If you’re trying to figure out what camping tool, calligraphy pen, or kitchen gadget you should get, good luck finding your answer through traditional search.
Googling what you’re looking for will turn up at least two to three Sponsored Results, AI Overview gobbledygook, and a couple of heavily sponsored “I rounded up the best products for 2025,” YouTube videos that don’t really tell you anything valuable.
The next time you open Instagram, boom, there’s an ad for the brand you saw advertising on Google. Soon, when you open ChatGPT, you’ll see a similar ad there, too.
Most consumers are sick of this process.
They want real advice, compelling ads tailored to them and their particular interest or what they want to know. Yet marketers continue to bleed budget into tactics that actively erode brand perception because they’re under immense pressure to generate demand.
We sat down with Blake Ziolkowski, Sr. Director of Merchant Sales, Account Management, Partnerships & Operations at Kard, to learn more about what’s going on and how marketers can change the game.
Saturating the internet with your logo is a dying strategy
The old idea was simple: show up everywhere. On Facebook, on Instagram, in Google search results. When someone doesn’t convert, chase them. And if that doesn’t work, chase them again.
But people are getting really annoyed at this strategy. They want to feel special, not spammed.
“There are mandates from the top that force a singular focus on incremental new user acquisition,” says Blake.
“But the truth is that doubling down on performance marketing ads alone tends not to work. In fact, it can deter folks and have the opposite desired effect. No matter how much marketers want them to be superior to branding and rewards, ads are never going to make someone feel like they’re part of the club, and that’s what drives loyalty.”
Retargeting ads, display ads, search ads, and social ads are all losing potency. Everyone has seen the same stuff so many times that they’ve become blind to it. To stop the scroll, you need something really unique. You need to be eye-catching, personalized, out of the box. Most importantly, though:
“You need to find people in channels where they want to be found, where they’d be excited to give your product a try,” Blake explains. “If you hit them in the wrong channel, and too often, you could immediately deter them from your brand.”
How to fix it in 3 steps
1. Find your candy stand
The way to continue driving value to your company as a marketer — without diminishing your brand — is to reach people when and where they want to be influenced. Blake points out:
“Grocery stores are very good at this. No one ever complains that there are candy bars at the checkout line. It’s convenient. It’s that tug at your cravings. If they put candy by the produce, you’d be annoyed. If they just put candy in the candy aisle, it would be really easy for people to avoid it."
Grocery stores deliberately put candy at checkout, and it’s a nudge people accept because the timing and context feel right.
Marketers need to find their version of the candy stand. But they’re struggling to do that right now because they don’t know how to have a conversation about business-level ROIKard is a commerce media network that uses first-party transaction data to deliver hyperpersonalized rewards that influence everyday purchasing decisions — in banking apps that people already use (candy stand, anyone?). One streaming service increased subscriptions by 410% in one year, one retailer won 35% more market share, and one QSR brought in 81% new customers in their first campaign. See it live.
2. Learn to talk like a CFO
Brand marketing will never get the budget it deserves until marketers learn to quantify it.
Blake emphasizes:
“That means fluency not just in incremental user acquisition, but also understanding how the media mix affects margins. You have to be able to defend emotional impact in the same sentence as ROI.”
That might mean going back to school, or paying a lot more attention to sales QBRs. Or it might just mean that now’s the time to actually figure out your attribution and reporting once and for all.
Whatever you do, make sure you can justify your branding and rewarding efforts. “That’ll get you buy in to experiment more, and really push the envelope,” Blake says.
3. Broaden your skillset
Point-solution marketers (paid search specialists, email automation experts, SEO technicians, social media managers) simply won’t be able to survive the next five years. Veteran marketers are already sounding the alarm.
Take Emily Kramer, who previously led and built marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Astro, and Ticketfly. Recently, she dedicated an entire edition of her newsletter to what she calls the “Gen Marketer skillset” — what companies need ot hire for and what marketers need to get hired in 2026 and beyond.
As she describes it:
“Gen Marketers are generalists who are fluent in generative AI, and who are ready for the generational shift we’re seeing in marketing. But ‘Gen Marketer’ isn’t another job title. It’s the new baseline skillset marketers need to succeed in 2026 and beyond. No matter your role in marketing, you will benefit from gaining a Gen Marketer skillset.”
To succeed in this era, Kramer thinks marketers will need to:
- Run differentiated campaigns that combine fuel and engine for your specific audience. “AI makes it faster to ship products, content, and campaigns, but harder to stand out.”
- Move at high velocity. Speed without direction = what she calls ‘Random Acts of Marketing™.’ “You need to test, iterate, and scale with intentionality.”
- Be nimble across channels, content formats, and campaigns as trusted tactics break down. “Test new channels and formats, experiment outside your domain, learn quickly, and identify what actually works for your audience.”
In short, companies need more “full stack” marketers who can think strategically, make their brand relevant, and prove its value.
Make people feel something
Attention is harder to earn, but the directive to acquire, convert, and keep customers isn’t going away.
The marketers who will be successful in the long run will be the ones who can really connect with their audience and create relevance where performance tactics fall flat — they are the ones who curate an exclusive club everyone wants to be a part of.
It’s going to be an ugly, bumpy ride for the next few years as the old performance playbook crumbles. But if you can start thinking outside the box now, you’re going to be setting your company (and yourself) up for the long term.
Want to know how other marketers think that things will change in 2026?
Download our latest guide to see what questions they’re wrestling with and what the data, case studies, and industry experts say about where the landscape is headed.
