The marketing playbook that worked in 2025 is actively hurting performance in 2026, says Donatas Smailys, CEO and co-founder of Billo, the largest creator marketing platform in the US.
May 13, 2026. Social media marketing moves fast, and trend cycles that once lasted a year now can change as quickly as in weeks. As platform algorithms shift and audience skepticism deepens, a set of tactics that dominated marketing are already showing early signs of failure, experts say.
“There is always a lag between when something stops working and when brands stop doing it,” said Donatas Smailys, CEO of Billo, a creator marketing platform. “Right now, that lag is costing real money.”
According to him, these are the top three marketing trends losing effectiveness right now:
1/AI chatbots that function as brand personas
A few weeks ago, Snapchat launched sponsored AI chatbots inside users’ direct messages, letting brands deploy conversational AI agents into the same inbox where people talk to their friends. They claim these to be more immediate, more personal, and more useful.
The attempt is not new, however. Meta tried the same thing with Messenger and WhatsApp, faced user backlash both times, and removed it. When Snapchat first forced its own AI chatbot to the top of all user inboxes in 2023, the app’s US App Store rating dropped to 1.67, with 75% of reviews rated one star, data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower then revealed.
Snap’s own CEO, Evan Spiegel, said recently that tech leaders underestimate the societal pushback coming against AI. It was said on the same call where he announced the sponsored chatbot rollout.
“Brands are being sold a chatbot strategy as if audiences were asking for it,” said Smailys. “They were not. People do not want to have a conversation with a financial services company in the same place they talk to their friends. The inbox is personal. Putting a branded bot there is not clever targeting, and while it looks like a new trend, we already know it doesn’t work.”
2/Creating AI avatars or self-deepfakes
YouTube is rolling out avatar tools that let creators clone themselves on camera. Despite that, as much as 46% of social media users already said they are not comfortable with brands using AI influencers, according to the Sprout Social Pulse Survey.
“AI avatars are mostly getting backlash, and there haven’t been many positive use cases. In reality, we see that real content creators, including small UGC creators, are becoming more popular than ever, so the AI avatar trend is already past its time,” Smailys says.
Several research studies and surveys have already showcased that AI content is even “dehumanizing advertising,” and customers perceive AI-generated content, including avatars, as lacking empathy and human touch.
“The reason for AI avatars was cost saving, but the performance and trust hit is also real,” said Smailys. “Creators are trading long-term audience trust for a short-term production budget win if they’re deciding to use their own deepfakes. That is a bad trade, and the data is starting to show it.”
Regulation is catching up too: The EU AI Act and FTC are already pushing mandatory AI content disclosure, with political deepfakes acting as the forcing function. Regulators are moving faster because elections are at stake. But the legal infrastructure being built around fake political figures won’t stop at politics, Smailys says. Mandatory labeling is coming regardless of whether audiences ever warm up to the format.
3/Viral sound-chasing and hook-mania
According to Smailys, for several years, the formula in advertising was simple: find a trending audio clip, bolt your product to it, post before the wave breaks, and engagement will be there. Brands built entire content calendars around this.
He adds that it is no longer working the way it did. TikTok’s and Instagram’s algorithm has shifted its heaviest weighting to watch time and completion rate. A video that gets skipped after a hook but before a payoff scores worse than a slower video that holds attention to the end. Trending audio does not compensate for that.
According to Sprout Social’s social media trends report, the brands generating genuine engagement are not the ones with the fastest turnaround on trending sounds, but the ones building recognizable characters and brand worlds that audiences return to.
“Hook-mania” has the same problem, Smailys adds. The three-second hook was a response to an algorithm that rewarded early click-through, but the algorithm now rewards different things.
“Everyone learned the same three hooks from the same ten creators,” he said. “Audiences have seen all of them. The hook that worked in 2025 is now the signal that this video is not worth finishing. You cannot shortcut your way to watch time.”
As algorithms evolve and audiences grow more skeptical, Smailys says marketing is shifting away from pure speed and scale, and back toward trust, originality, and recognizable human identity.