The real story in McKinsey’s State of Marketing 2026 is not the charts. It is the confession. Europe’s marketing engines were built for a world that no longer exists.
Budgets rise yet impact stalls. Data grows yet decision quality lags. AI expands yet teams operate with twentieth century structures.
The winners share one pattern. They stop treating marketing as a function and start running it as an adaptive system. • Cross functional squads instead of siloed departments • Always on experimentation instead of quarterly bursts • First party data as an asset not a compliance chore • Creative bravery tied directly to commercial impact
This shift is not cosmetic. It is existential. The report shows that firms who redesign around this model create disproportionate growth even in flat markets. Europe’s marketers face a simple question. Keep optimising the old machine or build the one that fits reality.
If your organisation feels stuck, this is the moment to redesign not repackage. The companies that act now will define the next decade of European marketing.
If you want communication that earns belief, not just attention, start a conversation with me.
Why collapsing trust is about to reshape power, economics and the future of knowledge
We always assumed the internet would make us smarter. Instead, it made us doubt everything. The breaking point wasn’t when people fell for fake news; it was when they stopped believing even the fake news they once trusted. The very floor beneath our information ecosystem has cracked.
When a system loses credibility, it doesn’t collapse slowly. It collapses overnight.
The internet is entering that moment.
For years, platforms optimized for attention over accuracy. Noise outperformed knowledge. Outrage outperformed expertise. Every incentive pointed downward. The result is the world we live in now: abundant information, vanishing certainty.
People no longer ask, “Is this true?” They ask, “Who wants me to think this?”
The shift is subtle but historic. When the public loses faith in the public’s own knowledge, the entire digital model wobbles. We’re seeing the early tremors of an epistemic recession: the rapid decline of the internet as a source of objective truth.
AI accelerates the crisis. Its power is extraordinary; its weakness is lethal.
AI doesn’t understand. It predicts. It assembles patterns of words that often look right but occasionally miss by just enough to erode trust completely.
One technologist put it bluntly: “When I already know something and check it with AI, it’s maybe 85% accurate. That 15% is a cliff, and that cliff is growing. Because AI trains on human writing, it inherits our confusion. It scales our errors. When the collective mind is foggy, AI becomes a fog machine.
The irony is brutal: the more impressive AI becomes, the less we trust what we read.
The coming rise of actual experts
Paradoxically, this collapse of digital certainty strengthens something older and more elemental: human expertise.
When filters fail, people start searching for faces, not feeds. They want names, not usernames. They want individuals whose competence is visible and whose reputation is earned, not algorithmic.
In a world where any answer can be fabricated, the rare people who truly know things become valuable again.
The economic shift is already visible:
• the era of influencers is aging • the era of experts is returning • authority becomes local, not algorithmic • knowledge becomes embodied, not aggregated
We’re moving from the era of “content creators” to the era of “credibility creators.”
The next few years won’t bring a post-truth world. They’ll bring a splintered one.
Instead of a single, global information sphere, we’ll live inside micro-networks of trust. Communities built around people, not platforms. Truth becomes relational. Believability becomes a currency.
The future looks less like Silicon Valley and more like ancient Athens: reputational, communal, human.
The lesson is uncomfortable but clarifying.
The internet is no longer the source of trust. People are.
The institutions that survive will be the ones that rebuild credibility at the human level, not the algorithmic one. The leaders who thrive will be the ones who understand that in a collapsing information economy, clarity is a form of power.
The prediction is simple: The future belongs to those who can be believed.
AI & Brand & Comms Strategy Leader | AI-Driven Storytelling, Behavioural Insight & Human Impact | The Curious Brain
December 9, 2025
What animals and nature can teach us about power, competence and the failures of modern societies
There is a quietly unsettling observation circulating in philosophical circles: animals, for all their supposed simplicity, do not let fools lead the pack.
Yet humans routinely do. This is not a sentimental comparison between nature and civilisation; it is a structural critique of how modern societies select those who command them.
In the natural world, leadership is costly. A wolf that cannot hunt, a lion that hesitates, a primate that misreads threat signals, does not retain status for long. The group corrects failure immediately. Competence is not aspirational. It is the prerequisite for survival.
Humans have inverted that logic.
Across cultures and political systems, many societies elevate figures who would not survive a day as leaders in the animal kingdom. Individuals rewarded not for judgement or restraint but for volume, confidence, and untested certainty. Spectacle becomes a substitute for substance.
This is not a moral failing; it is an economic and informational one. Modern leadership is often conferred through mechanisms that reward visibility over competence. Electoral contests, media ecosystems and corporate hierarchies are vulnerable to a simple bias: the ease of recognising noise over discerning wisdom.
In democracies, attention has become a form of capital. In corporations, charisma outperforms capability. In public life, performance frequently outranks understanding.
Animals select leaders based on demonstrated fitness. Humans select leaders based on perceived fitness, a perception shaped by narratives, algorithms, and increasingly polarised identities.
