Everyone wants your attention, quite literally. While I’m skeptical of the stat often cited by AI that Americans “see an average of 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements daily,” whether it’s 4,000 or 400, that’s a lot of content being created, distributed, and consumed. Or is it?

Stop for a moment and think with me about the last ad you recall seeing. Don’t overthink it. It doesn’t matter where, when, or how you saw it. It could have been a television commercial, a sponsored social media post, a billboard, a podcast read, or an ad tucked into a website.

What do you actually remember about it? The brand? The product? The claim it made? Did you believe it? Did you do anything afterward?

Whether you thought of an example or didn’t, whether you answered yes or no, or perhaps some place in between is inconsequential. If you’ve played along with me and read this far, I’ve just demonstrated that marketing can, in fact, capture your attention.

Yes - the truth I am hitting you with on your coffee break is that you are…impressionable. And that isn’t even necessarily a bad thing.

(And by the way, if for some reason you read and didn’t play along…how dare you!)

The thing is, impressions help us build a coherent model of the world that gets us from point A to point B. At one point in human marketing history, that impression might have looked like a painted boot hanging outside a cobbler’s shop. A simple, visual signal telling passersby what was sold and where to find it.

Today, the signals are more sophisticated, more frequent, and far more difficult to separate from everything else competing to shape how we understand the world. Which brings us back to the titular question: “When everyone wants your attention, how do you decide who deserves your trust?”

Your approach to that question reveals something about your values. Who you listen to, what evidence you require, and which voices you dismiss all say something about how you understand expertise, authority, and truth.

Cognitive science teaches us that we rarely evaluate an idea from a blank slate. We filter new information through what we already believe, who we consider credible, what feels familiar, and what the people around us appear to trust.

Those filters are useful. Without them, we could hardly function. But they also mean our judgments are never as detached from our values as we might like to think.

If marketing can shape how people understand the world, then those of us who create it carry a real responsibility. Our work should do more than capture attention. It should respect the person giving it by being accessible, useful, and clear about what we are asking them to believe.

That is the standard we hope to bring to the RBGS Reporter. We will tell you what we are seeing and show you what informs our thinking, grounded in the real work we do on client accounts every day.

You may not agree with every conclusion. That’s okay. We just hope the thinking is worth your coffee break. Enjoy!

- Zacharias Wray

P.S. We’d like to hear from you! How do you determine what sources are worth listening to? What value drives that decision for you?

Send your answers to [email protected] to continue the conversation.

AI is quickly becoming a legitimate product-discovery channel. Semrush found that 65% of AI users have replaced at least some product-related Google searches with chatbots, while IAB says AI-answer optimization is now the top area of increased focus for advertisers. Businesses now need to think beyond traditional SEO and consider how AI systems understand and recommend them.

Sources: Semrush, IAB, Microsoft Advertising

Creator partnerships and social advertising continue to gain ground as audiences fragment across platforms. IAB increased its 2026 social-media ad growth forecast to 16.5%, while creator and influencer partnerships ranked among marketers' biggest areas of increased focus. Social content is increasingly becoming part of the core customer-acquisition strategy, not a side experiment.

Sources: IAB, Digiday, Marketing Dive

The conversation around AI in marketing is shifting. IAB found that advertiser focus on using generative AI inside campaigns declined from 78% in January to 69% in September, while optimizing for AI-generated answers moved to the top of the priority list. The bigger opportunity may now be getting discovered through AI, not simply creating more content with it.

Sources: IAB, MediaPost

Linear TV continues to lose ground as advertising dollars move toward digital channels. IAB projects linear TV spending to decline 1.5% in 2026, while social media, connected TV and commerce media are all expected to post double-digit growth. The broader shift toward digital and connected audiences continues.

Source: IAB

A client’s website flashed the three words no business owner wants to see:

Critical. Website. Error.

The obvious suspect? A plugin behaving badly.

The actual culprit? Something much sneakier.

After digging into the back end, we discovered that someone had exploited a vulnerable plugin and planted a malicious script on the site. The script could show visitors a convincing (but completely fake) error message telling them to download an “update.” Click it, and they could end up downloading a virus instead.

And this unwanted guest didn’t leave quietly. Deleting the code only made it disappear temporarily - it kept coming back until we found and fixed the vulnerability that was letting it in.

Once we tracked down the source, we removed the malicious code, closed the security gap, and got the website back to doing its actual job (without trying to trick anyone into downloading malware). A win for RBGS and our client!

The takeaway: Keep your website platform, plugins, and themes updated. Never trust an unexpected download prompt. And if the same error keeps returning, don’t keep playing digital whack-a-mole - there may be a deeper issue hiding behind it.

Want the quick version of how it all went down?

We spotted this question floating around online, and the answers were…divided.

Some people said, “Save your money and build it yourself!”

Others basically said, “Step away from the website builder before someone gets hurt.”

So, who’s right?

Honestly? Both of them.

If you need a simple online home with your services, contact information, and a few good photos, a DIY website may be all you need. There’s no shame in starting small - especially when your business is still finding its feet.

But if your website needs to attract new customers, appear in search results, process payments, connect with other systems, or convince visitors to choose you over a competitor, you’re no longer building a digital business card. You’re building a business tool.

That’s where professional strategy makes a difference.

A website can look beautiful and still load slowly, confuse visitors, disappear on Google, or send every potential customer searching for the back button. Pretty matters - but whether the website actually does its job matters more.

The short answer: You don’t need to hire someone simply because websites are “too complicated.” Hire someone when the result needs to accomplish more than you can confidently build, test, and maintain yourself.

Have a website or marketing question you’ve been quietly Googling at 11 p.m.? Send it our way - it may appear in the next edition.

If you’re not sure what to work on in your marketing this week, start by getting clearer on your target audience.

Write down who you most want to reach, what they need, where they look for solutions, when they are most likely to buy, why they would choose you, and how you can best reach them.

You do not need a complicated persona or a 20-page strategy document. Even a simple one-page answer to those six questions can help you sharpen your website copy, create more relevant content, spend advertising dollars more intentionally, and make better marketing decisions overall.

This is just one of the 52 marketing ideas we’re sharing for 2026, with one practical action small business owners can take each week of the year.