Ad revenue invested behind creator-generated content is expected to top $180 billion this year, up 20% for 2024, and could more than double by 2030, per a WPP Media forecast. Yet despite the rapidly growing investment - increasingly driven by major CPG marketers - a vast amount of creator ad spend may not be effective. About half (45%) of creator ad spend on Meta failed to deliver brand impact due to missing logos or branding in the first three seconds,
Kind snack bars is hedging its bets on using generative AI tools, like synthetic audiences and AI agents, to turn its business around. This year has been "an inflection point" for the Mars-owned snack brand, as Osher Hoberman, CMO at Kind North America, puts it. Kind has been struggling to capture Gen Z's attention and faces stiff competition from private label brands, Hoberman said.
"Brand building is a bit like pointillism ... Every time you activate your brand, you're placing a dot in somebody's brain," said Kaplan, explaining that those individual dots cluster over time to form richer perceptions of a brand. Marketers who have a strong grasp of such perceptions can act with confidence on whether and how to deploy their brands in different cultural contexts while those who don't may simply create more noise.