The marketing industry is debating a fundamental question: is it still smarter to reach a million people today, or to find the thousand people they already trust?
This debate has been simmering since Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez stood up at an investor conference earlier this year and declared traditional brand marketing dead. In its place, an army of 300,000 creators, with social spending rising to half the company’s digital marketing budget. Trust, Fernandez argued, can no longer be declared by companies — it needs to be borrowed from people consumers already follow. Cannes turned that into a full-blown argument last month, with plenty on both sides ready to defend their positions.
As with most things in marketing, both sides have a point. Here is the case for each.
The Case For
To understand why Fernandez said what he said, it helps to understand what he is reacting to. The big TV ad did not get killed. It got stranded. Fragmentation did that. Not one platform, not one format, but the slow scattering of a mass audience into a thousand smaller ones, each with its own feed, algorithm, and trusted content.
Beneath it all, the same diagnosis. Culture did not go anywhere. It just stopped arriving on schedule. The big shared moments — the story everyone is talking about, the breaking news, the TV premiere of a blockbuster — have not disappeared. There are just fewer of them, and people now choose for themselves when they show up, on whatever screen is in front of them. Traditional media thinking does not work on a channel this fragmented, this decentralized, this fast.
The signs are everywhere. SharkNinja employs social publishers instead of creative agencies. Creative agencies like Ralph reinvent themselves as entertainment companies. Entertainment companies make a beeline for creators. Creators like YouTuber Brandon Baum are launching their own entertainment companies. Everyone is operating in everyone else’s lane now.
“We started off being an infomercial brand and we spent 28 minutes and 30 seconds educating you on a vacuum or a blender and it worked,” said Kaitlyn Hebert, global CMO of SharkNinja. “As formats and times have changed, we needed to figure out how to take what used to be a 28-minute story and turn it into six seconds, 10 seconds or 30 seconds. So our investment is we are going to go out and start to use social as our main channel to continue to use for storytelling, and what I mean by that is we are not going to stop focusing on traditional media. We are hugely excited about content and creators telling our story.”
None of this is entirely new. The shift has been happening in fits and starts for more than a decade. What is different is the stakes.
Two things changed them. The first is supply. There are now millions of creators making content at a professional level, in every category, at a volume that simply did not exist five years ago. That is enough supply to make “borrow trust instead of buying it” a real strategic option rather than a theoretical one. Whether it is enough to actually replace a media plan — at the reach, consistency, and brand safety a plan needs to deliver — is a different question, and it is the one most creator-economy arguments quietly skip past.
The second is discovery. The next place people go looking for something is not a search bar or a feed. It is a chatbot. And what a chatbot recommends depends on what has already been said about a brand across the open web — reviews, forums, creator content, editorial — not on how much that brand spent on a TV buy. A thousand creators publishing into that ecosystem feed it. A big brand campaign, by itself, does not.
That is the real case for what Fernandez is doing. Not that big brand marketing is dead but that the world it was built for has changed enough that defaulting to it no longer makes the sense it once did.
The Case Against
Just because it is harder to reach everyone today does not mean big brand marketing is dead. It just plays out differently now.
“What good brands understand is that you need to have an ‘always on’ strategy, one that places you in front of your audience across every screen,” said Dennis Kirschner, CMO and co-founder at ad tech company ShowHeroes. “Connected TV is the primary channel for achieving that, ideally backed by premium online video and display.”
ShowHeroes’ own research places average consumer attention for CTV at 82%, compared to 42% for social video. Leave that gap on the table and you are leaving attention on the table too.
“Of course, if you want to reach your audience, you need to show up on social media and work with the right influencers and creators,” said Kirschner. “But the brands that will win are the ones who refuse to choose — they will be on TV screens, the open web, and everywhere in between, because that is where their audience is.”
Nothing has killed mass reach. What has happened is that a generation of marketers who have never bought a GRP in their lives have decided that because their own feed is full of creators, the entire adult population must be watching the same thing. It is not. Reach still wins categories. It always has. The companies growing fastest right now are not the ones with the most TikTok mentions — they are the ones still building mental availability at scale, then layering creators on top as a distribution tactic, not an alternative to one.
The reality is that you cannot build a billion-dollar brand off a following of 40,000 engaged fans, no matter how “authentic” the relationship. You build it by being seen, over and over, by as many of your category buyers as you can afford to reach, most of whom are not thinking about you at all. CTV does that job now the way linear TV used to.
None of which means creators do not matter. They do, for the reasons Fernandez and Hebert each make well. But “borrowed trust” is an addition to the media plan, not a replacement. The brands quietly winning in 2026 are running both, at the same time, without feeling the need to declare one dead in order to justify spending on the other.
