Hello, fabulous entrepreneurs and brand enthusiasts!
You know how you can tell who's at the door before you even open it, just from the knock?
My neighbor's daughter has a very specific five-tap situation going for her. It's slightly chaotic, but it always comes with a doorbell push first; it's very much a statement. My son; however rings the bell once, and then knocks anyway, as if he doesn't trust my ears or the doorbell. After all this time, I don't question it anymore. We all have that person.
This week is about what it looks like when your brand has that kind of knock.
1. LinkedIn is calling flags on the play, but they are letting other players vote on the call
LinkedIn is now testing a feature that lets members flag posts and comments they believe are AI-generated, through a simple menu option that privately reports the content as "AI slop." LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan announced this week that alongside the reporting feature, LinkedIn is removing its "Enhance Your Post" tool, the one that rewrote your drafts using AI, and replacing it with a proofreader that corrects your words without changing your voice. His reasoning was direct: "We want members to get feedback from real humans on what sounds authentic, not just have an AI detector review it."
Why It Matters
LinkedIn has spent years building AI tools into the platform. So when its own Chief Product Officer says the goal is to help members get feedback from real people—not simply have AI polish their thoughts—that tells you something.
People can feel the difference, and removing their own AI writing tool is a significant move, because LinkedIn has invested heavily in AI features across the platform.
What This Means for Your Business
If you've been using the "Enhance Your Post" button to polish your LinkedIn drafts, it's worth asking what you were actually handing over and what came back. More practically: this is a good week to scroll through your last 60 days of LinkedIn content with fresh eyes. Does it sound like you? Would someone who has spoken to you on a call or read your emails recognize that voice on the page? The gap between technically well-written and genuinely you is exactly what this update is about.
L.A. Branding Perspective
What struck me about Srinivasan's statement wasn't the policy. It was this part: "LinkedIn isn't a one-word kind of place, and people feel more confident running their posts through AI." That's honest, and it got my attention.
Confidence in your own voice doesn't always look like you're scared to speak. It can also be a clarity problem. Listen, friends, there is an opinion war going on, and everyone has access to a weapon. Questions like: "What do I actually think about this?" "Is my opinion worth sharing?" "Do I need to say anything at all about this topic?" Those questions don't get answered by better software. The "Enhance Your Post" button was a very convenient way to sidestep that work without doing it. And now it's going away, which means the actual work is still there, waiting.
2. ChatGPT's advertising platform made two moves this week
The first: a product carousel format, confirmed August 6th, that lets a single ad placement show multiple items from a single retailer within a conversation. The second, and the more interesting one: a new "Agent Campaign" format where clicking an ad doesn't take someone to a website. It opens a business-specific ChatGPT conversation powered by the advertiser's own data. The ad becomes the beginning of an AI conversation, not a redirect. Crazy right?!
Why It Matters
The product carousel is recognizable to anyone who has run Google Shopping campaigns. The Agent Campaign, however, is genuinely new ground. A buyer goes directly from an ad into a conversation that knows the products, pricing, and tone, without leaving the platform. That changes what "your website" is for in a way that most businesses haven't thought through yet.
What This Means for Your Business
If you sell products and you've been watching ChatGPT ads from a distance, the carousel format gives you a format you already understand. If you're a service-based business or a founder who sells through relationship and conversation, the Agent Campaign format is the one to watch.
L.A. Branding Perspective
Every time something new like this rolls out, I get some version of the same question from clients: do I need to be on this? And my answer is almost always: that depends entirely on how clear your positioning is right now. Because any tool, be it ads, campaigns, AI conversations, will perform in direct proportion to how well-defined your brand is going into it. This update doesn't change the need for clarity; it's just giving you a new place to play things out.
3. Platform Properties by Google is here for all
Google rolled out Platform Properties to all Google Search Console users at the end of July, and this week it became available globally. This feature lets you connect your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube accounts directly to Search Console so you can see how your content on those platforms shows up in Google Search. You'll see which posts received clicks, which queries they appeared for, and what impressions they generated, all inside the same dashboard you use to track your website.
Why It Matters
A lot of the times people assume that social presence and your search presence are two separate tracks. Finally, Google is saying plainly that they aren't. Content you publish on TikTok or Instagram can appear in Google Search results, and now you can see exactly when that happens and what it's doing for your visibility. For businesses that have been investing consistently in social content without a clear way to measure its broader reach, this is the missing number.
What This Means for Your Business
If you have Search Console set up, join me in going in this week and look for the Platform Properties section. Connect any social accounts you post on actively and let it build a baseline. What you see in the first 30 days will show you which social content is doing double duty for your brand, that will lookl like appearing in both social feeds and search results. It will also show you which platforms are working harder for your visibility than you realized. For founders who post regularly on Instagram or LinkedIn and have wondered whether it's actually building something beyond the platform, this answers that with real data.
L.A. Branding Perspective
I cannot tell you how many times I've sat with a founder who is showing up consistently, doing the work, and genuinely has no way to point to it in a number that means something. The question of whether social content is worth the time has always been hard to answer cleanly because the data wasn't in one place. Now it is! And if you've ever had to justify that investment to yourself, or talk someone else into believing it matters, this is the thing that will help you do that.
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A Thought From Behind The Brand: What My Middle Child Couldn't Help Do |
My girls are currently homeschooled, but, back when they were in school before Covid changed everything, my middle daughter used to bring home folders of her class artwork. Her teacher would give the whole class the same assignment. She'd get the same instructions, same paper, same art supplies, the same amount of time. Twenty-something kids, twenty-something drawings.
I could pick her drawing out of that pile before I even looked for her name on it.
