By Matt Wurst, Genuin CMO

Statistically, just about every company in history has disappeared. Sure, there are legacy brands that still matter, but in the grand scheme of history, they’re few and far between.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career working with, or at, brands that figured out how to last. Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods. NBCUniversal, the NBA, HBO. H&R Block and Nestle. And on the other side of the spectrum, cultural phenoms that went from niche to global in what felt like a weekend. UGG. Ben & Jerry’s. Different categories, different eras… a few shared themes.

So what separates the ones that last from the vast majority that don’t?

Relevance.

Not awareness. Not reach. Not the size of the media plan. Relevance is what decides whether your brand gets picked tomorrow. And in a moment where AI agents, generative interfaces, and fragmented attention are rewriting how people discover and choose brands, relevance isn’t something you build once and ride. You have to keep earning it, in context, across every surface a customer touches.

Relevance Is Earned Across Surfaces, Not Inside Campaigns

Most relevance problems look like creative problems. They aren’t. They’re organizational, and they’re environmental.

Organizational, because the teams that build relevance rarely work together as one. Marketing operates separately from product. Performance runs on different creative standards than brand. AI gets treated as a distribution channel instead of a brand surface. Each silo’s defensible on its own. Together, they kill relevance.

Environmental, because most of the surfaces, environments, and platforms brands depend on aren’t theirs. Centralized social and AI apps decide what your brand looks like, who sees it, and what gets monetized on top of it. You can’t earn trust in environments you don’t control. And you can’t stay relevant in environments that aren’t trusted.

Three places this is breaking right now:

1. Brands are renting their audiences

The community-building playbook of the last decade has not aged well. Time and budget poured into platforms that own the relationship, set the rules, change the algorithm, and keep the data. The ROI is murky on a good day and negative on most. Brands invested in audiences they were never going to own, and now find themselves paying twice… once to build the community, and again to reach it.

You don’t earn relevance on rented land. You rent attention there, briefly, at someone else’s price.

2. Ad experiences are broken

Walk through almost any open-web property today. Page-load cluttered with low-quality ad units. Auto-play video stacked next to interruption overlays. Misaligned creative chasing the cheapest impression. Publishers flood pages to hit revenue goals, trading tomorrow’s audience for today’s CPMs.

The math works for one quarter. It doesn’t work for the brand on either side of the transaction. The advertiser’s message lands in an environment that degrades it. The publisher’s audience learns to ignore, block, or leave. Relevance dies in that experience long before the click.

3. Trust is collapsing

Consumers are losing confidence in what they see online. AI-generated content they can’t verify. Recommendations they can’t trace. Endorsements they can’t trust. The reaction isn’t loud, it’s quiet. They stop clicking. They stop buying. They silently churn from brands they don’t believe will change. By the time it shows up in the data, the relationship is already gone.

Trust is collapsing in the platforms, and in the brands that show up there badly. Become irrelevant and you don’t just lose attention. You lose belief. And belief is the part you can’t buy back.

How Genuin Ties It All Together

Genuin is built to take all three of those problems off the table. Plug-and-play, enterprise-ready SDKs for engagement and monetization, designed to give brands back the things they should never have given up: their audiences, their experiences, and the trust that holds both together.

• Onsite turns your owned properties into a destination, not a dead end. Generative experiences, video, and interactive moments that live on your domain, in your design system, with your guardrails. The place a customer lands from a paid ad is where the brand promise gets delivered. No handoff. No drop-off.
• Offsite extends that brand-safe experience into premium environments off your domain, distributing your story across the open web and into the publishers and partners where your audience already spends time. Same standards, same intent, same brand voice. One narrative, two surfaces.
• Network is what happens when a brand stops renting audiences and starts building one. A connected ecosystem of owned and partner inventory, governed by your rules, measurable end to end. You stop being a tenant on someone else’s platform and start operating like a publisher with leverage. From discovery to decision in an attributable environment.
• Monetize turns the attention you’re already earning into revenue, and captures the margin that platforms and intermediaries take today. Sponsored access, session-level takeovers, zero-party data as an outcome rather than a buzzword. A clear value exchange between brand, partner, and audience, instead of the interruption model that’s been losing trust for a decade. Monetization across retail, consumer services, media, and entertainment brands that have already earned the audience’s confidence.
• Studio, and the creator tools we’re building inside it, is how all of this gets made without an agency on retainer for every asset. Brand-governed creation at the speed marketing actually requires.

Underneath all of it sits an AI orchestration layer that ties the surfaces together. It’s what makes contextual continuity real and full-funnel orchestration possible.

The same brand voice, the same intent, the same guardrails, applied across Onsite, Offsite, Network, and Monetize, so a customer’s experience doesn’t reset every time they cross a channel. AI-protected, not AI-powered, because the brands that stay relevant decide what their AI is allowed to do. They don’t let their identity get vibe-coded by someone else’s model.

Relevance isn’t a campaign. It’s infrastructure. The discipline of showing up the same way, in context, across every place a customer might find you, with a promise the rest of your business can actually keep.

The companies that disappear stop earning that. The ones that last keep earning it.

Want to see it in action? Shoot me an email or a DM on LinkedIn and I will get back to your personally!

Most companies realize they “have to figure out AI,” but may not understand the growing sense of urgency. A quarter or two to watch how things develop. Another planning cycle to get the strategy right. A pilot program here, an experimental budget there, but alignment and commitments are happening inconsistently.

That window is closing faster than most leadership teams realize. And the cost of waiting is not just falling behind. It’s losing the structural ability to catch up.

Many of our senior leaders and Genuin team members spent years inside AdTech watching the same pattern play out. The brands that treated digital infrastructure as a future priority woke up one day to find that the platforms they had been ignoring had become the intermediaries standing between them and their own consumers. The landlord had arrived. The terms were not favorable.

“Infrastructure” is the key term here.

