Martin Renaud on AI and Simplifying Marketing Choices

Only 6% of European marketing leaders are mature with gen AI. Those 6% already capture 22% efficiency gains and expect 28% within two years. Everyone else ranks it 17th out of 20 priorities. McKinsey’s new State of Marketing Europe 2026 makes the split clear. Branding is back at number one. Budget discipline sits at number two. Authenticity is high. Gen AI sits near the bottom for most. The leaders who treat AI as an operating system rather than a pilot reinvest the savings into growth and creativity. The rest keep running the same playbook and see the gap widening. The next year will be even more interesting than the last. As always. https://lnkd.in/ez8F9c-K

Everyone in marketing has had that meeting: You've got a campaign concept that's interesting, maybe a little provocative, but by the time it's been through legal, product, sales, the executive team, and one more round of feedback, what you're left with is something so thoroughly inoffensive that no one will remember it 24 hours later... Docebo's CMO, Kyle Lacy, wrote about this dynamic in a piece recently, and calls it what it is 'the consensus trap'. The thing that struck me reading it is that the problem isn't any individual stakeholder asking for changes. Most of those requests are, individually, reasonable. The problem is that the cumulative effect of optimizing for everyone's comfort is content that resonates with no one strongly enough to move them. It's industrializing mediocrity, and the tools we're adopting to produce more content faster are making it worse, not better, because they make it cheaper to produce bland work at scale. The brands breaking through right now, across every category, share one thing in common: someone made a decision about what they stood for and held that line through the feedback cycles. That's not a creative department issue, it's a leadership issue. And it's one of the few things AI can't solve for you. Full piece here, worth 10 minutes of your time👇🏻 https://okt.to/uF5Vvc

McKinsey just published its State of Marketing Europe 2026 report and called it a warning. Read the same data again. It's a confirmation. 500 senior marketing decision-makers across five countries ranked their 2026 priorities. Branding came in first. Gen AI came in seventeenth — out of twenty. McKinsey calls this a contradiction. Cautious leadership. A coming "AI reckoning." I read it as the market pricing correctly. Look at what filled the top five: branding, budget rigor, data privacy, authenticity, employer branding. Every one of them is something a machine cannot hold. Every one requires a person or a house to stand behind the work. To be named, to be credited, to be blamed. When generation got cheap, it didn't make everything cheaper. It made the things that can't be generated more expensive. Trust. Provenance. The capacity to be held responsible for what ships. The CMOs aren't behind on AI. Most are behind on execution — 94 percent haven't matured their gen AI capability, and that part of the report is real. But their instinct about what to prioritize is not a lag. It's an early read on the consequence. McKinsey concedes it in their own closing: as AI shapes more decisions, brands shift from functional benefit to trust. They wrote the conclusion. They filed it under the wrong headline. Generation got cheap. Jurisdiction didn't. Rebel.Rebel

Brent Smart Urges CMOs to “Pick a Side” Between AI Slop and Human Craft The marketer implored brands to make things “the hard way”, genuinely solve customers’ problems, and inject creative friction into their work, LBBonline - Little Black Book’s Tom Loudon reports

This really resonated with me. For years, marketers have had to justify investing in brand because it wasn't always easy to tie directly to ROI. It's encouraging to see branding back where it belongs - as a strategic business driver, not just a marketing initiative. The AI point is what really caught my attention. We're entering a world where buyers aren't just searching Google - they're asking AI. If your company isn't showing up in those conversations, or the AI can't confidently explain who you are and the value you provide, that's more than a visibility issue. It's a credibility issue. Whether you're in energy, technology, healthcare, or professional services, your brand, content, and digital presence are increasingly shaping how AI represents you to potential customers. Definitely worth the read.

(thank you David Brannigan) Well, McKinsey again - Brand is the hottest thing, everyone says so, and here on LinkedIn the noise about it is deafening from everyone - business, marketing, design, digital, AI practitioners, and also dentists and any and all other professions. Plus, lots of sub-noise about the importance of the Brand Fundamentals that then engenders such 'Brand'. But zero noise about actually what those Fundamentals are exactly - exactly, not just 'Purpose and this and that', and even less - if that's even possible - on how to actually do that work. I know many of us (sorry-not-sorry not to be humble) know how to do what, and well, and can show the receipts - but I also know that there's many who substitute to it either dry business facts elegantly said or shiny objects of design, copywriting, and communications. I'll write some more about it very soon, and I look forward to both praise and hatemail. And so, dear Clients - reason of our existence and apple of our eyes - choose wisely. #brand #branding #brandconsulting #masterbranded #imgonnabeagurusomeday #thegreencarder

54% of buyers already hold a negative view of a brand that doesn't show up when they ask AI a question. Questions: Is brand *actual* brand or are CMOs confusing it with name recognition? Are customers understanding brand correctly? Why would anybody hold a negative view of a company that doesn't show up in AI engines? (they are likely those they have never heard of - because they don't show up) How does AI impact brand perception? Remember, it's not name recognition, and most people - CMOs included - couldn't tell you what a company's brand is!

Marketing isn’t a cost center. It’s the company’s market memory function. Every customer, investor, recruit, analyst, journalist and AI model remembers (or forgets) the company based on what marketing helps the business consistently communicate and prove. Read what Evan White had to say in this recent Senior Executive CMO roundup : https://lnkd.in/gjTSDS2M

"Agentic commerce will not replace traditional marketing. Instead, it will create a complex parallel operating system alongside existing consumer marketing." In this latest article for The Media Leader UK, Managing Director Helen Johnson, explores why the future of commerce won't be about choosing between AI and human marketing, but learning how to orchestrate both. As agentic commerce gathers pace, brands face a new reality: they're no longer marketing solely to people. They're increasingly optimising for AI-powered shopping agents too. Helen's biggest takeaways: 💡 Marketing now has two audiences: humans driven by emotion, and machine agents driven by data, availability and operational signals. 💡 Success depends on balance: brands that optimise only for AI risk losing the emotional relevance that builds long-term preference, while brands focused only on people may become invisible in machine-led buying journeys. 💡 Complexity isn't going away: agentic commerce won't simplify the ecosystem. It will introduce another operating layer that demands closer alignment across media, commerce, technology, data and operations. As AI-powered shopping assistants become more sophisticated, the competitive advantage won't come from replacing traditional marketing. It will come from orchestrating human creativity and machine optimisation together. Read Helen's full article below to explore what agentic commerce really means for the future of marketing 👇 https://lnkd.in/emzwVRfi SMG | Plan-Apps

Branding is the #1 priority for CMOs. GenAI ranks 17th. At first glance, those priorities seem unrelated. I think they're becoming inseparable. For decades, branding was largely about shaping what people thought after they encountered your company. Now, increasingly, AI is influencing whether—and how—that encounter happens in the first place. AI doesn't replace brand but it does change where brand gets interpreted. The organizations that pull ahead won't treat AI as another marketing channel or another productivity tool. They'll recognize that trust, expertise, consistency, and credibility have become machine-readable assets as well as human ones. Brand was never just what customers believed. Now it's also becoming what intelligent systems can confidently infer. That's a very different design challenge. https://lnkd.in/gPdwzjB8 #BrandAndAI #BrandIntelligence #BrandExperience #BrandArchitecture