Mackerel Media’s Search, Media and Digital Marketing Roundup – March 2026
There have been a number of updates across the digital space in March, with recent changes to how users discover content and shop online. From Google’s latest spam update and new Search Console insights, to new AI features in Maps, Shopify and Bing Reporting, here’s a look at some of the important developments over the last month.
SpamBrain’s Spring Clean
Google rolled out its March 2026 Spam update. This routine update focuses on improving Google’s own spam detection systems such as SpamBrain, their AI-based spam-prevention system. While specific details on what was targeted have not been disclosed, the update is designed to better detect and prevent new types of spam content and should only impact sites using manipulative practices such as low-quality AI content, mass building poor backlinks and keyword stuffing. Whilst a sudden ranking or traffic change is unlikely due to this update, we here at Mackerel Media can help monitor your site performance and ensure your site remains compliant with Google’s spam policies. Please contact us if you would like assistance with this.
Google has announced that their branded queries search filter is now available on all websites via Google Search Console. This update, which has been slowly rolled out since November, allows you to see both branded and non-branded search queries which are driving traffic to your site. This filter also includes misspellings and branded phrases entered in other languages. Being able to filter by branded and non-branded search terms will help give clearer insight into overall brand awareness compared to new customer reach, which can help with optimising search campaigns, content strategy and future keyword targeting.
Your New AI Travel Buddy!
Google Maps has started introducing Ask Maps, a new AI-powered interface which allows users to prompt Google about local businesses, recommendations and to help make travel plans. This enhancement allows users to ask questions such as ‘Where is the best coffee shop around here?’ and receive AI-generated responses such as the nearest recommendations, AI overviews of each location, venue highlights and menus, reviews, website and social media previews and directions all within a single chat window. This feature shows the importance of having a strong local Google Business profile listing, as well as ensuring that all your website content and social media content is kept up to date to appeal to future customers.
Google has updated its Google Merchant Center requirements, and is now tightening the rules around how out-of-stock products are displayed on ecommerce sites listed within Google Shopping. This update means that buy buttons for out-of-stock items can no longer be hidden, and instead must be visibly disabled and greyed out along with clear availability messaging such as ‘in stock’, ‘out of stock’, ‘pre-order’ or ‘back order’. This change is because previously it was possible to show out-of-stock products on Google shopping by leaving the purchase button as active, however this approach is no longer allowed. Online merchants must now make sure that their product feed and on-page product information is updated and consistent, else their products could be disapproved and lose visibility.
Bing Gets Nosey
Microsoft has updated their AI performance report within Bing Webmaster Tools, by now reporting on which AI queries are leading to your pages being shown on AI overviews. This new feature includes query to page mapping, which allows users to click on a query to see which pages were cited, or view a page to see which AI queries are leading to that page being suggested. This update puts Microsoft ahead of Google when it comes to AI citation reporting, and helps to provide clearer insight in the effectiveness of content whilst providing future opportunities for optimising content for related AI-based search terms.
Radio’s Still Running the Show
A packed house at Radiocentre’s Tuning In Scotland event in Edinburgh highlighted just how powerful audio continues to be for advertisers, with commercial radio now accounting for 55% of all UK listening and an even stronger 63% share in Scotland (vs. 35% for the BBC). From driving measurable web traffic in an increasingly AI-disrupted search landscape to building trust through authentic, culturally relevant moments, the event reinforced audio’s ability to deliver both scale and performance – making it a channel marketers can’t afford to overlook.
Mackerel Media’s Search, Media and Digital Marketing Roundup – January 2026
As the new year begins, there have already been several major updates across Radio, Search, Social and AI-platforms.. Here’s a look at the latest stories from January:
AI Overviews, Now With an Off Switch
Google is exploring new controls that would let website owners opt out of having their content used in AI search features such as AI Overviews. This move is in response to requirements from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which wants publishers to have greater choice and transparency over how their content is used in generative AI features. Google has said that while these controls are being considered and no timeline has been confirmed for when they may be introduced. These new controls will hopefully give many website owners and publishers greater control over how Google uses their own in their own search features.
