Field Tips: Midwest Marketing is Thriving

I recently read a great piece in the Wall Street Journal about the crisis currently hitting Madison Avenue. While the giant coastal agencies are dealing with massive layoffs and internal disarray, smaller Midwestern shops are quietly thriving.

As the owner of a Milwaukee-area agency for nearly 27 years, this wasn’t exactly news to me. Our clients aren’t looking for skyscraper offices or Manhattan overhead — they want a partner who actually gets them and stays focused on results.

Here’s why our Midwest sensibility is a direct win for your marketing:

• Stability over scale. While mega-firms merge and shuffle staff, we focus on long-term relationships. This means your account team stays consistent and focused on your goals, not on surviving the next round of corporate restructuring.
• Real-world value. We don’t have to bake Manhattan rent into our project costs. You get high-level expertise and senior-level attention without the bloated budgets often required by coastal firms.
• Authentic connection. There’s a growing gap between big-city agencies and the rest of the country. Working with a neighbor ensures your messaging is rooted in what actually resonates with your audience, rather than just chasing the latest cosmopolitan trend.

Whether you’re a national brand looking for a fresh perspective or a local business ready to level up, there’s a lot to be said for a partnership built on trust and accessibility.

If you’re interested in how a heartland approach can help your brand cut through the noise, just reach out. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

The promise of a purely digital future is being met with a powerful counter-movement as brands increasingly prioritize real-life, in-person experiences. While online marketing offers massive reach, it often lacks the sensory impact and authentic connection that consumers—particularly Gen Z and Millennials—crave in a landscape dominated by digital fatigue and scrolling fatigue. Major players like Netflix, Nike, and even digital-first platforms like Hinge are shifting their focus toward immersive pop-ups, community-driven events, and scenes over screens to cut through the noise of a saturated internet.

WHY IT MATTERS

Digital presence alone is no longer enough to build lasting brand equity. As the industry moves away from a purely creative-centric or awareness-focused model, the moment of conversion is increasingly happening in physical environments where context and human interaction drive decisions. Investing in experiential marketing allows brands to foster genuine trust, create shareable social content organically, and turn passive audiences into loyal communities. To stay competitive in 2026, marketing teams must learn to bridge the gap between their digital strategies and tangible, real-world activations that provide something real for people to engage with.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Recent technical evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) have identified a significant processing flaw known as the “lost in the middle” phenomenon. While these models are highly effective at identifying and recalling information located at the very beginning or the very end of a document, their performance drops sharply when analyzing information buried in the center. As AI tools increasingly serve as the primary readers and summarizers of web content, this U-shaped attention span means that even high-quality, relevant data can be completely overlooked if it isn’t placed strategically within the page layout.

WHY IT MATTERS

As marketing professionals, we need to rethink how we structure long-form content, such as white papers, case studies, and deep-dive blog posts. If a brand’s most persuasive arguments or key data points are tucked away in the middle of a page, they risk being excluded from AI-generated summaries and search snippets. This reinforces the need for an inverted pyramid style of writing—where the most critical information is front-loaded—and underscores the importance of human review checkpoints to ensure AI-driven summaries are accurate and complete. To maintain visibility in an AI-saturated ecosystem where over half of new articles are now AI-generated, marketers must prioritize a clear, hierarchical content structure that caters to the specific attention patterns of automated models.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Traditional search channels are no longer delivering the performance they once did, leading 42% of B2B tech CMOs to adapt their strategies for generative engine optimization (GEO) and zero-click search. A recent survey reveals that this shift is driven equally by declining performance in legacy channels and the fundamental way AI is changing how buyers discover and evaluate brands. Consumer behavior supports this pivot; only 8.8% of users accept the top search result without further fact-checking, signaling that traditional rankings have lost significant authority. Consequently, marketing budgets are following the trend, with 94% of digital marketing leaders planning to increase their GEO spend in 2026.

WHY IT MATTERS

This data confirms that the move away from traditional organic search is driven by current performance pain rather than mere future anxiety. As AI-generated search results increasingly prioritize trusted sources like media and analysts, brands must rethink their discovery strategies to ensure they remain visible in zero-click environments. Relying on organic search as a primary discovery channel is becoming a liability; instead, marketers should shift investment toward building brand authority that AI models will cite as a trusted reference. This evolution requires a new focus on broad visibility metrics over simple keyword rankings to stay competitive as rivals rapidly adapt to the GEO landscape.