Dec 9, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🎯 Let Creators Create

Plus: American Eagle Buys Buzz, Play the Ad

Good Morning, Marketers!

Today’s most effective marketing no longer interrupts culture; it moves with it.

INFLUENCER

Stop Treating Influencers Like Decorative Ad Slots

👀 What’s happening: HBR’s new research calls out a billion-dollar irony. Influencer marketing keeps growing while trust keeps tanking because brands still cling to the fantasy that authenticity can be copywritten, storyboarded, and force-fit into a campaign. Across global interviews the pattern is the same: authenticity dies the moment brands script creators into submission.

🔥 How this hits reality: If a creator cannot sound like themselves, the audience instantly knows it. The best campaigns work because influencers tell stories in their own language and on their own terms. Yet many CMOs still chase reach and message control which turns creators into billboard inventory and turns followers into skeptics. Real influencer marketing is a collaboration where brands let creators steer tone, format, and narrative. Anything else feels like an ad masquerading as a personality and consumers now smell that a mile away.

🎯 Key takeaway: Creators earn trust by sounding human so brands that silence their voice are sabotaging their own ROI. In this era the only strategy that works is giving influencers room to be themselves.

RETAIL

American Eagle Buys Buzz, Not Growth

👀 What’s happening: American Eagle threw a small fortune at Sydney Sweeney, Travis Kelce, and Martha Stewart to reboot its cultural relevance, and the numbers finally twitched upward. Q3 inched to one percent growth which is a polite way of saying the firehose of impressions is only now translating into receipts. Meanwhile, its cheaper sibling Aerie is casually comping eleven percent without any Hollywood payroll, which raised a few analyst eyebrows.

🔥 How this hits reality: This is the modern retail tradeoff as celebrity heat can fix awareness but not your underlying category fatigue. AE bought the internet for a quarter and got sellouts in denim but also out of stocks, uneven womenswear, and a loyalty bump that will only matter if conversion holds through a cold holiday season. The brand’s bet is that cultural presence will rebuild its menswear and denim moat faster than Gap can claw it back. Everyone else sees the real tension: fame is a blunt instrument when your sister brand proves community and product truth still scale faster.

🎯 Key takeaway: Celebrity hype can buy you attention for a moment, but it cannot outrun a brand that already has product pulling on its own, at least for now.

ADS

Zynga Wants You to “Play” the Ad

👀 What’s happening: At Beet Retreat LA, Zynga unveiled a new twist on advertising: turning brand placements inside its mobile games into playable moments. The company links CTV’s storytelling power with mobile gaming’s interactivity, creating a “dual-screen” model: tell the story on TV, close the loop in-game. Zynga claims the early results are strong: campaigns integrating Zynga’s inventory saw a 25% lift in tune-in and 95% ad completion rates.

🔥 How this hits reality: Zynga isn’t selling impressions anymore; it’s selling contexts you can play. Through programmatic tools and its own game portfolio, brands can appear like a “co-branded skin” within gameplay. Players earn rewards for completing ad tasks, while brands earn data and attention that feel voluntary. It’s a clever pivot for an ad industry exhausted by passive video spots, though making these “brand × game collabs” feel authentic is the real challenge.

🎯 Key takeaway: “Engagement” sounds better when you can win coins for it.

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