Hello, Hello, and Happy Tuesday!
π€π΅ Guess who's back, back again! Lena's back, tell a friend. My apologies for the random e-singing; it's one of the ways I shine the brightest in my head.
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Have you ever considered how, a few years ago, getting noticed seemed to be a huge challenge?
Now, getting noticed is easier than it's ever been.
AI can help write your emails, polish your website, generate social posts, and even create videos that look surprisingly professional.
That's the good news.
The challenge now is that your competitors have access to those same tools, and when everyone can produce polished content, polished isn't what stands out anymore.
Trust does!
This week I noticed something interesting while researching the latest marketing news. Whether I was reading about Google, AI search, advertising, or customer behavior, every story pointed back to the same lesson.
Technology is changing. Trust is moving upstream, and the businesses people trust are still the businesses people choose. That's where we're headed this week. Ready?
1. Google Is Beginning to Label AI-Generated Ads
Google recently announced that AI-generated advertising will begin carrying labels in certain formats, giving consumers more visibility into when artificial intelligence played a role in creating what they're seeing.
At first glance, this sounds like a technical update.
I don't think it is.
It's another signal that transparency is becoming part of the customer experience.
Why It Matters
For the last two years, businesses have been asking:
"How can AI help us create more?"
Customers are now starting to ask a different question:
"Can I trust what I'm looking at?"
Those are two very different conversations.
The more AI-generated content people encounter, the more they'll look for signs that there's still a real person, a real business, and real expertise behind what they're reading.
What This Means for Your Business
Don't mistake efficiency for authenticity.
There's nothing wrong with using AI to brainstorm, organize ideas, or speed up your workflow. Most of us are doing that now.
But your customers still want evidence that they're dealing with someone who has experience and not just access to the same tools everyone else has.
That means your customer stories, personal observations, original photos, behind-the-scenes moments, and genuine point of view have become even more valuable. Does that make this champion of using your authentic voice happy? Yes, yes, it does!
They're the parts of you AI can't manufacture from scratch.
L.A. Branding Perspective
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it's replacing trust.
It isn't. It's exposing where trust was weak to begin with.
Businesses that already communicate with clarity, consistency, and authenticity will continue to earn confidence.
The businesses hiding behind polished but generic messaging may find that customers become more skeptical, not less.
2. AI Search Is Quietly Changing What It Means to Be Discoverable
More businesses are beginning to optimize for AI-generated search experiences rather than focusing exclusively on traditional search rankings. Instead of simply asking, "How do I rank first on Google?" marketers are asking, "How do I become the business AI recommends?"
That's a completely different objective that requires different work.
Why It Matters
Think about the last time you needed a recommendation: a contractor, a medical specialist, a new tool. You probably asked someone you trusted to describe them before you ever looked them up. AI search is doing something similar now, just at scale and before anyone has opted in to the conversation. When someone asks Google or ChatGPT a question, the AI doesn't hand them a list of links and let them sort it out. It summarizes. It describes. It tells the person who's worth considering and why, before a single website gets visited.
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For most businesses, that summary is being written from whatever signals happen to be available: your website copy, your reviews, your LinkedIn, your content. If those things tell a clear, consistent story, the summary will too. If they don't, then AI will do its best with what's there. That's worth caring about, regardless of how or I feel about AI.
What This Means for Your Business
This isn't the week to publish five more blog posts. It's the week to strengthen the quality of the information already representing your business.
Ask yourself:
- Does your website clearly explain what you do?
- Are your customer reviews telling a consistent story?
- Does your LinkedIn profile reinforce your expertise?
- Would someone understand your value in less than a minute?
These aren't glamorous tasks, I know; however, they are the ones that will determine what AI says about you before a potential client ever decides to look you up.
L.A. Branding Perspective
I've always believed branding is less about saying more and more about making people work less to understand you. AI is now rewarding that philosophy. π
Watching what's happening with AI search right now is, honestly, a little gratifying. The businesses showing up in those recommendations didn't get there by publishing the most content. They got there because someone did the patient work of making them clear. That's always been what this is about.
3. LinkedIn replaced its legacy content algorithm with a new AI-driven ranking system.
Organic views are down roughly 50% platform-wide. Document posts are holding at 6.6% engagement, and LinkedIn newsletters deliver directly to subscribers' inboxes, bypassing the algorithm entirely.
Why It Matters
If your LinkedIn strategy depends on regular posts reaching your full follower count, that era is over. The accounts winning right now are leaning into formats the new system actually favors. They are (drum roll)document posts, video, and direct-to-inbox newsletters.
What This Means for Your Business
Look at where your LinkedIn time is actually going right now. If most of it goes into text posts, and you've been watching your numbers quietly drop, that's worth paying attention to. The issue probably isn't what you're saying. It's how you're packaging it.
Think about what you already walk clients through: a framework, a breakdown, a comparison. That same thinking, structured as a document post, will travel further than the same words in a text post every single time. And a LinkedIn newsletter subscriber is different from a follower. How so? They chose to hear from you directly, and, as MC Hammer says, the algorithm can't touch that.
L.A. Branding Perspective
Being that the inbox is the one place the algorithm doesn't control delivery, and that matters more than ever. If you publish thought leadership content regularly and haven't started a LinkedIn newsletter, that's where your attention belongs next. I've been building mine for a few months now, and the quality of direct engagement from newsletter subscribers is a genuinely different experience from post comments. Worth the effort.
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A Thought From Behind The Brand: "Everything Small Made Everything Big"
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I am an entirely grown woman who works in brand strategy for a living, and guess what? Mickey Mouse and his entire crew at Disney World are absolutely my new homies.
