Gary Calega

A recent NPR article suggests the influencer economy may be entering a new phase. As economic uncertainty shapes consumer behavior, brands and creators are being forced to rethink what influence actually looks like. Why does this matter? 1. Brands are prioritizing impact over volume. Influencer marketing isn't disappearing, but investment is becoming more deliberate. Brands are working with fewer creators and placing greater emphasis on measurable value, stronger audience alignment, and partnerships that drive results. 2. Consumer mindset is reshaping content. As audiences become more price-conscious, aspirational content may carry less weight than it once did. Creators who educate, solve problems, entertain, or reflect real-life experiences are increasingly positioned to build lasting trust. 3. Influence is becoming more resilient. The creators most likely to endure won't necessarily be the loudest or the biggest. They'll be the ones who adapt alongside their audiences, diversify beyond sponsored content, and continue delivering value even when buying behavior slows. The bigger question: If consumer priorities have shifted, should brands redefine what makes an influencer truly influential? https://lnkd.in/gemPnBtR

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Institutional ownership is already huge. Now we expect it to 10x in less than ten years.  It’s changing the game for PMCs. Scaling’s no longer optional, because the industry itself is scaling around them.  These owners want rock-solid professional partners they can trust with their management portfolio. There’s no room for data degradation or messy tools upmarket: every accounting inaccuracy can compound to millions in lost revenue.  Charlotte Muylaert calls this the Upmarket Reckoning, and she’s in this week’s The Scale Factor talking about it. As VP of Client Success, she has such a sharp lens into what it takes for PMCs to win. Any manager thinking about growth needs to read. Link in comments.

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Q4 is officially here, and so is RMP’s 2026 Holiday Guide. We dug into what actually mattered last holiday season, what’s changing for 2026, and what marketers should be paying attention to as peak season gets underway. From AI reshaping discovery to changing consumer behavior and the growing importance of creative, we’ve separated the noise from the trends worth acting on. We’ll continue sharing new data and predictions as they come in throughout the season. Reach out if this sparks anything in the meantime! Read more on the RMP blog.

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A high hook rate doesn’t always mean you have a winning ad. It means people watched the opening. The more important question is: Were they the right people? In our latest article, we explain how to: • Calculate and benchmark hook rate • Use creative as a targeting signal • Write hooks that qualify your audience • Test new openings without changing the entire ad • Evaluate hook rate alongside CTR, CPA, conversions and ROAS • Recognize creative fatigue—and refresh the right element The strongest hook isn’t the one that attracts everyone. It’s the one that makes the right audience think, “This is for me.” Read the full guide: https://lnkd.in/dwmCzqwc #PaidSocial #DigitalAdvertising #PerformanceMarketing

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Search is no longer just about keywords and clicks. It’s about answers. AI-driven tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) are changing the way people discover content, evolving from traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to include AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). If your site isn’t optimized for how people ask questions (and how machines interpret them), you’re probably invisible to the very people you want to reach. Curious what that shift actually means and how to get ahead of it? Read on! https://lnkd.in/gwiKNQf5 #revelmarketing #revelblog #AEO #SEO #GEO #searchengines #website #websitemarketing #buildsomethinggreater

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30,000 people are walking the InfoComm floor in Vegas this week. Most are looking at the wrong thing. They'll crowd the booths with the brightest LED walls. Photograph the spec sheets. Walk out with a tote bag full of hardware brochures. Almost nobody is shopping for the part that actually makes a screen work. The signage market hit $35.2B this year. 78% of it runs on cloud CMS. The hardware keeps getting better and cheaper. The software keeps getting smarter. And the deployment failure rate hasn't moved an inch. Here's why. The screen was never the hard part. The software was never the hard part. The hard part is everything between the login and the customer's eyeball. Strategy. Content that actually gets refreshed. Management. Install. Support. That's the 90% you can't buy in a booth. My team is on the floor this week. If you're there, find them and ask the question nobody at the booths wants you to ask: Who owns this once it's on my wall? That answer is the whole game. #infocomm OneRevel

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Sometimes the hardest question I ask a candidate is "What's important to you in your next career move?" You'd be surprised the amount of people that haven't full thought it through. My friends at LevelUp, Tara Nesser and Lauren Zaleski, created a really practical resource to help figure that out before jumping into the job search! Highly recommend https://lnkd.in/egqjbS86

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Doug Tallmadge took the stage at Madrona's IA40 Summit this week, where he made a bold statement: In 2026, marketing has never mattered more than it does right now. "In a world that is increasingly focused on AI, marketing is the part of every large organization that is focused on establishing a human connection with a customer, and that is something that fundamentally won't go away. In some ways it increasingly becomes the last moat for a company." It's the core of who we are and what we do at Gradial. We solve both the marketing workflow and the software beneath it, so marketing teams can bring that distinct, irreplaceable ✨ human connection ✨ to every one of their customers. #ia40summit

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For those who want to get a sense of how Revelio Labs workforce intelligence data is informing the market of AI's impact on the job market and workforce, CEO Ben Zweig delivers the news on Bloomberg.

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