In her latest column, Jessica Treasure of Bountiful Cow looks at why, even in an AI world, the fastest way to be known at scale is still fame…

‘I think we should go with Skoda’, my husband told me after researching a new car, ‘why?’ ‘because it keeps coming up well on ChatGPT’.

We may not be far away from a world where humans trust advice and recommendations from algorithms, over other humans. Research from Felipe Tomaz has demonstrated that word of mouth’s power is waning, from a 50% chance to shift the average consumer 2018-20, to a 35% chance across 2021-24. Meanwhile, KPMG’s 2025 global research found that 66% of people rely on AI without evaluating accuracy.

But what is feeding those recommendations? In an answer first world, the brands that show up are the brands AI already “knows”. And the fastest way to be known at scale is still fame.

As a planner and strategist this creates an interesting idea, not only do we need to create brand fame to the consumer, but also the AI bots.

Which creates an opportunity, which at Bountiful Cow we call Relative Advantage, as most brands are tackling the problem tactically with GEO, content fixes, prompt audits. Not recognising that discovery is moving upstream, fame is therefore not a legacy strategy but a critical lever to fuel all stages of the marketing funnel.

So, what’s changed, and why does that matter? Discovery is no longer searching and choosing between links, it’s being presented with the answer. AI doesn’t ask, ‘who deserves to be surfaced?’ it asks ‘who is already well-known enough to be safe to recommend?’ and then presents the answer after crawling and synthesising content from multiple sources. Weighting importance on frequency, consistency, familiarity and talkability. All outputs of fame driving marketing, not performance media tactics.

This matters particularly to media planners, as it moves the industry away from the short-term drug of prioritising and optimising conversion driving activity. A drug that effectiveness gurus such as Binet and Field have been lamenting for years. Proposing that both brand and business effectiveness vastly improve when you think long term, backing emotional fame driving communications over short term conversion driving comms.

An argument hard to hear for many brands, particularly those with tight budgets and sharp growth targets. However, it is now an argument with short term consequences, CFOs don’t have to wait for months for an MMM to tell them ‘brand advertising’ works, they will just need to ask ChatGPT (or any LLM) to find out if their brand shows up at all.

Fame no longer becomes a vanity move, the fluffy bit of the plan easily cut, it becomes the backbone of success creating value in the long and short term...

Don’t get me wrong I’m not anti-performance, AI just doesn’t reward over reliance on its tactics.

Performance activity is built to win declared intent, a search, a click, it is reactive by design. AI is increasingly proactive, filtering suggested brands, creating comparisons, narrowing the options before the user evaluates them.

There is also a measurement blind spot. Performance tactics are measured locally within platform, such as click through rates, CPAs etc., tying the results to one context at one moment in time. But AI systems don’t learn from isolated signals. They respond to patterns built across time and across environments.

Which is where its role becomes clear in the media planner’s world. Performance is great at providing the answers that have already been asked, fame determines whether a brand is named when the question is formed.

Fame no longer becomes a vanity move, the fluffy bit of the plan easily cut, it becomes the backbone of success creating value in the long and short term. Whilst brands catch up with this idea, it creates a Relative Advantage opportunity to exploit the competition’s over reliance on lower-funnel activity, AI ‘hacks’ and prompt optimisation.

So, in a world where more and more of the answers are automated, preference doesn’t always come from being efficient. It comes from being known. Building fame to make your brand unavoidable wherever the humans and bots go becomes the north star. As the brands AI will favour tomorrow are the ones planners (and marketeers!) are brave enough to back today.