Field Tips: Your 2026 Head Start

The urge to coast into the holidays is strong.

But before you set your “Out of Office” and close the laptop, there is a small window of opportunity to make your return in January significantly smoother.

You don’t need to launch a massive campaign this week. Instead, focus on high-impact “hygiene” tasks—the small details that often get overlooked but make a big difference in how professional you look on Day 1 of the new year.

Here are 5 tasks (that take less than 30 minutes) to help you hit the ground running in 2026:

1. Update Your Social Bios. Give your profiles a quick scan. Do your links work? Is your bio still accurate? Ensure your “link in bio” points to current content so you aren’t sending holiday traffic to a dead end.
2. Set Your Special Hours. If you have a physical location, update your Google Business Profile. Explicitly setting your hours prevents that annoying “Hours might differ” warning that confuses customers.
3. Fix Your Footer Date. It is the smallest detail that makes a site look neglected. Update your website footer copyright to 2026 now (or schedule the publish date) so you don’t have to think about it on New Year’s Day.
4. Send Yourself a Test Lead. It sounds basic, but when was the last time you checked your “Contact Us” form? Fill it out to make sure the notifications are actually hitting your inbox—and not your spam folder—before you step away.
5. Create a Win Wall. List 3-5 big wins from this year and share them with your team. It is easy to focus on what didn’t get done, but entering the break with a reminder of your success is a huge morale booster.

Have you already tackled your 2026 strategic planning or is that waiting for you in January?

If you need help mapping out the year ahead, reach out to our team. We’d love to help you build a plan that works.

Meta is Removing Less Content (And That’s Not Great)

WHAT’S HAPPENING. Meta’s Q3 2025 Community Standards Enforcement Report reveals a strategic pivot: the company is moving away from aggressive automated takedowns in favor of a Community Notes model, resulting in fewer overall content removals. While Meta claims this improves enforcement precision (reducing wrongful takedowns), the data shows that proactive detection for bullying and harassment has dropped significantly, while the prevalence of adult nudity and graphic content has actually increased. Additionally, the report confirms that fake accounts still comprise about 4% of monthly active users—equating to over 140 million profiles—and that link-based posts now make up only 2.7% of content on Facebook, a massive drop from nearly 10% in 2022.

WHY IT MATTERS. For marketers, this report signals two critical warnings: brand safety is becoming more volatile, and organic traffic is harder than ever to earn. As Meta relaxes proactive moderation to prioritize free speech, brands face a higher risk of their ads or content appearing alongside harmful material that algorithms previously caught. Furthermore, the persistence of 140 million fake accounts suggests that audience reach metrics may still be inflated, requiring stricter scrutiny on campaign performance. Finally, the decline in link visibility reinforces that Facebook must be treated as a destination for engagement, not just a traffic source for your website.

Read More on Social Media Today

McDonald’s Scraps “Creepy” AI Ad After Backlash

WHAT’S HAPPENING. McDonald’s Netherlands has removed its latest holiday commercial—created entirely with generative AI—after it faced immediate and harsh backlash from viewers. The 45-second spot, titled “The Most Terrible Time of the Year,” used AI to depict chaotic holiday mishaps, but critics slammed the visuals as “creepy,” “soulless,” and “slop”. Although the production agency defended the work, claiming it required weeks of human effort to refine the AI outputs, the negative sentiment forced the brand to pull the ad and issue a statement acknowledging the misstep.

WHY IT MATTERS. This is a critical case study in the limits of AI for brand storytelling. While generative video tools are powerful, consumer tolerance for the “AI aesthetic” is dropping fast—audiences are increasingly interpreting it as lazy or cheap rather than innovative. For marketers, the lesson is clear: emotional resonance requires human authenticity. If you use AI, it must be indistinguishable from high-quality production, or you risk alienating the very audience you’re trying to connect with.

Read More on Futurism

Creative Commons Backs “Pay-to-Crawl” to Save the Open Web

WHAT’S HAPPENING. In a significant shift for the organization known for championing open access, Creative Commons (CC) has announced tentative support for pay-to-crawl systems—technical standards that allow websites to automatically charge AI bots for accessing their content. CC argues that the current “block or allow” binary is failing publishers, driving them to lock content behind hard paywalls to survive the drop in search traffic. By supporting a standardized, automated payment model (often utilizing the HTTP 402 status code), CC hopes to create a “third path” where creators are compensated for AI training data while keeping information publicly accessible to human users and non-profit researchers.

WHY IT MATTERS. For marketers and content teams, this represents a potential lifeline for the “dying” organic traffic model. As zero-click AI answers erode traditional SEO traffic, “pay-to-crawl” offers a new revenue stream: monetizing the data itself rather than just the eyeballs on it. Importantly, this push for standardization aims to democratize data deals; currently, only media giants like Reddit or Axel Springer have the leverage to negotiate with OpenAI. A universal “pay-to-crawl” standard would allow smaller niche brands and blogs to be compensated automatically when their unique insights are ingested by LLMs.

Read More on TechCrunch

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