AI is accelerating that dynamic by an order of magnitude. The decisions brands and publishers make about infrastructure in the next 12 to 18 months will not just shape their competitive position. They will determine whether they still own a direct relationship with their audience at all.

AI Does Not Fix Broken Foundations. It Amplifies Them.

The most expensive misconception in marketing right now is that AI is a correction mechanism. That fragmented engagement strategies will get unified. That extractive monetization will become fair. That audiences who already feel like inventory will suddenly feel like relationships.

None of that is how AI works. AI amplifies whatever you have already built. Weak foundations collapse faster under AI than they ever would have on their own. Strong foundations — like owned audience environments, controlled context, first-party data, brand-consistent infrastructure — become genuine competitive moats.

The internet trained us to chase attention. AI is forcing us to earn it.

This is why the positioning that defines Genuin is not AI-powered. It’s AI-protected. The risk is not that AI is unavailable to you. The risk is that AI, deployed without the right architecture underneath it, destroys the one thing that took years to earn: consumer trust. And trust, once broken at scale, does not come back.

Fragmentation Is a Hidden Tax… And It’s Getting Called In

Most digital organizations are running what amounts to a technology stack held together with optimism. One platform for content, another for community, a third for analytics, a fourth for monetization. None of them were designed to interoperate. All of them are optimized for their own metrics rather than your business outcomes.

The cost of this fragmentation rarely shows up cleanly on a single budget line. It shows up as ops overhead, broken consumer experiences, data that leaks between systems, and teams perpetually chasing dashboards instead of executing strategy. It’s a tax, and in an AI-accelerated environment, the rate is increasing.

Genuin was built as a single orchestration layer that eliminates this complexity. When content, community, and revenue infrastructure run through one system, the organization stops optimizing for clicks and starts building toward outcomes. And critically, it stops feeding third-party platforms with data about its own consumers, data that gets used to build competing relationships.

The Sponsored Access Model: From Interrupt to Enable

Traditional advertising is adversarial by architecture. It competes with the experience rather than contributing to it. It forces impressions on consumers who did not ask for them and then measures success by how many people failed to avoid it. This model is not just declining in effectiveness. It is structurally incompatible with the trust-based internet that is emerging.

Genuin Monetize is built on a different premise. In the sponsored access model, the brand enables the experience rather than interrupting it. The consumer understands the exchange. There is no friction, no deception, no forced impression. Zero-party data becomes a natural outcome of a transparent value exchange rather than something you have to extract through mechanisms consumers have learned to resent.

The next generation of commerce media is not about placements. It’is about participation.

Every brand destination inside the Genuin network operates as a monetization engine. Session-level takeovers allow partners to own entire moments in a consumer’s journey, not banner real estate at the margins of one. Top-funnel storytelling and bottom-funnel conversion operate inside a single continuous experience.

The goal throughout is value exchange, not value extraction — and the difference between those two things is the difference between a relationship and a transaction.

Contextual Continuity: The Architecture of Trust

Most engagement strategies treat the consumer journey as a series of disconnected moments rather than a continuous relationship. Discovery happens in one environment. Consideration happens somewhere else. Purchase happens on a third platform. At each transition, the context resets, the narrative breaks, and the intent the brand worked to build quietly evaporates.

Contextual continuity is the infrastructure principle that prevents this. When a consumer enters a Genuin-powered destination, the experience continues. Same context, same narrative, same intent. The story does not restart. The relationship does not reset. Because the brand controls the environment rather than deferring to a third-party algorithm, consistency is structural rather than aspirational.

This is not a feature. It is the foundation. And it is what separates brands that are building genuine consumer relationships from brands that are renting the simulation of one.

Scale Without Context Is Just Noise

Genuin’s network reaches more than 200 million consumers through partners including iHeart, TED, Grubhub, UsWeekly and the McClatchy Media family of brands reaching over 200MM people. That number matters only because of the architecture underneath it.

We don’t operate as an open network imposing a single algorithm across every environment. We work inside defined, trusted partner ecosystems where the audience relationships already exist and are already meaningful.

Our AI layer contextualizes every experience based on what works within each specific partner environment. Content stays native to the space. The consumer journey stays consistent across the network. The signal generated across those interactions compounds over time , making every partner’s environment more relevant, not less, as the network grows.

This is the operational difference between centralizing control and distributing intelligence. Relevance does not get diluted at scale inside this model. It improves. Because real scale is not about reaching more people. It’s about staying meaningful to each of them.

The Window Is Open. It Won’t Stay That Way.

The next era of publishing, retail, and commerce will not be won by whoever generates the most content. Volume is already a commodity. It will be won by whoever builds the most trusted consumer relationships, at scale, inside environments they actually own and control.

That requires infrastructure most companies are not currently running. It requires an orchestration layer that connects owned properties and offsite distribution, onsite experience and network monetization, content creation and commerce conversion, without fragmenting any of it and without ceding the consumer relationship to a platform that has its own priorities.

At Genuin, we are building that infrastructure through an architecture designed specifically for this moment.

We haven’t officially announced this yet, but here’s a preview of what’s coming (and in many cases, already live):

• Octo as our multi-model, multi-agent AI orchestration layer.
• Maya as the interface powering generative engagement and experience.

The brands that navigate this transition successfully are not going to be the ones who made the best campaign decisions or found the most efficient media buy. They are going to be the ones who recognized that this was an infrastructure decision, and made it before the window closed

That window is open right now. It will not stay that way.

Connect with our team via our website or on LinkedIn and let’s discuss. We’d love to talk this more with you.

Several publishers are already deploying Monetize, activating upfront sponsored access placements across owned-and-operated properties, and extending reach to trusted destinations in the Genuin Network

NEW YORK, March 19, 2026 — Genuin, the leading provider of infrastructure for generative engagement, experiences, and revenue, today announced Monetize, a revenue engine that gives publishers, media companies, retailers, and consumer brands a consolidated path to net-new income. Monetize protects brands with AI, and unlocks profitability across their owned-and-operated properties without depending on walled gardens or auction-based pricing floors.

