Turns Out Machines Love a Strong Brand, with David Tiltman, Chief Content Officer at WARC

Transcript

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Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

 

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. We are in chaotic times in marketing. Our guest, David Tiltman, chief content officer at WARC, minds some historical references to call it the lightless middle of the tunnel. But encouragingly, the most recent research is telling us that even in the age of machines, brand matters. What are your distinctive brand assets? What are your category reentry points? Being clear on those and ensuring that your entire consumer experience is rich with them and coherent across all of the touch points will drive value with both your audiences, human and machine. David, welcome to the podcast. We are so looking forward to digging in with you. We love brains from work.

 

David Tiltman (01:11):

It's great to be here, Peter. Yeah, very good to be here.

 

Peter Crosby (01:17):

Your title is chief content officer, which I love, and you folks bring so much expertise to what is happening in this space and so much is going on. But Lauren and I had the chance to look at a few of your more recent reports, and so much of the theme is around the idea of the increasing importance of brand and brand building in this rapidly unfolding agentic era. So let's start with one of the major challenges that we saw that brands are facing today, and that is the multi-audience problem, how many entities they are speaking to to try to get their message across. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

David Tiltman (01:59):

Yeah, so this is a really interesting theme, but as you say, it's part of a broader attempt to understand what building a brand is and means in a changing communications landscape, but also a changing landscape of product discovery and purchase. And this has already been an ongoing theme through the past 10, 15 years where we've seen the rise of lots of different performance advertising techniques, indeed the rise of things like retail media when people are constantly asking, does brands still matter? Does brand building still matter? And of course, when AI came along, all of those questions got thrown up. Again, is this going to create a sort of world of perfect discovery where things like messy things like brand equity no longer matter? And actually what we're finding, very early days in all of this, but what we're starting to find is almost like a second order effect of the AI transition is that a strong brand and brand fundamentals actually matters more.

 

(03:15):

And we can come on to why that is, but in how you get to that strong brand and how you build a brand that is right for not just the current moment, but potentially the future moment, that's why we start to see intriguing themes and differences and spaces to explore. And the two audience problem, which you mentioned, is one of the biggest. So this is a phrase, the two audience problem that we started hearing about earlier in 2026. And the basis of it is, well, actually, if consumer journeys are becoming increasingly AI mediated, that is more and more product discovery is done via a chatbot or with the aid of an LLM in some way, then we have to become much more interested in how that LLM sources information about our product and service, and then the role of things like branding, creativity and all the other good stuff within it.

 

(04:31):

And the reason there is a two audience problem is that, and I hope this is not sustaining the obvious, but humans and machines think in quite fundamentally different ways. And the data that supports this came out at Cannes Lions this year. We saw a really interesting study from a digital advertising company called Jellyfish who partnered with INSEAD, the academic institution, to study the effect on humans and the effect on LLMs of highly awarded creativity. And they took a whole bunch of ads that had been highly awarded for creativity. They looked at the measured response on humans and said, "Is there any correlation to what the machines pick up on?" And basically there was zero correlation. There's completely, you see the charts and there's nothing.

 

(05:42):

There's nothing there. And actually that research has been since a similar study has been done by Kantar and they found exactly the same thing. So this is becoming a sort of repeated thing that the creativity that captures human attention and builds human memory does not do the same thing for a large language model. And so you're left wondering, well, does that mean we have to have two entirely independent strategies? If you are in a category where LLMs are becoming more important as part of the purchase process, does that mean you need a strategy for you might call generative engine optimization or something deeper than that because that suggests it's just SEO rebadged as well as what you do for humans. Now, there is space in between, which maybe we can go on to discuss, but that in essence is the two audience problem.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:47):

I think it's fascinating that there's no correlation between what agents and brands are.

 

David Tiltman (06:52):

It really was zero. It was zero.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:56):

So let's dig into that because I think a brand listening to this might be like, oh my gosh, what does my strategy need to be? But I think let's bring it back to brand equity because I agree with you, David, that I think it's still a superpower in the world of AI where we've, even before AI, become a little bit more short-term focused versus long-term focus. And I loved in your research that it showed that brand equity accounts for 63% of visibility in AI search, which is a huge correlation. So when we're talking about that, how do you define brand in the world of AI and what does it mean and where should brands be focusing their time?