A phenomenon well-documented in organisational psychology compounds the problem: capable individuals tend to speak less frequently and more cautiously in public forums, while the least informed express themselves with the greatest confidence. This asymmetry creates fertile ground for what sociologists call “the prominence of the unqualified.”
When intelligence becomes quiet, stupidity does not remain idle. It fills the vacuum, often with remarkable force.
The political implications are visible across continents. Populist movements frequently rally around figures who embody frustration rather than competence. Corporate boards occasionally elevate leaders whose primary skill is self-promotion rather than stewardship. Even cultural debates reward rhetoricians who can generate reaction rather than resolution.
This is not because people admire incompetence. It is because the systems mediating leadership, digital platforms, party primaries, media amplification structures, reward traits animals would interpret as signals of danger.
To understand the divergence between humans and animals, one must examine the criteria for trust.
Animals rely on instinct because instinct, in evolutionary terms, is the accumulated memory of survival. A wolf does not need rhetoric to assess a leader; it observes outcomes. Strength, coordination, foresight and risk-reading determine status.
Humans, however, are shaped by appearances. The modern environment is too complex for instinct alone, yet too mediated for direct evaluation. As a result, citizens and employees judge leaders through proxies: confidence, fluency, symbolism, partisanship, tribal identity.
These proxies can be gamed.
A leader who presents certainty can outperform a leader who possesses competence. A leader who entertains can overshadow one who governs.
A leader who simplifies can defeat one who understands.
Animals correct misalignment instantly. Humans often do so only after crisis.
The consequences of faulty leadership selection manifest in predictable ways: institutional volatility, declining trust in governance, corporate fragility, and social fragmentation. When societies repeatedly hand authority to the least prepared, the costs compound across generations.
The comparison with animals is not an argument for instinct over intellect. It is a reminder that leadership, at its core, is a survival function. When the wrong individuals rule, the group suffers.
Animals recognise this intrinsically. Humans often learn it only in hindsight.
If societies wish to reverse the pattern, the solution is not to mimic the animal kingdom but to realign incentives. Systems must reward:
• proven judgement over theatrical certainty • outcomes over rhetoric • long-term stability over short-term spectacle • accountability over charisma
The problem is not that humans lack the ability to choose good leaders. The problem is that the mechanisms we have built for identifying them reward the opposite qualities.
Leadership is not entertainment. It is stewardship.
Until modern societies re-learn that distinction, animals may continue to show more wisdom than the people who claim dominion over them
DepositPhotos, a global creative content platform with a set of AI-powered tools, has released its 9th annual forecast, “Creative Trends 2026: The Soft Rebellion.” Developed with input from global creative leaders and strategic thinkers, this data-driven report identifies eight directions that will shape how brands communicate, create, and connect in the year ahead.
Combining human-led qualitative research with platform data, the team analyzed how content creation is evolving amid media saturation, emotional fatigue, and the rise of AI. Using search requests and audiovisual insights from 45M+ users and a 323M+ file library, the report translates patterns into practical guidance, helping teams experiment confidently and keep human connection at the core.
From attention to connection
In 2026, the most forward-thinking brands won’t fight for attention; they’ll earn trust. As audiences become more sensitive to performative storytelling and digital noise, creativity is moving from spectacle to sincerity. A different, more intentional design mindset is taking hold, one that values emotional intelligence, cultural fluency, and the courage to slow down.
Unlike the high-gloss visuals of past years, today’s creatives focus on creative strategies that feel lived-in and emotionally grounded: imperfect compositions, authentic casting, and deliberate softness in motion and form.. Many are adopting modular, AI-assisted workflows that enable speed and scale — freeing up time to focus on what matters most.. The real challenge is no longer how to produce more—but how to create with clarity, care, and intention.
The 8 trends for 2026:
Reality Strikes
Blue Hour
Authentically Artificial
Petal Power
Kidult
The Tender Shift
Quietly Loud
Creative Sync
The 2026 report reflects a deeper industry shift toward emotional clarity and purposeful production, as traditional marketing loses traction, the most resonant creative work pairs raw emotion with thoughtful execution across multiple channels.
“Creative Trends 2026 reflects the conversations we’re hearing across design, marketing, and tech: how do we create at scale without losing the human spark? This report is a response to that question—grounded in platform data, shaped by real voices, and built to help teams deliver with care.”
To provide applied insights, the report includes commentary from creative leaders working at the intersection of strategy, design, and technology, including
Adina Cirstea, Creative Director at McCann Worldgroup;
Demetris Stefani, Founder of Hivebreed & UGC Factory;
Ruben van Eijk, Creative & Tech Executive;
Alexandra Zeevalkink, Editor-in-Chief at The Subthread;
Peter-Jan Grech, CEO & Founder of BRND WGN;
Patrick Horan, Senior Brand & Motion Designer at Skyscanner, and others, are offering tactics for adopting trends without breaking brand DNA.