New Formats, New Revenue Category

Sponsored Takeovers and Pinned Positions are not ad units, programmatic placements, or pre-roll. They’re sold upfront like sponsorships, delivered inside video-first feed environments audiences are already choosing, and measured like programmatic.

• Sponsored Takeovers give a brand partner dominant presence across a publisher’s homepage carousel or primary feed, with one activation covering three placements and guaranteed upfront revenue.

• Pinned Position locks a partner’s content into the top of any Genuin-powered onsite experiences, ensuring it is among the first things audiences see every session for the duration of the activation.

The Genuin Network

Publishers, retailers, and brands on the network, including iHeartMedia and TED, are already deploying Monetize within their owned-and-operated properties, activating sponsored session takeovers, pinned placements, and programmatic units across their editorial, commerce, talent, creator, and advertiser ecosystems in a single, continuous Genuin-powered experience.

Now, every scroll becomes a sale, every onsite touchpoint becomes a content experience with an ad placement, every creator and brand in-network becomes a growth partner.

Social Assets, Activated Across the Open Internet

Advertisers are sitting on social content libraries that they paid to produce, on platforms they don’t own, reaching audiences they can’t retain. Monetize gives that content a second life as premium inventory inside owned-and-operated environments that consumers trust, with no reproduction required from advertisers and no new platform dependencies. The activation lift is minimal, but the engagement and net-new revenue potential are significant.

One Infrastructure: Onsite and Offsite

The sponsored access model that powers a publisher’s owned properties doesn’t stop at their homepage. Monetize operates across two axes: onsite, within a publisher’s owned properties, and offsite, extended across trusted destinations in the Network, powered by Genuin, allowing any brand or advertiser to connect with iHeart, Us Weekly, TED, and many more. Both run on the same assets and are sold in a single activation, with no fragmented vendor stack and no algorithm dependency.

Genuin Monetize is the only infrastructure that unifies a publisher’s owned feed with a trusted open-internet network at this level of format quality and brand safety built in. It surfaces curated, contextually relevant content that is brand-safe by design, not by algorithm. This makes it a premium worth pricing and selling as one.

Monetize users can activate in-feed and in-stream IAB-compatible units via their preferred programmatic partners such as PubMatic and Magnite.

“The open internet is running out of premium experiences that actually work for consumers. Years of chasing eyeballs have come at the cost of pricing power and direct relationships,” said Bhargav Patel, CEO, Genuin. “Monetize was designed to address this. Publishers get a way to sell access to their best environments where consumer trust is paramount. Brands get a way to put existing content to work as extended engagement inside those environments. Everyone wins on owned ground.”

About Genuin

Genuin is making the world’s most trusted brands relevant in the age of AI as the industry’s first generative engagement, experience, and revenue infrastructure. Genuin empowers publishers, retailers, and consumer brands to embed video experiences inside their own properties, sell sponsored access to their most engaged environments, and extend that relevance across a trusted open-web network. Today, hundreds of organizations, including iHeartMedia, Us Weekly, and TED, rely on Genuin to power brand-safe digital ecosystems that inspire trust and drive measurable outcomes. For more information, visit begenuin.com.

For years, brands, publishers, retailers, and consumer service platforms have faced the same tradeoff:

• Scale or control
• Reach or ownership
• Advertising performance or durable relationships

The traditional social and advertising ecosystem forced that compromise.

The Genuin Network is designed to remove it. At its core, this is a shift from embedded video players to embedded engagement infrastructure.

Not just content distribution. Relationship infrastructure.
Not rented audiences. Brand-owned engagement ecosystems.

Built on embedded video engagement infrastructure across publishers, retailers, and consumer service platforms, the Genuin Network connects owned environments into a distributed open web ecosystem where:

• Content travels contextually across the Network
• Audiences stay inside trusted brand environments
• First-party engagement data stays with the brand
• Monetization flows across network participants

This isn’t another media channel. It’s a networked infrastructure layer where trusted engagement can happen across the open web. And brands of all types can participate today.

Earn From the Genuin Network

For publishers, retailers, and consumer platforms, the shift toward video engagement and AI-driven discovery has created a paradox. Engagement is rising, but traditional monetization models aren’t keeping pace. Static ad units and fragmented sponsorship structures don’t reflect how people actually consume content anymore.

What’s emerging instead is infrastructure-driven monetization.

With lightweight SDK integration, organizations can transform owned channels into continuous, scrollable video engagement environments. The Brand Control Center aggregates owned social, advertiser, creator, and user-generated content. Placements distribute it across sites and apps.

Monetize enables sponsorships, subscriptions, contextual advertising, and sponsored access environments — onsite or across the broader Network.

Instead of selling inventory, organizations monetize trusted engagement, contextual attention, and participation.

For publishers, that can mean partner-funded discovery environments or sponsored access to high-interest content ecosystems. Retailers can activate shoppable storytelling inside trusted environments. Consumer service brands can evolve loyalty experiences into media platforms.

Content doesn’t sit in silos. It flows across trusted environments while preserving ownership and brand control.

That’s incremental revenue without sacrificing relationships.

Spend In the Network

From an advertiser’s perspective, the shift is equally important.

Audience targeting alone isn’t enough anymore. Context, trust, and attention quality increasingly determine performance. As AI mediates discovery and filters content before consumers even see it, environment credibility becomes as important as creative.

That makes infrastructure, not just media placement, the new performance layer.

Consumers don’t reject advertising. They reject environments that feel extractive.

Video engagement environments restore alignment because discovery happens in context, not interruption.

Inside the connected open web Genuin Network, retail media networks, enterprise brands, and local advertisers can activate vertical video placements across publisher, retailer, and consumer service environments with contextual relevance built in.