 

David Tiltman (07:34):

Yeah, it's a really good question. So that stat you mentioned, 63%, that came from an analytics company called Charlie Oscar here in the UK, and they looked at the influence of all sorts of different types of marketing input into LLM visibility, and they found that 63% came from what they called long-term brand equity. Now, this is a very broad definition of brand equities, and it is essentially saying that the cumulative weight of everything you have done in the past is more important than the relatively small amounts of things you're doing in the present. And of course, that sounds obvious when you think about what an LLM is drawing from, it's drawing from the whole of the internet.

 

(08:30):

And actually what this starts to shine a light on is that brands have had a really clear and strong brand strategy over multiple years and have been relatively consistent in applying that strategy actually have some sort of advantage when it comes into this world. And it's for the simple fact that the same words, phrases, associations keep being made with that particular brand. So I'll give you an example from one of the reports we put out about this, and it was certainly true in January when we put the reports out. I'm sure it's still true now. If you do any kind of search within one of the major LLMs around the relative benefits of MasterCard, the credit card company, you will probably get the word priceless in your answer. So the word priceless will appear somewhere, and it's obvious why. They've used this as a phrase for 20 odd years.

 

(09:32):

Now, when they came up with this, they weren't planning for some AI mediated future some way down the line, but because they've consistently used a single phrase, a single idea and extended it all over the place, it then crops up in the answers. And again, just that link with all the other things you've seen has got to be some kind of advantage if you are in that, you're looking for a recommendation in that sort of space.

 

(10:04):

So yes, it does mean that companies that have been more consistent may be at some kind of advantage, but it doesn't mean that you can't start now to really think about how to resolve this. And the two big themes that came through from the jellyfish research I mentioned earlier, the Jellyfish and Insiad research is the stuff in the middle that if you think of this as a Venn diagram, what do humans like and respond to and recognize and what do machines respond to? It is a Venn diagram. There is a bit in the middle, and those things are around what it's marketing jargon, but what we would call distinctiveness. What is it that makes you, you? What are the core things about your brand that make you recognizable? And there is this phrase, distinctive brand assets that's come from a whole marketing science body of theory.

 

(11:08):

They're actually quite important. The other thing which is important is a phrase called category entry points, and that is a jargony way of saying knowing who you are for and when they might need you. And again, having that built out, codified, and indeed almost surfaced across the internet, again, is a superpower. So people that have already done the work around distinctive brand assets and category entry points do appear to have some kind of advantage.

 

Peter Crosby (11:45):

So David, I'm trying to align, and I think it has something to do with the broad idea of brand and then the narrower sense of brand, but this difference that you talked about that machines and humans do not agree on creative and machines are not engaged by what engaged as a human versus what you're talking about here. Can you talk about, is that the sort of difference between broad and narrow sense of brand?

 

David Tiltman (12:13):

Yeah, I think so. So one is about the application of creativity, which is very much a kind of, if you like, an advertising framing on this. And that is of course important. Advertising is ultimately how we communicate stuff. But I guess what I'm talking about is slightly more

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:35):

Upstream,

 

David Tiltman (12:36):

Slightly more higher order. It's about having a strong brand strategy and that not just appearing... Because again, remember that where a model learns about our brand is not just our website or our communications, it's what people are saying about us on Reddit, it's comment boards, it's all sorts of different inputs. So when we're talking about brands here in terms of things like distinctive brand assets, category entry points, we're talking about having a really strong upstream understanding of who we are, what we stand for, what we do, how we appear. And over time that should filter through into the way people talk about us. Now there is clearly danger here as well, and it's important to understand that too. We've detected over the last couple of years a phenomenon called what we call the CX gap, the customer experience gap. And that is in the world we live in, particularly the economic environment we've been in for the past few years, particularly in places like Europe, but it's a kind of Western phenomenon.