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During our family vacation, on day three, at Magic Kingdom, with hubby, our kids, grandson, and five other family members around me, I did something I never had on my bucket list. I did the hot dog dance with Mickey Mouse. Without hesitation. Without a trace of self-consciousness, I ran over to the marching band, forgetting I wasn't there alone. Because in that moment, I genuinely could not make myself believe I was anything else but invited to an exclusive magical moment.
That's the thing about Disney World that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since we got home - how deeply intentional they are. Every small intrictae detail, made everything big.
We went to Epic Universe and Universal too, both of which are extraordinary in their own right. But Magic Kingdom has a different quality, and it isn't scale or technology or the number of rides. It's the degree to which every single person there understands that they are not doing a job inside a brand. They are the brand, in every moment, and in every interaction.
Disney doesn't call their employees staff. Not associates, not team members. Every person who works there, from the ride operators to the characters to the person handing you a churro, is called a cast member. That one word does a lot of work. It's a worldview embedded directly into the job title, one that shifts how every person who holds it understands their role. Staff do their jobs. Cast members play a part in a larger story, and they know it.
When we met Tiana from Princess and the Frog, she didn't just have the look. She had the New Orleans accent. She had the lingo and the warmth and the specific way of moving through a conversation that made her feel exactly like the character. As a person who thinks about brands for a living, I could not break the spell. Not because I forgot what I was looking at, but because the totality of what Disney had built around every moment made the question of what was "real" completely beside the point.
That is what a fully realized brand does. It doesn't need to trick people, and it doesn't manufacture feelings from nothing. It creates something so complete in the language it uses, in how it trains the people who represent it, in the music that shifts in the air as you walk between one world and the next, that the experience becomes the reality. Disney doesn't ask you to believe in the magic. They've built something where the magic undeniably lives. When you encounter it at that level, the brand stops being something you see. It becomes something you're inside of.
My children's faces after every ride, that hotdog dance with my grandson and his favorite character, all of our expressions during the parade, the shows and the fireworks are some of the many memories I'll carry for a long time.
Quick Tips & Tricks
Before you create anything new for your brand this week, be it a post, a proposal, an email, or any piece of content - ask yourself: if someone encountered only what's already out there representing me right now, would they know exactly what I stand for and who I'm for?
Adding more on top of unclear doesn't make it clearer. It just means more things pointing in different directions. Getting into the habit of checking the foundation before building on it is what will separate brands that grow stronger over time from ones that just grow louder.
This Week's Dos & Don'ts
Do think of every person around your brand: your team, your contractors, anyone who interacts with your clients on your behalf as a cast member. Give them the story. Walk them through what your brand stands for, what it sounds like, and what it would never say. Disney or any other top-tier brand experience you've had the opportunity to encounter wasn't built by hoping people would figure it out on their own.
Don't mistake adding more for building clarity. More content, more platforms, more output is amazing, but none of it makes an unclear brand clearer. Before you add anything new, the more useful question is whether what's already representing you is actually doing its job.
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A Brand Voice One-Pager
This is exactly what it sounds like: a single document that captures your brand voice, your key messages, and the words or phrases that are always in or always out. One page. Nothing more.
The tool doesn't matter; it can be a Notes File, a Google Doc, a Canva template, a Word file, whatever you have open or are comfortable using. The habit is what really matters. I keep one for L.A. Branding that I actually update when something shifts, and I build one with every client before we create anything together.
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What makes this particularly useful right now is that it doubles as the brief you hand AI tools when you want them to produce work that actually sounds like you. A solid brand voice one-pager takes about ninety minutes to build the first time.
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It will save you hours of editing AI output that doesn't sound like you, and it will make your content sharper whether or not AI is involved.
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Trend Worth Watching
AI tools are increasingly becoming the first point of contact between your brand and a prospective client. Yes, before your website, before your LinkedIn profile, before any piece of content you've deliberately created for that purpose. When someone searches for what you do in Google's AI Mode or asks ChatGPT who to hire for something you do well, what comes back is generated from what's clearly and consistently available about you online.
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Brands that have done the work of articulating who they are, who they serve, and what makes them different will be summarized accurately. Brands still operating on scattered messaging and vague positioning will be summarized accordingly.
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The smart move right now is to treat your public-facing content as the brief you're handing to an AI platform that will introduce you to future clients. Make it specific. Make it true. Make it a consistent story every time.
Community Engagement Corner
This week's question:
The Disney trip got me thinking about something I've been sitting with ever since we got home: the idea that a great brand experience is never the result of one big thing. It's the accumulation of small, intentional decisions that most people never consciously notice β but that everyone feels.
Which made me want to ask you this: What's one thing about working with you, or buying from you, or being a client of yours, that your best customers or clients would name if you asked them, but that you've never formally called part of your brand?
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It might be how you answer emails. The way you run a first call. Something about how your packaging arrives, or the specific words you use when things go sideways.
What's the small thing that makes people feel like they're in good hands before you've delivered a single result?
What's yours?
Hit reply and let's talk about it!
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Remember...
Feel free to quote me: "The people who encounter your brand aren't analyzing it. They're feeling it. Make sure what they feel is intentional." This is what I am sitting with after experiencing "The Most Magical Place On Earth".
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We all need support and clear strategies when going through the many seasons of change pertaining to marketing, branding, and AI. Don't hesitate to share this issue with someone who could use these insights.
See you next week!
Lena Anderson
Founder & Chief Branding Enthusiast L.A. Branding
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