For most of the last decade, brand-building came with a fairly simple playbook. Own your narrative. Control your message. Pour resources into content that tells your story, in your voice, on your channels. It made sense at the time, search engines rewarded volume and authority, and brands competed for attention on their own turf.

That world hasn’t disappeared. But something has been layered on top of it, and it plays by a completely different set of rules. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, these are now often the first places people go when researching a brand or comparing options. And here’s the uncomfortable part: these platforms don’t particularly care how much you’ve invested in your own content. What they care about is what everyone else has said about you.

This is a structural shift, and it’s happening faster than most communications teams have noticed. If you’re still measuring reputation by what you publish, the gap between how visible you think you are and how visible you actually are inside AI-generated answers is growing every month.

The Currency Has Changed

It has always known, instinctively, that earned media carries more weight than owned content. A journalist writing about your brand because the story is genuinely interesting feels different from a brand writing about itself. An analyst recommending your product unprompted means more than any ad you could run. This is not new.  What’s new is the scale at which it now operates, and how directly it determines whether your brand exists in an AI’s answer.

A Muck Rack analysis of more than 25 million links cited by major AI platforms found that roughly 99% of all AI citations come from non-paid sources. Earned media journalism, research, third-party coverage, and analyst commentary account for 84% of everything these platforms cite. Journalism alone accounts for 27%, a figure that’s held steady across every wave of this research.

Owned content and paid placements together account for just 16%. Press releases barely register at 1.1%. The hierarchy PR people have always sensed that earned beats owned, and every time has now been confirmed in hard numbers. And it isn’t just more persuasive. It’s structurally more visible.

What AI Actually Trusts, and Why

Nobody sat down and programmed these models to prefer earned media. They were trained on the internet as it actually exists in an environment where editorial credibility and third-party validation have always been the signals that separate trustworthy information from noise. The same instincts editors have relied on for a century are now baked into how these systems decide what to surface.

A controlled study found that getting coverage in third-party news outlets produced a median 239% lift in AI search visibility, with some campaigns seeing increases as high as 325%. These aren’t small optimisation wins. They’re the difference between a brand that exists in the world AI draws from and one that effectively doesn’t, no matter how strong its own channels look.

The kind of question being asked matters too. When people ask AI about industry trends, what’s happening in a category, who’s leading, and what’s changing, journalism is cited more than twice as often as for how-to questions. So if a buyer asks what’s going on in marketing technology, retail, or enterprise software, the platform first reaches for news coverage and analyst commentary. Brands that show up there get surfaced. The ones that don’t, simply don’t.

The Recency Problem 

Here’s something most brands haven’t factored in: 57% of journalism citations with known publish dates come from content published in the last 12 months. Visibility peaks hard in the first month after a story runs, then drops off fast through month six.

A single burst of coverage tied to a launch gets you a spike, not a foundation. The brands building lasting AI visibility are the ones that show up consistently across trade press, industry publications, podcasts, and analyst reports, month after month. Earned media cadence isn’t just a PR strategy anymore. It’s closer to infrastructure.

The Gap Almost No One Is Measuring

The most uncomfortable finding in all this: a research study comparing journalists’ PR teams’ active pitches with their AI platforms found just a 2% overlap. Traditional PR metrics, such as impressions, AVE, and tier-one hits, were built for a world where humans were the audience. They were never designed to capture influence over algorithms, and they don’t.

Reputation is now being built in two places at once in people’s minds, and in what these models have learned to associate with your name. The same thing shapes both. A journalist who covers you because the story’s worth telling. An analyst who recommends you because the evidence backs it up. These were never just “awareness” plays. They’re the raw material that determines whether your brand shows up when it matters most at the exact moment someone’s deciding who to trust. Earn the coverage. The machines are paying attention too.

The brands that earn lasting visibility inside AI-generated answers are the most credible ones, consistently validated across sources that algorithms and people alike have learned to trust. The Marquee Awards recognise exactly this calibre of work, celebrating the digital campaigns and martech execution that demonstrate genuine impact, not just reach. For brands building the kind of third-party credibility that AI platforms reward, recognition here is part of the evidence.

Brand trust has always been described as valuable. What it has rarely been is defined. 

For years, marketers spoke about it the way economists once spoke about market confidence as a climate, a feeling, something you sensed rather than measured. That vagueness was for convenience. It meant trust could be declared without being demonstrated, celebrated without being earned, and reported without being verified. 

In 2026, that era is over. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer conducted across 15 countries with more than 15,000 respondents, brands now rank above governments, media organisations, NGOs, and employers as the institutions consumers trust most. Eight in ten people say they trust the brands they actively use. But the more important finding is what trust has become in the buying process. 

The study confirms that trust now sits alongside quality and price as a primary purchase consideration. Consumers are actively wielding it as leverage, choosing, switching, and walking away from brands based on whether trust is present or absent. In other words, the value of brand trust is the value of being chosen at all.

Marketing today is measured relentlessly. Dashboards quantify performance, algorithms guide decisions, and success is often summarised in a spreadsheet. But numbers rarely capture the full weight of an idea.

The Marquee Awards recognise the work that moves beyond metrics; the strategies that reshape markets, the execution that delivers results, and the leadership that drives teams forward. For brands like Airbnb, Unilever, and HubSpot, awards are proof points that attract talent, reassure clients, and elevate influence. 

At a time when marketing success is often judged by dashboards alone, the Marquee Awards reaffirm a broader truth: lasting impact emerges where creativity, strategy, and measurable outcomes meet.

Martechvibe, the organisers behind Vibe Marketing Tech Fest, announced the Marquee Awards recently, as a way to recognise excellence at the intersection of marketing and technology. 

From industry-defining digital campaigns to the martech and adtech systems that power them behind the scenes, the award celebrates work that delivers both creativity and real-world results.

It is structured across two categories;

• Technical Excellence: Use of martech platforms, data, automation, and customer experience technologies.
• Industry Campaigns: Digital campaigns, judged on creativity, technology, and strategy.

The awards honour teams that combine strategic thinking, technical rigour, and measurable impact. But earning a Marquee Award isn’t just about strong work; it’s about how clearly that work is presented, and the business value it brought.

Creativity isn’t just for the creatives. It’s a new way to look at an old-standing challenge. Challenges like high acquisition costs, slowing of retention figures, efficiency in campaign orchestration – these are the real-world scenarios that digital marketers are dealing with. 

Marquee Awards honours the unsung heroes behind these campaigns.  

The teams behind the strategies, marketing innovation, technology that’s leveraged right, execution that’s smooth and storytelling that seamlessly slips into the customer’s mind. 

It’s time to let your work shine, including everything and everyone behind the scenes. 

Think of it as a case study where the clearest strategy to demonstrate business impact wins. The jury cares about your story—how clearly you can show impact, innovation, and results. 

That’s what makes awards memorable.

Crafting a strong Marquee Awards submission is about storytelling. Guide the jury through your journey, from the challenges you faced, through the creative and strategic solutions you implemented, to the tangible outcomes you achieved. 

Here’s what really works when crafting a Marquee Awards submission;