Google has announced their Universal Commerce Protocol, which allows users to make purchases directly within Google’s own search and AI Overviews, without needing to visit an ecommerce store’s website. Developed with partners including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, UCP allows users to now discover, compare and purchase products without leaving Google, creating a large change from how users go from finding products to buying them.
Google Demand Gen: Fewer Clicks, More Shopping
Google has also made some new updates to their Demand Gen ad campaigns, including more shoppable features and improved measurement across YouTube and Google placements. Shoppable ads on connected TVs are now available which allows users to browse and buy directly from YouTube ads.
ChatGPT Eyes the Ads Business
OpenAI has announced that it will soon begin testing ads within ChatGPT. Ads will appear at the bottom of chat responses on both the free and Go plan, but not on Pro, Business, Enterprise or under 18 users. OpenAI has confirmed that ads will only show if they are relevant to the user’s query, and that ads will not influence the responses given to users. This will initially be trialled in the US. This new potential ad placement gives brands and advertisers the opportunity to reach users at the exact moment they are actively asking questions and exploring decisions.
Another Feed, Another Ad Placement
Meta will begin rolling out ads on Threads to users worldwide from February. Threads, which launched in 2023 as a competitor to X, now has over 400 million monthly active users. This new update means that advertisers can run Threads ads through existing Meta campaigns, with placements managed alongside Facebook and Instagram activity. This new choice of ad placements gives brands another opportunity to reach users as Threads continues to grow.
Reddit has launched a new automated ad option called Max campaigns, designed to simplify setup and improve performance for traffic and conversion objectives. Max campaigns automate audience targeting, creative placement and budget allocation, using Reddit’s community signals to optimise delivery in real time. Currently available in beta, early reports have shown lower costs and higher conversions compared to standard campaign setups.
Global: Where the UK Tunes In
Global continues to dominate the UK radio market, with multiple brands delivering record-breaking audiences according to RAJAR Q4 2025 figures. Heart remains the UK’s biggest radio brand with 12.7 million weekly listeners, followed by Capital as the number one hit music station with 9.2 million. Smooth, Classic FM, LBC, Radio X, Capital XTRA and Gold Radio all reported strong and growing audiences, reinforcing Global’s position as the UK’s largest commercial radio group. Senior leadership highlighted sustained audience growth, increased listening hours and the continued strength of live radio in an increasingly competitive and fragmented audio landscape.
Mackerel Media’s Search, Media and Digital Marketing Roundup – December 2025
As 2025 comes to a close and planning for the year ahead begins, here’s a look at the main updates across digital search, social and ecommerce from December, and what they mean for the new year.
This December Google rolled out their December 2025 Core Update, which ran from the 11th of December to the 29th. This latest update is designed to discover and suggest relevant, satisfying content to users across all sites, rather than targeting specific penalties. As with previous core updates, there may be some shifts in search position and visibility. Mackerel Media can assist with reviewing your website’s performance and how we can help improve your organic visibility going into 2026. Please contact us if you have any questions.
2025: The Year We Asked Google Everything
Google released their Year in Search 2025, which reveals the top trending results for actors, movies, games, recipes and travel destinations throughout 2025. The top search globally was Google’s own ‘Gemini’, followed closely by ‘India vs England’. In the UK ’28 Years Later’ was the most searched for movie, and ‘Adolescence’ was the most searched for TV show. ‘Oasis’ and ‘Cat Burns’ were the top male and female music artists searched for, and the most popular ’What is’ search was ‘When is Easter’ The way people searched also changed, with more users asking questions in conversational ways, with phrases such as ‘How do I…’” reaching record levels.
Google has updated their Merchant Center Product Studio with new creative tools which means you can now animate and improve product images within their interface. Static product photos can be turned into short animated clips, distracting backgrounds can be removed, and you can improve the overall quality of images, all without leaving Merchant Center. These tools are designed to speed up the creative process, especially for shopping ads and social content, making it easier to test which images get the most attention.