Content aggregation ensures creative consistency. GenuinAI optimizes placement and personalization without invasive tracking. Measurement remains privacy-forward and relationship-based.

The result isn’t just improved media efficiency. It’s brand participation inside trusted engagement ecosystems.

Instead of chasing impressions across fragmented platforms, advertisers operate inside environments where discovery, engagement, and conversion are structurally connected.

That reduces waste. And increases impact.

Build Your Own Network

Some organizations want more than monetization or media activation.

They want durable audience relationships.

Embedding vertical video engagement environments directly into owned digital properties allows brands to reclaim the relationship layer social platforms historically controlled.

Most video platforms stop at playback. Engagement infrastructure extends further into creator activation, moderation systems, data continuity, monetization flexibility, and AI-assisted personalization.

Creator programs scale supply. Studio tools streamline production. Placements ensure visibility. Monetize activates revenue streams. GenuinAI supports personalization, governance, and optimization at scale.

Over time, these engagement environments naturally evolve into communities as participation grows.

And critically, first-party audience data remains owned.

Brand-owned engagement environments don’t have to operate in isolation. They can connect to other trusted environments in the Network while maintaining brand safety, data control, and contextual continuity.

This balances independence with scale.

You’re not renting reach. You’re building infrastructure.

This Moment Matters. Here’s Why:

You’re not going to be surprised to learn this, but several macro shifts are converging:

• AI is reshaping discovery and decision-making
• Video is becoming the default communication medium
• Trust is emerging as a core marketing currency
• Brands are actively reclaiming audiences from social platforms
• Marketers are shifting from campaigns to ecosystems
• Media is shifting from channels to infrastructure

Industry research consistently reinforces this shift toward AI-mediated discovery, trust-driven engagement, and infrastructure-led marketing strategies.

In this environment, isolated channels underperform. Infrastructure wins. Connected video engagement networks offer:

• Stronger first-party data continuity
• Higher contextual relevance
• Sustainable monetization models
• Deeper consumer relationships
• AI-protected engagement environments

Participation in the open web is no longer optional. Ownership is strategic.

Tear Down The Walls

The future of media, marketing, and commerce won’t be dominated solely by centralized platforms or rented distribution.

It will be distributed. Contextual. Trust-driven. AI-enabled. Infrastructure-powered.

Organizations that understand this early gain structural advantage.

Whether they choose to earn from the Network, spend in the Network, or build their own engagement environments, the historic tradeoff between scale and ownership is fading.

The era of rented audiences is ending.

The era of trusted engagement infrastructure has begun.

And the brands that move first will define what comes next.

The Super Bowl has always been the Super Bowl of marketing. Biggest stage. Biggest budgets. Biggest creative swings.

Brands spend millions producing commercials. Within minutes of kickoff, those spots are everywhere. Shared, debated, memed, praised, roasted. For decades, one destination has quietly become the industry’s unofficial archive for all of it. Adland.

But when the advertising community woke up on Super Bowl Sunday this year, they had a new way to engage with great content and each other. Through a new partnership with Genuin, that archive is evolving from a place where ads simply live to a place where the marketing community can actively engage with them in motion.

The timing matters. The Super Bowl remains advertising’s biggest cultural moment, but the life of a commercial now extends far beyond the broadcast itself. Conversation, analysis, and community engagement increasingly define the real impact of creative work.

Adland’s Legacy and Positioning for the Future

Adland.tv has long been central to that conversation. Founded roughly 30 years ago by a creative director as a space to share advertising content, the site began as “Badland” before rebranding to Adland in 2000. Over time it evolved into one of the world’s largest archives of commercials, including an extensive Super Bowl collection that marketers, creatives, and enthusiasts return to year after year.

In 2025, Adland became part of Marketecture Media, the industry media company led by Ari Paparo, Jeremy Bloom, and the pseudonymous AdTechGod. Marketecture has built a strong reputation for connecting industry insiders through journalism, commentary, newsletters, and events that help make sense of a rapidly changing advertising ecosystem.

Integrating Genuin’s video experience into Adland’s digital properties represents a natural next step in that evolution

Why Community Matters Around Video

Advertising content is inherently social, yet the conversation about it has historically lived somewhere else. You watch the commercial on TV. You debate it on social platforms. You search for it later on video sites or trade publications.

That fragmentation often pulls engagement away from the publishers and communities most closely tied to the content. Embedding Genuin’s community-powered video experience directly within Adland helps address that gap. It keeps the audience where the content lives while creating a richer environment for discovery, discussion, and professional insight.

Jeremy Bloom, co-founder and CEO of Marketecture Media, sees this launch as an exciting milestone that happened to coincide with advertising’s biggest annual moment, but he emphasizes that the real opportunity lies ahead.

“Since I first learned about Genuin and saw the technology they built for engaging communities around video content, I knew it would be an easily scalable way to turn Adland’s historical content into a living community experience for consumers, the creatives, advertising lovers, and marketers alike,” Bloom said. “Given our plans for Adland and the broader Marketecture ecosystem, I see this partnership as only the beginning of what we can build together.”

Turning an Archive Into a Living Experience

For Adland, this integration transforms a massive archive into something more dynamic. Instead of simply hosting videos, the platform can now foster deeper interaction through immersive feeds, contextual placements, and community participation.

For the Adland audience, that translates into a more immersive way to engage with advertising culture itself. Creative work becomes something to discuss, revisit, and experience collectively rather than just passively consume.

Bhargav Patel, CEO of Genuin, sees the partnership as both strategically important and personally meaningful.

“Adland has always been a cultural touchpoint for advertising professionals, and working alongside longtime industry leaders Ari Paparo and Jeremy Bloom allows both of our organizations to modernize how the marketing community experiences creative work,” Patel said. “Video should not just be watched. It should spark conversation, discovery, and connection inside environments the industry already trusts.”

