Pay attention to what he says about Ai slop, and how the big trust play will always be to remain human, and how flaws actually make us connect and bond with other people...
Ryan Deiss on the Three Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2026
Why Most Marketing Strategies Are About to Stop Working
Most of what's working in your marketing right now is about to stop working. We spent over $8 million on marketing tests across our 17-company portfolio. And I would bet that much and more that these three trends I'm about to show you will dominate marketing over the next 12 months.
Almost nobody else is talking about these yet. But by the end of this video, you're going to have a specific action plan for each one. Not theory, not predictions -- things you can actually implement today to break through the noise and get more sales.
Trend 1: The Death of Traditional and Macro Influencer Marketing
If you run a business and you're still relying on traditional influencer marketing -- where you're paying somebody with a big following to hold up your product and say nice things about it -- that model is dying. We've got to have something that represents our brand today. Faceless brands are gone.
Here's why. Consumer trust is at an all-time low. They just don't trust brands anymore. According to the most recent PricewaterhouseCoopers business trust survey, 90% of executives think that customers highly trust their brands, while less than 30% of consumers who are polled actually do trust those brands. Think about that.
The data is clear. Despite what a lot of business owners and marketing executives think, people just don't trust their brands. And increasingly they don't trust influencers either. You and everyone else knows that Matthew McConaughey doesn't drive a Lincoln and he sure as heck doesn't use Salesforce.
How the Influencer Market Has Shifted From Macro to Micro
First there were the macro influencers -- the really big influencers, the Kardashians, the Mr. Beasts, the folks with the really massive audiences. And for a while that worked. But then it got expensive and then the trust eroded because everyone knew that it was just pay for play. And then a lot of these big influencers got smart and started building their own brands where they have actual equity instead of just taking an endorsement fee.
So then the market shifted to the micro influencers. These folks have a smaller following but frequently they are more engaged. They also seemed more authentic, and that worked better too for a while. But even micro influencers are still external. Plus, do you really want to manage a dozen micro influencer relationships?
What an Embedded Influencer Actually Is
In our tests, we're finding that embedded influencers are outperforming micro influencers and macro influencers. So what's an embedded influencer? An embedded influencer is a trusted internal voice within a company. It could be a founder, could be an executive, it could be a team member who creates audience-building content that builds trust, drives traffic, and hopefully generates some sales.
This is not a hired endorser. This is not an external creator. This is someone inside the brand who embodies its values and who's communicating their messages directly.
Why Leaders on Social Media Statistically Increase Brand Trust
There is one strategy that every brand can implement that is statistically proven to increase trust scores. According to a research study by Forbes and G2, 82% of consumers surveyed said that they're actually more likely to trust a company whose leaders are active on social media. In other words, if you want people to start trusting your brand, you need to get people inside the company -- and ideally the founder or CEO -- on social media.
How Gary Vaynerchuk Used Embedded Influence to Grow a Family Business
This isn't new. This is how people like Gary Vaynerchuk got his start. Before he was Gary Vee the social media celebrity, he was the embedded influencer for his family's wine business, Wine Library. He got on camera. He talked about wine. He was real. Sometimes a little too real. And he turned a $3 million family wine shop into a $60 million a year business.
Warren Buffett has been doing this for Berkshire Hathaway for literally decades. The difference is back then we just called them celebrity CEOs. Now it's a system, and now it's something that any company can build -- frankly, even if the founder isn't that charismatic.
And if you're the founder thinking there is no way you're going to do this, fine. My question to you is going to be: if not you, then who? Because it needs to be someone.
Step 1: Choose the Character You Are Going to Play
There are three steps to building an embedded influencer for your brand. Step one, you've got to choose the character that you're going to play. I don't mean that you're being fake. I mean that you're being intentional about how you show up. Every great content creator, whether they realize it or not, has a chosen character that they're playing on screen.
That character has three critical components that you're going to want to get clear on before you release this character to the world.
Component 1: Your Unique Points of View
Component number one is your unique points of view. These are your contrarian beliefs. These are the hills that you are prepared to die on. For example, I say things like: I believe that visionary and integrator are fake job titles. And I say things like: I believe that most company mission and vision statements are just entrepreneurial arts and crafts. Those are my unique points of view.
