Even for national or global brands, localizing the messaging and targeting can significantly increase revenue and media ROI. Photo Credit: Valeriia Miller When it comes to ad targeting, bigger isn’t always better. Even for national or global brands, not every product or marketing campaign will be relevant to every consumer. Spending ad dollars to reach irrelevant consumers is a waste, so segmenting is non-negotiable! On a recent earnings call, Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden said, “We need to be a global brand with a local mindset. And I say local again and again and again – the world is developing in a way that you need to be successful locally. And, locally, it always starts with the consumer and the athlete.” And today, a wealth of technological developments are making it easy to get super-precise with your targeting and make the deepest impact for your brand. Why is local marketing important in 2026? First, in years of economic uncertainty, media buyers need to be extra judicious in allocating every dollar for the maximum return. Focus your advertising budget into areas with the highest potential for conversion (either now or down the road). Second, we’ve all heard it ad infinitum, but the media consumption landscape is fragmented. Everybody’s watching, listening to, and scrolling something different! Local marketing is a great way to broaden and retarget your audience, wherever they might be online. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans’ trust in the media is down nationwide, thanks to misinformation and bias running rampant. People may be more trusting and responsive to messaging in their local news and communities than mass media outlets. Source: Gallup 2024 Furthermore, SOCi’s Local Visibility Index 2024 reported that high-visibility brands increase their revenue 2-3x the rate of the average company are more than twice as likely to be seen by consumers searching for local businesses online Collectively earn about $54.1B per year left behind by low-visibility brands Finally, EMARKETER reports that 68% of US internet users say localized messaging from national brands makes the ads more relevant… …but only 26% of marketers consider strengthening hyperlocal advertising a top priority! That’s a big opportunity for your brand to swoop in and meet the neighbors. Hyperlocal advertising significantly increases consumer curiosity, trust, and purchase intent. How do I optimize my Google Business Profile to show up when people search “[my product/service] near me?" Google prioritizes three main factors when determining which businesses show up for "near me" searches: Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. This means your Google Business Profile category, business description, services, and attributes need to align closely with search intent. Distance (or Proximity) is self-explanatory – the proximity of the business to the searcher is a key factor affecting the positioning of the listing in Google Maps. Google considers the user's location to show the nearest relevant businesses. Prominence relates to how well-known and reputable your business is, both online and offline. This includes your review quantity and quality, citations across the web, and overall online authority. Other factors may include customer reviews, multiple locations (businesses with more have an advantage), and recent activity with the listing. Learn how to adjust your content and search engine marketing strategies for AI-powered brand discovery. How can AI help with hyperlocal advertising? AI has always been the engine of programmatic advertising, which enables precise targeting and measurement for optimization. But now, you can get really granular with the help of machine learning models that build AI audience personas based on behavioral patterns and media consumption in a given zip code. Generative AI technology helps with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) by producing multiple variants of a creative visual asset to test at scale. DCO tech can recognize patterns between audience behaviors and times of the day or year, customer attributes, and creative aspects. How can I market to a specific region offline? One of the best ways to reach regional audiences is to sponsor local events. Professional, college, or even high school sports bring people together by the thousands; and the audiences are attentive, in a positive mindset, and loyal to their teams. Concerts and music festivals do the same. Leveraging this built-in passion and sense of community can really serve your brand. Out-of-home (OOH) or digital-out-of-home (DOOH) media is another great way to expand awareness and spread your message at scale. Dynamic creative optimization comes in handy here, too – you can automatically switch your messaging depending on the time of day, weather, or foot traffic patterns. The creative possibilities are endless, and programmatic DOOH media buying makes precise targeting and measurement a breeze. “We've heard skepticism about whether OOH works, but we've made a real impact for clients when we've paired foot traffic measurement with our OOH campaigns. We geofence the OOH targeting, and we can see who has passed by and whether they come into stores. From there, we can track lifts or changes in foot traffic after a billboard goes up. We've seen increases as high as 37% for a single store!” - Georgia Schreiner, Exverus Media Director Experiential activations like pop-ups, in-store appearances, and guerrilla stunts make a big impression, bring people together, and spur millions of organic social posts for scale. How do I determine which markets to run paid media campaigns in? When we run national campaigns like Equinix B2B or The Chosen theatrical premieres, we carefully choose the most important designated marketing areas (DMAs) based on factors like: Audience fit, which suggests conversion potential Scale of media availability Proximity to selling stores/retailers Size of addressable target audience in each market DMAs have historically been defined by TV and radio advertising networks, but they’re important for efficiently running paid social, search, out-of-home (OOH), experiential, and other media channels, too! It takes a team of expert media planners and analysts to compile a bird’s eye view of your hyperlocal advertising’s impact on overall brand-building and sales growth. To ask questions or find out more about hyperlocal, national, or global media planning strategies, drop us a line below! For more ad buying news and tips, join our free, weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

The prestigious honor goes to one excellent media strategist industry-wide annually. Exverus Media's VP of Media Strategy Tasha Day has won the prestigious Campaign US title of Media Planner or Buyer of the Year for 2024! The winners were announced at a ceremony in New York City on Wednesday, March 27, 2024. Tasha describes Leading Lightly: Lower Your Stress, Think with Clarity, and Lead with Ease by Jody Michael as one of her favorite leadership books. As it turns out, she also epitomizes what the book describes as “mental fitness”: the ability to engage constructively and positively in life and work every day, no matter what stressors she encounters. Day brings [19] years of media planning experience to her current role as VP, managing media strategy and operations across all but one of Exverus’ clients. Her leadership helped pull the agency out of the pandemic and into 145% growth in three years. From Stella & Chewy’s Petfluencer Contest to [winning] Tiger Woods’ TGL Golf, she is able to focus on both the small details and the big-picture ideas. Stella & Chewy’s Petfluencer Contest was one of the company’s most successful programs ever. Pet owners used Exverus’ location data technology 269% over projections, while boosted influencer posts resulted in four times the landing page traffic. Day’s use of data-enriched storytelling allowed consumers to feel seen, which was crucial to the smooth rollout of media plans. Watch Tasha talk more about this wildly successful campaign and how it naturally collected robust sets of zero-party data for the brand: Tasha helped pull Exverus out of the pandemic and up to 145% growth in 3 years while caring for a family, home, and herself. The agency celebrated industry-leading growth of 53% from 2022-2023 and has received numerous other industry accolades this year. She also initiated Exverus’ Sharing is Caring program, in which rotating team members present on industry topics to the rest of the agency. Recent topics included “The Role of Paid Search in a Media Plan”, “How to Best Utilize Chat-GPT in Marketing”, and “Taking Feedback Well”. Exverus has earned its place as one of LA Times' Top Places to Work for 2023, largely thanks to Tasha's leadership, as reflected in the agency's remarkable 92% employee retention rate in 2022 and consistently high ratings by her staff. Tasha is mental fitness epitomized (and powered by technology). Top-tier industry publications regularly cite Tasha’s expertise as a media planner, and her hard work is a key ingredient of our agency’s numerous award wins. She was recently the only agency representative chosen to speak on a major conference panel about how CPG brands can build up consumer data while respecting privacy and trust, something Tasha and her team are mastering every day. She explains how Stella & Chewy's used consumer data to build another successful, experiential campaign for long-term customer loyalty, and how data informs all of the media strategies her teams build: See all the CampaignUS 2024 Agency of the Year winners here. For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter here.