What This Means for Publishers, Brands, and Communities

For Genuin, the partnership reinforces a core belief: video engagement works best when it lives inside owned environments where communities already gather, not only on external social platforms.

That approach helps publishers maintain stronger first-party relationships, increase time on site, and create new forms of value exchange between content creators, advertisers, and audiences. Brands benefit from deeper engagement and context. Communities gain spaces designed for interaction rather than interruption.

The broader industry implications are increasingly clear. Publishers want ownership of their audiences. Brands want meaningful engagement rather than passive impressions. Communities want environments that feel purposeful rather than fragmented.

Video sits at the center of that convergence. Community is what amplifies its impact.

Beyond the Super Bowl Moment

Launching this partnership in the wake of the Super Bowl highlights a larger shift. Commercials may debut during the game, but their influence now depends on what happens afterward. Discussion, sharing, analysis, and rediscovery extend the lifecycle of creative work well beyond the initial broadcast.

Adland has documented advertising history for decades. With Genuin’s video experience now embedded into the broader Marketecture ecosystem, it is helping shape how that history is experienced moving forward.

Within Genuin, there is particular excitement about reconnecting with iconic advertising moments from the archives while helping build new ones. The partnership also opens the door for closer collaboration across the Marketecture organization, including its enigmatic CMO, AdTech God.

Despite ongoing speculation (unsuccessfully) linking that persona to various industry leaders — including Terence Kawaja, Lou Paskalis, Jeff Green, Elli Dimitroulakos, Eric Franchi, Melanie Zimmermann, Peter Naylor, Matt Barash, Jessica Shapiro, not to mention Paparo and Bloom, themselves — the identity remains part mystery, part legend, and fully embedded in advertising culture.

For both organizations, the goal is straightforward but ambitious. Transform video from something people watch into something they actively engage with, together.

And in an industry built on creativity, conversation, and community, that evolution feels long overdue.

New Integrations Transform Publisher Audiences into Engaged Communities through Creator-led, AI-Personalized Experiences

For Immediate Release

January 20, 2026 — NEW YORK and SACRAMENTO — Genuin, the generative video engagement infrastructure for owned and operated digital experiences, today announced a strategic partnership with McClatchy Media to integrate video-powered, community-driven experiences across McClatchy’s national magazine properties and its portfolio of local newspapers nationwide.

That rollout begins this month, following successful initial launches on Us Weekly and Bargain Hunter in December and Life & Style earlier this month.

The partnership represents a significant evolution in how publishers engage audiences by embedding scrollable, social-style video communities directly within trusted journalism environments. Through Genuin’s infrastructure, McClatchy will upgrade its video experience without rebuilding its platforms, enabling deeper engagement, longer session times, and new monetization opportunities while maintaining full control over data, design, and user experience.

Unlike traditional video players or off-platform social embeds, Genuin’s platform connects video, community interaction, and monetization into a single integrated experience. Publishers can onboard users with first-party data, personalize content discovery by interest, enable engagement through video feeds and comments, and encourage sharing that brings new audiences back to owned and operated destinations. Contextual calls to action allow publishers and advertisers to convert engagement into loyalty and commerce.

“For readers, this means a more engaging and personalized way to discover stories, creators, and conversations that matter to them, all within the trusted environments they already rely on,” said Bhargav Patel, CEO of Genuin. “For publishers, it means increasing session time and monetization without building a new platform or sending audiences to Big Social. McClatchy is setting a new standard for what modern digital journalism experiences can be.”

The integration also creates new opportunities for local newsrooms by enabling community-driven storytelling and supporting local advertisers through brand-safe, contextual video environments aligned with editorial standards. By leaning into community participation, McClatchy aims to strengthen the relationship between its journalism, its audiences, and the local businesses that support them.

“Adding interactive vertical video to our properties aligns with the expectations modern readers have for mobile-first content consumption,” said Andy Wilson, EVP of Commerce and Partnerships at McClatchy Media. “Our readers are conditioned by TikTok, Reels, and Shorts to consume content in vertical, bite-sized formats, and we are meeting them there while providing a path to deeper storylines and editorial value. You need to take mobile users seriously by meeting people where they already are in terms of their daily media habits.”

As part of the partnership, McClatchy will introduce its first-ever onsite creator incentive program. The program is designed to invite creators to contribute authentic, interest-driven video content directly within McClatchy’s owned environments, aligned with editorial voice and community relevance.

Following the initial launches on Us Weekly, Life & Style, and Bargain Hunter, the video-powered community experience is also beginning to roll out across McClatchy’s portfolio of local newspapers like The Kansas City Star, and The Miami Herald, focused on community journalism, with additional national magazine integrations planned for early 2026.

Similar deployments of Genuin’s video-powered communities have demonstrated meaningful increases in session time, repeat visits, and advertiser engagement across media and commerce environments, reinforcing the platform’s ability to transform passive audiences into active communities.

To learn more about Genuin, visit https://begenuin.com.
For more information, visit www.mcclatchy.com.

For more than a decade, I’ve been deep in the adtech trenches. I’ve built companies that scaled across continents, sat at the center of real-time bidding wars, and helped architect some of the systems that define how digital advertising moves today.

At IQM, we built a system that continues to operate at the center of modern advertising. It helps brands and publishers transact, optimize, and perform at scale. That engine still runs strong. And yes, it still matters.

But the internet is evolving. And evolution demands new solutions.

That’s why I started Genuin. Not to replace the past, but to build on it. To create a layer that doesn’t just move value, but creates it through participation, context, and real human connection.

Which brings me to the headline of this article:

That line stuck with me after spending a week at CES surrounded by thousands of people all trying to shape what the next phase of the internet looks like. One thing was clear. We’re not just facing a tech shift. We’re in the middle of an environment shift.

The Shift is Not Ads in AI. It’s the Rise of Conversational Environments

Let’s be real. Programmatic advertising is optimized for attention after it happens. Someone scrolls. A moment passes. An impression is captured and monetized. That’s a machine built to extract.

