Get ready to explore: A dispatch from Possible 2026

Brett wrote about the AI Overload at Possible last week, but there was more to the conversation than LLMs. Here are some of my favorite tidbits from an action-packed conference.

1. Brand creative empirically outperforms pure performance creative

After seven years of tracking and measurement, MMA, in partnership with Ally Financial and Campbell’s, unveiled financial results of their Brand as Performance study. The bottom line: brand affinity creative (advertising designed to make a consumer like the brand) converted customers at a higher rate and led to longer customer lifetime value. Not only that, the study showed that sales lift in groups exposed to brand affinity creative extended for six months beyond the three-month study period, showing the long tail of work that makes prospects like you.

2. Reach is worthless, but engagement pays off

Top performing brands that are winning culture and winning at the register, like Kraft-Heinz, Tubi and JCPenney, are winning through engagement. It’s not about getting in front of the most people the most times. It’s a game of making a deeper impact by delivering things that bring joy and make people want to spend time with you.

3. Use AI to do things you couldn’t before

It’s a failure of imagination to only look to AI for ways to do what you can already do. Instead, take bigger swings at things that simply weren’t possible before. To power their Five-Star Theater holiday effort, Amazon used a customized agent to scrub through tens of thousands of reviews for the most Shakespearean takes on their products, worthy to be read by actors.

4. Everyone’s just experimenting

Even the world’s biggest companies don’t have a playbook for AI and LLMs. The current moment is all about experimentation. Just trying new things is the overriding recommendation from the theorists, marketing leaders and experts.

5. Tentpoles of marketing in the last decade are officially deceased

Before LLMs, social referral traffic to brand and publisher sites was already plummeting. AI answers and summaries are driving search referrals down even further. Video engagement is in decline, too. So stopping customers with video and driving them to your site is officially a dead strategy. It’s time to try new things and reexamine old assumptions about what works.