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Welcome back to The Brief by Kuro House, where we break down the day’s most impactful marketing stories, bringing you the details that matter for staying ahead in a rapidly changing landscape. Today, we’re diving into everything from seismic shifts in publishing business models to the evolving role of AI in holiday shopping, and the new frameworks shaping how content is licensed for AI use. Let’s get into it.
First up, a true “Big Bang” moment for the publishing world, courtesy of Digiday. Reach, the publisher behind UK giants like the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, and Daily Star, is making its first-ever foray into paid digital subscriptions after 120 years of ad-funded, free content. This move comes as Reach faces a 30% year-over-year drop in traffic—a loss of over 51 million visits in October alone, largely due to Google search volatility and the rise of AI-generated summaries that divert referral traffic. CEO Piers North is clear: while headlines about search declines are dramatic, the real issue is the complexity and unpredictability of referral sources—Google Search, Discover, and News all behave differently, making it hard to pinpoint the exact cause of falling numbers. North’s strategy is to introduce premium, ad-lite content tiers, starting with regional titles like the Manchester Evening News, with subscriptions at £1 for the first month and £4.99 monthly after that. The Liverpool Echo and WalesOnline are next, with the eventual aim of a unified subscription across Reach’s portfolio. Alongside this, Reach is investing in video production and leveraging AI to streamline editing, even as it navigates layoffs and newsroom restructuring. North is also betting on first-party data—millions of registered users—to personalize content and ads. While Reach hasn’t landed major AI licensing deals yet, North believes pay-per-use licensing will soon be a revenue stream as AI companies realize the value of high-quality content. The bottom line: Reach is reinventing itself for the AI era, balancing ad-supported free content with premium subscriptions, and gearing up for a future where content value is recognized—and compensated—by both readers and AI platforms.
Switching gears to retail, Modern Retail reports that this Black Friday and Cyber Monday, brands are playing defense amid economic uncertainty, tariffs, and margin pressure. While some brands are touting record deals, others are quietly trimming their discounts. For example, bag brand Caraa and its sibling charcuterie brand Mercado Famous dropped their discounts from 30% last year to 25% this year, while Petite Plume, known for holiday pajamas, scaled back from 25% to 20%. The reasons? Rising costs from tariffs, supply chain challenges, and a need to protect margins. Brands are scrutinizing their “promo math” more closely, balancing the need to entice price-conscious consumers with the risk of eroding brand value or being left with excess inventory. The paradox, as Creditsafe’s Ragini Bhalla puts it, is that consumers need promotions to spend, but retailers can’t afford deep markdowns. CommerceIQ’s data shows that while ad spend is up 22% year-over-year, discounts are down 1.7%, and prices are up 3.7%. Trust is also key: more than one in five shoppers have abandoned brands over “misleading” Cyber Week offers, and more than one in ten have left brands they felt cheapened by aggressive markdowns. The result is a narrow lane for retailers—shrink discounts too much and consumers hesitate, go too deep and you risk long-term loyalty. Even so, brands like Mac Cosmetics are leaning into livestreaming and TikTok Shop to drive engagement, while Petite Plume sees the holidays as their “Super Bowl,” with pajamas flying off the shelves every 20 seconds in Q4.
Now, let’s talk about how AI is transforming shopping behavior, with fresh data from Digiday. This holiday season, two-thirds of Americans are reportedly considering using AI—think ChatGPT or Gemini—to help with holiday wish lists, a massive leap from just 11% last year. Deloitte’s survey shows that 56% plan to use AI chatbots to compare prices and find deals, 47% to summarize reviews, and 33% to generate shopping lists. The shift is away from browsing and toward asking AI for “the right answer,” a trend that’s forcing marketers to rethink SEO and media planning for a zero-click, AI-driven discovery landscape. AI-powered commerce features like OpenAI’s Instant Checkout are blurring the line between discovery and purchase, and Brightedge reports a staggering 752% year-over-year spike in AI referrals to e-commerce brands. Sectors like grocery have seen a 900% increase in AI visibility, as shoppers turn to bots for everything from recipe planning to essentials. Yet, traditional search isn’t dead—Google remains the top choice for over half of U.S. consumers, and most still visit retailer sites to validate purchases after AI-assisted research. Trust remains an issue: shoppers still prefer community forums, user reviews, and retailer sites over AI sources, and 64% feel bots are “stealing the joy” from holiday shopping by increasing competition for limited products. The big question for brands: how do you get seen in an environment where the first audience is an AI model, not a human?
On the content licensing front, Digiday brings news of a significant expansion in the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Collective. Arena Group, BuzzFeed, USA Today Co, and Vox Media have joined over 50 partners in this initiative, which aims to standardize how publishers license content to AI systems—and get paid for it. The RSL protocol lets publishers set machine-readable terms in their robots.txt files, specifying licensing and royalty requirements instead of just “allow” or “disallow.” The framework is designed to enable pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference fees, and is supported by major CDN providers like Fastly. While similar efforts are underway—like the IAB Tech Lab’s Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) and Cloudflare’s Content Signals Policy—RSL and IAB are collaborating to ensure their standards complement each other. The catch? There’s no enforcement yet; these frameworks only work if AI companies agree to play by the rules. The hope is that with enough publisher buy-in, AI companies will face enough pressure to comply, especially since negotiating individually with thousands of publishers isn’t scalable. RSL’s approach is to create a collective rights organization, akin to ASCAP for music, to streamline licensing and royalty payments. As the group grows, it’s focusing on international expansion and developing a public licensing agreement by year’s end. The ultimate goal: a global, scalable system where publishers of all sizes can get compensated for the value their content brings to AI platforms.
That’s all for today’s edition of The Brief. From publishers reimagining their business models for the AI era, to brands recalibrating their holiday strategies, and the ongoing quest to define fair value in an AI-powered world, one thing is clear: change is the only constant. As always, we’ll be here to keep you sharp and informed. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you tomorrow.
