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Marcus Johnson: Atmosphere TV is the largest streaming TV platform purpose-built for shared social spaces like bars, restaurants, gyms, and airports. Atmosphere TV is the creator of Chive TV and over 30 mesmerizing audio optional channels entertain over 150 million monthly viewers

Marcus Johnson: Hey, gang. It's Monday, September 28th. Stephanie, Yuri, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, the marketing podcast made possible by Atmosphere TV. I'm Marcus, and joining me for today's conversation we have two folks. Living in New York, our VP of Insights, Stephanie Paterek.

Stephanie Paterik: It's awesome to be here.

Stephanie Paterik: Good to see you, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson: Good to see you, too. Thanks for joining. And living in New Jersey, our Principal Analyst and head of our advertising, media, and tech desks, Yuri Wormser.

Yory Wurmser: Hey, Marcus. How are you doing today?

Marcus Johnson: Hey, fella. Very good. How are we?

Yory Wurmser: Good, good.

Marcus Johnson: Very nice. Very nice. Anyway, today's facts

Marcus Johnson: Who is the best-selling fiction author of all time? Two answers would be correct, 'cause they're kind of tied for first, but I ... Who do you think? Any guesses

Yory Wurmser: I would go with, uh, I'd go with, uh, J.K. Rowling J.K. Rowling.

Marcus Johnson: Oh, solid guess.

Stephanie Paterik: John Grisham?

Marcus Johnson: No. I'll give you a hint. It's not a mystery who this person is

Marcus Johnson: Fiction writer Agatha Christie

Yory Wurmser: Oh

Marcus Johnson: shocked me. Yeah. According to the Guinness World Records, Agatha Christie is officially recognized as the best-selling fiction writer, author of all time, selling upwards of two billion copies worldwide. Only Shakespeare has a claim at perhaps selling more according to the UNESCO index translate, uh, translationum.

Marcus Johnson: That's not a word. Her works have been translated into at least 103 different languages, outranking every other individual writer in history. Her masterpiece, uh, 1939 masterpiece, And Then There Were None, which I just started, that's why I was curious about, about her, uh, has sold over 100 million copies, making it officially the best-selling mystery novel in human history, one of the top single selling books of all time.

Marcus Johnson: Have you read some Christie, have we? Christie people?

Yory Wurmser: Yeah. My, my family, uh, are big fans. I have three daughters and they, they all went through a, a, uh, a, a Christie phase. So-

Marcus Johnson: Okay. I'm in it, or I'm starting it, at, at least. Stephanie? I

Stephanie Paterik: haven't. You know- Not yet ... I, I haven't read a lot of books in the mystery genre.

Stephanie Paterik: Okay. And you're make- now I think I have to. I'm gonna add it to my, my back to school fall reading list.

Marcus Johnson: She's got a lot to choose from. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections of crime fiction, plus six additional romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, um, bringing her total number of published books to 86.

Marcus Johnson: That would be one book for every year, um, of her life.

Yory Wurmser: Incredible.

Marcus Johnson: She lived till she was 85. Remarkable. Yeah. Um, what a national treasure. Uh, anyway, she's from England. Anyway, today's real topic, the future of digital.

Marcus Johnson: Remember to check, uh, to check out the takeaways we have for you at the end of the episode. They're new, um, but they're gonna be at the end of every episode, uh, so you guys can remember what the hell we talked about. So they will be there. Let's start with, we just hosted our Future of Digital events at City Winery in New York.

Marcus Johnson: Um, the, we think second event, we hope, I hope second event, 'cause otherwise I wasn't invited to the others. Um, and we also published some accompanying research looking at, um, a number of things. You guys write, uh, how AI is changing consumer behavior, marketing, and the path to purchase, where established advantages persist across digital, uh, the digital economy, and how marketers should act on AI now.

Marcus Johnson: Um, but we wanted to talk about a few, um, of the most interesting pieces of data, uh, and learnings from this research. Uh, s- Stephanie, I'll start with you. Uh, what's one data point that best tells the story of AI consumer adoption so far?

Stephanie Paterik: Yeah. Well, this project is so interesting, and it's my, my first time working on the Future of Digital Report.

Stephanie Paterik: I think Uri's got a couple under his belt, and it's a month s- it's a months' long project, um, really bringing together the perspectives of about 20 analysts across the different industries we cover, and coming up with a unified view of what the next year and beyond is going to look like. So we really focused on the timeframe of 2027 to about 2030, and very quickly it became clear that AI could not be a footnote in this one.

