Antisocial
The next battleground for brand visibility isn’t the social feed. It’s the AI response.
Issue № 161 | London, Sunday 5 April 2026 | 🐣
Read on to learn why:
① Your clients think social media is more risk than reward.
② People’s aversion to AI’s slop isn’t stopping them turning to it for answers.
③ The stronger the mutual need, the more durable the partnership.
④ The moment Swift absorbs an innovation, the challenger window closes.
⑤ Brand portability is not a given.
⑥ Marketing belongs in the boardroom. But it has to earn its seat.
⑦ Great leaders focus on a consistent vision of the future, not the past.
What's new
Active social media use is dropping as Britons become more cautions online, the FT reports.
① Ofcom’s latest research paints a stark picture. Active social media use in the UK has dropped sharply — only around half of users now actively post, share, or comment, down from 61% in 2024. The proportion who think the benefits of being online outweigh the risks fell from 72% to 59%. People are becoming more passive, more cautious, and more selective about what they put out there.
But here’s the really interesting finding: more than half of UK adults now use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini — up from 31% last year. Some, Ofcom noted, appear to be interacting with AI as though it were a person. One cohort is shrinking. The other is exploding. That’s a shift all financial services and technology marketers need to pay attention to.
Why it matters
Social media is having its Big Tobacco moment. Sentiment is turning. Jemima Kelly captured the mood brilliantly this week, arguing that algorithms have trapped us in a risk-averse, backward-looking cultural loop — feeding us what we already like, punishing anything new or different. Her diagnosis was about culture, but it applies just as well to B2B marketing: the platforms designed to amplify your message are now actively working against originality, reach, and trust.
② And trust is the real casualty. Alphaville revealed this week that a small restructuring firm’s head of marketing and communications, the elegantly named Emilia Carrière, appeared to be an AI-generated fake — complete with fabricated bio, alluring headshot, and interests in golf, fine wine, and the early history of Russia. (After the story broke, the bio was updated to note she was also an avid FT reader. At least someone at the firm has a sense of humour.) When even corporate team pages can’t be taken at face value, the credibility of the entire online environment degrades further. People don’t believe anything they see online anymore. And yet — ironically — they’re turning to AI chatbots for answers in ever greater numbers.
The money is following the attention. OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads trial hit $100m in annualised revenue in just six weeks, with fewer than 20% of eligible users even seeing ads yet. Self-serve advertising launches this month. Meanwhile, Bluesky just launched Attie — an AI assistant, powered by Anthropic’s Claude, that lets users build custom social feeds through natural language prompts. Even social platforms are pivoting away from the feed-scrolling model toward AI-mediated experiences.
Most marketing teams are still pouring budget into platforms where their audience is actively retreating.
For B2B marketers, the implication is clear: the next battleground for brand visibility isn’t the social feed. It’s the AI response. When a CFO asks ChatGPT to recommend payments infrastructure providers, or a CTO asks Claude about blockchain platforms for securities settlement, your brand needs to be in that answer. Most marketing teams aren’t remotely set up for that challenge — because they’re still pouring budget into platforms where their audience is actively retreating.
I’m not suggesting that consumers won’t keep scrolling Instagram Reels and TikTok for hours. Sadly, that’s not changing anytime soon. But if you’re a B2B marketer spending time and money building a brand presence on those platforms, stop. The data no longer supports it. Your audience — senior decision-makers in financial services and technology — isn’t there in any meaningful professional capacity. The platform dynamics are working against you and sentiment is now shifting to the point where I’d question the reputational risk of being there at all.
What to do about it
Take action
LinkedIn: This remains non-negotiable for B2B. It’s where senior decision-makers engage professionally, and nothing in Ofcom’s data suggests an equivalent decline there. Keep investing — but with sharper, more original content that earns attention rather than adding to the noise.
Reddit: Start treating it seriously. This isn’t a fringe suggestion. A study of 30 million sources found that Reddit is now the single most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity. Google pays Reddit roughly $60m a year for access to its data to train AI models. OpenAI has a similar deal estimated at $70m. When AI systems build answers, they draw heavily on authentic human discussion in forums like Reddit — not on your corporate social posts. If your brand isn’t part of those conversations, it’s invisible to the systems that are increasingly mediating how your prospects find information.
AI-first: Begin building AI visibility as a discipline. How does your brand appear when a prospect asks ChatGPT or Claude about your category? If you don’t know the answer to that question, find out. Invest in authoritative long-form content, technical credibility, and the kind of substantive online presence that AI systems treat as trustworthy. This is where marketing budgets should be migrating — not toward another TikTok experiment nobody in your C-suite asked for.
Get help
Two ways I can help you:
Tackle a specific challenge by retaining me in an advisory capacity or on a fractional basis.
Elevate all your marketing and communications by hiring me as a full-time member of your team.
Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
NatWest and Sainsbury’s partner to offer new finance products
③ The stronger the mutual need, the more durable the partnership.
🗞️ NatWest has announced its third embedded finance partnership, extending its 2025 acquisition of Sainsbury’s Bank’s core banking assets into an ongoing product collaboration. Sainsbury’s customers will gain access to savings accounts, unsecured personal loans, and a co-branded Nectar credit card, delivered through Sainsbury’s digital channels via NatWest’s BaaS platform, NatWest Boxed. Nectar loyalty members receive tailored rates. Products launch in H2 2026.