The prestigious honor goes to agencies who have shown significant growth & innovation in the last 5 years. (L to R): Hillary Kupferberg Bram, Tasha Day, Bill Durrant, Talia Arnold, Jack Win, Melissa Andraos We are honored to be named Adweek’s Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year!! 🏆 Our talented team and brave clients earned this award through their creativity, tenacity, and honesty. “Exverus clients appreciate the customization and personalized attention they get from the agency, as is evidenced by the brand Stella & Chewy’s, a raw pet food company that found Exverus because it could help the brand punch above its weight in the crowded pet food market. ‘They have the years of experience, but they also are incredibly nimble and are able to be reactive in the moment and adjust to suit our needs in a really thoughtful way”, Betsy Radue, senior director of media, PR, and digital marketing for Stella & Chewy’s told Adweek. "One of the best things about Exverus is how they really focus on prioritization and keep us honest about the metrics that matter to our business goals.." - Doug Cornille, chief growth officer at BellRing Brands [parent company of Premier Nutrition Company] Cornille added that, "the Exverus team is extremely proactive, challenging the brand and ensuring it has the best media plans.” Read more about our decade of successful campaigns for brands like CLIF Bar, New Belgium & Bell’s Brewery, and Kum & Go below: https://www.adweek.com/agencies/adweek-breakthrough-media-agency-of-the-year-exverus-media/ For media strategy tips, research, and analysis; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter for free here.

When it comes to loyalty, think long-term, not last-click Key Takeaways Fewer than 1 in 4 customers say genuine brand affection is why they stay loyal — Razorfish research calls this gap the "loyalty deficit," and it's built on function (product, checkout, price, switching cost), not points. First-party data captured during a tentpole campaign has a short shelf life; brands that build segmented retargeting and lookalike audiences in the first 14 days after a spike outperform those who wait for the quarter-end report. Retail media networks (Amazon, Walmart Connect, Sam's Club Connect) already have the infrastructure to treat existing customers differently from prospects — most brands are paying for that capability without activating it. Media mix modeling is shifting from a rearview-mirror reporting tool to a forward-looking decision engine, but only 28% of marketers say their org is effective at turning MMM insights into action — and retention is the KPI most often left out of the model until it's too late. Learn tested and proven methods of outsmarting the competition with agility, brand positioning, and creativity. There’s a self-serving story many marketers tell themselves: that repeat customers keep coming back out of genuine affection for the brand. But new research from Razorfish shows that fewer than 1 out of 4 customers agree. That gap is called the loyalty deficit, and it’s costing brands more than they know. What drives customer loyalty in 2026? The answer is less romantic and more pragmatic than brands might think: whether the product works whether checkout is painless whether the price makes sense, and whether switching to a competitor feels like effort they don't want to spend. Discounts haven't lost their pull, but they've become the baseline, not the differentiator. According to the Razorfish data, the benefits gaining ground now are things like: getting first access to a drop being treated like a VIP, or receiving support during an actual day of need, not just a birthday email. Loyalty, in other words, is being built more in how a brand treats people when it counts than in how many points they've stacked up. Exverus' Director of Retail Media Jason Giammona speaks at the 2026 Brand Innovators Future of Retail & Commerce conference. And that value doesn't have to live inside one brand's four walls, either. More than half of consumers say the strongest perks are the ones that work across categories entirely — a coffee loyalty program that also gets you airline miles, or a coalition wallet like Fetch that pools value across retailers. That's real headroom for challenger brands that can't out-discount a category leader but can out-partner one. One word of caution: as brands lean on AI to personalize these experiences, execution quality matters. Razorfish's research found that AI can just as easily damage the relationship as deepen it — the differentiator is whether the technology still feels like it's coming from a person who gets you, not a script or a bot. The Habit x LA Dodgers partnership is an excellent example of instilling brand loyalty by integrating into a city's culture. Read how we did it! How can I build customer loyalty into a media plan? Audit your loyalty program against the "loyalty deficit" lens — are you offering tangible, functional value, or leaning on brand-affinity messaging consumers don't actually credit? Gather first-party data and turn it into long-term loyalty. Pilot one soft-perk benefit (early access, VIP service recovery, a milestone-adjacent empathy touch) alongside your existing discount structure. Evaluate one cross-brand or coalition partnership opportunity that could extend perceived value without eroding margin. A recap of Vanessa's advice on choosing between customer retention and acquisition in a media plan. How to preserve consumer attention post-campaign Your tentpole media campaign brought you something valuable: real first-party data captured at a moment of high intent - who clicked, on what product or category, in which channel. It’s the accuracy of that data, not just the volume of it, that makes first-party data so useful for precise retargeting and lookalike modeling as third-party cookies degrade. We know loyalty initiatives need to go beyond points and create memorable experiences consumers really care about. But that starts with what you do in the two weeks right after the spike. Day 0-1: Build the custom audience before the spike cools. Push spike-engaged users (site visitors, retail media ad clickers, DSP-served impressions) into a dedicated retargeting segment in your DSP, split by product or category clicked - not one blended pool. A blended audience gets generic creative; a segmented one gets creative aligned with what they actually looked at. Day 2-5: Retarget on the channel where intent was highest, then layer DSP and paid social around it. Sponsored search on Amazon or Walmart converts the highest-intent segment fastest; DSP Display and Paid Social extend reach to the browsers who didn't purchase yet. Day 5–7: Build the lookalike in parallel, not after. Use the same spike segment to seed a prospecting lookalike audience. The point about first-party data accuracy applies directly here: a lookalike built off real, spike-captured behavior outperforms one built off broader historical data. Day 7–14: Shift paid budget from spike-segment retargeting to loyalty-program promotion. This matters because willingness to trade data for value is real and growing. Deloitte's research found that 89% of Gen Z and 87% of millennials surveyed are willing to share personal information in return for more personalized offers or experiences. This is the window to promote loyalty or rewards incentives tailored to each segment and the category they engaged with, not a generic program ad to everyone. A one-night event and a month-long tournament are fundamentally different math problems — here's how to plan for each. Retail media: The overlooked loyalty channel Retail media networks (RMNs) have loyalty infrastructure already built in: Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions, Walmart Connect's shopper segments, paid social suppression and sequencing, and programmatic retargeting all let you treat existing customers differently from prospects, inside the same media buy you're already running. And Walmart’s recent restructuring, which aligns Walmart Connect with Sam’s Club Connect for shared capabilities, champions the membership model as a persistent, relationship-based view of customers rather than a series of one-off transactions. It means retailers can now see not only what a customer bought, but what ads they were exposed to, how they engaged, what they did next, and how their patterns emerge over time. These first-party data points form the foundation for repeat purchases and lifetime value, not just campaign-level ROAS. That’s golden for brands, as RMNs are quietly becoming loyalty engines informing long-term brand equity, not just immediate performance. If your team is still treating every impression as a single-touch acquisition moment, you’re paying for infrastructure you’re not using. How can I build customer loyalty using retail media networks? Start with a customer analysis that compares the cost and value of acquiring a new-to-brand customer against the cost and value of retaining a brand loyalist. From there, identify which paid media channels in your current mix are being used exclusively for acquisition, and map out retention audiences that could be activated instead. Apply a framework for sequencing paid media touchpoints to existing customers based on purchase history and lifetime value tier, rather than treating all retargeting as one undifferentiated pool, and evaluate ]the RMN's closed-loop measurement capabilities to ensure no retention-focused spend is left on the table. Predictive analytics and big-picture insights make marketing mix modeling tools invaluable to brand marketers of all industries in 2026 and beyond. Media mix modeling (MMM) as loyalty engine Most teams treat media mix modeling (MMM) as a rearview mirror: run the campaign, wait for the quarter to close, then let the model tell you what worked. But EMARKETER's Media Mix Modeling Trends 2026 report (to which Exverus's own VP of Analytics Joshua Edelman contributed) confirms that gap is now