Stephanie Paterik: Um, and we really wanted to take a deep look at how it's affecting all of digital marketing. Um, for me, what really became a North Star was looking at consumer usage and habits because I think that if we look at the history of how, you know, new technology comes out, how revolutions happen, usually the tech comes first, the consumer or the user comes second, and then brands and dollars and investments follow.

Stephanie Paterik: Mm-hmm. And so I'm, long way of getting to a data point, I think something really interesting is that ChatGPT reached one billion, uh, weekly users, um, in August of 2026, and we find that, um, out of US internet users, 52% are using a generative AI, uh, you know, platform, a chatbot, uh, at least monthly, and 40% are using it weekly.

Stephanie Paterik: Mm-hmm. So from that I take, you know, now that's not a lot compared to how much time I spend scrolling social or maybe even streaming, you know, Netflix. Um, but we are seeing it creep into habitual use. Yeah. And that's a point where I think marketers have to pay attention.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. I mean, you said creep. It seems like it's faster.

Marcus Johnson: It seems like, that's what it jumped out to me the most, um, Uri, from the research, the, the speed, the f- it's four years ago no one used gen AI, and so, and today, to Stephanie's point, 52% monthly, 40% weekly. So just the pace of this to me is what really stood out.

Yory Wurmser: Yeah, it's phenomenal. And, and what's interesting about that weekly versus monthly rate, when you're talking about a weekly user- user, that's really someone who's using AI all the time.

Yory Wurmser: Like, it's actually becoming a, a, a fundamental part of how they research. Um, and right now, you know, as Stephanie said, it's over 40%, and it's up to 78% of AI users are using it weekly, so not only are more people- Oh, wow ... using it every year, more people are using it habitually- Mm-hmm ... and, and regularly every, every year.

Yory Wurmser: Um, and that's up from, you know, I think around 70% or something like that last year. Yeah. So pretty rapid increase in how many people are using AI, um, you know, not just at all, but regularly.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. And how many- Please, please ...

Yory Wurmser: yeah, Marcus, just, um, the 78%, I just wanna clarify, it's 78% of AI users, or

Marcus Johnson: just- Yes.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah, yeah. Um, as opposed to, yeah, across the population, right? Mm-hmm. The adult population. Um, what also fascinates me is we're talking about how people are u- uh, well, how many people, um, are using it, and how often they're using it, um, monthly or weekly. The time spent. Now, I think, Stephanie, we talked about this before when we spoke to an ep- uh, on an episode with Nate.

Marcus Johnson: It looks like a small share of our time spent with digital media, right? It's, like, 3% or so.

Stephanie Paterik: Yeah. But,

Marcus Johnson: um- 16

Stephanie Paterik: minutes a day ...

Marcus Johnson: 16 minutes. But among Gen AI users, it's over half an hour, and that to me is, again, fascinating because four years ago no one, no one was using this thing, and now all of a sudden it's half an hour of people's time every day of AI, uh, Gen AI users.

Marcus Johnson: And it's a very active behavior as well. And then fast-forward a couple of years, we're talking about approaching 45 minutes of people's days spent engaging with, chatting with, um, these, uh, Gen AI, uh, Gen AI platforms, LLMs. So that, Uri, what do you make of that, um, figure? Do you think that is actually quite high because th- that was zero a few years ago, or in context it's actually a smaller part of our digital media usage than, um, we might think?

Marcus Johnson: I

Yory Wurmser: think when you break down how people are using AI, it's not super surprising. A lot of people are, uh, mostly using it for searching and for working. Um, uh, only about a third of people who use AI are using it for shopping. So, you know- Mm-hmm ... when you think about how they're using it and think about how you may be using it, using it for getting things done.

Yory Wurmser: Yes. Um, and that those people are- Using it for hours on end and not just, you know, half an hour. So that, that, that, uh, usage skews the whole average up. So it makes sense. I mean, it's- they're using it very differently than how people used search.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Paterik: Yeah. It's interesting, too, if you think about the adoption curve, like I always go back to when Facebook first came out, and I, I was, uh, I was teaching a college journalism class at the time, and I remember walking around the classroom and all my students were, like, s- glued to this site called Facebook, you know, and not paying attention to the lecture at all.