Conversational AI flips that on its head. People ask, speak, participate. Intent is no longer inferred. It’s explicit. High-signal. High-value.

So the question isn’t “Can we monetize AI conversations?” Of course we can. The real question is:

Are we designing environments for participation, or just cramming new pipes into old surfaces?

Here’s the answer. The old playbook won’t cut it.

Pipes Move Value. Places Create It.

Adtech isn’t broken. In fact, it’s brilliant at what it does. It moves demand and supply, clears markets, and scales distribution better than anything else. And as AI multiplies the number of touchpoints where content and commerce collide, those pipes matter more than ever.

But Genuin lives on a different layer. We’re not in the plumbing business. We’re in the place business.

We’re building environments where participation already exists. Where intent, attention, and conversation naturally converge. Why? Because context is king. And context doesn’t come from a CPM bid. It comes from experience design.

Adtech monetizes moments. Environments shape experiences.

That’s not a tagline. That’s the strategy!

Why Contextual Environments Matter More as AI Becomes the Interface

Three forces are becoming impossible to ignore:

1. Conversation beats the feed. When people speak, they reveal what they actually want. You don’t need to guess or retarget. You just need to listen and design accordingly.
2. Context outperforms targeting. Let me say it clearly. Context wins. The stuff that understands where it lives will always perform better than the stuff that follows you around like a pop-up you can’t shake.
3. The web is moving from traffic to destinations. AI isn’t just changing how people discover. It’s changing where they choose to spend time. The places with purpose will win.

And none of that is unlocked by duct-taping programmatic into a chatbot window. It’s unlocked by building environments people actually want to be in.

Content as Inventory vs Community as Infrastructure

Here’s where the category line gets drawn.

Traditional systems treat content, pages, and even conversations as inventory. Units to be filled. Slots to be priced.

At Genuin, we treat them as infrastructure. Because:

• Infrastructure supports participation
• Infrastructure creates continuity
• Infrastructure earns trust

In that model, monetization isn’t bolted on. It’s designed. It’s native. It’s optional. And it works because the experience works first.

That’s a whole different future than figuring out how to wedge an ad into an AI response.

The Future is Designed, Not Extracted.

Let me be clear. I didn’t come to this perspective by walking away from adtech. Not even close. Adtech is in my bloodstream. It built my career. It’s still foundational to how I lead.

But I arrived here by continuing to build inside the ecosystem. By watching where the attention is going and asking a very simple question.

Are we building places people actually want to be in?

Because here’s the hard truth. Trying to monetize AI experiences without rethinking the environments they live in is like putting billboards inside a library. You might make some money. But you’ll completely misunderstand the space you’re in.

The systems that win won’t just be the ones that moved fast. They’ll be the ones that asked better questions.

• How do we create places that earn participation?
• How do we make monetization feel native, not disruptive?
• How do we respect intent instead of hijacking it?

One model moves value. The other creates it.

So no, AI doesn’t need more ads. It needs better environments.
Because the things that last aren’t built by capturing fleeting moments.
They’re built by creating places worth returning to.

By Matt Wurst, Genuin CMO

Everyone feels it, even if they’re still doomscrolling on the couch tonight. Something in social media is breaking. And for once, it’s not a new feature rollout or a platform rebrand. It’s the relationship between people and the places where they spend their digital time.

A new analysis of search behavior across the United States shows nearly 2MM people per month are actively looking for ways to delete or deactivate one of their social media accounts.

Not snooze it. Not silence it. Not take a digital detox weekend. They want out.

Brands, publishers, and platforms should care about this. This isn’t an “AI is the new search” story. The cracks in social media point to something much bigger. People are craving a different kind of digital experience. Heck, they’re craving a different kind of BRAND experience. One with less noise. One with more value. One that feels like community, not performance.

People Are Leaving and Not Quietly

This isn’t another prediction piece. This shift is already changing expectations for how content should look, feel, and work inside digital experiences, and how we ALL plan for 2026.

Here is what the data is telling us via a new study from Get Response: Nine platforms dominate the conversation about deleting accounts in the United States. The volume of exit searches tells a bigger story about user fatigue, emotional strain, and the growing desire for alternatives.

1. Instagram: The undisputed leader of digital burnout, with nearly 600 thousand monthly searches about deleting accounts. The comparison loop is relentless. The pressure to present a filtered life never slows down. Only 5% of people looking to leave are curious about suspending their accounts. The rest are done.
2. TikTok: About 460K people per month look for the door, but TikTok users come back at a much higher rate. The app’s discovery loop, hyper-targeted video feed, and tailored dopamine hits are difficult to walk away from. People know they are hooked, and still go back five times more often than Instagram users.
3. Snapchat: Snapchat has always positioned itself as a playground for younger audiences. Yet privacy concerns, lawsuits, and algorithmic pressure have started to push users toward the edge. Deletion interest is steady, which signals that even the next generation is questioning the value they get back.
4. Facebook: Privacy frustration is the biggest push factor. One in five people who delete their Facebook account eventually try to reactivate it. Nostalgia, family updates, and old memories pull them back. It is the emotional scrapbook effect.
5. X: Nearly a quarter of a million users search for escape routes each month, which given the total monthly active users, is significant. Twitter once held the promise of a true feed, but the combination of outrage cycles, political tension, and algorithmically rewarded conflict leaves people exhausted.
6. YouTube: Only 185K deletion searches across a 2.7 billion user base. That ratio alone tells you something important. Video still reigns supreme. And when a platform feels like a tool that helps you learn or relax rather than a place where your identity is constantly on display, people stay.
7. LinkedIn: Only 15K removal searches each month. LinkedIn has its own flavor of pressure, but it is largely driven by professional ambition, not social comparison. In a world of enforced positivity and career narratives, people tolerate it because it serves a purpose.
8. Reddit: 8K deletion searches. Almost nothing. Reddit proves that community, anonymity, usefulness, and self-curation create loyalty. People stay when they feel seen and not judged.
9. Pinterest: Seven thousand deletion searches. The platform operates as a visual inspiration engine. No pressure to perform. No algorithmic trap of arguments or validation cycles. But also: no real video.