the industry's biggest measurement constraint. MMM is evolving from a reporting tool into a decision engine, but most marketers aren't ready for that shift. Only 28% of marketers say their organization is very effective at converting MMM insights into action! That's likely because they’re thinking of MMM after a campaign, rather than before. EMARKETER's report shows marketers running MMM reports sporadically instead of timing them strategically. EMARKETER'S report shows marketers running MMM reports sporadically, instead of timing them strategically. The mismatch shows up hardest in customer retention strategies. Acquisition spend gets modeled aggressively because the feedback loop is fast. Retention rarely gets the same treatment — the payback is slower, the attribution murkier — so it gets planned by instinct, or worse, left out of the model entirely until someone asks why churn spiked after a tentpole event. That's backwards. As EMARKETER reports, the optimal modeling cadence depends on the decision being made, which means if retention is a KPI you’re seeking in Q4, it needs to be in the model before Q4, not reconstructed from Q3's numbers after the fact. Before you build your holiday retention budget, model it. Before you brief your loyalty program refresh, size it against your other channels in the same tool you'd use to defend a paid social increase. MMM done right doesn't just tell you retention worked — it tells you how much to put behind it before you needed it to. How do I model customer retention strategies in MMM? Add retention/loyalty as a standing line item in your MMM inputs now, ahead of Q4 planning — not as a post-hoc addition. Set your modeling cadence to match your decision calendar: quarterly retention decisions need quarterly-relevant model inputs, not just annual reporting. And require a documented expected payback for loyalty spend the same way you would for any acquisition channel — no more "soft" budget lines. For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter here. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Exverus Media Director Vanessa Pinzon walks marketers through the balancing act Make new friends, or keep the old? As the saying goes, one is silver and the other's gold. Brand marketers have to walk a fine line between retaining existing consumers and acquiring new ones for sustained business growth. With paid media strategies, that means retargeting existing audiences while expanding to new-to-brand audiences. At MediaPost's Planning & Buying Insider Summit in Chicago this September, Exverus Media Director Vanessa Pinzon joined three other media experts onstage to discuss customer retention vs. acquisition. Read the highlights or watch the full conversation below: Finding new audiences Q: When everyone's trying to find new audiences, and we're all chasing the same signals, where are you looking? Vanessa: This is where you have to, as a media planner, think outside of the box. Everything is intent signals right now, and everyone's using that as the definition. But you have to think of evolution and think of adjacent signals: What are they doing? What are they consuming? I have a descriptor of who the target is and the intent signals. That's great, but all of our CPG competitors are going to be going towards the same thing. So, what is the secondary layer of behavior that may give us an insight to who this audience really is? Is there a way in from a different perspective? Who owns client identification Q: Let's look into these nonobvious signals. Is this where we have to rely on the human touch to really talk to the clients, get an idea of what their audience is? Can we ask AI what some of these non-obvious touch points were? V: I think it all starts with the client brief. I think as we go into this AI era, it's about holding the clients a little bit more accountable to providing us beyond demographic information. Could they share what the purchasing journey is for their consumers? Is there additional information they can share with us that we, as media experts think, maybe there's a way in from this angle versus your traditional [audience profile]. So I think we hold our clients accountable a lot more for providing us with that true direction. Because they are the goalkeepers of their brand, and they are the ones that need to really help us identify the audience. Learn to build customer retention strategies from media planning through measurement. Customer retention vs. acquisition Q: Let's say clients’ budgets are halved tomorrow. What would you prioritize? Would you prioritize finding new customers or activating against existing ones? V: I think it really depends on the business goals. Do you have a strong enough core, and is retaining those customers and that revenue your priority? Or has your base shrunk? Is the category shrinking? And do we need to focus more on the prospecting side and increasing those new-to-brand sales and expanding our audiences? Incremental budget allocation Q: [Let’s say your] clients are like, "Hey, I have incremental dollars. We have to use it before we lose it because I need to make sure I comp over it for next year." Where is that money going? V: I think incrementality is what's going to guide the additional funding. Where is the incrementality? Is it within the core audience or is it within the prospecting and expanding of the audience? It's usually a quick turnaround and a quick exercise of asking, are we funding the right approach? [Because] we want to make sure that, at the end of the day, everything gets tied back to the business KPIs, because that's what we're going to be measured on. About the Author Vanessa Pinzon is a Media Director at Exverus by Brainlabs, a full-funnel media planning and buying agency, where she oversees strategy for Xponential Fitness, Soules Kitchen (CPG), and Specialty Coffee Association (B2B). Across Vanessa's 18 years in advertising, she's led teams building omnichannel media campaigns at top agencies for retail, pharmaceuticals, finance, and government clients. She also serves on Cal State Fullerton’s Alumni Board of Directors as VP of Marketing and Communications. Follow her on LinkedIn. For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter here.

How to identify, partner with, and measure the value of creators for long-term business growth Jump To: What's the difference between an influencer and a creator? How do we identify the right niche creators and local influencers? Should I hire an influencer marketing agency or use a self-serve platform? What's the relationship between UGC and creator marketing? How does creator marketing fit into an omnichannel media strategy? How can creator marketing build customer loyalty? How do you measure the creator ROI of creator partnerships? What mistakes should brands avoid when partnering with professional creators? Key Takeaways: Creator marketing delivers its strongest ROI in the upper and middle of the funnel. Exverus recommends using creators for awareness and product education, then converting engaged audiences through search and retail media, measuring success by brand lift and assisted conversions rather than last-click attribution. Follower count is no longer the best signal for choosing a creator. Algorithmic feeds now distribute content by relevance, so brands should select creators based on audience fit, campaign objectives, budget, geography, and content format. Leading brands now treat creators as year-round brand infrastructure. At Cannes Lions 2026, Southwest Airlines, Duolingo, and Unilever described recurring creator ambassador programs, and Exverus' own multi-year creator partnerships for New Belgium Brewing show the value of building on past results. Creator content can extend far beyond social media. Social Reach, a proprietary format from Exverus and SeenThis, places vertical creator video in premium display placements across the open web and has outperformed paid Meta ad efficiency by 50%. Think quick: I bet you can name your favorite influencer faster than your favorite celebrity endorsement. The global creator industry is projected to reach some $480 billion in size by 2027, nearly doubling in three years, according to Goldman Sachs. And just in the US, EMARKETER forecasted influencer marketing to grow 14.2% in 2025 to $9.29 billion—not including paid media amplification or spend outside social media. We all see this trend in our feeds every day! And the right creator can do more than just recite your product’s features; they can demonstrate to an audience how to use your product in real life and instantly show its effects. For example, when we won a 2024 WARC Effectiveness Award for our work with Premier Protein on Amazon Prime Days, it wasn't for product-based ads listing the ingredients and health benefits. Instead, we partnered with fun, aspirational health influencers that made videos demonstrating how they use Premier Protein in their daily morning routines. This helped the audience visualize themselves using the product and increases the chance of a buy. Let's answer some FAQs about creator marketing in 2025: What's the difference between an influencer and a creator? We often use these terms interchangeably, but there are some subtle differences: Influencers are primarily defined by their ability to influence purchasing decisions and drive audience behavior. Follower count is traditionally the key metric for success. Creators emphasize content quality, storytelling, production value, and longer collaborations. They're usually positioned as experts with specialized skills, rather than merely people with large followings. Creators typically diversify their revenue streams, going beyond product sponsorships to subscriptions, courses, speaking opportunities, or their own product launches. Learn our scientific approach to spending on social for maximum return How do we identify the right niche creators and local influencers? Bigger isn’t always better. In the past, larger influencers were thought of