Digital marketing news and trends: August 2026

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Every month, our performance team pull togethers the latest digital marketing news and trends across SEO, digital PR, paid media, social, AI and beyond. Then we separate the genuinely useful developments from the stuff that can probably stay buried in your LinkedIn feed.

Welcome to the Monthly Marketing Mash-Up for August 2026. This month, an M&S product expert is proving your next big creator might already be on the payroll, Google is testing how ready websites are for AI agents, Meta is sharpening its focus on new-customer acquisition, and some of the smartest recent Digital PR campaigns have started with that most British of subjects: the weather.

M&S has found a brilliant creator. She already works there.

M&S has spent years working its way back into the cultural conversation, and one of its more interesting recent social successes has come from someone rather closer to the products than your average influencer.

Kathryn Turner is M&S Food’s Director of Product Development and joined the business back in 1995. Her TikTok content takes people behind the scenes of products, suppliers and development decisions, putting genuine expertise in front of the camera rather than handing a script to somebody outside the business. By early June, less than a month after starting the account, she was already approaching 50,000 followers, and the account has grown to over 100,000 since.

There’s a useful lesson here for brands contemplating yet another creator brief. Your most credible spokesperson may already be sitting inside the business.

The trick is finding people who have something genuinely interesting to say, then giving them enough freedom to sound like themselves. A product developer talking passionately about the product they helped create carries a different kind of authority from a polished endorsement. It feels authentic because it is.

The key takeaway:

Before you look outward for your next content stream, look inward. Employee-generated content can bring expertise, personality and credibility together at a cost most influencer budgets would be quite jealous of.

Google is testing how ready websites are for AI agents

For years, we’ve been designing websites around two broad audiences: people and search engines. Chrome Lighthouse is now experimenting with a third.

Its new Agentic Browsing category looks at how easily AI agents can understand a website and interact with it. The checks include familiar fundamentals such as accessible names and labels and stable page layouts, alongside newer ideas including llms.txt and WebMCP, a proposed standard that allows websites to expose specific actions to AI agents in a structured way. In plain English, that could make tasks such as searching, filling in forms or completing bookings easier for an agent to carry out reliably. Read Google’s Agentic Browsing guidance and its introduction to WebMCP.

There’s an important caveat. This is experimental, the standards are still developing and Google says the category currently provides actionable signals rather than a definitive ranking. In other words, this is one to watch rather than one to panic about.

What it does give marketers is another signal about where digital experiences are heading. Clear structure, good accessibility, predictable interfaces and well-defined actions already make websites better for people. Increasingly, they may also determine how successfully AI agents can use them.

The key takeaway:

AI-readiness will increasingly become part of what “good” looks like online. The smartest move now is to strengthen the website foundations that help both people and machines succeed: semantic structure, accessibility, stable layouts and journeys that are easy to understand and complete.

Meta gives advertisers a clearer route to new-customer acquisition

Meta has also been making changes to how advertisers distinguish between winning new customers and selling to people who already know the brand.

Its Customer Lifecycle Strategy introduces an “Acquire new customers” option within Sales campaign setup, giving advertisers a clearer place to apply existing-customer exclusions and signal that acquisition is the priority. Meta’s own interface also warns that focusing specifically on people who have never purchased may increase cost per result, which is hardly surprising. New customers tend to require a little more wooing. Read Meta’s guidance on Advantage+ sales campaigns. 

The important bit is in the setup. Current hands-on testing suggests advertisers may still need to define and select the right customer audiences themselves, so this shouldn’t be treated as an AI-powered button that instantly knows every customer you’ve ever had. Accurate audience definitions and good first-party data are still important. 

Strategically, though, it’s a useful prompt. Acquisition and retention do very different jobs, and bundling them together can make performance look healthier than the underlying growth story really is. If your business needs net-new customers, you should know what you’re paying to get them and how that compares with the value they go on to generate.

The key takeaway:

Growth reporting gets much more useful when acquisition and retention are measured separately. If winning new customers is the goal, isolate that activity properly, understand the true cost of acquisition and judge performance against the value those customers go on to create.

The best Digital PR starts with something people already care about

Some of our favourite recent Digital PR ideas have had an unlikely common denominator: weather.

IKEA used 20 years of climate data, analysed with the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, to identify Sweden’s sunniest square metre on Gotland. Then it turned the finding into something physical, marking the location with permanent stone armchairs inspired by its SKARPÖ outdoor chair. An abstract dataset became a place people could see, photograph and visit, with a very believable reason for IKEA to be the brand behind it. IKEA explains the project here.

Meanwhile, Where’s Cool started with a much more immediate summer problem: where can you go nearby when it’s absolutely roasting? Its searchable map combines public data and user confirmations to help people find pubs, cafés, restaurants and bars with air conditioning across England and Wales. The live site now covers more than 287,000 venues. Have a look at Where’s Cool.

The executions are completely different, but the process underneath them is useful: interest, proof, asset. Start with something people already recognise or care about, give the idea authority through evidence, then turn it into something useful, visual or tangible enough to travel.

The key takeaway:

The strongest Digital PR ideas start with a real public interest, then turn it into something people can see, use or get behind. Data gives the story credibility, but the creative leap is what gives it attention.

Also on our radar this month

• Google Ads has an August deadline worth checking: From 17 August 2026, Google is changing how Target CPA and Target ROAS strategies behave for campaigns that are limited by budget. Google recommends reviewing relevant campaigns, particularly those performing better than their existing targets, and has introduced a Bid Target Adjustment Tool to help. Read Google’s guidance.
   
• Google Search is getting better at doing, rather than only answering: Connected Apps are rolling out in AI Mode for US users, initially including Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music. Users can take an AI-generated response and move straight into actions such as building a shopping cart or creating a design. For brands, it’s another sign that parts of the customer journey may increasingly happen inside AI-led search experiences. See Google’s announcement.
   
• AI is increasing creative volume faster than creative quality: Research from TikTok and WARC, based on 400 global marketing leaders, found that 90% of those surveyed now use AI as a core creative tool and 88% have increased creative volume, but only 45% report significant improvements in quality. Faster production clearly helps, but human judgement, cultural understanding and original thinking still have a fairly important role to play. Good news for us, then. Explore the TikTok and WARC findings.
   
• Chester Zoo rallies attractions over misleading weather icons: Chester Zoo says simple rain-cloud icons can make an entire day look like a washout, even when showers may only last a short time, potentially putting people off visiting outdoor attractions. More than 80 organisations backed its call for clearer forecasts, leading to a summit with the Met Office, government officials and tourism leaders in July. It’s a strong example of Digital PR taking a shared business frustration and turning it into an industry-wide conversation. Read Chester Zoo’s update.

What does all this mean for marketers?

There’s a fairly clear thread running through August’s updates. Platforms are automating more, AI is becoming more capable and the mechanics of digital marketing keep changing, but the advantage still comes from making better decisions around the technology.

That means building digital experiences that are simple enough for humans and machines to navigate, being more rigorous about where growth is really coming from, putting credible people at the heart of your content and turning data into activations that people genuinely want to engage with.

We’ll be back with another Monthly Marketing Mash-up next month. If one of these updates has raised a question about your digital performance, get in touch and we’ll happily dive into the details.