existed.

Old attribution: “User A clicked Facebook, then purchased.” MMM: “Historically, increasing Facebook spend correlates with statistically significant sales lift.” It’s less deterministic but often more realistic for modern fragmented journeys.

2. Incrementality Testing

Controlled experiments measure whether marketing actually creates additional conversions versus capturing existing demand. Example of Incrementality Testing An e-commerce fashion brand is running:

Meta ads
Google Ads
influencer campaigns

The marketing dashboard shows:

12,000 conversions from Meta ads.

At first glance, the team assumes: “Meta generated 12,000 sales.” But there’s a problem: some customers may have purchased anyway without seeing the ads, the ad just happened to be there to help them click and purchase. Incrementality testing tries to answer the more important question: “How many additional sales happened because of the campaign?” How Incrementality Testing Works We create two groups:

Group	What Happens
Test Group	Sees the ads
Control Group	Does NOT see the ads

Everything else remains as similar as possible. After the campaign:

Group	Conversion Rate
Test Group	5.2%
Control Group	4.1%

Interpretation The difference: 5.2%−4.1% = 1.1% That 1.1% is considered the incremental lift caused by advertising. Meaning:

many conversions would have happened naturally,
only part of the campaign actually created new demand.

3. First-Party Data Ecosystems

Companies are now increasingly investing in:

CRM systems,
loyalty programs,
owned communities,
and authenticated user relationships.

4. Attention Metrics

Some marketers (including us) are shifting from click-based optimization toward:

engagement quality – number of followers is not important, how people are engaging in conversation with you is important.
attention duration – there is no point in showing a huge traffic growth when people are spending only 0.1 second traffic.
brand recall,
and influence metrics.

Our 2 cents

The attribution systems that defined modern digital marketing were built for a more trackable internet which no longer exists. Privacy regulation, platform fragmentation, AI-assisted discovery, and signal loss are dismantling the assumptions behind deterministic attribution. The biggest challenge for digital marketers in 2026 may not be generating demand, it is proving where demand actually came from.

The post Attribution Is Breaking: Why Digital Marketing Measurement May Collapse in 2026 appeared first on DMC Digital.

FOMO Marketing: The Psychology of Demand

Zainab Pithawala — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:32:12 +0000

Did you play Pokemon GO at its peak? Perhaps, watched Avengers: End Game without watching the previous parts? Bought limited edition shoes? Rushed out to buy the Dubai Chocolates? Or Collected the Kinder Joy themed toys? Well then you have just fallen for the biggest marketing strategy out there. As marketers, capturing an audience is just half the battle, using that audience’s attention to drive sales for a business is the battle won. An effective marketing strategy should evoke emotions that compel an audience to take action. One such powerful emotion is that of fear. When used strategically fear sells. FOMO also known as the fear of missing out ‑ plays on human instincts to not miss out on opportunities. The phenomenon of FOMO can be said to exist as part of the young generation’s psyche, the fear of missing out when their peers have access to something that they don’t. Urgency, exclusivity, and social proof contribute significantly to how effective FOMO is at triggering responses from individuals, and thus making it among the strongest psychological stimuli in current marketing practices. What is FOMO Marketing? Humans have an innate tendency to compete for resources, more so when we know they are scarce. We don’t like to lose out on something, making us motivated to take action. Similarly, FOMO, marketing uses Cialdini’s principles of scarcity, getting into consumers’ emotional responses and triggers, making them want to act quickly in order to not miss out on an opportunity. Think of notifications like,” Only one left in stock. “Diya recently purchased a few and gave it a five-star review.” Or META’s “Zainab’s on the Meta AI app, join them now.” That’s creating FOMO while delivering social proof of people liking your product. Why should FOMO Marketing be your next move? FOMO marketing is an automatic call to action, leveraging emotions and desires into affirmative purchases that drive businesses.

Creates a sense of urgency: FOMO in marketing creates a sense of urgency because consumers believe something is available to them for a limited time. It basically screams “now or never”. When something feels limited, it pushes people into YOLO mode. Don’t overthink it – just add to cart while there’s still some available.

Increased engagement: FOMO tactics automatically increase engagement by engaging the audience and encouraging them to come back frequently. For example, when an influencer decides to have flash sales through their social channels, they make fans check their pages more often, turning on notifications in order to ensure that they won’t miss anything. Offers that are only available for a short period and exclusive promotions stimulate curiosity, making more people get involved in the process and interact more. As another case in point, purchasing concert tickets may be considered, because a musician announces the venue for certain hours and releases only a certain amount of them, prompting fans to set reminders and visit the site right away upon its going live. Some users won’t buy tickets but will still be engaged in other ways.