Some of them make people uncomfortable. Some of them will likely create angry comments from haters. That's the point. If your unique point of view doesn't make someone disagree, if it doesn't make someone a little bit angry, it's not really a point of view. You need to know what yours are before you ever turn on a camera.
Component 2: Your Brandable Hooks
Component number two is your brandable hooks. These are the visual and verbal signals that make you stand out. My friend Alex Hormozi has been rocking the nose strip. Before that, it was the distinctive mustache. These aren't accidents -- they're signals.
I'll be honest, this is an area I need to work on. I'm kind of always in the same place, and I look like a lot of other people. But I'm telling you that because I want you to hear something important: you don't have to get every single piece of this perfect to start. You just have to get started.
Component 3: Acknowledge Your Flaws and Quirks
Component three of your character is to acknowledge your flaws and quirks. These are the things that make you human -- your warts, all of it. Going back to Gary Vaynerchuk, the dude cusses like a sailor. He also likes blueberries a little too much. Those aren't bugs, those are features, and they make him human.
If you know anything about my story, you know that I nearly ruined my marriage because I'm a bit of a workaholic. It's the reason that I do what I do and talk about what I do -- because I don't want people to make the same mistakes. We kind of like characters who are good at what they do while also being workaholics and also kind of being a walking dad joke. If you don't believe me, just look at the success of the TV show Ted Lasso.
While your unique point of view will grow your authority and your brandable hooks will enable you to stand out in a crowd, it's your flaws that will actually make you trustworthy. It's your flaws that will bond your audience to you. Because perfect people aren't real. And consumers know that.
Step 2: Choose One Platform and Master It
Step two, you've got to choose the stage. And by stage, I mean what platform are you going to show up on? Are you going to be on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok? Are you going to have a podcast? My advice: start with one. Just one.
If you're having a hard time deciding, pick the channel where your people are already hanging out -- where your ideal customers and clients are already there. But whichever channel you choose, you've got to master it. You've got to build the habit. You've got to build the audience. Then you can expand.
Once you've picked your channel, get somebody to help you who specializes in that channel. Don't try to get a catch-all marketing person who's supposedly good at everything. Those people don't exist. Find a single channel manager who's an expert at just that channel and go all in.
Step 3: Integrate the Embedded Influencer Into the Business
Step three, you've got to integrate the character into the business. This is where embedded influencers become a marketing channel and not just some personal branding play. Once you have people's attention, where do you want to direct it? Are you going to send them to your homepage, to a lead magnet, other social posts, a product?
The goal isn't just to build a following. It's to drive awareness and traffic back to your brand. Whether it's a link in a post, a link in your bio, or just a casual mention to comment or direct message you for details, you've got to have something.
You don't need a million followers. You need one voice that people trust, and that voice should be inside your company. That's embedded influencer marketing. If you're a CEO or founder and you don't want to do this, then go through the process I just described for somebody else in the company. If it's not you, then it needs to be someone, because this is the future.
Trend 2: Why Long-Form Content Is Winning on Short-Form Platforms
About a year ago, I was pretty much ready to give up on social media. I was doing the stuff that everybody told you to do. I was posting. I was consistent. I was putting out what I thought was, frankly, pretty good content. The engagement was flat. The reach was basically my mom and some random dude eating Cheetos on his couch. And it sucked up a lot of my time.
I want to be clear: I'm not an influencer. I'm not a YouTuber. I'm a business owner who posts content.
The Experiment That Changed Everything: Uploading Full Videos Instead of Clips
One day out of frustration, I did something I thought was kind of stupid. I had a YouTube video that I knew a lot of people loved -- it had a lot of views and great engagement. I was thinking I should probably chop it up, make reels, turn it into tweets and all that. Instead, I said forget it. I downloaded the entire fully edited video from YouTube and uploaded the whole thing directly to X.
Then I took a longer newsletter I had written that had done well, and instead of shortening or chopping it up, I posted a slightly shorter version to LinkedIn just to get under their word count. Both worked. They significantly outperformed everything else I'd been doing by an order of magnitude. That's when the light bulb went on.
