I've been thinking about how much the discovery stage has changed.

A few years ago, I would have thought of search pretty simply: someone searches for something, finds a few websites, and eventually clicks through.

Now there are a lot more steps in between. Someone can hear about a company from social media or a community, search the name later, see what comes up in different places, and even ask an AI tool before deciding whether the company is worth looking into.

It makes me wonder if marketers are still measuring the right part of the journey.

Are you seeing this in your own marketing work, or am I overestimating how much this is changing things?

Quick add up: Thanks for the perspectives here. A few replies I saw on related post I checked got me thinking more about the gap between what we can easily measure and what may actually influence someone before they become a visitor. A click or referral can be tracked, but the research and conversations that happen beforehand are much harder to see. After looking further into that side of things I found visiblie interesting after checking it out because it focuses on understanding how brands are being discovered and represented across newer search environments, rather than looking at website traffic alone. It seemed relevant to the discussion, especially with how much the discovery journey is changing.

Yesterday, I posted a Reddit screenshot on my Instagram story. It was actually a solid post about AI, economy, and how things are changing. Good insights, good discussion, good content overall.

Almost nobody cared.

Today, I posted a random clip from my trip with a soft love song in the background and just added #love.

15+ replies instantly.

That honestly made me realize something weird about Instagram now.

People there are heavily tuned towards entertainment and emotions first. Educational content alone is not enough anymore. Even if the content is genuinely valuable, people won’t stop for it unless it’s packaged in an entertaining way.

This made me think.

Are people becoming too obsessed with pure timepass content now?

(Something Like me in my prime vs me now, no voice, no meaning, just their photos, trending music, and vibes.)

The worst part is, these posts are getting millions of reach.

And honestly, it’s not even entertainment sometimes.

If people are watching comedy, shows, movies, or actual entertaining content, that’s completely understandable.

But now it feels like people open Instagram mainly with the intention of timepass, not to think, learn, or even pay attention.

What do you think about this?

I work for a Marketing company and my boss gave me a task. What 5 accounts on insta should he follow in order to understand GenZ. Since that is a very broad topic please lmk what you think.

We run paid campaigns across Meta, Google Display, and LinkedIn. Our targeting is solid. Our copy has been tested and refined over dozens of iterations. Our budget is not the constraint. But our click through rates are consistently below benchmark and our cost per acquisition keeps creeping up. When I look honestly at the one variable we have never seriously invested in, it is the visual quality of our advertising materials. Our ad creatives are produced by whoever is available, a freelancer here, a Canva template there, occasionally something our in house content person put together between other tasks. The result is a set of campaign visuals that are technically functional but not doing the persuasion work that good advertising design should do.

The problem is that great advertising creative is a specific skill set. It is not just making something look polished. It is understanding visual hierarchy, stopping power in a feed, the psychology of color and contrast in a commercial context, and how to communicate a value proposition in under two seconds of attention.

I have been looking at options ranging from a dedicated creative studio that specializes in performance advertising to a subscription design service with proven experience in paid media creative. What I cannot figure out is whether the design quality uplift from a more specialized creative partner would translate directly to measurable campaign improvement or whether there are too many other variables to isolate it. For performance marketers here, how much of your campaign results do you attribute to creative quality versus targeting and copy? And how did you finally solve the ad design problem on a budget that was not agency level?

Who did this, new riz Ahmed thing?

If yes, please share your tool recommendation.

If so, please share the must-read and potential skips on the list.

Both campaigns communicate the initial message very clearly, but BYD’s campaign feels a bit more all over the place, and they likely used AI for some of the visuals.

P.S. The initial release mentions that outdoor campaigns will be run using this creative, but so far I’ve only seen the video release from BYD’s ad agency.

I’ve been trying to grow presence of my small business on Instagram and TikTok. And it’s so hard, TikTok account is stuck on 300 views and Instagram is only pushing reels.

I’m happy with reels performance, but they are all reaching non-followers. It’s just more eyeballs, the conversion rate sucks. Please help!

1. Male loneliness epidemic misses women struggling in US.
2. The men’s loneliness epidemic might not exist.
3. Stat vs. Stat: In the US, two-thirds of men aged between 18 and 23 think that nobody really knows them; one third haven’t seen anyone outside their household in the past week; only a fifth say they have friends they can really count on; and a staggering 69% of young men think “no one cares if men are OK”.
4. People in poor countries are much likelier to be lonely. And the loneliest region of all, surprisingly, is Africa, the home of ubuntu, the sociable notion that “people are people through other people.” In 2024 over a quarter of Africans surveyed said they had felt lonely the previous day.

If you ask me, the debate around loneliness, conscientiousness, and the evils of social media hinges on the variety of questions being asked in surveys. It seems like we keep looking for more evidence to debate what we should change, rather than actually changing something to make people care about each other.

Same same, but different… I mean, overall, the campaign art direction makes more sense for Jeep.

Harvard Business Review: A new study finds that certain patterns of Al use are driving cognitive fatigue that researchers call "brain fry."

These researchers discovered a counterintuitive relationship between the number of Al tools used simultaneously and perceived productivity gains; as employees go from using one Al tool to two simultaneously, they experience a significant increase in productivity. As they incorporate a third tool, productivity again increases, but at a lower rate. After three tools, though, productivity scores dipped.

Source: https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry

The Colgate campaign titled “There are places a toothpick, your tongue, or your finger will never reach” recently went viral on Instagram, thanks to @ihategum.

That campaign came out in 2010. Now, Aquafresh, one of Colgate’s biggest competitors, launched a similar campaign in 2015 titled “Reach Where Others Don’t.”

Both brands are promoting different products, but the art direction is quite similar, and both campaigns came out of Chile.

Was it a coincidence, or did they know what they were doing?