Stephanie Paterik: And, uh, and you know, my- so I barely had an idea of what it was n- neither, you know, much less my mom. Mm-hmm. You know, fast-forward, you know, several years, a decade or more, and, you know, my mom spends hours on Facebook. So I think it is interesting to look at that population, those who are, you know, the first adopters who are leaning into gen AI and using it a lot now, which tend to be the younger generations.

Stephanie Paterik: Mm-hmm. It'll be interesting to see if that becomes sort of a blueprint or predictive of how, you know, l- larger society, um, ends up adopting it.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. Um, obviously talking about how AI is impacting, uh, consumers, but Yuri, what's one stat that best explains how AI is actually impacting marketing today?

Yory Wurmser: There are a few wa- different ways you can look at it. Just in terms of advertising itself, it's still a relatively small part of the overall advertising mix. Mm-hmm. It's about 32 million, uh, billion this year, and of that, only about a billion comes from advertising within ChatGPT. That- those are our, our estimates.

Yory Wurmser: But in fact, uh, OpenAI released a run rate of a billion, uh, in August, which indicates that our, our estimate is probably pretty close to right this year. Um, but it's having a much bigger effect in terms of how people are thinking about, um, having visibility, uh, how marketers are thinking about visibility within these chatbots because it is starting to add a layer into the consumer journey that, um, pretty much all shoppers, uh, pretty much all marketers, uh, need to pay attention to.

Marcus Johnson: What I found interesting, Yuri, though, about the, um, AI advertising number i- and the way you describe it really crystallizes it for me, the importance of this, um, it's the first new major ad channel since CTV. Yeah. Um, and we estimate that by 2030, AI chatbot and conversational search ad spend will already be half the size of CTV ad spend at close to $30 billion in the US.

Marcus Johnson: Um, that context I thought, yeah, was really interesting.

Yory Wurmser: Yeah, and what, what's- Another l- what's also interesting about it is how much of that Google is capturing at the moment. Mm. Um, the vast majority of the ad spend happening adjacent or within chatbots, um, is happening in either Gemini, uh, I'm sorry, is happening in either AI mode or in AI overviews.

Yory Wurmser: Um-

Stephanie Paterik: Right ...

Yory Wurmser: Google right now is winning the monetization, at least through advertising, of, um, of AI.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Yory Wurmser: But that doesn't necessarily mean OpenAI is not going to be- have a very successful ad business. Um, but it, it's starting from a, without the, the consumer data, without the ad tech, the ad technology, uh, th- without the platform that Google has.

Yory Wurmser: Yeah. So they have a lot of catching up to do, and it's gonna take them a while to actually, uh, you know, gain many billions of dollars of ad revenue.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah.

Stephanie Paterik: Laurie, that's such a good point, and, like, they are in building mode. And one thing we haven't talked about is just the economic pressure on AI to fund itself.

Stephanie Paterik: Um, we found that- Right ... that by the end of this year we will have collectively around the world invested $1.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, which is, which is pretty incredible.

Marcus Johnson: Wow.

Stephanie Paterik: And, and so you can see that for, for all of them, but, you know, certainly looking at OpenAI, there is going to be tremendous pressure on the ads business to start to compensate for that.

Stephanie Paterik: Mm-hmm. They are not getting there through subscriptions alone. We saw the same story with streaming TV. Like Netflix and many of the streamers said, "We'll never sell ads." And then they got to a point where they realized, like, oh, you know Yeah To continue to grow- We need

Marcus Johnson: money ...

Stephanie Paterik: to fund, you know, uh, the, the cost of producing content and movies, you know, we've gotta open to ads.

Stephanie Paterik: And so it'll be interesting to see the traject- trajectory, but it's worth noting the pressure on the ads business and, in turn, the opportunity that that's gonna create for, for brands who want a chance to play there.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Yory Wurmser: Yeah, very true. And yet at the same time it's, they've got their work cut out. It's gonna be tough to, to go against Google and, and beat Google at this game.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah.

Yory Wurmser: Um, but yeah, they, they have that strong imperative to do so.

Marcus Johnson: Especially when you're going up against companies that ... 'Cause some companies are under more pressure than others. Some already ha- are making billions of dollars and, and are able to lean on that whilst they figure out AI. Others can't. And so, uh, yeah, it's definitely an uneven balance in terms of where the pressure is.

