Happy Wednesday 👋
For the past year, agencies, platforms, and brands have all been circling the same question from different angles: what actually shapes influence now?
Technology has moved fast. Culture has moved slower. And the gap between what tools can do and what people trust them to do is starting to matter more than raw capability.
Three new reports from Omnicom and WPP help explain why. They do not frame influence as a media problem or an AI problem, but as a human one.
Let’s get into it.
Driving the news: Across Omnicom’s Future of Brand Influence, its MediaPost briefing, and WPP’s How Humans Decide research, the data points to a single constraint on influence: human cognition. The findings cluster into four clear themes.
How people actually make decisions
Roughly 70 percent of brand decisions are made emotionally first, with rational justification happening afterward.
Habit drives more than 50 percent of repeat purchase behavior, outweighing price changes, feature improvements, or promotions in many categories.
Brands that align messaging with existing behavior patterns outperform behavior change campaigns by 2x on effectiveness and recall.
Decision confidence increases by over 25 percent when choices are narrowed rather than expanded.
Attention, memory, and overload
Less than 25 percent of consumers can correctly recall a brand after seeing a personalized digital ad within the same browsing session.
Increasing frequency beyond three to five exposures per week produces diminishing returns, with brand favorability declining as repetition rises.
Consumers exposed to fewer messages that feel intentional are 1.7x more likely to remember the brand than those exposed to high volume adaptive messaging.
Reducing message volume while increasing clarity improves memorability by nearly 40 percent compared to high output strategies.
Trust and social influence
Peer behavior influences decisions up to 2x more than brand messaging, even when the brand message is more detailed or informative.
Small group social proof drives up to 3x higher persuasion than celebrity or large scale creator endorsements.
When people perceive messaging as automated, trust drops by roughly 30 percent unless the message includes clear human framing or intent.
Where AI helps and where it does not
AI optimized creative improves short term performance metrics by 10 to 20 percent.
Those gains show no statistically meaningful lift in long term brand preference.
AI is most effective when supporting decision making, such as narrowing choices, testing variations, and accelerating learning.
Taken together, the data explains why scale alone is no longer producing influence. Distribution is no longer the bottleneck. Human limits are.
The stakes: This reframing matters because many brands are still chasing influence through volume and efficiency. More content. More personalization. More automated touchpoints.
The research suggests this approach increasingly works against itself. When messaging overwhelms rather than guides, attention fragments. When persuasion feels automated, trust erodes. Brands do not lose because they disappear. They lose because they blend together.
The next advantage will not come from better tools alone, but from knowing where those tools stop helping.
The friction: There is a structural tension running through this moment. AI systems reward speed, scale, and optimization. Human decision making rewards familiarity, meaning, and restraint.
Many organizations are optimizing for what machines do well without fully accounting for how people absorb information. That mismatch shows up as creative fatigue, declining trust, and skepticism toward even well intentioned campaigns.
Influence weakens when efficiency outruns understanding.
What this unlocks: For brands willing to adjust, this creates room to compete differently. Influence shifts away from who can publish the most and toward who can connect with intent.
AI becomes most valuable behind the scenes, helping teams learn faster and focus attention where it actually matters. Humans decide what deserves to exist. Machines help make it better.
The opportunity is not to sound smarter or faster, but to sound clearer and more human at scale.
The bigger picture: The future of brand influence will not be decided by platforms or algorithms alone. It will be decided by how well organizations understand people and how carefully they use technology in service of that understanding.
AI may change how influence is delivered. It does not change where influence comes from.
For everything else, see below 👇
Media
Warner Bros. and Paramount Are in Talks With Netflix
A potential deal underscores how much leverage has shifted toward global streaming platforms. (The New York Times). Link
Spotify Is Pushing Deeper Into Video Podcasts
The company wants creators to think beyond audio as competition for attention intensifies. (The Hollywood Reporter). Link
Amazon’s Beast Games Is Getting a Second Season
The copyright-free format hints at how platforms are lowering risk on big entertainment bets. (Business Insider). Link
AI
OpenAI’s Countdown to Monetization
Ads, distribution pressure, and a Google-shaped threat are starting to define the next phase. (Digiday). Link
Why AI Boosts Creativity for Some Employees but Not Others
The gains depend heavily on role clarity and how the tools are introduced. (Harvard Business Review). Link
Bollywood Embraces AI Tools for Moviemaking
Studios are testing efficiency gains without fully handing over creative control. (Semafor). Link
Universal Music and Nvidia Strike an AI Deal
The partnership highlights how music companies are trying to shape AI use rather than block it outright. (The Verge). Link
Art/Fashion
Wes Anderson’s Work Is Headed to Fine Art Exhibits
The filmmaker’s aesthetic continues its move from cinema into institutional culture. (The Hollywood Reporter). Link
Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Debut Is Setting the Tone for AW26
Menswear and couture are converging around restraint and clarity. (Dazed Digital). Link
Niche Logos Are Overtaking Big Name Brands
Smaller, more specific visual identities are resonating as mass brand signals lose meaning. (Semafor). Link
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