Helps boost sales: Fear of missing out drives people to purchase right away without overthinking various details of their decisions.

Enhances brand perception: Providing your clients with some exclusive bonuses or allowing them to get early access may enhance the prestige of your brand.

Improves brand perception: Giving out exclusive deals or an early access can make a brand feel more premium and more connected to its audience. When individuals feel like they’re getting something not everyone else has, it adds a sense of value and makes the brand stand out.

Improves customer loyalty: Giving loyal customers early access or exclusive perks makes them feel seen and appreciated. When people feel like using a specific brand actually pays off, they’re way more likely to stay loyal, and even hype the brand to others.

Effective social proof: When you see “10K people bought this” or “going viral,” it can act as insightful social proof that makes others not want to miss out.

FOMO Marketing Tools: The effective implementation of FOMO marketing strategy requires the combination of different techniques such as exclusivity, urgency, limited availability, and even some social proofing elements. If done correctly, such marketing activities will attract much attention and stimulate customers’ actions. It is important to distinguish between understanding of FOMO principle and effective ways of its practical use. Below, there are some of the most common strategies used by brands in order to induce the fear of missing something important: Limited-time offers It is probably the easiest way to apply this psychological concept. Limited time implies that customers have to make a decision quickly, not to miss the opportunity. Another industry that has mastered FOMO recently is entertainment, particularly through movie theatres with the releases like Dune: Part Two. Movie theatres, specifically chains like AMC Theatres that have turned merchandise into must-have collectibles. For instance, the now viral Dune popcorn bucket. The snack bucket was limited to a few weeks of theatrical release, it was utterly bizarre and became meme worthy.. People who hadn’t even planned to watch the movie suddenly wanted the bucket. It became a conversation starter online, driving both engagement and ticket sales. Flash sales Flash sales refer to unexpected discounts offered for a short period of time. In fact, they are rather spontaneous sales events that often surprise their target audience. Besides, flash sales are very effective in stimulating repeat visits because customers never know when the next event will occur. Exclusive access It is well-known that humans enjoy being unique and exceptional. Therefore, exclusive products and services help customers experience that feeling. Influencer marketing If the product is promoted by an influencer whom consumers consider credible, then immediately becomes popular due to the involvement of that person. The consumer will not want to miss this trend or opportunity to purchase a product from someone whom he/she trusts. For instance, Rhode never floods the beauty market with its product but it strategically releases products in limited quantities. The brand’s marketing leans into aspirational marketing, powered by Hailey Bieber herself. When consumers see a celebrity they admire using a product, it automatically increases its desirability. Add to that influencer collaborations with creators like Alexandra Malena Saint Mleux who is often regarded as the epitome of the cool clean girl aesthetic makes the product not look like skincare but more of a lifestyle choice. Social media teasers These teasers are about creating curiosity around something without giving away too much information. This way, people are drawn into the product launch because they do not know exactly what to expect. Contests and giveaways This strategy works through time limits and small number of rewards. People tend to rush when it comes to contests, so they can participate in them and win a prize. For those who did not participate, there will still be the feeling of loss since winners of contests will promote their prize on social media. Live updates Phrases such as “Only 3 left,” “500 people are viewing this,” or “Selling fast” make consumers act faster and order products right away. They know that there is no guarantee that they can acquire this product at the later stage. FOMO Fatigue: While FOMO is a potent weapon in your arsenal, using it too often might result in its opposite. People will realize that nothing is actually ending anytime soon or that there aren’t only a few products left. FOMO must be authentic if you want it to work. When such realization strikes, urgency turns into apathy. Decisions are postponed because consumers expect a similar or even better offer to reappear later. The psychological element which led to action now leads to postponement. In addition, there is a cognitive downside to the constant sense of urgency. Urgency requires attention and decision-making continuously. If everything seems urgent, then nothing matters. Consumers become mentally deaf. This brings us to our next point: FOMO must be balanced. FOMO works because we all know what it feels like to want to fit in and not be left behind. We are social creatures who require connections and inclusion to function properly. It is not just about convincing consumers to buy products, but about selling ideas or experiences. In this era of rapid changes in fashion, where everything becomes outdated overnight, FOMO is an excellent way to motivate customers to purchase your products. After all, it isn’t about the product itself; it’s about selling the idea that you’ll regret it if you don’t have the item. So, how many times have you made purchases based solely on FOMO?