as better for brand awareness and broad reach, while micro- or nano-influencers were more likely to drive sales conversions for their trustworthiness and relatability. But today, that's not always the case. Algorithmic social feeds are now highly astute at feeding the right content to the right consumer at the right time, making follower count just one of many factors determining placement. The key to identifying the right niche creators for your project is precise targeting based on deep insights about your audience. Establish: Demographics and psychographics Campaign objectives Budget parameters Geographic scope Content format preferences These will help you narrow down your search to make the most of every influencer dollar you spend. Should I hire an influencer marketing agency or use a self-serve platform? This depends upon a few factors like your campaign budget, your in-house manpower, the length and complexity of the campaign, and the level of control and oversight you want to maintain. Agencies are excellent for managing complex or long-term partnerships, especially if you have limited time and resources to do the legwork in-house, but they can cost more. Choosing a self-serve creator marketing platform can be daunting, as the available options are ever-growing. But platforms like CreatorIQ and Captiv8 have been building out their tech capabilities to better automate creator vetting, brand safety management, customer service, and reporting. In short: More budget, less time? Agency. More time, less budget? Platform. Learn to meet savvy consumers everywhere they search What's the relationship between UGC and creator marketing? User-generated content (UGC) is a highly effective type of content, which can come in the form of photos, videos, reviews, or text created by people, rather than brands. UGC can be: Organic, in which actual customers voluntarily create content for free. This type is the cheapest and most authentic but hard to scale and control. Paid, in which creators make content for a brand's channels that looks like organic UGC. It's cheaper than a full influencer partnership. 93% of marketers report that UGC performs better than branded content, according to Hootsuite. UGC can be integrated into social but also CTV campaigns, with shoppable ad formats and interactive features for a smooth path to purchase. Organic UGC builds authentic community, UGC creators provide scalable authentic content, and influencers reach new audiences. Most successful brands use all three strategically. How to build a successful UGC partnership: 1. Run A/B tests to determine which creative messaging resonates best with your audience 2. Create a natural, relatable vibe that feels more entertaining or educational than promotional 3. Use UGC to retarget people who have already interacted with your brand to reinforce trust and push conversions 4. Integrate UGC onto your product detail pages (PDPs) to reinforce trust & drive conversions Instagram Reels beats TikTok on several key metrics, and Meta's ad capabilities are only getting stronger. How does creator marketing fit into an omnichannel media strategy? Creator content can serve marketing objectives at all levels of the customer journey: Brand awareness & discovery As the Premier Protein example above illustrates, social media channels can be a powerful brand discovery source that displays your products and messaging to a wide audience with broad reach. Purchase consideration Creators can "unbox", review, or give informative tutorials on your products or services Link directly from content to purchase pages through link stickers, tappable buttons, or other interactive features. Creator discount codes & affiliate links drive conversion Source: WARC "The Future of Media 2026." How can I repurpose video ad creative? Exverus recently partnered with ad-tech vendor SeenThis to launch a new ad format called Social Reach, which takes vertical videos (brand-made or creator-made) and places them in premium Display slots across the open web. This allows media teams to repurpose creative assets and extend their reach far beyond social media platforms. It's already beating the efficiency of paid Meta ads by 50%! Social Reach is just one example of repurposing creator content for multiple channels. Other ways include: Linking to YouTube videos from social posts or blog posts Reusing YouTube videos for CTV ads Building earned media coverage around brand/creator partnerships The key is keeping the visual vibe and the messaging consistent. Earned media & organic reach Trade publications like AdAge and Marketing Dive love to report on a good brand/creator collaboration, so leverage it to earn even more publicity for both parties. Planning a PR strategy around your partnership is a cost-efficient way to multiply the impact on awareness and reach. Live, experiential events Think outside the screen! Live, IRL activations with brand reps and creators onsite draw crowds, encourage organic posting, and leave a deeper impact on attendees than a digital ad alone. Get some ideas for experiential marketing activations below. How can creator marketing build customer loyalty? At Cannes Lions 2026, the CMOs buzzing about creator marketing weren't talking about campaigns anymore; they were talking about relationships. Southwest Airlines, Duolingo, and Unilever all described creator strategies that look less like paid social buys and more like standing brand infrastructure. Southwest suggests building a roster of regular, recurring ambassadors and giving them the same treatment you'd give your best partners: early access to news, company dinners, a dedicated newsletter. Unilever's CEO said creators are the people who decide whether a brand stays relevant when the ads stop running. They’re building the year-round brand equity you already need to have in place before a performance campaign. And Exverus' own New Belgium Brewing media team can attest to the mutual benefits of extending their creator partnerships from year to year. Media Supervisor Marlee Thompson explains: “We’ve been able to learn from the previous year and lean into what worked best for reach and engagement to get the most value for our investment. We’re continuing to build a strong rapport with the creators’ audiences and producing entertaining content that speaks to both the audience's and the brand’s tone and style.” How do you measure the ROI of creator partnerships? 79% of marketers cite determining creator ROI as their biggest challenge. That's not a measurement problem – that's a strategy problem. Why creator ROI feels impossible Attribution gaps plague creator campaigns because creator content often drives awareness and consideration rather than direct conversions, making it difficult to isolate impact. Add platform fragmentation—where each network offers different metrics, attribution windows, and reporting standards—and cross-channel comparison becomes nearly impossible. But the silliest reason? Over 50% of marketers spend only 30 minutes or less vetting a single influencer, and only 25.6% consistently receive documentation on influencer vetting. You can't measure what you didn't plan for. The answer is upper-funnel Many brands push creator partnerships toward social commerce—buying products directly on TikTok or Meta. But as we've noted before, social platforms are still most effective for upper- and mid-funnel awareness goals, not direct conversions. Just because a platform is popular doesn't mean it's the most cost-effective way to close sales. Creator content builds discovery and demand; search and retail media convert it. How to measure creator ROI Map creator partnerships to funnel stages, not vanity metrics. Use creators for brand awareness and product education, then retarget engaged audiences through retail media networks where purchase intent is highest. Track assisted conversions, not last-click attribution. Also, build creator briefs that define success beyond engagement rates—brand lift, consideration, search volume increases. Finally, invest in proper vetting: Consider audience quality, brand alignment, and past performance data. What mistakes should brands avoid when partnering with professional creators? Freebies aren't payment Sending a free product sample is not sufficient payment for a whole day's worth of work packing, commuting, shooting, editing, writing copy, sharing content, and doing internal admin tasks. If you don't have the budget to pay a creator's going rate for a day of labor and supplies, please don't reach out. It's a waste of their time and yours. Let creators do what they do best Don't hire a well-known internet personality and then snuff out their whole personality by making them read your scripts and perform your corporate-speak. Let creators do what made their audience love them in the first place. If you can't relinquish that control, then just hire actors for a traditional commercial. No generic template emails Lia Haberman, social & creator marketing consultant to Fortune 500 brands and author of the popular ICYMI Substack newsletter, advises: Don't send out a generic message. Don't address them as "Dear creator" or use their social handle instead of their name. Take the time to do your research. Make the effort, use their name and some acknowledgment of why they're a good fit for this campaign. Personalize the outreach. I've worked with creators who say they don't want to feel like they're just a cog in the wheel and impersonal pitches are a deal breaker for them. In 2026 and beyond, brands will start looking at influencer marketing as an overall strategy, rather than a silo in their marketing mix. Influencer and creator marketing can elevate, if not lead, every pillar of marketing communication when planned and executed thoughtfully. To learn more about what the right creator partnership could do for your brand, drop us a line! For more media tips, analysis, and case studies; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter here. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is then carefully reviewed and edited by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Before you cut your media agency to save budget, weigh the hidden costs of in-house buying against what a specialist partner brings. For most brands spending on multiple channels, hiring an external media agency delivers better performance per dollar than an in-house team, because the costs of in-housing (senior talent, tools, and constant retraining as platforms change) are often larger and less visible than agency fees. But in-housing can make sense for brands with a single dominant channel, very high spend, and the budget to retain specialist talent. Many brands land on a hybrid model, depending on their capabilities and goals. Here are some of the considerations that should guide your thinking process when deciding whether to hire a digital ad agency or build a media buying team in-house: What an in-house media team really costs When you cut the agency fee out of your marketing budget, every job it covered moves onto your payroll: senior media strategists cost six-figure salaries (plus approximately 31% more in benefits). Then you need junior media planners/buyers, ad ops specialists, data analysts, platform experts (like Amazon, for example), and the measurement tools a media agency can spread across its whole agency roster. And bringing media in-house may not even eliminate the agency line item, as Marketing Dive reported in 2023 that 92% of marketers with in-house agencies still work with external agencies in some capacity. In fact, the biggest champions for in-housing don't claim it to be a money-saver. In the ANA's 2026 State of In-Housing report, only 9% said they view in-housing as a cost-saving alternative to external agencies. The brands that in-house well do it for control and speed, not cost. When you're conducting your cost-benefit analysis, ask every media agency you're comparing to break down its fees line by line so you can make an informed decision. The consultant's POV We know we're a little biased here. So don't take our word for it! Steve Boehler, founding partner at marketing agency consultancy Mercer Island Group, explains: Agency consultant Steve Boehler "It’s incredibly hard for marketers to staff and maintain an outstanding in-house media capability. Platforms and technology change constantly. Best practices today are different from a month ago. Specialized planning tools are needed to plan across platforms. There is no formal career path for the folks that have hands on keyboards. There is no learning from other agency clients. Staffing your own internal media capability may seem like a cost savings, but it often is not. And the actual performance often lags behind an agency’s capabilities." What a digital ad agency brings to the table Context Long-term planning Creative campaign ideas Data analysis Context Meta, Amazon, and Google are appealing directly to brands, beefing up their AI-powered campaign optimization abilities to eliminate the need for agencies. But no single media channel can fully replace digital ad agencies. Why? Because media channels are ingredients, and agencies are professional chefs. None of these platforms know what you're doing on the others, or in real life, and they don’t have a deep understanding of: what your target consumer’s complete purchase journey could look like your brand’s voice, business challenges, and category positioning how multiple marketing channels work together for brand and performance why certain campaigns perform better than others your business's sales patterns over time All of this context is absolutely necessary to plan an effective, full-funnel media campaign, evaluate its progress, and make adjustments based on actual sales. Media planning requires a long-term view and full-funnel integration. Long-term growth strategies While immediate ROI metrics can look attractive, brand marketers under pressure to close sales often get short-sighted and overlook the importance of long-term brand-building. This mistake is called short-termism, and it must be avoided to ensure brand success. Paid media efficiency isn't about eliminating channels -- it's about reaching new consumers everywhere they discover and building swift, elegant paths to purchase. We go long. Media planners collect deep audience- and competitive-insights to build a bespoke, full-funnel media strategy that guarantees the most bang for your buck. New research from WARC proves media is a marathon, not a sprint Creative campaign ideas Digital ad agencies live at the intersection of creativity and technology, where bold media ideas meet cutting-edge execution to drive real business results. In order to remain at the forefront, we strategically partner with advanced ad tech vendors and publishers to unlock transformative value for our clients. For example, in March, we partnered with SeenThis to launch a new ad format called Social Reach, which splashes brands’ existing social videos across the open web in PubMatic’s premium Display slots. Our innovation beat Meta Ads' efficiency by 50%! You can see more of the creative ideas we've brought to life on our Campaigns page. Sophisticated data analysis Modern, AI-powered MMM, MTA, and brand measurement capabilities that were once reserved for the biggest high-rollers are now available to brands of all sizes through your media agency partner. Our in-house media buyers and data analysts use platforms like Keen Decision Systems, Resonate, Skai, and DoubleVerify to justify every recommendation with brand safety and suitability for clients’ peace of mind. Again, we're not just reporting today's sales performance -- we're evaluating your whole brand's health to ensure continued growth tomorrow and next year. When in-house media buying makes sense In-housing isn't altogether a bad idea, just a specific one. It tends to work best for brands where a single channel, such as Paid Search or Amazon, drives most of the business, so a small team can go deep instead of wide. It helps when spend is high enough that the additional costs of labor and tech are smaller than the fees saved. It also suits brands with rich first-party data they'd rather keep close to home. As Marketing Dive noted, in-house teams can access a company's first-party data more quickly and securely than external agencies can. It's no coincidence that the early adopters of in-house programmatic buying were mostly digital natives like Netflix and Target, whose deep first-party data gave them a head start. The strongest reasons to in-house are strategic, not financial. In the ANA study linked above, 53% of respondents said the primary role of an in-house agency is to act as a strategic partner in upstream strategy. If you need to react to sales data by the hour, or agency approval cycles are slowing you down, having the team inside your walls pays off. Just go in clear-eyed. A successful in-house team needs real career paths, a budget for tools and training, and an honest plan for the work that will stay outside. Brands that check some of these boxes but not all of them usually do best with a hybrid model. Retail media, including Amazon, is so much more than last-click. Learn how it can grow a brand top to bottom. The hybrid media buying model For many brands, the answer isn't either/or. In a hybrid model, the brand keeps some media functions in-house and hands the rest to a digital ad agency. The split usually follows one of a few lines: The brand might own strategy, budget, and audience data while the agency handles execution, platform management, and measurement. It might run the one channel it knows best, such as paid search or Amazon, and outsource everything else. Or it might keep always-on campaigns internal and bring in an agency for bigger launches and new channels. The hybrid model has become the norm largely because full in-housing is so hard to staff. In a Digiday survey, 62% of marketers said hiring talent is a challenge for bringing media buying in-house. An agency consultant quoted in the same piece put it plainly: most brands now run a hybrid model because building teams in-house is expensive, and finding the talent is often the problem. But hybrid only works when both sides can see the same data. Before you divide the work, agree on who owns the platform accounts, the reporting, and the measurement, and make sure your media agency partner gives you full visibility into costs and fees. Otherwise you end up with two teams optimizing in two directions, and nobody with the full picture. How to decide on a digital ad agency If you've weighed the costs and decided an outside partner makes sense, for all of your media or just part of it, the pitch process is where you find the right one. Hold every agency to the same five questions: Industry expertise: What experience do they have in your category or with a similar audience, and can they show examples? Your actual team: Who will work on your account day to day, and will senior leaders stay involved after the contract is signed? Staying current: How do they keep up with emerging platforms, AI, and new measurement standards? Proprietary tools: What data sources, tech platforms, and measurement tools can they bring that you couldn't access on your own? Transparency: How open are they about media costs, fees, rebates, and preferred vendor relationships? That last question matters most, because it's the one that makes an honest cost comparison with in-housing possible. If an agency hesitates to answer it, that's your answer. You'll find these questions on our Services page, and our Guide to the Agency Pitch Process covers how to run a review from shortlist to signed contract. FAQs Is it cheaper to buy media in-house than to hire a digital ad agency? Usually not for brands advertising across multiple channels. Cutting the agency fee moves every job it covered onto your payroll, including senior strategists, buyers, analysts, and the tools an agency spreads across its