 

(13:52):

We've seen lots of low growth companies looking to prioritize margins, and we have seen an erosion of customer experience in its broader sense that's clear in all sorts of different data points. The danger for me is where what we say about ourselves in our ads does not match up with the actual experience customers are getting, because that mismatch tends to be where you then get lots of negative word of mouth online, and that then could be picked up by the model. So it does push us into a much broader definition of brand that is not narrowly focused on advertising, it is brand in its broader sense.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:36):

When you think about, just a quick question around brand equity, you probably have larger brands who have been around for hundreds of years like MasterCard who's talking about priceless. If you're a smaller brand and you're just starting up, you have the ability to be nimble to adjust to trends and things like that. But do you have any advice for where they start from a brand equity standpoint? Because they don't have the history, but they do have other abilities that larger brands don't have.

 

David Tiltman (15:05):

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess there's this sense that large brands have an inbuilt advantage, and of course they do have the kind of weight of history. I think where, again, without going down too many rabbit holes of differentiation and distinctiveness and all that kind of thing, I think where a small brand can really have an advantage is that it doesn't need to cover as many bases as a large brand. It can afford to do a few things really, really well. So I talked about category entry points earlier, can it find two or three category entry points it really wants to just own and be known for and build around? So it can have a sort of benefit in that way in terms of being that ability to focus as long as you are clear on how you do focus. I think also, and we're still learning a little bit about this, smaller brands tend to still get quite a lot of juice out, so things like creators and earned media and that kind of thing.

 

(16:20):

The sort of thing that on their own isn't enough for a larger brand, it has to have that sheer weight of numbers in the market. And some of those spaces, if they use them smartly, can be areas, things like Reddit is an example, can be where the models pick up information. So I wouldn't assume that because you're a small brand, all the cards are stacked against you. You have that ability to be selective and nimble and move quicker than the larger organizations.

 

Peter Crosby (17:01):

So David, when we think about, and tell me, so I'm going to express a though and see if it's true, that the weight of the brand or where the brand comes from in this broadest sense is a lot from what we might call the context layer that brands are trying to build, which is sort of the why rather than necessarily than the what of things. And so when you think about that, a lot of the advice that brands are getting is that you need to core different versions of how somebody can use your product or all the vocabulary of desire in a way, like why someone would connect with your product. And so a lot of marketers might be thinking, "Oh my gosh, I need so many new webpages that represents every single little thing." But I'm not sure that that's necessarily true, and it seems like noise, and I just wanted to get from you how you think about it.

 

David Tiltman (18:10):

It's a really good point, and I don't know that we've got the sort of real long run data to say what is the right thing to do because -

 

Peter Crosby (18:22):

So early.

 

David Tiltman (18:24):

Exactly. It's really early. And as you've just said, you push that sort of be clear who you are, who you stand for, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, you could imagine a thousand different, I don't know, mini YouTube videos or pieces of content that are trying to connect the dots. Now, I think there is danger here, but it's not necessarily to do with the models themselves. It's more to do with actually coming back to what we're trying to say to humans. And the danger is, so there's some incredible data that we saw in Cannes Lions from a company called Creative X.

 

(19:17):

They're a sort of creative testing and audit firm, and they studied 633,000 different ads all from Fortune 500 brands across the big digital platforms, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok. And they found the sheer scale of fragmentation, and this is between 23 and 25, so this is before everything went quite as bananas as it's gone in the past year or so. They found that 93% of those ads from Fortune 500 brands had under $10,000 of media spend attached to them, and 70% had under a thousand. So we can already see that this fragmentation is a huge, huge, huge issue. Now, where this starts to create a tension, for me anyway, is we've already said that having a degree of consistency or what at Cannes Lions was called coherence to your communications is really important because it joins the dots. How do you build meaning and build a message out of multiple different things?

 

(20:29):

The more stuff you are throwing out there, particularly low budget, high volume, just stuff, the harder it becomes to maintain that strategic discipline, that kind of coherence across your messaging. So I think there is a danger here in that sort of tension between volume and meaning. I think that is a real tension in the market. Quite where this goes next, I don't know, I'm not sure. We hear a lot of marketers complaining that they are basically churning out content and it's almost getting away from them, this sort of sense of permanent creation, and they're losing that ability to be strategically focused. So it's a really interesting space. We're very early into it, and maybe one application of AI will be to force that strategic coherence. So you could imagine AI being part of the solution as well as the problem. But yeah, so this is going to be a massive talking point over the next few years.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:36):

Let's stay on the topic of media because I know it's a hot topic, especially in the world of AI. And there's now AI summaries that were traditionally where search traffic was driving performance marketing may have lost some effectiveness versus PR. There's community discussions, brand reputation, all these different pieces around media. Do you think that we're witnessing a permanent shift where earned and owned media matter more than paid media budgets from an AI discovery standpoint? And share your thoughts around that media space because it's a -

 

David Tiltman (22:12):

Yeah, I'd hesitate to call anything permanent in the current -

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:17):

Fair

 

David Tiltman (22:18):

Point. In the current market. And I think it's really, really unclear. In some ways, if there is a positive, I'm being optimistic, the past year or so of research has almost acted like a forcing function to get us to remember all the things we should have been thinking about anyway.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:44):

Yes.

 

David Tiltman (22:46):

So it's not like, oh my God, my word, earned and owned suddenly matter, but they've always mattered. We've just not really had the kind of measurement structures or the focus to bring them in properly. So I think this is operating as a bit of a forcing function. In terms of paid media itself, obviously there are lots of different types of paid media. I do think that if the more AI matters in the product discovery process, the more the platforms will look to monetize it. So this is still, if we're comparing it with the rise of search, which isn't a perfect analogy, but if we are, this is still early days of Google. They haven't screwed everything down and monetized it yet. And indeed, if you look at the, maybe it's out of date now, but some of that initial IPO documentation by OpenAI, they only get anywhere near their valuation if they have fundamentally transformed the paid media market.

 

(24:01):

They're like, whatever it was, $100 billion by 2030, which sounds like something that Dr. Evil might've said, but that model only works if they fundamentally reshape paid advertising. So I think this is a fluid space that we're going to see a lot more on. There is one final point I will make though, which is I talked about brand equity mattering, but that being the brand in its broadest sense.

 

(24:41):

We've known for many years that paid media is a relatively small contributor to brand equity. So what we see in advertising, it's not tiny, but studies by people like Cantar put at about 25%. There was a figure of 28% came out in Cannes Lion, and obviously it's a space we control. But this is a reminder that the game has always been bigger than paid media, and we may now see more evidence of the ways these other types of, whether we call them media, earned media, owned media, or other kind of touch points show up. It's becoming more obvious as we learn more about what the models build on.

 

Peter Crosby (25:30):

And it does seem like, as always with these things, it seems like you have to bring it back to the consumer, and then what is their journey in this new world, which is really hard to pin down. So you thinking always putting the consumer at the forefront, which I think it's hard to do when... I don't know, I think of the alignment of marketing and brand and channel, all of the sort of cross-functional folks that are involved in creating that consumer experience. It seems figuring that out together feels like more important maybe than each individual, "Oh, paid media's going to go do this." It seems like maybe the coherence also needs to show up in terms of how all these teams work together.

 

David Tiltman (26:29):

I mean, 100%. If this just becomes another marketing silo, then we've lost the opportunity. It just becomes like the SEO team or something like that. This feels much more holistic than that. Now, we know that large organizations really struggle to operate in a holistic manner, but the ones that manage it, the ones that make it, you would think they would have an advantage.

 

Peter Crosby (26:59):

What are you seeing of the ones that do, that you have experience with or that you've seen research about, what are you seeing them do that helps them achieve this greater coherence in both team organization, team collaboration, and then therefore coherence out in the world?