Marcus Johnson: On the advertising side, one of the big questions is about, um, how do you move from, from SEO, uh, search eng- search engine optimization to, to, to, to, um, uh, G- GEO, uh, generative, uh, engine optimization. A- and Stephanie, what do you think is the mo- one of the most import- important factors for marketers, uh, considering, uh, when they're considering this, uh, transition?

Stephanie Paterik: I think the transition from SEO to GEO is more than an acronym change, and it's really, um, when, when we look at how AI, you know, generative AI, uh, uh, sees your brand, it's not just looking for keywords and indexing pages, it's actually building an understanding from a, a whole, you know, digital ecosystem of trust signals.

Stephanie Paterik: And so I think AI is really good at synthesizing a lot of information about your brand at once from a lot of touchpoints, and then, like, narrowing down an output and a recommendation to a user. So through eMarketer's AI Visibility Index, we've been tracking, um, particularly citations and, and, and, and what types of sites, uh, is AI taking a look at when it is making product recommendations in particular.

Stephanie Paterik: And we found that the most popular, you know, the, the most cited types of sites are still brand sites, which is interesting because the brand site still matters. But we see, uh, we see a rise in, um, you know, th- there's, there's definitely a popularity in publishers, in authority sites like industry bodies, like the Academy of Dermatology might be, you know, putting its seal of approval on a particular kind of lotion, and that is ranking heavily.

Stephanie Paterik: Um, and we also see retail sites popping up there. Um, so trust signals seems to be a theme a- across those. Like, don't just t- like, yes, here's what the brand has to say about itself, but don't just take our word for it. Mm-hmm. Here's what other people are saying about the brand.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Yory Wurmser: What's notable also is just how fast the th- the, the, um, GEO changes every month.

Yory Wurmser: Um, so- Hmm ... the general idea that trust, you know, that, that these, um- That these, uh, AI crawlers are looking for trusted sources holds. Um, that seems to be something that's steady, but what they consider as a trusted source or as a voice of the consumer seems to change on a monthly basis. Reddit was all the rage in GEO for months, and then all of a sudden it dropped off a cliff in August, um, or early September.

Yory Wurmser: So, um, it, it's a rapidly evolving field. Um, but what S- uh, Stephanie said is absolutely true. You know, building those brand fundamentals, um, and having a trusted brand is critical in this- Mm-hmm ... you know, in GEO.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Paterik: And Rory, that's such a good point. It, it makes me think of as well, it's important to understand that it has, it has, like, new...

Stephanie Paterik: It, it has two knowledge bases. So one is there's the body of, of work and information on the internet that these models were trained on. Um, and that, that body of work can go back years. And then there's, like, you know, the monthly update of the live web. And so you're right, when we're especially looking at the live web, uh, uh, influence can shift really fast.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Marcus Johnson: What I loved arguably most about this research was how you used visuals to c- communicate a point. Um, 'cause I've read a decent amount about this stuff, but it's hard to think about it i- in terms of, okay, what does that actually look like? And some of these were just fantastic, and what we're discussing here, um, for, for eMarketer, uh, Pro Plus subscribers, you guys can head to emarketer.com and, um, and check this out.

Marcus Johnson: We'll put the link in the, in the show notes as well. Slide 31, the, the way you explain and show all the signals that go into this, um, um, I think is... Yeah, it was a really good representation of what's actually going on here. Let's end with this. Um, Stephanie, I'll go to you first for this one. What's one surprising stat that jumped out to you most, um, from this research, uh, o- over, I think, 60 slides or so?

Marcus Johnson: There's a lot in here. Was there kind of a dark horse stat, something you weren't expecting to, to see?

Stephanie Paterik: Well, we've talked a lot about AI, but we actually touch on, uh, we touch on a lot of digital trends, and one is what's happening in kind of the crossover of the social media and TV space. And in particular- Mm

Stephanie Paterik: we see that social video is going to col- it's going to generate more ad revenue, um, I think actually in 2027 than all of converged TV combined. So it's interesting to see, you know, this, this, like, surge of social video and, and also just the endurance of social media at this point. I think that there were a, there, there, I've read a lot of think pieces about the death of social, you know, the feed is dead.

Stephanie Paterik: Um, but when we, you know, when we did our forecasts, uh, we actually see Meta continuing to grow social usage, time spent overall continuing to grow. So- Mm-hmm ... that was super interesting to me.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, we had to revi- I remember it was within the last 12 months, I think, we were like, "It's peaked." And then time spent on social, and then very shortly after, we're like, "It hasn't.