client roster. In the ANA's 2026 State of In-Housing report, only 9% of respondents said they view in-housing as a cost-saving alternative to external agencies. When does in-house media buying make sense? In-housing works best for brands where a single channel drives most of the business, spend is high enough to justify dedicated talent and tools, and rich first-party data gives the team an edge. It can also make sense when speed and control matter more than cost. What is a hybrid media buying model? In a hybrid model, a brand keeps some media functions in-house and hands the rest to a digital ad agency. Common splits include owning strategy while the agency executes, running one core channel internally, or keeping always-on campaigns in-house while an agency handles launches and new channels. Can AI tools from Meta, Google, and Amazon replace a media agency? Platform AI can optimize campaigns within its own walls, but no single platform sees what's happening on the others, or in your business. A media agency connects the full picture: your customer's purchase journey, how channels work together, and how media drives actual sales over time. What should I ask a digital ad agency before hiring them? Ask about their industry expertise, who will actually work on your account, how they stay current, which tools and data they bring that you couldn't access on your own, and how transparent they are about costs, fees, and rebates. If an agency hesitates on that last question, that's your answer. About the author Talia Arnold is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Exverus by Brainlabs, an independent, full-funnel media agency serving both challenger brands and Fortune 500s. With 2​2 years in advertising, media planning, and entrepreneurship; Talia was named a 2025 CampaignUS Inspiring Women in Media and a 2024 ADWEEK Media All-Star. If you’re curious about what fresh recipes our chefs could cook up for you – let’s talk. For more advertising news and tips, join our free weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Partnership with PadSquad drove incremental engagement for Stella & Chewy's While the decision to invest in mobile advertising may be easy, creatively devising ways to stand out and make a lasting impression is far more challenging. Integrating technical formats like AR in advertising campaigns can help your message stand out from the crowd of static or video social ads. Utilizing technology like AR in advertising campaigns requires a strong ad tech partner, a data-driven media strategy, and personal connections with consumers. In 2023, Exverus teamed up with ad-tech solutions provider PadSquad to develop a new mobile ad experience for Stella & Chewy’s, the raw natural pet food for dogs and cats. Together, we built an interactive AR experience in which pet parents were encouraged to upload photos with their pets, decorate them with AR frames and filters, and upload them to social media. Try it yourself here! Our interactive, programmatic mobile experience helped make Stella & Chewy’s a category leader in just a few months. Nearly a quarter-million users engaged with this campaign, leading to a 702% higher engagement rate than standard benchmarks! “This is the sort of participatory advertising that brands dream of. Stella & Chewy’s is now a category competitor with a deeper connection to a growing segment of brand loyalists.” Anna Elema, Exverus Media Director Stella & Chewy’s experienced an incremental 2% lift in brand awareness from just this one tactic with a <$500K budget. And the campaign won the 2023 MediaPost OMMA Award for Best Mobile Marketing campaign of the year! Why it worked: In this case, we tapped into the emotional connection people have with their pets and allowed them to be creative with the ad unit, to make something uniquely their own, and to share photos of their pets, which pet owners already love to do. Read more about the campaign in Adweek here.

New research proves media is a marathon, not a sprint We've said it before: investing in paid media is like a 401K, not a penny stock. And now, the market's catching up to the math. WARC's 2026 report, "The Pace Principle 2.0," explains why short performance marketing plays fail to compound: brands leaning too hard on quick-hit social spikes hit a "platform ceiling" — content loses momentum the moment paid promotion stops, because it never had time to build beyond a single channel or moment. And that's just the first of three kinds of plateaus WARC's research identifies. Clear the platform ceiling and you run into a "cultural ceiling" (momentum tied to a trending moment resets the second that moment passes. Clear that too, and the hardest barrier is a "self-sustaining ceiling," where creators and communities keep carrying an idea forward on their own, without you constantly prompting them. Very few brands ever get there, and it's not a coincidence that it takes the longest to build. Here are 3 actionable ways to avoid performance marketing plateaus; details on each below! Plan for a 12-month distribution, not a 6-month blitz Refresh creative assets throughout the campaign Pair ROI with brand equity and CLV in your reporting How long should a performance marketing campaign run for the best ROI? Using our proprietary Marketing Mix Modeling tools, Exverus compared a client that invested $10MM in advertising over just six months against spreading that same $10MM across a full 12 months. The result: a 51% increase in ROI from the longer timeframe alone — same budget, same brand, dramatically different return. Independent data from our partners at Keen Decision Systems noted a similar pattern: spend spread across a longer period generated $2.21 in revenue ROI, compared to $1.46 for spend concentrated into a shorter window. Now, Mastercard's recent analysis of 500+ campaigns found that campaigns running longer than 90 days consistently outperform shorter efforts, with post-campaign uplift nearly doubling for the longer-running ones. Here's why: Brand media campaigns, spike-captured audiences, and loyalty infrastructure don’t have time to compound if the underlying plan resets every few months. Remember when we discussed the difference between the World Cup (a month of games) and the Super Bowl (one night)? Longer flights give marketers room to refresh creative, rotate audiences, and sequence messaging across the customer lifecycle. A six-month sprint doesn't have time for that before the budget runs out. A short campaign has to nail everything on the first try, whereas a longer one gets to learn. And it's not just about giving the algorithm more time to optimize; it's about giving the brand itself more time to compound. Each touchpoint a consumer has with your brand builds familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust. Six months of concentrated spend front-loads that exposure and then goes dark; whereas twelve months of distributed spend keeps reinforcing it when new buyers enter the market. Same dollars, same brand, but only one plan is still working for you in month eight. Make the most of tentpole media events by planning for long-term value and retention from the beginning. How do you avoid ad fatigue in a paid media campaign? You know that feeling of watching a TV show and seeing the same ad more than three times?! It's the worst, and you'll be paying money to turn customers AWAY from you. Easy does it! Blitzing your consumers in a short window causes ad fatigue and can build negative brand perception rather than positive recall. It's a common performance marketing mistake. Switch up your creative assets Spread spend over a longer flight instead of concentrating it into a short, heavy burst, and refresh creative before fatigue sets in. A 2024 article in Journal of Advertising adds an important nuance to this: How fast an audience wears out on your ads depends heavily on how attached they already are to your brand. In other words, consumers with weak or no existing brand attachment fatigue fastest. So a cold audience that's hit with a heavy burst of the same creative is most likely to tune you out - not great for brand awareness-building! A longer campaign flight lets you build familiarity first, refresh creatives before fatigue sets in, and earn the tolerance for repetition that builds memory instead of irritation. At Exverus by Brainlabs, we've spent 12 years refining our approach to full-funnel performance marketing for growth-stage, culture-creating brands. Here's what demonstrably works. What is dual cadence measurement? If you only report on ROI, you're only telling half the story — and it's the half that argues against the strategy that's actually working. CTR, ROAS, and CPM fluctuate weekly due to seasonality, creative fatigue, and platform noise; not one of which is a strategy signal. The metrics that actually predict future revenue (brand equity, consideration, share of voice) are quarterly by design, since brand lift and MMM need time to become directional. If you read a 12-month campaign through a weekly dashboard alone, you'll end up cutting the exact investment that was working. The fix is running two tracks side by side, not picking one. At Exverus, we call this dual cadence measurement: weekly check-ins for pacing and spend efficiency, and quarterly reports for brand lift, awareness, and MMM. WARC's research supports the same split: fast metrics are for in-flight optimization only, while slow signals track sustained growth. Mastercard's data sharpens the point even further: post-campaign uplift nearly doubled for longer-running campaigns, meaning some of the strongest evidence shows up after the flight ends. Media metrics for the long game, not just the launch Keep ROAS and CTR for mid-flight pacing decisions, not for judging whether the strategy worked. Build brand lift and MMM into quarterly reviews, not weekly dashboards. Make at least one forward-looking metric — awareness, consideration, or brand lift — non-negotiable in every QBR. Learn more about dual cadence