 

David Tiltman (27:18):

Yeah, look, it's a great question. I haven't seen anyone completely join the dots with a view to AI, but if we think more broadly about what does it take to build a integrated team, this is something we've done a lot in the world of brand and performance. We've put out reports that talk about this, and there's lots of really interesting and practical things you can do. Obviously, in the perfect world, you have buy-in at C-suite level, which then allows you to generate your North Star vision that can then get transmitted through the teams, et cetera, et cetera. And clearly that is a great, if you've got that opportunity. You also find that a lot of CMOs need to push their own agenda while they're pushing on that sort of C-suite agenda as well, because a lot of CMOs walk into quite siloed teams, quite entrenched silos, particularly in that brand and performance space.

 

(28:24):

And so there, things like a common language really helps. So are you really clear on what types of customer you need to reach and build penetration with if you are going to grow as an organization? Is that clearly articulated through the marketing department? Do you have a clear sense of what your North Star metrics are and how the different things you do will move those metrics? And then there's one bit of, it comes from Instacart. Instacart has an amazing case study on this, by the way, in terms of Instacart's own marketing and advertising, a lady called Laura Jones has led it. It's great. She talked about how they had to make their own weather. And I love this because it's just a very, very practical, really practitioner piece of advice. They realized they did this big Super Bowl campaign, and they realized that having a single point to focus on the Super Bowl, it's a moment in time, forced all the teams to come together and work together.

 

(29:41):

So because there was a single moment in time where everything had to be right, all the teams came together and did what they needed to do and collaborated.

 

(29:52):

And she picked up on that. Said, "Well, rather than do that once a year for the Super Bowl, why don't we have a series of tempo moments through the year. And she described that as make your own weather, rather than just go by what the category says are the two or three big moments in the year, develop your own ones and that again act as a forcing function to bring people together.

 

Peter Crosby (30:18):

I love that. And does that give us a little hint of what the future might look like for brands who are trying to compete for attention in this incredibly noisy and chaotic world of the consumer?

 

David Tiltman (30:36):

It's great. So the marketing space is a really interesting one at the moment. It's absolutely fascinating because it feels so much is kind of being rethought and so much is up for grabs. I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase, there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's not just a British phrase. So there's a slight random rabbit hole, but there's a book written, I think after the Second World War, but it's set during the Second World War, and it describes the period in England between the battle of El Alamein and D-Day as the lightless middle of the tunnel. So you're in the middle, you can't see what was behind you and you can't see what's ahead of you, but you know stuff's going to change. That term, the lightless middle of the tunnel is a phrase I use a lot for marketing at the moment because it does feel like we're in a period of transition without a clear sense of where we are heading.

 

(31:51):

I think we can say fairly that the past 10 years has been marked by fragmentation of formats, huge amounts of fragmentation in terms of the formats and the content that brands create, but at the same time, a concentration of value. So a small number of big companies are sucking up the value. So we've got on the consumer side, if you like, abundance and on the media side, that real sort of concentration of value. Now, I don't think there's any reason to think this will change. The big question is whether it's the existing players, the Googles and the Amazons and the Metas of this world that capture the value or whether somebody like an OpenAI can fundamentally break in and reshape the advertising economy. I think the final thing I'd say about this is the key is increasingly about what you might call intent or intention rather than attention.

 

(32:54):

So you talk about brands competing for attention. Well, actually what they're competing for with most of their budgets at the moment is intent. It's about those signals of intent that people like Meta and Google and people like YouTube and all the rest of it are increasingly able to offer us. And that is very true in the retail media space as well. That's going to continue. But at the same time, if we do believe that building brands still matters, then any asset able to capture any form of scaled attention, that's what creators do, whether it's a sports event, a cultural event, that's still going to be appealing to advertisers. But I think that might not always look like a classic media play. Things like partnership, sponsorship, those sorts of things we're going to see a lot of focus on as well because you're still going to want to find those moments of scaled attention.

 

(33:54):

It's just becoming harder to find them in media itself.

 

Peter Crosby (34:01):

So David, all of this data and all of this and what comes out of it is really the kinds of signals that folks are looking for right now because that lightless middle of the tunnel is a very scary, uncertain place to be. And when you individualize it down to the person working in it, it's uncomfortable. And I think everyone's trying to figure out what's my next move? In order to be able to be a better marketer in these times, what do you see the best marketers doing? When I think of the woman in Instacart, having those kinds of light bulb moments and the courage in a way, because the natural thing I would think I was putting myself in her place is like, no, go where the noise already is and just win at the noise. But this is sort of a real shift in how to play and I'm wondering how people work through that.

