Why Entrepreneurial Brands Must Rethink How They Show Up in a Changing Media World

Media is changing faster than marketers can keep up with and for Entrepreneurial Brands, that creates both a competitive edge and a new set of risks.⚡

In this edition of The Specialist View, Lee Baring, our Managing Director, unpacks the three forces reshaping media effectiveness in 2026:

1. Increased fragmentation across channels, platforms and formats

2. AI which is rewiring how people discover, evaluate and act on information

3. A widening gap between impressions and real human attention – media is becoming more technically viewable but cognitively ignored

These shifts are breaking long‑established effectiveness models and forcing brands to rethink how they plan, buy and build memory. But they also create opportunities for Entrepreneurial Brands to outperform slower rivals.

Is media becoming less effective? 💥

For decades, the relationship between Share of Voice (SOV) and Share of Market (SOM) provided a reliable planning rule: outspend the market and growth would follow.

But that relationship was built on three assumptions:

- Audiences were concentrated in a limited number of channels

- Impressions broadly delivered comparable levels of attention

- Journeys from exposure to action were relatively stable

With the development of media channels and habits changing at an increasing velocity, those assumptions are becoming less and less accurate.

Today, fragmentation dilutes reach, impression quality varies wildly and AI increasingly mediates how people move through the funnel.

As a result, equal SOV no longer guarantees equal impact and ESOV becomes a blunter, less predictive tool.

Attention enables Entrepreneurial Brands to win

In a fragmented media world, making the impression count is paramount. Harnessing attention and understanding the differing attention various formats can deliver is a critical consideration, especially when trying to improve a brand’s efficiency from an ESOV perspective. 🚀

Numerous studies have proven that certain environments or factors, consistently deliver higher human attention:

Sound and vision cut through (especially big screen video) 📺

The trust equity the environment holds, e.g. newsbrands 📰 but also respected influencers.

Personalisation: addressable media or media that can actually be owned and held, e.g. Direct Mail ✉️.

What brings these three examples together goes beyond what a media metric can measure.

Attention is a deeper human quality, a consequence of the state of mind of the consumer. Sound and vision cut through because it becomes harder to avoid, personalisation instigates our natural instinct to engage when our name is said (the Cocktail Party effect).

AI is driving fragmentation in the established discovery pathway 🤖

AI, specifically LLMs, isn't changing where attention flows, but it is changing how value is created from attention once you have it.

Key changes happening right now:

Search behaviour: AI Overviews (AIOs) fragmenting a once established conversion pathway, limiting page size and redirecting for listings.

Content through the LLM Lens: LLMs and AIOs are presenting the content of sites that otherwise would have been visited by the consumer. This decreases the opportunity to connect and harming the potential for ad revenue.

For Entrepreneurial Brands, AI is providing new challenges which in turn has to re-focus comms objectives. Marketeers have two clear routes for a world with increasing influence governed by AI: you can either influence people or you can choose to feed machines.

The brands that win will be the ones who understand both and Entrepreneurial Brands have the agility to outmanoeuvre the market.

What Should Marketers Do?

Optimise for attention, not impressions: Lean into high-attention environments: AV, newsbrands, OOH, premium YouTube, and Mail. Your budget goes further when human attention is guaranteed.

Plan for mindset, not channel

- A TikTok view is not the same as a Facebook view

- A YouTube Premium creator is not the same as a YouTube mid-tier feed

- A newsbrand reader is not the same as a passive social scroller

Buy the context that supports how humans actually behave.

Prepare for AI-led journeys: Optimise your content for AI surfaces, not just search engines.

Feed the machine with:

- Structured product data

- High-quality content

- Strong brand assets and recognisable distinctive cues

Brands with clear, fluent, memorable assets will win in a fragmented world.

2026 isn’t just another year of change, it’s the continued structural shift in how media works: the evolution before our eyes. Fragmentation, AI disruption and attention scarcity will challenge brands who rely on old playbooks. But for Entrepreneurial Brands willing to adapt, it’s an opportunity to outperform the market. 🚀

At The Specialist Works, we help brands navigate this shift with clarity, creativity and media thinking built for how people actually behave in 2026.