• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

There's a lot to unpack in a new consumer research study released by Omnicom Media this morning, especially how it defines "people" vs. things that are, well, not people.

The study, dubbed "The Future of Brand Influence," is based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults in October 2025 utilizing Omnicom Media's proprietary consumer opt-in panel, and it was authored by "Omnicom Media Intelligence," which seems like a new sub-brand to me, but internal branding has been shifting lately inside Omnicom's media enterprises lately, so I'm not exactly sure.

Not to digress from the study's findings, but the official press release blurs Omnicom's new branding even further, calling "Omnicom Media" a "Connected Capability." I hope to learn more about that positioning another time, but let's get to the gist of the just-released study's findings.

First off, it is comforting to see that it also supports a long legacy of communications planning studies showing people -- not advertising -- are the single most influential factor influencing other people.

Indeed, Omnicom's new study follows WPP Media's October 2025 study "How Humans Decide," which also found that good old human word-of-mouth remains the No. 1 factor influencing human consumer brand decisions, even in these earliest of AI influencer/agent-to-agent marketing innings.

You may recall that I ended that column teasing the question of how long humans will remain the No. factor influencing other humans, and that we should all be awaiting some forthcoming WPP Media study, "How Agents Decide?"

Well, it looks like Omnicom Media was trying to get at that in its new report, but I have to say even I am surprised by the blurry way it categorizes the new Big 3 consumer influencers: people, AI and, well, "influencers."

The categorization raises so many questions -- including whether Omnicom Media now considers influencers something other than people, or even AI -- but some new alternatives, or possibly a hybrid category.

Hybrid makes sense to me, because AI agents already have emerged as what we might conventionally think of as social media "influencers," albeit synthetic ones. But I'm thinking Omnicom Media might mean something else here, like, "influencers" vs. ordinary people. Or a hybrid of human and AI influencers vs. ordinary people.

Historically, communications planning studies have found that while "people" are the No. 1 source of influence for other people, some people have more influence than others -- especially friends and family, and professional advisors like doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.

Personally, I think we're in a flux phase of redefining all of the above -- both people, AI and "influencers" -- \and that these definitions will have to be redefined yet again very soon, with even more blurring of the lines, because the spheres of influence will happen across a spectrum including more man/machine interaction -- and delegation -- at various stages of the process. If you want to get a glint of my thinking on that, go back and read (or re-read) my November 2025 column ("From H2H To A2A: A New Marketing Framework"), which at least tries to delineate how that branching might work along the spectrum.

That said, I have no idea how or what the Omnicom Media Intelligence team was thinking when they put this report to bed, so I asked NotebookLM to mindmap it for me. You can see that at bottom, but it's an overall analysis of the 33-page report. So I prompted it to see if it could draw a mindmap just focusing on the logic of grouping top influencers along a spectrum of influencers, AI and people, and while it could not quite do that graphically, it did offer this suggestion for how to visualize it in your own head:

"To visualize this, think of consumer influence as a multi-microphone stage: while brands used to have the only megaphone, they are now just one voice in a 'loud choir' where the audience (People), the digital assistants (AI), and the featured soloists (Influencers) often hold the best-tuned microphones."