Early in my career, I was given “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White as a gift.
First published in 1920, one of the greatest lessons in its thin and pocket-sized pages is how writing tools influence our writing: your smartphone text would be vastly different created on a typewriter.
More than a hundred years later, we find ourselves using Generative Artificial Intelligence to write at work, home, and school; filtering our diverse, nuanced, and individual ideas through many of the same programs. Have you considered how this influences what you read and write? Will this ultimately influence how we talk?
Growing Repetition & Diminished Quality.
Scientific American reports that words preferred by ChatGPT, such as delve, realm, and meticulous, are becoming more common in everyday conversations. This should be no surprise: millions of people turn to the same AI tools in order to perfectly convey their thoughts. When everyone asks AI to “make this better,” it will attempt grammar accuracy from the knowledge it is fed, not an actual human experience that is felt. AI tools are programmed with what scientists call “machine learning,” and can only attempt to imitate emotional nuance.
Which brings us neatly back to Strunk and White.
This week, the literary magazine Granta published Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” as a Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize finalist. Despite its praise from Granta’s judges for “precise yet richly evocative” language, readers noticed some odd metaphors bearing the hallmarks of AI:
“The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.”
“She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.”
Online debates regarding the ethics of author usage of AI ensued. The publication LitHub wrapped its coverage of the news encouraging readers to browse other stories for potential AI.
This controversy took place just a few days after Hachette had canceled its US launch plans for author Mia Ballard’s novel “Shy Girl.” Max Spero, CEO of AI detection software Pangram, examined the novel and concluded with high confidence that the book was “largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted.”
The flood of AI-enabled writing is already here. As the volume of LLM created works continues to grow it may become harder for new human voices to be discovered. This doesn’t just affect the authors, publishing houses, and every day people leaning on AI to communicate with confidence.
This is also our new challenge as strategists.
We constantly adapt to help our clients challenge their old ways with the new. But as we evolve ourselves, we must consider how to embrace AI as an assistant while keeping our voice as authors.
If AI Summaries Don’t Mention You, Will Your Audience?
While search was once a journey, AI summaries are becoming the destination.
For years, brands optimized to earn the clicks, but now users increasingly trust AI generated summaries without continuing onto a website. BCG reports that shopping-related AI summary use grew 35% from February 2025 to November 2025. According to BCG, consumers feel AI summaries are more personalized, transparent, and objective. Meanwhile, Bain & Company finds that 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results for at least 40% of their searches.
This type of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is driving brands to become visible inside AI-generated answers.
This is a major shift in discoverability as AI summaries may cause traditional organic traffic to decline. A user may see the AI summary’s answer and conveniently take it at face value without continuing to do more research. This forces our brands to ensure the information provided is also accurate and aligned with our messaging goals.
You Can’t Spell Authority without AI.
AI summaries are shaped by a stack of signals with high authority.
Owned content is the foundation: websites, blogs, FAQs, product pages, and structured content.
Earned media adds validation through press, third-party articles, and reviews.
Community confirms how the brand is discussed: how people talk about your brand across Reddit, forums, YouTube videos, social media, and creator content.
Consistency is also key: when the same brand story appears clearly and multiple times across multiple sources, AI has builds more confidence on what the brand is known for.
This is our new interesting challenge and brand strategists: not just publishing our own claims, but ensuring their is enough proof online for an AI summary to identify, trust, and recommend. To move from self-definitions to external validations. A brand can no longer rely only on what it says about itself. It needs credible validations through mentions and conversations.
The brands that will win in this new discoverability moment will be clear, consistent, and validated by culture. Which brings us to our own question we can ask ourselves:
So who will appear and disappear in AI summaries?
Vertical Dramas Are Rewriting the Rules of Online Video
It was during a particularly humid summer day that I watched my very first Vertical Drama.
Vertical Dramas are short - 1 to 3 minutes long - episodic shows recorded and edited vertically for smartphones. Their popularity is so immense that it is capturing viewership from major streaming platforms, whose own vertical dramas are in development to align with this trend. Even the Latino community, known for its popular “Novelas,” just released its first “Micro-Novela” in this format. They are often watched within apps like ReelShort and Sereal+. To get a better sense of how popular these Vertical Dramas are, just take a look at the market leader, ReelShort, which boasts roughly 70 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs). In general, Vertical Draa viewers spend an average daily engagement time of 95 minutes.
There is an international appeal to vertical dramas: this format began in China, where studios first produced short form C-dramas, mainly in the genre of romantasy to appeal to a young, female audience. Today, many of these popular series are produced in Canada, and are now becoming most popular in the US. In the first quarter of 2025, the United States became the primary driver of the vertical drama industry, capturing 49% of global revenue: nearly $350M in a single quarter. These may be fantasy stories but they drive real revenue. Some charge per episode with constant cliffhangers to keep you interested, while others solely charge for the final episode to finally reveal how the story you watched will end.
This makes for an interesting contrast with the pay model of streaming platforms. Unlike Netflix or Disney+, these platforms do not primarily rely on a flat monthly subscription.
For example, viewership of Vertical Dramas largely relies on a “Coin” Model This main revenue driver (60% of income) lets users watch 8–10 episodes for free, then pay for individual subsequent episodes which are roughly 90 seconds long.
So beyond their international and drama driven appeal, what is making these stories so popular? Well, along with their alignment to the ever growing romantasy genre - we all know Heated Rivalry by now! - this type of storytelling is also known for resolving the decision fatigue presented by streaming platforms.
Key Takeaway
Today’s fractured media landscape also fractures our attention: Gen Z adults toggle between 6 platforms on average daily, each with its own rhythm and rules. But the growth of vertical dramas shows that audiences want stories that build over time to escape our world of short clips that do not build towards a message.
That is where I can see a brand leader or strategist apply something useful. Vertical dramas build emotion over time, not just a moment, and this approach can be applied beyond just romance or fantasy. Take a sneaker brand for example: the brand could tell a story about belonging, identity, or shared purpose across multiple episodes. Viewers like you and me can watch how this individual person grows into the part of a collective in a few episodes.
Brand strategists with an eye on Vertical Dramas will start experimenting with this format, turning short pieces into a collective narrative. When this happens, Vertical Dramas will inspire both their clients and their viewers.
Blinding Colors: Visibility In the Age of Artificial Intelligence
An excerpt from Blinding Colors, a speculative short story blending analog and digital forms — from AI instructions to spoken-word transcripts — to explore the dominance of AI generated content and the human voices that go offline to be heard.
Your audience is emotionally underfed, yet dopamine-saturated.
Online audiences can correctly identify AI-generated content a mere 13% of the time, cementing a crisis of authenticity and misinformation online. The social media channels that once helped personas educate and inspire each other are now inundated by bots. Gone are the days of authentic human connections online: the touching music lyrics in an away message, bonding through baby photos, wanderlust from travel videos, and hoping for true love after “sliding in a DM.”
Your biggest challenge is rising above the overwhelming noise of overly polished AI-generated content.
The constant stream of mental stimulation is preventing them from actually feeling something real.
Because they crave real moments of connection with fellow personas, they have made the successful transition into offline forums, where they can exchange the facial expressions and physical touch available only through a real-life encounter. Your audience has been here before: having survived the isolation of a pandemic, they fully understand community is felt best through contact.