reporting and choosing the best KPIs for your campaign. At Exverus, we built our organizational structure around the dual-cadence model of simultaneous brand/performance media long before research proved it out and other agencies began catching up. As an independent agency, we maintain the agility to keep planners and performance buyers working closely together on every account, with the added scale and technological capabilities of larger shops. Curious what we could do for your brand? Drop us a line! For more performance marketing tips, agency news, and campaigns, subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Key Takeaways Sonic logos that include the brand name are 9x more effective than those without, according to The SoundOut Index 2025, which covered 174 brands and over 70,000 consumers. Consumers overestimate their own sonic memory: while 36% of consumers claim they recognize a sonic logo, they are only right 43% of the time - and without a brand name, accuracy collapses to 18%. Too many brands are chasing short-term buzz over lasting recognition. Sonic branding agency amp's Best Audio Brands 2026 report found that use of one-off custom music jumped 140% in a year, while use of branded music (sound a brand owns and repeats across campaigns) dropped 67%. US adults average 2 hours 44 minutes of daily audio consumption per EMARKETER, yet audio ad spend still lags behind that listening time. Much is written about the creative side of advertising and the visual representation of brands via logos, color palettes, and website design. But one crucial element remains overlooked and underutilized: Audio! Nowhere is the power of sound clearer than on short-form video. According to the TikTok and Luminate Music Impact Report, 84% of songs that entered the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 went viral on TikTok first. When a sound can travel that far, brands have a real chance to create moments that stick in consumers' ears long after they've stopped scrolling. What is sonic branding? Sonic branding, sometimes called audio or sound branding, is the strategic use of sound or music to reinforce a brand's identity and create a memorable experience for target consumers. It includes jingles, sound logos, brand anthems, brand voices, and functional sounds that evoke emotion, convey messages, and establish a brand's personality. This is not a new concept. Jingles and audio signatures date back to the 1920s, when radio advertising first took off. What has changed is the number of places a brand can be heard. Beyond radio, streaming, and podcasts, audio advertising is expanding into retail media networks (like Lowe's in-store audio) and non-intrusive in-game placements, which means a brand's sound now travels to the store aisle and the game console, not just the car radio. What are some examples of sonic branding? When we say "Nationwide is on your side," you probably hear the melody. The same goes for McDonald's "ba da ba ba ba," Netflix's "ta-dum," the Nintendo Switch "click," or Tony the Tiger's "They're grrrrreat!" SoundOut's 2025 Index, a ranking of 174 brands' sonic logos, adds a few more to the list. Arby's took the #1 spot as the most recognizable sonic logo, displacing 2023 leader Hot Pockets. AutoZone is close behind, with Liberty Mutual completing the top 3, all of which rated over 90% brand attribution with consumers. Heritage also pays off: Maybelline's refreshed 25-year-old jingle stormed straight into the top 20 with 73% attribution, and Pillsbury's updated Doughboy giggle also outperformed many newer compositions. The common thread is consistency, and many of these assets say the brand's name out loud. More on why below. Where smart media buyers are spending in podcasts, radio, video, & gaming Why does sonic branding matter now? We've been tracking audio's momentum for years. Audio advertising was by far the fastest-growing media channel of 2024, showing a remarkable 36.4% year-over-year growth according to IAB's Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Even so, as we noted in our look at what's new in audio advertising for 2026, spend still hasn't caught up to how much people actually listen. That gap is even wider among younger consumers. The Gen Z Audio Report from Edison Research and SiriusXM Media found that Americans ages 13-24 spend four hours and 10 minutes with audio per day. For brands that want to reach the next generation of buyers, a consistent sonic identity is one of the most direct ways in. How effective is sonic branding? The case for sonic branding rests on three benefits: differentiation, emotional connection, and recall. In a crowded marketplace where consumers are bombarded with messages across devices, a distinct sound helps a brand stand apart. Research backs this up: Edison's 2025 research shows that humor and music remain the most effective triggers for engagement among Gen Z listeners, and 49% say they are much more likely to pay attention to an ad if it makes them laugh. Sound also shapes how an ad lands emotionally. Spotify's Sonic Science Volume 2 study found that 60% of listeners' ad engagement carries over from the audio content heard immediately before, which is why context and creative fit matter as much as the sound itself. Recall is where the newest data gets most useful for marketers, and most humbling. SoundOut's 2025 findings show that a memorable melody alone isn't enough; 22 of the top 25 sonic logos include the brand name, and 90 of the bottom 100 omit the brand name. The takeaway is that a sonic asset only builds equity if listeners can connect it to the right brand. The ubiquitous video platform is now America's #1 home for podcasts. Learn how your brand can benefit from its reach, engagement, and loyalty. What is the short-term trap in audio marketing? Sonic branding agency amp's 2026 report points to a worrying trend: Brands are commissioning more one-off custom tracks while investing less in owned, repeatable sound. As one amp executive put it, "The story of 2025 [was] a pivot from building equity to making an impact". We see this as another form of short-termism. A fresh track may win a campaign moment, but a consistent sonic asset repeated across every touchpoint is what builds long-term brand recall and loyalty. In an increasingly voice-activated ecosystem of smart speakers, podcasts, and in-store audio, every aural touchpoint is a chance to reinforce your brand. All you need is the best media agency to put your brand's message into the right ears. For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news, join our free weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Habit's guest chef residency series launched with chef Jet Tila, inviting culinary collaborators to create limited-time menus that go beyond the standard celebrity meal Habit's new chef in residency program kicks off with Jet Tila JULY 22, 2026 (LOS ANGELES, CA) -- Habit is rethinking the celebrity restaurant collaboration with the launch of Habit & Co., a new residency platform by creative agency Optimism BH, media agency Exverus by Brainlabs, and partner agency SonderCo that invites chefs and cultural figures to develop original limited-time menus for the fast casual chain. Starting with chef/restaurateur and television personality Jet Tila, the social-first platform replaces the familiar celebrity order with an eight-week culinary residency, giving each collaborator the opportunity to create dishes inspired by their own tastes, backgrounds and stories. Media agency of record Exverus by Brainlabs will unfold the campaign across eight weeks with a social-first strategy supported by digital out-of-home, in-restaurant creative, owned digital channels, paid and organic social media, creator content and an editorial partnership with Eater. Each residency concludes with a fan giveaway tied to the featured resident. "Habit asked us to deliver overnight sales and long-term brand building simultaneously," says Georgia Schreiner, media director at Exverus. "The only way that works is if paid media feels less like advertising and more like culture. Each resident chef gets a bespoke channel strategy tailored to where their core audience actually lives." Habit taps LA Dodgers pitcher Alex Vesia for Double Play menu Next up to the plate is Dodgers pitcher Alex Vesia for an eight-week menu inspired by one of baseball's most iconic moments: the double play. Like his predecessor, Chef Jet Tila, Vesia’s residency will be announced on a 20,000 square foot digital out-of-home (DOOH) screen in his hometown of Los Angeles, followed by a full-funnel media campaign. Courtesy of creative agency Optimism BH “To make the campaign feel as double-sized as Alex’s menu items, we partnered with NPRP Media for a giant DOOH play,” says Exverus by Brainlabs Media Director Georgia Schreiner. “For this residency, we’re tapping into the deep regional connection between Alex and Dodgers fans in California, while expanding the campaign nationwide.” Creative agency Optimism BH designed an 8-week social content plan that will feature and highlight details around Alex’s story and menu. Fans will also have the opportunity to take home an exclusive Alex Vesia x Habit bobblehead. Partnership agency SonderCo collaborated with the brand from early concept development to strategy and talent relationships that brought Habit & Co. to life. “Unlike the last resident, Alex isn’t a chef,” says Optimism BH Creative Director Todd Eisner. “But he genuinely loves Habit Charburgers, so it was our job to make sure that enthusiasm was captured in our content.” The Double Play Menu is available at participating Habit locations nationwide beginning September 16 for a limited time. Exverus has been Habit's media agency of record since August 2025, as reported by ADWEEK. Nations Restaurant News and MediaPost spread word of the campaign launch. Stay tuned for the last residency announcement, coming later this year! For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter here.

