• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, May 7, 2025

At a recent event, I listened to panelists discuss how they established partnerships across the ecosystem, unifying advertisers, their agencies, and publishers. One statement stopped me cold and caused me to think.  The panelist, who shall not be named because of respect for the rules of that room, said the Internet is all “scrolling, shopping and sharing -- that’s it.” 

Rarely have I heard something so simple and yet so all-encompassing and accurate.  I hope they planned that one as a nugget of wisdom and thought it through in advance.

The Internet is very much focused on scrolling, shopping and sharing. Our time has shifted to scrolling though social media videos, buying products, sharing videos and memes, or parcels of wisdom about our day. 

The Internet used to be about communication and knowledge-sharing. Search was the foundation of the web, but as social media has proliferated and as video has become the dominant format, those behaviors have changed forever. 

As consumer behaviors shift, so do advertisers’ strategies. This is what I have been focusing on the last few weeks in my columns. Because of “scrolling, shopping and sharing,” the media mix has changed. You are seeing budgets shift to video and social media, which is why influencers and creators are so important now.  They are the nexus of video and social media, and they have had a dramatic impact on the shopping patterns of the online consumer.

The first step for advertisers is to be reactive and shift their budgets.  The next logical step is to be slightly more proactive and think through their strategy going forward. It’s not enough to simply move budget to video and social. It’s not enough to incorporate more influencer marketing into the mix. You need to start thinking about the actual way those dollars are being spent, and how you break through the clutter in a meaningful way. 

Interruptive ads are fine, but you need more sponsorship.  You need to be integrated in new ways to increase engagement with your brand.  Influencers and sponsored posts are but one piece of that strategy.  The best brands are looking to more innovative models like content marketing, native advertising, experiential and more.  These are ways that break through and create cumulative value more quickly than simply inundating the audience with frequency. 

Inundation and higher frequency is detrimental to your brand.  The message gets tired.  You need to be smarter and find ways for your dollars to work harder, without being forced to simply spend more money to overcome the numb-ification of the audience. 

In a world that can be so simply summarized as “scrolling, shopping and sharing,” you need a strategy that can be as simple, and align with the behaviors implied by that statement.  To do that, you need to be proactive and find those new tactics, not just reallocate your budget and hope.  After all, as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy.