How Conversational AI Forces Brands to Go Multi-Channel and Compete Beyond Clicks

AI is rewriting the rules of visibility, and marketing is moving from buying impressions to shaping answers. As conversational discovery replaces traditional SEO and static social feeds, the real battleground is no longer the search results page but the AI-generated response itself. Winning now means ensuring a brand’s expertise shows up accurately in real-time answers, and that shift forces marketers to rethink their foundations: every public-facing asset becomes training data, and showing up in AI outputs requires deliberate architecture, not incremental media tweaks.

Doug Wyatt sees this as a major opportunity for the industry. As a senior media and marketing leader on the front lines of this evolution as Adobe's Sr. Director of Americas Media, his view is shaped by years of work driving transformation in the marketing and advertising space. At the heart of the transformation is how individuals engage with a brand. "Conversational AI isn’t static. It’s a dialogue, and brands that interrupt instead of contribute will disappear," says Wyatt. He has put this philosophy into practice at Adobe, where his team's affiliate strategy changed to prioritize "getting people talking about the products" over direct sales.

The need for such a pivot is timely, as many brands are in a "freakout phase" over sharply declining SEO numbers. As organic traffic drops, a common temptation is to view AI ads as a simple replacement for lost clicks, just another key enterprise SEO and AI trend prompting a new strategy. According to Wyatt, this thinking is a serious miscalculation. He suggests the starting point for this work can be found in an overlooked asset: the non-branded search data most marketing teams already possess. The new approach to AI visibility requires a different architecture.

• A common miscalculation: Leveraging AI as a marketing and awareness channel means that brands will have to think beyond traditional click-gathering strategies. "There's going to be an overestimation on people thinking this is just going to be another immediate traffic driver, and an underestimation on the content needs and the journey work that will have to happen to ensure you are providing true value," explains Wyatt.

The conversational paradigm also arrives with a major challenge: consumer skepticism. In an era of heightened privacy awareness, marked by regulations like GDPR and CCPA, an ad that comes across as too personal can feel invasive. From his insider perspective during Adobe's participation in the ChatGPT alpha release, Wyatt clarifies that this early, "clunky" state of AI ads is a temporary phase built on limited technology and not the final vision. He explains that the solution lies in shared responsibility: platforms must educate users about how advertising works, and brands must earn their place by being genuinely useful. "The most valuable ad is going to be the one that feels like help."

• The intent advantage: While there is a learning curve to get into the AI space, Wyatt says the advantage is that user interactions provide insights into intent that aren't available in other channels. "Intent expressed in a conversation is more powerful than years of behavioral tracking," he says. "Behavioral data could be 30, 60, or 90 days old and no longer relevant. Knowing where the customer is mentally right now is a much more valuable hook for marketers than what we've had before."

• Welcome to my channel: On the question of who owns the customer relationship, Wyatt's answer is clear: brands do. "Think about ChatGPT as someone who gossips. All they're doing is repeating information that's already out there, information they picked up." From this perspective, the AI acts as a repeater of information it finds elsewhere. The onus, then, falls on the brand to create the source material—the influencer content on YouTube, the active subreddits, the LLM-optimized how-to articles—that the "gossip" will pick up and share.

• Experts, not advertisers: If AI repeats what it picks up from source material, it's up to brands to evolve as thought leaders and experts in their field. "Brands that behave like experts will outperform brands that behave like advertisers," Wyatt says. "Are you an expert in your space? Are you setting the right context for the customer of where your product fits, versus just telling them your product is the best?"

For Wyatt, the shift is from creative that sells to creative that helps, signaling a broader change in marketing that emphasizes context, expertise, and participation. Users asking questions to an LLM are looking for the best answer to their queries, and the brand that presents expertise is going to win out. The difference is that brands are no longer playing directly to the user, or even head-to-head with other brands. They're playing to the LLM as the third party who can share a positive outlook on the company. "Who actually owns the future of customer relationships? Is it you as the brand, the platform, the AI layer? It's your responsibility to make sure you've got all your bases covered to make sure that this third party can have the right conversation with your customer."