Local Intent, Now With Pinpoint Accuracy
Google has also expanded their channel controls within Demand Gen PPC campaigns by adding a Google Maps placement. This means that advertisers can now show their ads within Google Maps alongside other channels like YouTube, Discover and Gmail. Alternatively, dedicated Maps-only campaigns can now be set up for local targeting. This update provides great control over Map placements, making it easier to target users during local searches.
LinkedIn has introduced a new suite of ad tools to help build brand awareness for B2B advertising. These ad tools include a reserved top-of-feed ad placement for guaranteed visibility and personalised creative based on user profile data (such as a user’s job title, company or industry) to make ads feel more relevant to each individual. LinkedIn has also added AI-powered ad variants which can help with ad split testing and campaign optimisation. These tools will help brands target the right professionals earlier in the buying journey with less manual work.
Instagram Takes Its Best Guess At You
Instagram has released a new feature called Your Algorithm, which shows users the topics that Instagram thinks that a user is interested in based on their previous activity. Users can now adjust their interests to see more or less of certain content, add their own and even share their algorithm snapshot to their Stories. This update aims to increase transparency and help users see more relevant content while avoiding unwanted recommendations. For brands, this means that you should focus on clear, topic-specific content which best aligns with user preferences to improve organic reach. This feature is being introduced in America and will expand globally in English in 2026.
Turning “Skip Ads” Into “Let’s Chat”
Finally, YouTube is updating Shorts ads so that advertisers can turn on comments for eligible ads. The aim is that now ads will start to feel more like organic Shorts and encourage engagement with users. Short ads can now include a link directly to your website, helping to make it easier for viewers to continue their journey to using your services and perform better, especially during busy shopping periods.
Why Growth Can Hit a Ceiling, and how fuelling future demand unlocks the next phase of growth
It’s our fault. As an industry, we’ve built a trap… and many businesses are now stuck inside it.
We’ve moved from an era where data was scarce and difficult to access, to one where we’re completely overwhelmed by it. Measurement was rightly designed to make marketing more accountable and effective. Instead, in the pursuit of certainty, it has quietly narrowed how growth is defined and potentially limited how far businesses can scale.
What started as optimisation has become the sole focus.
The Performance Paradox
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a recurring trend: clients across the board, but especially in finance, attempting to tie every single penny back to direct conversion. I’ve even been asked to forecast a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for OOH and sponsorships.
When ROI dips or conversions slow down, the instinct is to double down on bottom-of-the-funnel activity. On paper, this feels logical. In reality, it often creates a “Performance Growth Ceiling.”
Instead of unlocking scale, businesses begin to see:
- Rapidly increasing CPAs as the immediately available market is exhausted
- Lower-quality or irrelevant traffic being forced through the funnel
- Declining ROI – the exact opposite of the original goal!
The 95:5 Rule
To break through this ceiling, we have to distinguish between Current Demand and Future Demand.
Current Demand (5%): These are the people actively researching or ready to buy right now.
Future Demand (95%): These are the people who aren’t in the market today but will be in months or years.
Brand activity isn’t just about awareness or other metrics, it’s about fuelling future demand. This means building familiarity and mental availability long before a buying decision is triggered. This simplified way to reframe brand activity highlights to key stakeholders why the long-term matters.
Especially in B2B or high-consideration sectors, 95% of your target market is currently “out-of-market.” They are living their lives, not searching for your category, and therefore not thinking about your competitors.
Moving Beyond the “Race to the Bottom”
If you solely increase performance budgets, you are fighting a war over that 5% sliver of the pie. Without building mental availability (the likelihood of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation) you are entering a race to the bottom against every competitor chasing the same leads and effectively increasing the cost to win on your own brand terms in bottom of the funnel channels.
It’s important to note that brand activity can still deliver short-term wins, however its real power lies in priming the 95%. By the time those customers move into the 5%, you should already have mental real estate.