She drew people a specific way. Big round heads, very small legs, arms that came straight out from the middle of the body like a little cactus. If she drew herself, she'd always put herself in something purple (her favorite color), regardless of what she was actually wearing that day. And no matter what the assignment was, there was almost always a sun in the exact same corner of the page, the upper left, drawn the same way every single time. She was never told to put it there. It just showed up. Every time.
Her teacher could have corrected any one of those choices. Could have taught her the proportions, walked her through where arms actually connect to a body, gently suggested that not every drawing needs a sun in the upper left corner. And Destiny would have produced something more technically accurate. It also would have looked like seventeen other drawings in that folder.
The purple clothing and the sun in the corner are not things that needed correcting. They are exactly what told me, before I'd even turned the paper over, that this one was hers.
You know where I'm going with this life analogy, right?
LinkedIn announced this week that it's removing its AI writing tool, the one that "enhanced" your posts before you published them. The feature was designed to help people sound better. And it did, in a technical sense. Posts came out more polished, more professional, more grammatically sound. They also started to sound like each other. The edges that made one person's voice distinct from another person's got rounded off in the same direction, and what came back was correct in the way a corrected drawing is correct: accurate, improved, and somehow harder to identify as belonging to anyone in particular.
Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer, said something this week that I think gets at the real reason they're pulling it back: people were using the tool not because they had something to say and wanted help saying it, but because they weren't confident that how they actually say things was worth reading. That's the layered problem underneath the surface.
Your audience - the people who have been reading you, following you, hiring you, referring you - has learned your voice the way I learned Destiny's drawings. They know your rhythm. They know the thing you always come back to. They know how you phrase something when you actually care about it. Those patterns are not incidental to your brand. In most cases, they are your brand.
What my daughter taught me without meaning to is that the people who follow your work have already built a map of you in their heads, and the moment you hand your voice to something that smooths out the specific, slightly imperfect things you always do, you step off that map without realizing it.
Marketing Leader Prompt of the Week
The Signature Audit Prompt:
"I'm going to paste a piece of content below. I want you to read it the way someone who has never met me would read it and tell me: is there anything in here that could only have come from one specific person, or could this have been written by any thoughtful professional in my industry? Point to specific phrases or sentences that feel generic — things anyone in my field might say — and then look for anything that feels specific to a real individual with an actual point of view. If you find the second thing, tell me what it is and why it works. If you don't find it, tell me what's missing and give me two or three examples of how that same section might read if a real person with strong opinions had written it. [Paste your content here]."
Why it works: Most feedback on marketing content focuses on clarity and correctness. This prompt asks a different question: is this traceable to a specific person? That's the version of quality that builds recognition over time, and it's the hardest thing for an AI tool to manufacture from scratch.
What kind of thinking it unlocks: It surfaces the difference between content that communicates and content that connects. Those aren't always the same thing, and most of us can't see the gap from inside our own drafts.
How to use it: Run it on your last five LinkedIn posts, your most recent newsletter intro, or any email going to someone you've worked with before. If the same phrases keep getting flagged as generic across multiple pieces, you've found your clearest opportunity to sharpen your voice.
This Week's Dos & Don'ts
Do: Reach out to three existing clients this week with no agenda, no upsell, no check-in that's really a pitch in disguise. Just have a genuine "I was thinking about you, how are things going?" In a tighter economy, the relationships you've already built are doing more work for your business than any new marketing push, and most people dramatically underinvest in them when they're focused on finding new clients. The ones who feel seen and thought of don't shop around.
Don't: Run your LinkedIn posts through an AI rewriter before you publish them, even now that LinkedIn's built-in version is going away. Third-party tools will still exist. Let your voice shine authentically.
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Meta's 2026 Holiday Marketing Playbook for SMBs
This is a free, downloadable guide published this week through Meta's Business platform. It's 34 pages and covers three areas: using Reels to build awareness, working with creators to reach new audiences, and making it easier for people to buy once they're interested. It also includes specific timing recommendations, checklist-style setup guidance for Meta ads, and shopping data from nearly 15,000 consumers across 18 countries that's actually useful for deciding where to put your attention between now and December. The timing section alone is worth the download. Most small business owners underestimate how much lead time the holiday season requires, and this lays it out with real dates. Find it through Meta's Business pages under the 2026 Holiday Insights Center.
If your goal isn't to collect more data, but to identify patterns. This platform will help you find them without spending a weekend sorting through notes. Oh, before I forget: For those of you who run creator partnerships, this is an excellent hub to store what you learn from those comment sections and debriefs.
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Trend Worth Watching
Platforms are starting to push back against AI-generated content, not just flag it.
You've read what Linkedin is doing. Pinterest added feed filters to reduce AI content. Snapchat announced it will stop recommending AI-generated posts. TikTok has launched AI literacy measures. None of this is coincidence. Every platform built on connection between real people is arriving at the same conclusion: when the feed fills up with content that sounds like it could have come from anywhere, people spend less time there.
For businesses with a clear point of view and a recognizable voice, this is actually good news. The brands that kept showing up as themselves, consistently and specifically, are going to have an easier time standing out in feeds that are actively being cleaned up. The smart move right now is to treat your voice as something worth documenting and protecting — not because a trend told you to, but because the work you've already done to be recognizable is starting to matter more than it did last year.
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Community Engagement Corner
I am always on the lookout for what's actually working out there, and I know you are too.
So tell me: what's a tool you've tried recently that genuinely impressed you for marketing or branding?
I want to hear about them. We spend a lot of time in this newsletter talking about what the platforms are doing. I want to know what's actually working in your hands.
Hit reply and let me know.
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Before I let you go...
If this is your first time joining us in the L.A.B. be sure to check out any past volumes of L.A. Brand Weekly you may have missed, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
See you next week!
Lena Anderson
Founder & Chief Branding Enthusiast, L.A. Branding
