The Good Comms Edit - Issue 21 - 31.08.26

A Monday briefing on the biggest shifts in PR, marketing and brand storytelling.

I think marketing might have a measurement problem ... not because we don't have enough data, quite the opposite, we can measure almost everything now ... clicks, views, reach, engagement, conversions, followers, ROAS, watch time, impressions - yada yada.

We've become extraordinarily good at counting what's easy to count but three things I've been reading recently have made me wonder whether we've accidentally started confusing what's measurable with what matters.

I think that's a conversation worth having.

1. Social-first marketing may have hit a ceiling

WARC has published some fascinating new research this month looking at what it calls the "twin pace" brand.

The premise is interesting - brands have understandably poured investment into social and creator marketing because it gives us something traditional brand building often doesn't ... speed. We can respond to culture quickly, test ideas, generate engagement and see results almost immediately but WARC argues that there's a problem.

Social-first growth eventually hits three structural ceilings - platform, cultural and self-sustaining. Most brands, it says, don't even get past the first, they remain dependent on algorithms and paid distribution meaning the moment the investment stops, much of the reach stops too.

Why it matters

This challenges one of the biggest assumptions in modern marketing - that engagement equals brand growth ... it doesn't necessarily.

You can have a Reel with a million views and build very little long-term memory, you can generate thousands of interactions without significantly increasing the number of people who would recognise, remember or choose your brand six months later.

Social is brilliant at speed but brand is built over time and perhaps we've been asking one to do the job of both.

What I'd be thinking about

Look at your marketing activity and divide it into two columns ... 1. What is generating attention today? and What is building recognition tomorrow?

You need both but if everything you're doing disappears from people's minds the moment they scroll past it, you may have built a content strategy rather than a brand strategy.

2. The creator economy has an authenticity problem

CreatorIQ has just published its State of Creators 2026 report, based on more than 5,000 creators across 100 regions and there's a fascinating contradiction buried inside it.

Brands consistently say they value things like relevance, engagement, authenticity, audience trust but what actually correlates most strongly with how much creators earn?

... follower count and views.

In other words, the industry says it values connection but its money still disproportionately rewards scale and creators are feeling the tension.

42% said there is now conflict between the content their audiences want and the content brands ask them to create. Among creators with more than 500,000 Instagram followers, that rises to 53%.

Why it matters

Because the very thing brands are trying to buy from creators, trust, can be damaged by the way brands work with them and that's quite a paradox.

A creator doesn't become valuable simply because they've assembled an audience, they're valuable because they've built a relationship with that audience. Their tone and judgement and taste.

If a brand partnership asks them to temporarily stop behaving like themselves, it may be paying for the audience while removing the thing that made the audience listen.

What I'd be thinking about

Next time you're considering a creator partnership, don't start with "How many people can they reach?" Instead, start with "Why do people trust them?" then protect the answer.

Give creators enough freedom to sound like themselves because if your campaign requires them to suddenly sound like your marketing department, you've probably misunderstood what you're buying.

3. We're starting to discover the cost of too much advertising

Here's perhaps my favourite little communications story of the week. Pinterest users have discovered a rather inventive way to avoid advertising ... they've started swearing at it.

A viral hack has been circulating showing that adding profanity to a Pinterest search can cause ads to disappear because advertisers generally avoid having their content appear alongside terms deemed "brand unsafe".

Search for inspiration normally? Ads. but add a swear word? Suddenly, according to users sharing the trick, Pinterest starts looking much more like the Pinterest they remember.

Pinterest says it's aware of the behaviour and is looking at ways to improve the search and advertising experience.

It's funny, but I think there's something much bigger underneath it.

Why it matters

We spend enormous amounts of time asking How do we get our advertising in front of more people? But perhaps we don't spend enough asking Do people actually want it there?

WARC's latest work on retail media points to a similar problem. As ad loads rise, the industry is starting to talk openly about the risk of "enshittification" ... platforms gradually making the user experience worse in pursuit of greater monetisation.

That's not just a media-buying problem, it's a whole brand problem, because every time your message interrupts, irritates or overwhelms somebody, that experience becomes part of how they feel about you.

What I'd be thinking about

Before buying another placement, ask yourself, Does our presence make this experience better, neutral or worse? That's a surprisingly useful communications test.

The goal shouldn't simply be to appear wherever attention exists, it should be to earn attention without making the place you're appearing in less enjoyable.

The Pattern

Put these three stories together and I think they expose something quite uncomfortable.

Marketing has become exceptionally good at optimising proxies. Engagement becomes a proxy for brand strength, follower count becomes a proxy for influence, ad impressions become a proxy for attention but they're not the same things.

A person can engage with you and forget you, a creator can have millions of followers and very little influence over them and an ad can be seen without being welcomed.

Which means perhaps one of the most important skills in modern communications is learning to look beyond the dashboard.

Not ignoring data but interpreting it, asking what the number is actually telling us and, perhaps more importantly, what it isn't.

The Last Edit

There's a question I've found myself coming back to while writing this week's Edit ... Are we measuring what matters or simply valuing what we can measure?

The things that make brands genuinely valuable are often frustratingly difficult to put neatly into a dashboard.

Trust, recognition, reputation, affinity, distinctiveness and the feeling somebody has when your name comes up in conversation.

None of those arrive with a tidy weekly percentage change but they're the things that make someone remember you or recommend you, choose you and come back to you.

So, perhaps good marketing measurement shouldn't simply tell us what happened.

It should help us understand why it mattered and that's a rather different thing.

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Everything & Nothing helps creative people and cultural organisations find the stories worth telling and share them well.

The Good Comms Edit is our weekly look beyond the headlines at what's changing in PR, marketing and brand storytelling, why it matters, and what we'd be thinking about next.

Back next Monday.