How to make deliberate, intelligence-driven decisions about where and when to show up Every growth-stage brand eventually reaches the same inflection point: the market gets crowded, competitor budgets get bigger, and the playbook that worked last year starts showing its age. How can you get prepared? The insights here come from campaigns we've run for challenger brands in real competitive environments, from protein nutrition to streaming entertainment to fast casual dining. A common lesson threads through all of it: Brand positioning that is driven by competitive insights, gains market share while maintaining brand equity, and holds steady when competitors move is the way to earn to long-term customer loyalty. Learn tested and proven methods of outsmarting the competition with agility, brand positioning, and creativity. Competitive insights: Turn collection into action Most brands we work with already have competitive intelligence. They have the Pathmatics or MediaRadar login, the share-of-voice dashboard refreshed weekly, or the SEMrush keyword export sitting in someone's Dropbox. What they don't have is a decision framework that turns that data into a better media plan than they'd have built without it. Data collection is easy, but real leverage comes from what you do with it. Your competitive intelligence should answer 4 questions: Where can we be over-indexed, not just where are we behind? The instinct is to find competitive gaps and close them. For challenger brands, this is almost always the wrong move. Pick three or four channels where you can meaningfully outperform the competition and commit there. Trying to match a bigger competitor everywhere means losing everywhere. When should we show up (not just where)? Most brands look at channel mix and ignore timing entirely. If your largest competitor goes dark in Q1 every year, that's not a clear opening. An audience still in-market, and you're the only voice in the room. What are their creative signals saying? If a competitor has been running the same video concept for six months, they've hit on something that works. Find out why! Are they tapping into price, lifestyle, or a specific audience? That's strategy intelligence, not just channel intelligence. Which gaps are actually traps? Not every white space is an opportunity. Competitors often leave a channel because it isn't working. An under-utilized channel in your category is only worth pursuing if your own signals support it. Gain market share without a price war Brands increasingly want to conquest competitors through paid media, but many end up in a CPC arms race that inflates costs on both sides and moves no one's market share. Paid Search conquesting is notorious for starting bidding wars, which can threaten brand visibility and rising CPC costs for everyone involved. The brands gaining real ground are winning on presence, relevance, and timing. Here's how we think about category conquesting from a paid media standpoint: Show up where purchase decisions happen, not where keywords live The highest-leverage conquesting channel right now isn't Google, but retail media. 50% more retail media networks are offering competitive conquesting this year than last year, per EMARKETER. RMNs let you reach verified competitor purchasers using first-party purchase data, right when the consumer is in purchase mode. Find one or two retail media networks where your category lives, run a test targeting category keywords first, then add competitor audience targeting on top. However, if your brand has no retail distribution, then programmatic audience conquesting via competitor brand affinity segments is your primary lever. Programmatic can target the actual locations of competitors, geofence their events, and retarget for weeks afterward. Challenger brands, audit your brand defense before your next offense. Pull a search impression share report for your own brand terms. If competitors are capturing a meaningful share, strengthen your branded keyword bids before spending on conquesting. For market-leading brands, this should be your primary competitive paid media focus, not conquesting. Maintain brand positioning when competitors move in When a wave of challengers flood the shelf, the reactive instinct is to match their spend, defend every keyword, or drown them out on social. That path burns budget on a war of attrition, and challengers with lower awareness always have more to gain from the chaos than you do. The stronger play is to already have the infrastructure that matters: retail presence, brand equity, and media that keeps working when the category gets loud. When a competitor makes a big move, the question to ask yourself isn't 'How do we respond?' It's: 'Where have we already earned an advantage, and how do we extend it?’ CASE STUDY: PREMIER PROTEIN UNDER PRESSURE When a stampede of protein trendhoppers hit the market in 2025, Premier Protein didn't try to outspend the field. Instead, we developed a first-to-market Social Reach ad unit that delivered existing vertical video creative across the open web at half the cost-per-view of Meta. In combining that with a precise retail media strategy, CTV, Audio, and Search; Premier Protein built enough brand equity and presence that they could absorb the pressure and prevail. Going dark is a gift to your competitors Going dark on media sometimes gets framed as financial discipline, when really, it's a donation to your competitors. When a brand pulls back because of budget pressure, post-season fatigue, or new leadership it instantly loses share of voice. More importantly, it hands competitors a cleaner media environment, lower CPMs, and an audience all to themselves. Research from WARC confirms what we've seen firsthand: Regaining market share and brand equity after going dark is more costly and difficult than maintaining them with even modest investment. We've lived through this with a CPG client that came off a record-breaking sales season and then went dark for five months. During that window, consumer price sensitivity increased and competitors moved in. When the client resurfaced, it had lost 26% of annual revenue. Brand awareness and consideration were still intact — but last-touch conversion had collapsed because consumers could no longer differentiate this brand from a cheaper competitor. The instinct to pause often comes from treating advertising as a cost to cut rather than an investment to protect. And there's a second, quieter risk: leaning into short-term promotions to hit profit targets while dark on media trains consumers to wait for a discount, weakening brand value even as it appears to stabilize revenue. Even for brands with genuinely seasonal products, the right move is to define the minimum-presence threshold that keeps your brand in the game while competitors fund their own recovery later. BRAND POSITIONING ACTION ITEMS → Know your moat before you need it. Audit your retail presence, search share, and audience segments now. When competitive pressure spikes, you need to know where you're strong before you're forced to defend it. → When budget cuts are unavoidable, protect brand spend first. Performance spend has nowhere to perform without it. → Monitor SOV during slow spend periods. If your share is dropping while competitors' grows, the cost of the cutback is already showing up in the data. This piece originally appeared in our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. For more tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe for free here. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. 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