Marcus Johnson: Never mind. The people still find more time."

Stephanie Paterik: Everyone, like, checked their pockets and found an extra- ... extra hour to spend.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. And there's stuff going on, like certain ones doing better than others, but by and large, social's still, um, yeah, uh, absolutely holding strong. Yuri, what about you? What jumped out to you, a surprising stat that jumped out to you?

Yory Wurmser: For me, it was when I was doing research on the open web and some of the traffic declines in, in the open web. Um, for one thing, everyone talks about Google zero, um, you know, zero click. Um- And there's, uh, traffic referrals are down across the board from Facebook and from Meta properties, from other social properties.

Yory Wurmser: Um, everyone seems to be sending fewer referrals to publish- to publishers than in the past. So it's not surprising that publisher, on average, or publishers are down in their traffic, uh, by about 30%. But the thing that surprised me was that direct traffic is actually up. A lot of the publishers are able to keep their c- to attract, um You know, more direct traffic and keep people on the site more than they have in the past.

Yory Wurmser: So to me, that was a hopeful sign and it, and it a little bit goes back to what Stephanie said about the importance of trust. A lot of these publishers who have a high degree of trust from consumers are getting that direct traffic, and when we looked at, you know, traffic by individual, uh, publishers, some of them, some of them have actually seen their traffic increase over the last three years.

Marcus Johnson: Mm.

Yory Wurmser: Um, places like New York Times and Dow Jones, um, The Guardian. These are places that people, you know, trust as sources, maybe obviously not universally, but, uh, they have a, they have a loyal, uh, customer base that's, that is, is continuing to go to them.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Interesting. Um, really quickly, fr- one thing for me, slide 26, I really liked the way this was laid out, um, and it, 'cause it kind of talked about what's come before and, and posed the question of what to expect.

Marcus Johnson: It was looking at, say, a new channel means a new race for visibility resembling early search and social. Uh, it says brands ask, "How do I get found?" Um, and, uh, the, that created the SEO economy. Uh, you talk about how, um, I, how do I earn attention? That created the creator economy, and then this question of how do I get recommended?

Marcus Johnson: That's AI now, and then, um, question mark, what does, what is that gonna create for us? So, uh, yeah, I love the way that this addressed what was going on here, but then posed some really interesting, and also answered some really interesting questions about the future of digital. Uh, that's all we've got time for for today's episode.

Marcus Johnson: We'll move to top three takeaways. Uh, the speed of adoption and, uh, just how remarkable it is. Four years ago, no one used gen AI. Uh, fast-forward to today, and half of people, 52%, uh, of American internet users using it every month, 40% every week, and gen AI users using it for half an hour every single day already.

Marcus Johnson: And number two, Google's dominance in AI spend and its competitive advantage as it evolves, uh, search, uh, into conversational search. I think it's an important point. And then lastly, AI forming its view of your brand from an ecosystem of signals. Uh, check out slide 31 in the Future of Digital deck. Link in the show notes for that.

Marcus Johnson: Uh, the full report is called The Future of Digital 2027: Marketing For the New Human/Machine, uh, Journey. Uh, a link is in the show notes of course, and pro plus subscribers at connectivitymarketer.com. We recently hosted, did our second Future of Digital event, uh, in City Winery in New York. Congrats, uh, congratulations to everyone who made that possible.

Marcus Johnson: Uh, make sure you sign up for next year's one. You can't right now, but just mental note. Anyway, uh, that's all we got time for. Thank you to my guests for today. Thank you to Stephanie

Stephanie Paterik: Thank you so much, Marcus and Yuri. Great talking with you.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. You too. Thank you to Yuri.

Yory Wurmser: No, thanks for, thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson: Absolute pleasure. And thanks to Lance on the production crew helping us out with this one, uh, and to everyone for listening to Behind the Numbers: The Marketing Podcast, made possible by Atmosphere TV. Tomorrow I'll be here hosting the Sports Marketing Podcast: In the Game, discussing when sports become entertainment, uh, basically how all those streaming, uh, shows have influenced uptake in, in, um, actual sports, uh, things like Drive to Survive.

Marcus Johnson: Um, uh, oh, my friend's gonna kill me for forgetting. Heated Rivalry. God. Sorry, Dina. God, she's gonna be furious. Uh, and many, many others. We'll talk about that. Um, Wednesday, Suzy will be here with the September Retailer Awards, and Friday I'll be back with another episode of Behind the Numbers.