If you only harvest what’s ripe today, you eventually starve. Growth strategies should be treated like ecosystems, not extraction tools.
True growth isn’t found by just squeezing the last drop out of the 5% who are ready to buy; it’s found by nurturing and winning amongst the 95% who haven’t even started looking yet.
If this is done right, you can fund the future and watch the ceiling disappear.
Top of mind doesn’t mean top of consideration. Here’s why that matters for regulated brands.
We all want to feel good about making decisions, and we all want to feel we’ve made good decisions. Agreed?
So, why do prospects end up making decisions that seem utterly baffling to you, but good to them?
Picture the scene….Your brand awareness surveys are reporting your best ever results. Prospects know your name and what you stand for. You’ve engaged with them well and delivered a brilliant solution to their challenge. You believe you’ve done everything right.
But, in that crucial decision-making moment, despite all your hard work, and after doing all their research, and after engaging deeply with your brand, the prospect chooses….someone else.
What the….?!
Whether you’re a growing challenger bank, a specialist investment manager, a large law firm, or a fintech with a stunningly innovative proposition, it can (and will) happen to you. The prospect reverts to the familiar, to the brand you thought you were doing so much better than. You might start to wonder whether brand awareness is actually a vanity metric.
This is the Salience Gap.
It’s the empty void between “I’ve heard of you” and “You are the only one I trust to solve this.” And in regulated sectors, where trust and authority are often the entire currency, this gap isn’t just a marketing problem, it’s a fundamental business risk.
The Myth: Awareness = Salience
Brand Marketing 101 refresher: Awareness and Salience are not the same thing.
Awareness is passive. It’s a shallow, rational fact. “Yes, I know that firm’s name.”
Salience is active. It’s a deep, emotional shortcut. “When I think ‘secure place to earn interest on my company’s spare cash’ I think of them. I trust them.”
Awareness gets you on the longlist. Salience gets you on the shortlist, or better, the list with only one name: your own.
The challenge is that many marketing strategies assume that piling up short-term, rational awareness-driving activities will, over time, add up to long-term salience.
This is a myth.
The research is unambiguous: long-term brand effects are generated in a very different way from short-term ones. You cannot simply accumulate a series of short-term clicks, leads, or “persuasion” messages and expect to build a powerful, salient brand.
How does the salience gap open up?
As with many marketing challenges, there is never a single event that cracks open the salience gap. Rather it develops over time, and is often influenced by one of three things:
- Market Drift: The market’s needs and expectations have quietly shifted, but your positioning and media presence haven’t. You’re still showing up where your customers were, not where they are, in the broadest possible sense.
- Accidental Inaction: You’ve been successful. But, you’ve taken your foot off the brand-building pedal to focus on other priorities. Meanwhile, your competitors have been strategically building their salience.
- Strategic Misalignment: The business has been – or has become – focused on short-term, rational, performance-based marketing. You’ve become excellent at capturing immediate demand but have accidentally stopped building the brand that creates and protectsfuture demand. When marketing focus drifts to immediate ROI, losing track of salience is all too-easily easily done.
Why regulated brands are most at risk
To help understand the salience risk for regulated brands, it’s helpful to consider a broad and simplified model of the foundational factors that go into decision making.
Firstly, the specific proposition on offer has to align perfectly with the prospects immediate needs and situation at the time. We’ll call this the ‘rational’ justification.
Secondly the prospect has to trust the brand, believe it understands them and their deeper needs, and feel the brand is highly relevant to their position and situation. We’ll call this the ‘emotional’ justification.
Of course there are a myriad other micro-complexities that go into decision-making. That said, very often they come back to one of the two justifications. “I didn’t like their sales presentation” could well be a trust or understanding (aka an emotional) issue, as could “their interest rates are market-leading but there’s just something about them that puts me off.”
In a regulated situation, where compliance is key, it’s very easy to be drawn into rational justifications – rates, features and facts – when trying to persuade a prospect. We need to go far further than that, and behave far more strategically, building up trust over time through carefully considered brand marketing.
