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Dear Chiara,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response and for connecting us with your colleagues! We look forward to learning more about the wellness, art, and family-friendly experiences available during our stay.

What do the 2026 marketing shifts really mean for your brand?

Most of the articles I have read are calling them trends, but I see it as a shift thats not going anywhere for a while beyond 2026. It's the beginning of a massive shift that we all need to be paying attention to as brand builders and leaders.

This moment is the result of compounded consumer fatigue, rapid cultural shifts and the acceleration of AI. We're stepping into a new era of marketing that has been quietly forming for years.

So instead of you having to sift through all the crap to find out whats actually important, I have broken down my top 4 shifts that I think are going to change the way that our brands are built at their foundations.

Is the AI slop era over?

It feels like the AI slop era is over, at least for now. People are tired of bot comments, fake campaigns, vacuous creative and chat-coded copy that's dead behind the eyes.

Trust is shifting towards brands that are clearly prioritising human-created content.

And even the largest, most coveted brands are moving away from the slop and getting serious consumer buy-in because of it.

Just look at Hermès, who recently created a campaign entirely by hand, hiring animators, illustrators and original musicians instead of defaulting to AI-generated shortcuts. That level of craft signals effort, care and trust. It shows that a brand is willing to put the work in, rather than pumping profits and getting lazy. It also feeds into the connection and analogue lives that people are craving right now.

But AI isn't going anywhere. This dip in trust is temporary and will likely become just a blip in an ever-evolving matrix. As time passes, whether that's months or decades, AI-generated content will become familiar and accepted. Which is exactly why this moment matters. There is a real opportunity right now to lean hard into human creativity while it still cuts through. So what can we do?

We can build smarter systems, automations and integrations powered by AI in the backend, freeing up more space for creativity, storytelling and human connection at the frontend.

What does this mean for your brand?

Get radically intentional about buying back your time. Use AI and automations to streamline backend processes so you can spend more energy on meaning, expression and relationships.

If you don't know where to start, go straight to the source. Use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or your favourite friendly local robot as a thinking partner. My top recommendation is to use AI for analysis, research, structuring, sense-checking ideas, and spelling and grammar support. As well as plugging in all your business processes and asking it - how can we utilise AI to reduce friction and remove manual tasks.

For now, most of us don't need to hire an in-house AI creator or become besties with Midjourney and whatever new tool drops next week. What we do need is to increase the effort we put into meaningful stories, content, collaborations and how we show up. This means knowing your community better, leaning into your point of view and creating conversations through our brand messaging.