The pattern is clear. Platforms built on comparison, performance pressure, and algorithmic intensity drive people away. Platforms built on value, utility, or genuine community keep people around.

The Consumer Shift Is Bigger Than Social Media

Emplifi’s “State of Social Media Marketing 2026” report adds more context. Users want different things from digital spaces. And brands have to adapt.

According to the study:

• 73% of marketers say short-form video is the number one content format.
• 82% consider user generated content critical for success, yet only 31% are operationalizing it at scale.

People don’t want beautified ad reels. Or algorithmic slot machines. They DO want content that feels real, fast, useful, and personal. They want video that speaks to them in context. They want a digital environment where they can learn, explore, and decide without pressure.

Which is interesting, because this is exactly what social platforms can no longer provide. They’ve become too big, too loud, too crowded, and too dependent on the very mechanics that exhaust their users.

The next phase of digital growth will not come from louder feeds or bigger algorithmic engines. It will come from giving people back some control over their experience.

What Users Are Actually Craving

Based on the data, the sentiment, and the cultural tone, users want three things.

• Intentional discovery: People are tired of randomness. They want to choose their own exploration, not be dragged into an endless feed they never asked for.
• Real community, not performance: Platforms that reward self expression over self promotion create healthier dynamics. Reddit thrives because ideas matter more than identity. Pinterest works because creation matters more than validation.
• Digital experiences that feel human: This includes content from real people, real stories, and real perspectives. UGC fits here. Short-form video fits here. Community-led content fits here.

This is the opposite of the legacy social environment. And this is exactly where owned community experiences step up.

The Future Is Not Anti Social. It Is Pro Community

We’re in a moment where both users and brands are looking for the next chapter. Not another app. Not another scroll trap. A space where people share knowledge, inspiration, and recommendations without all the pressure baked into traditional platforms.

This is where owned communities and video-powered ecosystems change the game.

Brands, retailers, publishers, and creators can build digital destinations that feel more like Reddit than Instagram. More like a modern forum than a stage. More like a community space than a performance arena.

When you create environments where people can show up as themselves, and not as avatars of perfection, you build loyalty. When you surface useful video content instead of addictive loops, you build trust. When people feel seen and not judged, they stick around.

Planning for 2026: Own, Don’t Rent

The social media breakup is not a trend. It is a correction. Users are choosing environments that let them breathe. Brands that understand this shift will win the next phase of digital engagement.

Be the place people want to spend time. Not the place they are actively trying to delete.

Collaboration brings Genuin’s video capabilities to one of the world’s largest digital media networks, unlocking new engagement and revenue opportunities

For Immediate Release

November 17, 2025 — New York, N.Y. — Genuin, the leading generative video experience infrastructure platform, today announced a strategic partnership with iHeartMedia, America’s premier audio media company. The partnership launches today with Genuin’s generative video infrastructure embedded directly into iHeart’s digital ecosystem as a new iHeart Highlights experience across web, mobile web, and in-app environments.

The collaboration underscores a shared vision to deliver immersive, social, and community-driven video experiences across one of the largest digital media networks in the world.

iHeart listeners are already highly engaged with their favorite podcasters and creators across social and video platforms, particularly on YouTube. Integrating video experiences directly into iHeart’s owned-and-operated digital properties is a natural extension of that behavior. Through Genuin’s plug-and-play SDK, iHeart can accelerate time-to-market, embedding vertical video capabilities seamlessly across its network to deepen audience connection and retention.

The integration of Genuin’s vertical video carousels, feeds, and interactive features will bring new levels of engagement to iHeartMedia’s audiences while introducing entirely new revenue streams for advertisers and sponsors. These shoppable, AI-curated, and community-driven video formats will live natively within iHeart’s content ecosystem, expanding both user engagement and monetization opportunities.

Through this partnership, iHeartMedia will leverage Genuin’s generative video platform to create community-powered experiences around its extensive portfolio of radio, podcast, and talent-driven content. Listeners and fans will be able to watch, share, and interact with meaningful highlights and short-form clips captured from their favorite shows, podcasts, and live moments.

By uniting iHeartMedia’s unmatched reach, which spans more than 850 radio stations, hundreds of top podcasts, and tens of millions of monthly digital users, with Genuin’s AI-orchestrated, embeddable video infrastructure, the companies are redefining how stories, creators, and brands connect with listeners and viewers across platforms. For advertisers, this collaboration unlocks new monetization opportunities through shoppable, social, and community-driven video formats natively integrated into iHeart’s digital ecosystem.

“This partnership is a defining moment for Genuin,” said Bhargav Patel, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Genuin. “iHeartMedia’s reach and media leadership give us an unmatched runway to deploy innovative video experiences across millions of users. Together, we’re reimagining how audiences connect with video, audio, and content communities in a unified, immersive way.”

The alliance also reinforces iHeartMedia’s commitment to innovation and partnership as it continues expanding its role in shaping the future of media.

See more: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ov6u2xytI6Q

For Genuin, the partnership represents another major milestone in its growth trajectory. It follows collaborations across retail media, consumer services, and entertainment publishers that have rapidly expanded its monthly active user base. The company has built the first generative video engagement value-exchange network, connecting retailers, consumer services, and media publishers through embedded, shoppable, and social videos that power proprietary, high-performing media formats. This ecosystem enables partners to reclaim audience relationships, drive engagement, and generate new revenue streams within their owned and operated channels.

As generative AI, media, and technology continue to converge, Genuin and iHeartMedia are working together to redefine how audiences experience, discover, and engage with the content they love — and to bring AI-curated, video-driven community experiences to the forefront of one of the world’s largest audio platforms.