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How to make sense in creative nonsense

Zainab Pithawala — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:59:27 +0000

As marketers, we often encounter one of the silliest yet most important tools at the creative front: creative nonsense.

The standard definition of creativity requires novelty and appropriateness as its core pillars. When we remove appropriateness, it becomes ‘overinclusive thinking’: a type of thinking where the connection between ideas is lost, making them irrelevant.

Marketing has always lived in a strange space where brilliance and absurdity look almost identical. What one person calls “genius,” another might dismiss as “nonsense.”

Rise of the Nonsense:

Scrolling through Instagram, you might often notice that some of the most engaging content doesn’t really make sense. It doesn’t look planned, it’s impulsive, raw, random and maybe even chaotic.

This by any means does not share accidental grounds. It is a niche that many influencers and companies particularly choose.

Creators today build their entire online presence around absurdity, more so, controlled absurdity. They have jump cuts that feel off, humour that feels too random, pointless narratives, but they bring millions of people in.

Why does it bring engagement, one might ask?

To put it simply, everything on the internet feels the same. The digital landscape has millions of posts by the hour, all overly polished, highly AI-generated. It has become predictable, perfect grammar, structure and deep metaphors no longer feel raw and human, they’re expected.

Creative nonsense, however, disrupts this pattern. When you are stuck in a world of endless scrolling, having the audience look twice and interrupting their flow is your ultimate power.

The Fast pace:

The world online isn’t just fast in its pace, but it skims through all the information available.

Research suggests that the average attention span when watching anything online is now less than a minute, only 47 seconds. That makes it awfully hard to capture an audience that can be uninterested within a millisecond. If a creator cannot strike a blow by the end of the first 1.5 seconds, then the following 45.5 seconds will never even be seen.

That’s the Skimmer’s Rule in play. Nearly 75% of visitors skim-read the text; three-quarters of the audience will not read the carefully crafted 500-word caption you put together. Instead, they will mentally summarise it down to 10 words. That gives you a tighter window to work with. Your 500 words need to be easy enough for a quick summary.

Even when the best search engine results page links enjoy a 39% click-through rate, the “Read More” button on social media is an uncommon occurrence. Your hook must be smart and fast because otherwise, the “Read More” button becomes nothing more than a “Close Ad” button for you.

This means 3 things:

You have 1.5 seconds to capture attention.
less than a minute to hold it
A high chance your content will be reduced to a few words

But something strange has been happening with nonsense; it survives compression. It taps into memory, sense of self and breaks the rhythm.

AI and the Flood of Sameness:

To add to the problem, AI has made it more difficult for content to actually get recognition.

It is fantastic at creating ideas, expressions, and connections.

But most of it is missing something essential: judgment.

An algorithm can produce, but it does not select. Algorithms lack an understanding of context, subtleties, and when something just feels wrong.

And that’s why so much of AI-generated content turns out to be useless. Intelligent-sounding nonsense is still nonsense.

Which is precisely where human thought comes in, not to add more ideas, but to sort through them.

The trick today is not just about being creative. It is about selecting.

Does Nonesense always work?

Not all nonsense is effective, and not all nonsense can work; most of it just becomes noise.

The difference between nonsense and creative nonsense lies in intent.

Creative nonsense feels random only at the surface of things; it is deeply catered to its audience and relevant underneath. For many, it taps into something real and personal, perhaps an emotion, a behaviour or a shared human frustration,

When brands and creators get this right, they do more than just entertain people, but create a connection, turning an audience into a community.

The absurdity then becomes a mirror, something the audience instantly recognises even if it’s exaggerated or irrational. Be it Duolingo’s aggressive bird that threatens to lock you up if you don’t do a lesson or with the Autizmen’s humourlessly funny content, they don’t make sense, but keep the audience engaged till the end.

How Brands Can Use Creative Nonsense

Brands often play it safe. They’re scared of confusion, inconsistency, or anonymity.

However, their attempt to provide answers leads them to disappear into thin air.

The idea here is not to confuse people but to surprise with intention.

The following guidelines help maintain such a balance:

1. Absurdity for the Hook, Not for Clarity

Absurdity can catch people’s attention, but not convey the whole message. After you have caught attention, clarity has to kick in.

2. Start with Friction

The most effective content shouldn’t start with your praise of yourself. It should start where your audience stops to think. Recognition immediately connects.