This is why long-term brand-building, built on careful emotional underpinning, is so powerful. It doesn’t just make people aware of you; it makes them feel good about you, and makes them trust you, building cognitive ease when the decision-making moment comes. This emotional connection is what makes you the first, and perhaps only, choice when a need arises.
Brand-building isn’t vanity – it’s your most valuable commercial asset
Research carried out by Les Binet and Peter Field for the IPA (See ‘The Long and the Short of It‘) , is clear: brand-building is the primary driver of long-term profit.
How? By reducing price sensitivity.
In regulated sectors, this is the ultimate goal. It’s the difference between competing on price (hello inevitable race to the bottom) and competing on authority in a race you can own. A salient brand can command a premium because it has already done the hard work of building trust.
This is where we can move from an unquantified “brand strategy” to hard media investment numbers. As readers familiar with Messrs Binet and Field will know, their data shows the optimal, most efficient, and most profitable media budget split for a business is, on average, around 60% brand-building and 40% activation.
Many B2B brands might be surprised to find they are sitting at 10% / 90% respectively, or even 0% / 100%, if performance channels are dominant. This is the very definition of strategic misalignment, and the clock is ticking for your brand’s salience. Aside – now is the time to ask your team what your split looks like!
How do we close the gap?
From our perspective, closing the salience gap isn’t necessarily about spending more. Rather, it’s about spending more wisely via a unified media and measurement strategy.
We focus on several core questions when we tackle the challenge:
- Where in the media world does our audience live, work and play? We need to understand where our audience spends their time, and we need to understand the channels, publications and brands they interact with, consume information from, subscribe to and value. Understanding their work and personal habits allows us to understand the full media landscape through which we can reach them.
- Where in the media world are we currently showing up, and how? We need to understand how well our current media strategy supports our brand. Are we (as we’ve discussed above) stuck in a rational loop, allocating our media investment to features and benefits? Are performance metrics revered above all, and are we consequently missing out on emotional connections? Or – are we doing some work in the emotional space, building some of the underpinning trust we need, but need to go further to achieve the necessary breakthrough?
- Which media platforms will deliver the positioning, authority and alignment we need vs those that won’t, or which no longer give us what we need? In the regulated sector, trust needs to be front and centre in any media plan. For example, TV and OOH offer enormous reach and are proven trust-builders, and present myriad options for reaching audiences. We need to think about positioning and authority – which publications and platforms can we stand on the shoulders of, in order to reach and connect with our audiences? A classic approach of less is more, particularly in a highly digitised, programmatic world, might be the best way to build enduring, emotional relationships with the profitable customers of the future. Above all, this approach needs to be unified, so that brand and performance media are seamlessly integrated and interlinked.
- What are all the measurements we can take to ascertain the reach and relevance of the brand? To be truly effective in driving brand salience and long-term benefit, we need to go beyond standard metrics like Click-Through Rate, Time-on-Site and so on. We need to look at all of the short and medium-term indicators of long-term performance. In other words, we need to measure all the ways in which your audiences interact with, receive, seek out and explore your brand, so we can build a unified understanding of the impact of your media investment and where we should direct our attention and emphasis. We also need to explore commercial metrics – enquiries and leads generated, quality of leads generated, conversion rate of leads to business, and revenue generated. These are – ultimately – the true measures of success.
In conclusion
Awareness is a vanity metric if it doesn’t come with salience. Being known is not the same as being chosen. In the high-stakes, high-trust regulated world, you cannot afford to be overlooked in the critical decision-making moment.
Salience must be earned, and it must be maintained with care, attention, and strategic investment. It is the single most powerful driver of sustainable, profitable growth.
If you are finding that your brand is top of mind but not top of consideration, that is the clearest sign of a Salience Gap. It’s time to reorient your media investment strategy so it is truly building your most valuable asset.
Our answer – Unified Media. We bring together brand, performance, measurement, data and teams to deliver a truly integrated approach. Everything connects to deliver awareness, salience and measurable growth.