About Genuin

Genuin is the first generative video experience infrastructure for brands to embed social-style video and community engagement into their own websites and apps. Built for publishers, entertainment networks, retailers, and consumer services brands, Genuin powers scrollable, shoppable video across owned digital properties, turning homepages, apps, and content pages into dynamic, interactive destinations that drive engagement and create new revenue. Each experience is contextually relevant, brand-safe, and designed to reach audiences without relying on third-party platforms or social feeds. As the network grows with new partner integrations, Genuin connects brand content with nearly 200 million global consumers in the moments that matter. With built-in commerce, sponsorship, and zero-party data capture, Genuin transforms marketing from a cost center into a content-powered profit engine.
To learn more, visit https://begenuin.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

About iHeartMedia

iHeartMedia, Inc. [Nasdaq: IHRT] is the leading audio media company in America, with 90% of Americans listening to iHeart broadcast radio in every month. iHeart’s broadcast radio assets alone have a larger audience in the U.S. than any other media outlet; twice the size of the next largest broadcast radio company; and over four times the ad-enabled audience of the largest digital only audio service. iHeart is the largest podcast publisher according to Podtrac, with more downloads than the next two podcast publishers combined, has the most recognizable live events across all genres of music, has the number one social footprint among audio players, with seven times more followers than the next audio media brand, and is the only fully integrated audio ad tech solution across broadcast, streaming and podcasts. The company continues to leverage its strong audience connection and unparalleled consumer reach to build new platforms, products and services. Visit iHeartMedia.com for more company information.

We’ve entered a strange chapter in the AI story, one where infinite potential meets a quiet kind of complacency. The same tools that promised to unlock human creativity are, in some ways, dulling it.

And as we have already seen on a seemingly daily basis, the pace of change is accelerating and the impact is already massive.

So predicting what could or will happen even just a few months from now would be a fool’s errand. We wake up every day with 10 new things to learn, and sometimes 20 things to unlearn.

Yet some fundamentals in business, marketing, and operations remain constant.

The Business Reality: Capabilities and Capacity

For most organizations, AI is no longer a differentiator. It is the cost of admission.

Leaders are now balancing two urgent priorities:

• Capabilities: What AI can do for them today
• Capacity: How deeply it can scale across teams and systems

Everyone is chasing efficiency through automation, smarter personalization, and faster content creation. Yet few have built the foundation to turn that activity into lasting advantage.

The primary challenge is focus. Many companies are distracted by the endless wave of tools instead of grounding their AI strategies in business goals like growth and velocity.

What most businesses need is not more AI tools, but stronger AI muscles. People, processes, and platforms that can build, train, and evolve continuously.

As Shelley Palmer said at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference last month, successful teams now divide their energy between two essential roles:

• Vision creators, who define what the future should look like (10%)
• Execution specialists, who make that vision real (90%)

AI excels at execution, but still requires human oversight, judgment, and accountability. The goal is to amplify human capability with AI, not replace it.

The real challenge is not adopting technology. It is integrating intelligence into the rhythm of how a business thinks, learns, and grows.

The Consumer Shift: Convenience Over Creativity

On the other side of the equation, AI has made life easier. Maybe too easy. But not necessarily better.

Consumers can produce videos, write essays, or make purchasing decisions in seconds. Creators can spin up campaigns, podcasts, or designs before their morning coffee.

The problem is that frictionless creation often leads to thoughtless creation. And that creates a hidden cost: cognitive laziness.

We’re basically starting to outsource curiosity. Fewer people are learning how to think. More are learning how to ask AI to think for them.

The line between creating and curating blurs every day.

The result is not just content slop. It is an internet filled with work that feels the same: derivative, surface-level, optimized, and forgettable.

The Homogenization Problem: Everything Feels the Same

AI is flattening the creative landscape. When everyone has access to the same tools, models, and datasets, originality becomes the first casualty.

Brand campaigns, product descriptions, and even strategic plans are beginning to sound alike. The irony is that technology built for personalization is producing sameness.

This is not an AI problem. It is a human one.

When everyone uses AI to produce faster instead of deeper, differentiation can only come from intent, not automation.

The Human Advantage: Intent, Taste, and Context

So how do we stay distinct in a world where everything can be generated?

By leaning into intent, taste, and context.

• Intent defines purpose. Why are you creating or communicating something? What value are you adding?
• Taste defines quality. What design, tone, or story choices make it unmistakably yours?
• Context defines relevance. How does your work connect to this moment, this audience, or this need?

AI can imitate intelligence, but it cannot replicate judgment. It can generate form, but not feeling.

The best outcomes happen when human clarity and machine capability move in sync.

The New Workflow: Rethink from First Principles

Workflows are being rewritten from the ground up. The old idea of reaching the right person, in the right place, at the right time, with the right message still applies. But AI makes it scalable and measurable in new ways.

To get it right, companies must rethink their processes from first principles.

Use AI as an amplifier of strategy, not a shortcut.
Maintain human guidance instead of passive automation.
Treat experience as more valuable than digital nativity.

The best AI results come from human discernment, not blind trust.

The Leadership Mandate: Train, Play, Repeat

AI success starts with leadership.

Forward-thinking leaders are setting aside regular team sessions, what some call “AI Tuesdays.” They explore, test, and learn together.

They encourage hands-on experimentation, even if it feels messy. Small wins compound.

The real muscle to build is not technical coding. It’s prompt literacy, or the ability to think and communicate in ways AI can execute effectively.

English (or your native language) is becoming the new coding language for the modern enterprise.

Narrowing the Focus

AI is not the end of creativity or innovation. It is the start of a new discipline.

The next leaders will not be the ones predicting the future of AI. They will be the ones shaping it with purpose, adaptability, and taste.

At Genuin, we believe progress in 2026 will not be defined by who uses AI the most. It will be defined by who uses it the most meaningfully.