As consumers increasingly turn to AI tools during the discovery phase of their journey, brands are now faced with the need to ‘speak’ a new language that allows them and their core messages to get picked up by Large Language Models (LLMs).

A dentsu Beach House session titled ‘Machine Readable. Human Referenceable. The Future of Algorithmic Brand Fame’ reflected on how AI is injecting new behaviors across the path to purchase. About 15% of searches every day are net new to the internet, meaning consumers are fully embracing this new context in which they don’t need to know what they want before getting started on their journey. Instead, they can turn to AI tools to discover what to need or want by stating their challenges or overarching goals. At the same time, while shortening (if not collapsing) discovery, the presence of AI in the mix is leading audiences to do more post-validation, looking for humans to back up the information returned by the machine.

Another session, titled ‘The Last Human Decision: Brand Trust and Authenticity in the Agentic Age’, remarked how this transformed context is creating a new paradigm in which brands need to understand the difference between ‘mastering’ (understand how the agentic world works) and ‘mattering’ (combining customer understanding to being authentic to the core of your brand).

Ultimately, as brands are setting themselves to speak in multiple languages, their messages can only land with either audience if they are backed by human voices.

This notion was further explored in a session titled ‘The Intimacy Economy: A Conversation on What Happens Next in Media, When Reach Gives Way to Chosen Engagement.’ The session reflected on how consumers are choosing niche spaces to interact with each other and with trusted sources, leading brands to increasingly lean into community-first engagement that is less focused on mass content and maximizing reach, but rather more on the quality of interactions.

And what’s more intimate than a Facebook Group with 6 members? McDonald’s decided to revive a community dedicated to its Filet-o-fish sandwich that was created by a customer back in 2012 and put its global marketing engine to work to celebrate it and help it enroll new members. This created massive engagement with audiences everywhere who were attracted by the notion of the corporation making this curious bet, and earned McDonald’s massive respect in the social landscape for its decision to honor the ‘Ogs’ who stood there (and stayed) from the very beginning. The campaign was awarded a Bronze Lions in the Social and Creator category.

Engaging consumers in these intimate spaces can do wonders for brands in terms of showing to what extent they are ready to have authentic, unfiltered conversations with their audiences. For instance, when facing a supply chain crisis after a truck transporting 400,000+ chocolate bars was stolen in Europe KitKat decided not to hide the fact, but rather to emphasize it in the media and launch a ‘Stolen KitKat Tracker’, encouraging consumers to participate in a mass campaign to determine if the chocolate bars in their possession came from the missing batch. Turning a challenge into participation with a sense of humor, ‘The KitKat Heist’ was awarded the Grand Prix in PR, as well as Gold Lions in both the Media and the Social & Creator categories.