💡 A financial services partnership isn’t a distribution deal. It’s a brand trust transfer. NatWest already serves one in three UK families, but Sainsbury’s reaches those same people in a completely different context — the weekly shop, the loyalty points, a habitual relationship built across millions of touch points a year. You can’t buy that kind of trust but you can piggyback on it via partnership.
✅ Before signing a partnership, ask three questions: Do their clients trust them in a way that would transfer to us? What data or insight do they have that we don’t? And what do we bring that they genuinely can’t get elsewhere? If you can’t answer all three clearly, what you have is a press release, not a partnership.
TECHNOLOGY
Swift says blockchain-based shared ledger will go live with real transactions this year
④ The moment Swift absorbs an innovation, the challenger window closes.
🗞️ Swift, the financial messaging cooperative connecting 11,500 institutions across 200 countries, says its blockchain-based shared ledger will go live with real transactions this year. Built with more than 40 banks — including JPMorgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America — the ledger is designed for real-time, 24/7 cross-border payments and the movement of tokenised value, with Swift’s trademark compliance, resilience, and interoperability baked in from the start.
💡 Swift’s blockchain ledger may not be more technically sophisticated than what blockchain challengers were building five years ago. What it has — what no challenger can buy or replicate quickly — is 50 years of institutional credibility, a cooperative ownership structure whose member banks literally own the network, and the kind of regulatory track record that makes “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM” a genuine business strategy, not a cliché. The moment Swift absorbs an innovation, the challenger’s window closes.
✅ If you’re marketing a challenger proposition in financial infrastructure, don’t position against the incumbent — you’ll likely lose. Position for the gap: what the incumbent won’t do, can’t do quickly enough, or won’t prioritise for smaller clients. Own that space clearly and completely — while you still have it.
MEDIA & MARKETING
Monzo ditches US operations after boardroom reshuffle
⑤ Brand portability is not a given.
🗞️ Monzo is closing its US operations. Accounts will be shut by June, around 50 jobs are going, and the neobank — which launched stateside in 2020 — is doubling down on the UK and Europe, where it secured a full ECB banking licence in December. The retreat follows years of struggle to gain traction, a withdrawn banking licence application, and a boardroom reshuffle that replaced CEO TS Anil with former Google executive Diana Layfield.
💡 I’ve often praised Monzo for investing in brand. But I can’t help wondering whether their failure to crack the States is - in part at least - because its brand lacks portability. Of course, regulatory complexity, stiff competition and the different US revenue model were the main hurdles but the brand must have played a part too. Monzo’s identity is brilliant precisely because it’s so specifically British. The plain-speaking, warm, slightly irreverent tone that makes it stand out in the UK is a competitive advantage at home. In a market like the US, I suspect it doesn’t land quite the same way. Brand portability is not a given — and the cost of discovering its limits can, apparently, be five years and 50 jobs.
✅ Before committing budget to geographic expansion, do the brand work first. Does your identity travel, or is it too culturally specific to translate? Test your proposition, your tone, your visual language with the target audience — and take the results seriously.
WILDCARD
Boards need to rethink how they advise CEOs
⑥ Marketing belongs in the boardroom. But it has to earn its seat.
🗞️ According to the AlixPartners Disruption Index, 72% of CEOs say they find it increasingly difficult to set priorities — yet 87% say their boards already have the right people and knowledge to help. The problem isn’t talent. It’s how boardroom discussions are structured: too backward-looking, too focused on variance reporting, not enough scenario-based thinking or qualitative customer insight.
💡 The article makes a telling point about understanding clients. It argues that boards shouldn’t rely on NPS scores and churn rates alone — they should be asking CEOs what conversations they’re having with clients and what those clients’ pain points are. That’s marketing’s job. And yet marketing is rarely in the room when these conversations happen. If nearly three-quarters of CEOs are struggling to prioritise, the function with the deepest understanding of client needs, competitive positioning, and market sentiment should be contributing directly — not summarising its findings in a deck that arrives two weeks later.
✅ CMOs shouldn’t wait for an invitation to the boardroom. They should build the case by framing their insight in the language boards care about: customer risk, competitive exposure, and revenue impact. The goal isn’t a permanent seat at the table — it’s making your function impossible to plan without.
Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
📉 Private capital’s great disappointment era begins
🫣 Arbuthnot chief: High street banks’ push into wealth is no threat
🇬🇧 Wise launches UK current accounts
🧐 Lessons for rich families from a private banker
👏🏻 Standard Chartered poaches Ole Matthiessen from Deutsche Bank
TECHNOLOGY
🦾 Banks are better positioned to benefit from AI than many realise
🗽 How Securitize is working with NYSE to bring equities onchain
🥇 FNZ launches Select premium service with priority access
💰 OpenAI raises $3bn from retail investors
🤖 Mistral AI raises $830M in debt to set up a data center near Paris
MEDIA & MARKETING
📣 Marketers should elevate brand building from “cost” to “investment”
📬 How AI improves email deliverability beyond send times
👋 WPP Media’s global chief strategy officer retires
🎬 Sora’s shutdown could be a reality check moment for AI video
👨🏼💻 Flipboard’s ‘social websites’ are a new spin on decentralised social media
The last word
⑦ David Martin writing in American Banker on why banks should avoid the self-inflicted wound of negative messaging:
“The most effective leaders and marketers I've seen spend their energy painting a compelling picture of the future and backing it up with consistent action.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Aspire to InMarketing.
Wishing you an influential week,
P.S. David Hieatt’s excellent book Do Open was a huge influence on me when I first created IMTW. It’s been a pleasure to be your trusted editor ever since.