3. Edit to the Core

If people skim through all the stuff online, any extra words will distract them. Minimalism is not just a style; it’s a requirement.

4. Accept Your Flaws

Anything overproduced becomes part of the crowd. Anything slightly raw and humanised draws attention because of that quality.

5. Be Ruthless about convergence:

Go wild with generating ideas, then go crazy killing those that don’t fit.

Many brands, before the development of AI, have functioned very well on this tactic.

In the 90s, Asian Paints came out with an ad called “Mera Wala Cream” It exploited a peculiar quirk that all advertising producers know: the one that plagues their clients with the infamous “mental shade.”

The commercial follows an obsessive character who turns down dozens of cream samples that all look similar to him with a single, repetitive statement, “Mera Wala cream” (my kind of cream). To the owner of the store, it was just “Creative Nonsense.” However, while one can see no difference between off-white and pearlescent eggshell from afar, there is an ocean separating these shades from each other.

Instead of avoiding the nonsense in its commercial, the company embraced it, doing two things by using the repeated phrase of “Mera Wala [Colour]”:

Reinforced the Obsession: It let the consumer know that it understands them perfectly and knows their irrational fixation on certain colours.

Created a Phrase Branding: The company managed to transform the “irrational” obsession of consumers into a commonly used expression that referred to their desired colour – Mera Wala [Colour].

Instead of searching for trends to follow, they became trends.

However,

Marketing has moved from a world of building recognition to a world of fighting for attention.

Earlier, brands like Asian Paints had time to explain themselves. Today, they have moments.

Earlier, creativity could unfold slowly. Today, it must hit instantly.

This shift changes the role of nonsense. Before, it was risky.

Now, it’s often necessary. We still remember unhinged ads from our childhood, from MTV beats to Idea’s honey bunny. They were creative, catchy, but more importantly, selective and relatable.

Creative nonsense is not the problem. Irrelevant nonsense is.

When used intentionally, absurdity becomes one of the most effective tools in modern marketing. It disrupts patterns, captures attention, and makes ideas stick.

But without clarity, it quickly turns into noise.

In a world where content is abundant and attention is scarce, the goal isn’t to sound creative. It’s to be understood.

Because in the end, the only creativity that matters is the kind that actually makes sense.

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Can Your Agency Truly Serve You and Your Competitor?

Zainab Pithawala — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:11:12 +0000

After a decade in performance marketing, we’ve seen one issue haunt agency leaders more than any other: “the competitive vertical portfolio.” It’s a grey area no one really talks about during a sales pitch, but it’s the one question that can make or break an agency’s reputation.

In the rush for scale, agencies often sign every client that walks through the door. However, The dilemma lurks in the shadows of those signed contracts: Can an agency maximize your ROI while simultaneously helping your biggest rival do the same? On paper, it’s just business. In practice, it’s a moral minefield.

When we first asked our team if we would ever take up a client within the same industry, in unison everyone said “no” which in honesty reflects Kant’s arguments on moral actions, think of it this way: if everyone managed competing clients in the same space without boundaries, would trust even be possible? Kant might say, “Nope.” Because when you treat clients as mere means, using their confidential data to optimize for one and then another, you violate a moral law.

Agencies often like to talk about the mechanisms of “internal firewalls,” the idea that there exists a Team A and Team B who are in different pods, blissfully unaware of each other’s tactics. For many agencies, this in reality could be true. Specifically vertical agencies that have built their empire upon managing the same clients. They have the resources to allot separate teams and guarantee a practice fair to all. More than that they offer the stability and the knowledge of knowing what is best within that industry, eliminating the novice trial and error.

We personally felt knowledge isn’t a liquid you can pour into separate buckets. Suppose a senior strategist discovers a high-converting “hook” or a specific bidding loophole for Client X; it is professionally impossible for them to just “un-see” it when reviewing Client Y’s account across the hall.

When we apply “agency best practices” across competing accounts, we’re homogenizing competition. If everyone is using the same “secret sauce,” does the sauce even exist anymore?

