☕️ Australia is raising the stakes on reaching under-16s

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In today's MarketingShot:

🛍️ Influencers now rival search for Gen Z discovery

🚫 Australia is raising the stakes on reaching under-16s

👗 Fashion marketing is shifting from magazines to feeds

🎥 X wants creators to ditch Twitch for live video

💰 Cloudflare will now make AI pay publishers

🎁 + 7 other news you might like

💡 + 3 strategies & tactics

🧰 + 3 trending tools

🛍️ Influencers now rival search for Gen Z discovery LINK

Social media influencers and bloggers have become a leading way to discover products for Gen Z, cited by 41% of that group, placing them nearly even with search engines and ahead of most other discovery channels.

Across all U.S. adults, only 27% name influencers as a discovery source, while word of mouth leads at 51%, retail browsing follows at 44%, and search engines sit at 42%, according to YouGov Profiles data.

Among Gen Z, just 19% discover products through TV or radio commercials versus 41% through influencers, while the reverse holds for Baby Boomers and older, where 41% cite broadcast ads and only 13% cite influencers.

🚫 Australia is raising the stakes on reaching under-16s LINK

Australia has doubled the maximum penalty for social media companies that fail to keep under-16 users off their platforms, responding to signs that children are getting around the ban.

Canberra brought in the first-in-the-world legislation in December, blocking all children from every major platform, and since then dozens of other countries have started moving toward or introducing similar plans.

A study that followed 400 children before and after the ban found little change in social media use rates, with authors concluding it was unlikely to help teen mental health as intended.

👗 Fashion marketing is shifting from magazines to feeds LINK

Fashion marketing has moved away from print magazines like Vogue toward social media feeds, where platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts now drive how apparel trends spread and how brands reach shoppers.

In a 2025 global survey of 3,000 Snapchat users, more than 80% used social platforms as their main way to follow fashion trends, eight in ten trusted creator opinions like those of friends, and 70% shared new purchases online.

Rob Prsa, owner of Kay Bahd Apparel, says "attention is the new cost of goods in 2026" and argues brands should act as media companies first, creating lots of content or risk becoming invisible on social platforms.

🎥 X wants creators to ditch Twitch for live video LINK

X has rolled out an updated live-streaming command center inside its Creator Studio, aiming to pull creators away from Twitch by making it simpler to schedule and run live broadcasts directly in the app.

The new live composer offers a streamlined setup on desktop with chat controls and thumbnail uploads, plus a dashboard showing audience insights like viewer and comment peaks and audience demographics, but only for X Premium subscribers.

To promote the feature, X is putting an extra $1 million into creator funding for livestreamers this month, though the company has not clarified whether that sum will be split among many creators or awarded to one.

💰 Cloudflare will now make AI pay publishers LINK

Cloudflare said on July 1, 2026 it will pay website owners when their content appears inside an AI search answer, replacing its earlier Pay Per Crawl model that charged AI companies for each individual page fetch.

The company argues crawling poorly measures value, since more than half of legitimate bot traffic re-fetches unchanged pages, and it launched partners Ceramic.ai, which pays publishers per query, and You.com, where AI agents pay on demand for premium content.

Cloudflare cited 2025 Pew Research data showing users clicked a search result just 8% of the time when Google displayed an AI summary, roughly half the rate seen without one, with broad availability of the new program planned for later in 2026.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> FREE! The email subject line rules that don’t hold up!: A large-scale study found that overused power words like "free" and ALL CAPS lower email open rates, so marketers should test conventional advice rather than trust it.

> Programmatic vs Editorial SEO in an AEO world: Pair mass-produced data pages with hand-written expert content, because programmatic drives reach while editorial builds the authority that makes AI engines cite your brand.

> Aira and How AI-Generated Summaries Are Impacting Your PR Outreach [Webinar]: Formatting pitch emails with bullet points near the top boosts what AI email summaries surface to journalists, since bold text, tables, and attachments get ignored.

Other news you might like

• LinkedIn rolls out new AI-powered promotional toolsLINK

• Reddit rolls out split testing to all advertisersLINK

• ChatGPT Thinking mode changes which brands get citedLINK

• Instacart expands retail media beyond performance with shoppable video and AILINK

• Media Briefing: ‘Surveillance pricing’ laws are coming for dynamic subscription strategiesLINK

• AI Shopping Assistants Jump to the Top of Retail BudgetsLINK

• Nike rewrites marketing playbook around micro-communitiesLINK

🧰 Trending tools

openserp: open-source API that retrieves search engine results from Google, Yandex, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia for AI and SEO use.LINK

specification.website: a platform-agnostic web specification covering HTML, accessibility, security, SEO, and agent-readiness, licensed under MIT.LINK

ktx: a context layer that helps AI agents like Claude and Codex query company data accurately with full business context.LINK

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