Your best marketing in 2026 won't be read by humans

Creator marketing intelligence for brand builders
May 19, 2026

Three months of slow drumbeat reached a crescendo in the last seven days. Axios, Razorfish, Adweek, and Muck Rack all arrived at the same intersection from different streets. Two brands rang our phone in the past few weeks asking us to help them make sense of it. So this seems like the right Tuesday to stop reporting on the trend and start naming what it is.

Most of the noise around generative engine optimization treats it as a search problem. A new dialect of SEO. Schema markup, llms.txt files, content structure, citation engineering. All useful. None of it the moat.

Here's what's actually happening. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews which mattress to buy, which CRM to switch to, which energy drink doesn't taste like cough syrup — the model isn't ranking ten blue links. It's making a recommendation. And like any good recommendation, it weighs the opinions of people who aren't selling you something more than the opinions of people who are.

The numbers say that out loud. Muck Rack's latest analysis of 25 million AI-cited links pegs 84% of those citations as earned media — journalism, third-party coverage, user content — with paid placements barely registering. YouTube's share of social citations across the major engines just doubled in five months, to 39.2%, while Reddit's halved. The engines are listening to other people talk about you, and they're listening hardest to the people best at talking.

You see where this lands.

Every YouTube review with a clean transcript, every TikTok demo that pulls comments, every Reddit thread where a creator's name gets thrown around as gospel, every podcast where a brand comes up unprompted — these are now training material. The corpus from which the machines compose their answers. Creator marketing didn't just gain a use case. It quietly acquired a second job: shaping how AI describes your brand to everyone who asks, for as long as the citations hold.

This isn't a 2027 problem. It's a today problem with a 2027 invoice.

Citation authority compounds the same way domain authority did. The brands building that footprint now will be the brands AI cites by name in two years. The brands waiting for someone to publish a definitive playbook will spend the rest of the decade trying to elbow into answers that already have a default.

The dot that hasn't been connected yet is this: the cheapest, fastest, most operational lever brands have to build that footprint is the channel they're already running. Most marketing teams haven't noticed. The ones that notice first won't be defending their creator budgets next year. They'll be deciding where to put the lift.

— Jeremiah Rosen, CEO, Sundae Collective

Ad Age, Marketing Dive, Modern Retail, May 6–12, 2026

When Ad Age reported on April 16 that Target was killing its Creator Program in favor of a gamified gift card model, we covered it in our April 28 issue and called it what it appeared to be: a major retailer trying to underpay the channel. The full picture has now landed, and it's a more interesting story.

Target didn't just retire one program. It restructured into two. Club Target is the gamified successor — points, challenges, gift cards, and at the top tier, commissions — designed for nano-creators and brand enthusiasts. Target Ambassadors, powered by LTK, is the invite-only program for established LTK creators, with multi-tiered commission structures, monthly bonuses, and dedicated brand campaigns. The Ambassador program quietly launched May 1; both were announced together on May 6. Chief Digital and Revenue Officer Sarah Travis called the two "very, very distinct cohorts of creators."

Sundae take: Our April 28 read held the principle but missed the structure. The principle still stands — creators with real audiences deserve real money — and Target Ambassadors actually delivers on that for the tier where it matters most. Club Target is the more interesting open question: whether gamification and gift cards retain enough nano-creators long enough to produce real content velocity, or whether the program flames out within twelve months the way most points-based brand programs do. The strategic lesson for brand marketers is the stratification itself. A single creator program serving every tier from the megafan with 800 followers to the established LTK partner with 80,000 was always trying to do too many things. Target named the two cohorts, gave them different programs, and let them self-select. Worth watching whether others follow.

Read on Marketing Dive →

Digiday / Influence Weekly, May 2026

TikTok released its Model Context Protocol server at TikTok World, letting AI agents interact directly with its ads platform — querying performance data, surfacing recommendations, and executing campaign actions through a standardized interface. It joins similar moves from Google, Meta, and Amazon, with each platform building proprietary MCPs to maintain data sovereignty over how agents interrogate their systems. Per adtech analyst Shirley Marschall, the proprietary-MCP move is platforms protecting their dataset moats while letting agents in the front door.

Sundae take: Two AI shifts are happening at the same time, and they pull in the same direction. AI engines are increasingly describing brands to consumers. AI agents are increasingly running campaigns for brands. Both reward brands with legible, well-structured signals across the open web — including the kind that creator content produces. Agentic media buying is going to compress the role of the human campaign manager fast. The creator strategy underneath the buy will become more strategically important, not less. If your team is debating whether to spend cycles getting smarter on agentic tooling or smarter on creator content, the honest answer is both, and the second one is the one that compounds.

Read at Digiday →

Tubefilter, May 13–14, 2026

At its 2026 Brandcast presentation, YouTube put creators at the center of its upfronts pitch — announcing exclusive creator-fronted shows, expanded partnerships, and a slate of programming designed to compete head-on for traditional TV ad dollars. The headline is YouTube selling brands on creator shows the way networks sell pilots.

Sundae take: YouTube has been quietly building this for two years, and it's now the most important pitch in TV upfronts. Creator-fronted programming isn't replacing prime time — it is prime time, for a generation of viewers who never developed the habit of channel surfing. For brand marketers, the strategic question is no longer whether to buy creator content. It's whether to buy it as a one-off campaign or as a recurring show. The brands that figure out the difference will spend less per impression and own more of the cultural surface area. And per the lead piece in this issue, there's a second compounding benefit: long-form YouTube content with clean transcripts is exactly the substrate AI engines pull from when they cite brands. Two birds, one buy.

Read at Tubefilter →

Curated by Isla Novak, Sundae Collective.