How a Five-Part Series Generated Nearly One Million Views and 5,000 Leads
I took it further. I took that YouTube video that was doing well and instead of releasing it as individual standalone reels and short-form video, I released it as a series. The results were dramatic. One video in the series got almost 12,000 likes and 7,000 comments. Part two got 8,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Even by part four, we were looking at around 12,000 views.
That one five-part series got -- at the time of this recording -- 973,000 views, 33,000-plus likes, over 13,000 comments, and most importantly, it generated 5,255 leads and counting from my little account. For comparison, a typical reel for us gets somewhere between 5,000 and 45,000 views. That is not a small improvement. That is a completely different category of results.
And on X, longer posts right now are getting 5 to 7 times more views and engagement than short-form posts.
Why Short Form Gets Glances but Long Form Gets Stairs
Short form might get you a glance. It might get you a lot of notices, but it's long form that gets you stairs. And that's the goal. We want to turn the glances on social media into stairs, because if you can get them to stay and binge, you can get them to bounce around to your other content. And if you can get them to bounce, you can eventually get them to buy. That's the flywheel.
Trend 3: Consumers Are Rejecting AI-Generated Content
Consumers are starting to notice AI-generated content. And they don't like it. It started with the obvious stuff -- the em dashes that were everywhere, the emojis all over the place, overly polished language, that kind of bland, stilted corporate AI voice that all sounds the same. But now they're getting even more savvy fast. They can feel it now. Even when you can't necessarily point to the exact reason, you can tell when something just feels off.
Any business can pump out so-called great content at scale, and most businesses are. But if there's not a real human story behind it, people are going to scroll right past it. Content is everywhere. So the scarce resource is no longer quantity. And the scarce resource is no longer quality. The scarce resource in content today is humanity. Real human stories, real human experiences -- the kind of things that AI can't possibly replicate.
The 10-80-10 Rule for Using AI Without Losing Your Human Voice
First, you don't abandon AI. That would be stupid. AI is an incredible tool for researching, drafting, and ideation. But use it differently than most people are using it. I use a model called 10-80-10. It's really simple.
The first 10% is human. This is you. This is me. That's when the idea, the concept, the scope, the story, the unique point of view -- all of that has to come from you. Because AI doesn't have your stories. It doesn't have your scars. It never owed the IRS $248,000.
That middle 80%, once you've given it that first 10% of humanity and story and narrative and scope, AI takes over. Let it do the heavy lifting. Let it do the research. Let it do the first drafts, create the structure, the outline, the formatting -- all of it.
And that last 10%, this is where we get human again. You come back to the material and you plus it. You rewrite it in your voice. You add in stories that might have been left out. You add the details that only you would know because you were there. You make it sound like something a real person said, because a real person actually did say it. And that real person should be you.
The brands that win over the next 12 months are going to be the brands that lean into human while everybody else is leaning into AI. Most are frankly going to be too lazy, or they're just not going to have the chops. They're not going to have the stories. They're not going to have the experience to pull this stuff off. So this is your edge.
Bonus Trend: Ads Are Coming to AI Platforms
There is one more bonus trend I want to discuss, and that is ads in AI. As of this recording, ads haven't officially come to any of the AI platforms in any meaningful way yet, but they will. AI companies need to monetize, and ads are ultimately how they're going to do it. ChatGPT has already announced that ads are coming.
Some of the other AI companies are positioning themselves as ad-free, and maybe it'll stay that way, but new ad platforms are a massive opportunity. Think about when Google first launched ads, or when Facebook launched -- we're talking nickel clicks, dime clicks, amazing traffic as cheap as could be. The early adopters who figured out those platforms while the big brands were still evaluating made fortunes.
You've already got your niche product. Now you're looking for the best way to market it. Follow Ryan's advice and pick one channel, pick the problem you're going to solve, and then hire someone who is a master at that channel to help you make the most of it. Show up everyday and master that one channel. And don't be afraid of your human flaws. That's the ultimate pushback against Ai slop.
Ryan makes it abundantly clear that he isn't against Ai, and that it is a powerful tool for research, formatting, outlining, etc. It's just not the final version that you share. Rochelle does an excellent job using Ai to find a niche in the market, and you should definitely take a look at her HIT framework for finding great niche ideas that are a perfect fit for your and your business.
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