 

David Tiltman (35:09):

Yeah, it's a great point. And maybe it's worth going back to, we said up at the top of the podcast, and there's still a huge need, or if anything, there's even more need for a brand to be really, really clear on what it is, who it's for, when they'll need you, and what makes that brand distinctive or stand out, what makes you, you. And I think there's still an awful lot of brands that haven't done a lot of that work and actually spend a lot of time chasing the volume, chasing the noise, chasing trends, chasing fans. And I do think it's much easier to get through the lightness middle of the tunnel if you know who you are because you've then got the train tracks, at least to extend the analogy. You know which way you're pointing and you know where you're trying to get to.

 

(36:13):

So I think that's very important. And if you take that back a step further, it's never been more important to be close to the customer. Everything in marketing comes back to do you know your category? Do you know your consumer? And how quickly can you transfer what you are seeing, the shifts you're seeing in your end markets into your own understanding and your own sorts of strategies? So I think while I understand it's a sort of definitely uncertainty in the market, we all feel that, I do think some of those fundamentals are still absolutely fundamental.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (37:01):

And one double click I'll say to that is you not only need to know who you are, what value you drive all that, but you need to also communicate that effectively. I know a lot of brands who can articulate that message, but they don't have built out PDPs. They don't talk about it on their brand.com. They're not including it in their retail media ads to tell that story. So even to take that one step further, that needs to be part of this strategy. How are you telling the story through your creative, through your content? Because if that doesn't always come through, then it doesn't matter if you know who you are.

 

David Tiltman (37:35):

It's a great point. And you'd think that would be hygiene level, but it really isn't. There's lots of opportunities there just to adopt that common language, tighten the consistency or the coherence, whatever we want to call it.

 

Peter Crosby (37:51):

Yeah. And Lauren, you saying that just brings that word coherence booming back into the front of my brain. When I was reading about that, I don't know why it struck me so much, maybe because so often I see that word in the negative, in the incoherent, but you don't often hear people talking about, oh, we... And I don't know why, I don't know if the listeners will have the same experience, but I felt like that's a real touchstone sort of watchword, I think, as we might apply tests to whether or not we are meeting that level and what does that take and what does that mean at your organization and how does it change the way in which you work, test, et cetera. For me, it sort of stood out, so thanks for at least sparking that.

 

David Tiltman (38:39):

It's exactly that. Lauren just mentioned things like PDPs, but it's also in things like your customer service emails or your CX onboarding stream or whatever. Is your distinctive tone of voice or your point of view on the world coming through all of that? Or have you just let the product and dev team put together the words in the email and it all just feels very machine driven? So I think there's still loads of opportunity to build some of that coherence and it's becoming so important.

 

Peter Crosby (39:23):

David, I know Work, a lot of what you produce is available only to your customers, but is work.com, are there resources there where folks could dip their toe into some of this?

 

David Tiltman (39:35):

Absolutely. Yeah. So we have a whole product that's free to access. You just register for it and you get lots of great content for free. And then obviously the paying subscribers get a much deeper set of research, case studies, examples, and all the rest of it. We also have our own podcast as well. It's called very imaginatively the Walk Podcast.

 

Peter Crosby (40:05):

That's some branding right there, David.

 

David Tiltman (40:08):

It is definitely distinctive.

 

Peter Crosby (40:12):

Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this data and this perspective with us. It's super valuable to our audience, and Lauren and I always appreciate folks who will come and give to our community. So thank you so much clearly.

 

David Tiltman (40:27):

No, it's our absolute pleasure.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (40:28):

Thanks so much, David.

 

Peter Crosby (40:30):

Thanks to David for all the coherence. For more of that, swing on over to the resources section at digitalshelfinstitute.org and become a member while you're there. Thanks for being part of our community.