Is it ethical or not? We asked our team members at DMC to share their opinion. A lot of them obliged. Here are their thoughts:

“I personally believe it’s unethical for an agency to run digital marketing campaigns for direct competitors in the same city. As a client, you place immense trust in your agency, not just with your brand, but with your data, your customers, and your growth strategy. What’s really stopping an agency from misusing that access, even subtly? NDAs and contracts exist, but in reality, enforcement is weak and trust is fragile. From where I stand as Director of Operations, we value client relationships far more than short-term gains, and we would never onboard a client that directly competes with one we already serve.” -Director of Operations

To counter this, our Jr. Digital Marketing Executive presented her side of the argument: “While geography is a hard line, many in our strategy and growth teams argue that a vertical portfolio is actually a client’s secret weapon, provided the agency has the scale to back it up. If we have the resources to deploy entirely non-overlapping teams, we aren’t just ‘recycling’ ideas; we are applying high-level sector intelligence. Onboarding a competitor in a completely different geographical location isn’t a conflict; it’s a data advantage. It allows us to spot macro-trends and algorithm shifts in one market and protect our clients in another before the wave even hits them. For us, the ethical line isn’t the industry; it’s the ‘overlap.’ If the teams and the territories don’t touch, the client only stands to gain from our specialized expertise.”

While we were looking from a lens of a purely mechanical standpoint, managing two competing companies in the same city is an ethical minefield. You are essentially bidding against yourself with two different checkbooks. For instance, a moral conflict arises when you choose to optimize a Client to win the top spot; you are inherently driving up the CPC (Cost Per Click) for the second Client. We have to ask ourselves, if one didn’t know which client paid them the biggest invoice, would we still feel the strategy was fair?

Data and Strategy Execution

In the digital marketing landscape we can never assume data to just be a commodity. When a client shares their margins, conversion paths, and LTV (Lifetime Value), they are handing you the very means to their survival.

Some within the team felt that signing competitors would mean unintentional use of insights gained from one client’s “hard-earned failures” to jumpstart a competitor’s “easy success” which felt like a breach of trust. In our world, once that “sacred trust” is commoditized, the agency is no longer a partner; it’s just a vendor.

“What’s really stopping an agency from misusing that access, even subtly? As a client, you place immense trust in your agency, not just with your brand, but with your data and your growth strategy. From where I stand, crossing that line is a risk to the very foundation of what we do.” — Director of Operations

We found three ways an Agency can deal with the situation of a vertical expansion:

Firstly, they can act as a specialist which means they take everyone in a niche. They own the data, the agency’s goal is “market-wide efficiency,” not “individual dominance.”

If an agency manages 50 personal injury law firms across the country, they aren’t guessing what works. They have seen 1,000 versions of a landing page, 5,000 ad headlines, and millions of dollars in spend.

“Why would you want an exclusive agency that has to ‘learn’ on your dime when you can hire us and skip the six months of expensive failure?” They don’t offer “innovation” in the sense of reinvention; they offer optimized stability.

Secondly, they act as a Transparent Silo, which means they heavily rely on “firewalls” that are separate teams, dedicated Slack channels, and restricted data access to manage competitors under one roof. The agency is upfront about the conflict, betting that structural barriers can override human intuition.

Lastly, an agency can choose to be the Exclusive Partner. They take one player per market. It’s more expensive, and the growth is slower for the agency, but the loyalty is absolute.

The Question that Remains:

Ultimately, the health of our industry doesn’t depend on Return on Ad Spend; it depends on Moral ROAS. If we were the client, we wouldn’t want a “promise.” We would expect Full Disclosure before the contract, Data Portability (our pixel stays in our house), and Creative Originality that isn’t rolled out to our rival the following Tuesday.

As Keynes suggested, the difficulty isn’t in coming up with new rules, it’s escaping the “growth-at-all-costs” mindset. We must decide: Are we custodians of our clients’ growth or just auctioneers for their budgets?

We must acknowledge a curious double standard in the professional world. We don’t blink when a top-tier accounting firm manages the audits for three competing banks, or when a law firm represents multiple players in the same industry. These professions handle the fundamentals of a business, finances and legal survival, yet they are rarely criticized for a lack of integrity.

So, why is the digital marketing space treated differently? Perhaps it’s because our work is so public. An audit happens behind closed doors, but an ad campaign lives in the open market, where every “win” for one client can be a visible “loss” for another in the same auction. In marketing, the conflict isn’t just in the data; it’s in the very air we breathe.

The digital marketing industry is at a crossroads. Unlike professions guided by centuries of case law, we are writing our ethical code in real-time. We must decide if we are comfortable being “The Factory” a data utility for the masses, or if we want to be the “Sovereign Partner” who treats a client’s growth as an exclusive mission.

We want to hear from you: Does the “Accountant Model” work for marketing, or is our field inherently different because we compete for the same limited digital real estate? If you were the client, would you value the “Aggregate Intelligence” of a specialist, or the “Quiet Loyalty” of an exclusive partner?

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