Recently, Australia's eCommerce and retail community gathered at ICC Sydney for Online Retailer Conference & Expo, the country's largest eCommerce conference, where thousands of digital and marketing leaders get across the latest developments in the industry. I delivered a presentation on how to win in the content-driven digital commerce landscape, and what follows are the highlights that I’m sure you’ll also find valuable.

Working with brands globally, we have a front row seat to what’s around the corner, and how brands are tapping into the latest shifts. Here’s what’s on the horizon.

User-generated content has been a winning content format for one simple reason - people tend to trust a real person more than a polished ad.

Back in the day, it was an indie brand's secret weapon. When smaller brands didn't have a multi-million dollar budget for mainstream media or mega-influencers, UGC was how they drove reach and sales. Creator product seeding and UGC at scale still works wonders today, but the landscape is now shifting, with two key factors working behind the scenes.

Can you imagine hitting your highest growth targets in business to date, but at the same time the business still feels shaky?

This familiar pattern we see plays out when growth is driven almost entirely on a handful of bestsellers scaled by performance marketing alone. But when you take those bestsellers out of stock, there’s nothing left holding new customer relationships together, because there’s been little focus on building affinity with the actual brand.

Performance marketing is genuinely good at what it does, and traditional agencies running it are built to find what converts and scale it. But the brief they’re given is usually “drive revenue,” not “drive revenue whilst building a brand that new people come back to,” and the gap between these two is where a lot of brands begin to lose ground.

What happens next is that ads are optimised for broader appeal, and your brand starts to look and feel like every other brand in the category. And when you sand down the edges to appeal to everyone, your meaning drifts away too. Differentiation helps you find your tribe, and drive preference, and preference is what drives margin, so the P&L over time will begin to tell this story too.

So how are other brands solving this? It begins with ads, because that's where most brands either build equity or slowly erode it.

We've all seen how the former era of the polished campaign has given way to rawer, more unfiltered content that audiences have responded to. Brands are beginning to open the doors to the inner workings of their brand and teams. This means taking customers along for the ride for both the ups and downs behind the scenes and at times turning internal blunders into brand-love.

What's been fascinating to watch is what happens when a brand navigates something difficult in public. The connection that forms in those unscripted moments is a different quality to anything traditional marketing campaigns can create.

You've closed the round. The capital is there, and there's finally real runway to build something bigger. The product has always been strong, and so has the brand history. Yet the brand feels like it's working harder than it needs to for every new customer it wins.

Most founders eventually land on the same realization, that the identity that got them here was built for a different moment. It's not that it's wrong. It's just dated. A brand built for the year you started is rarely built for the year you're trying to win.

When the year gets busy, the day-to-day pulls us from meeting to meeting, and before long we're going through the motions without stopping to find time to be more curious, and ask better questions of the teams we work with. As you meet with teams this week, internally or externally, here are some questions you may not have asked in a while, designed to surface sharper insights and make sure your paid media spend is working as hard as it should be.

Consider this a starting point for richer conversations over the next month.

Beauty brand founders preparing for launch have been living and breathing their brand for months or even years. They know exactly how their beauty brand identity should feel, and have a clear picture of the kind of person who'll fall in love with their range.

But the gap between knowing something deeply and bringing it to life is where a lot of pre-launch founders stall. Some don't yet have the words to articulate their brand. Others have too many words and struggle to distill them into something simple and clear. And then there are founders who are crystal clear on what their brand stands for, but haven't yet stress-tested their definition against the market to find a position no one else is claiming.

So how do you take what's in your head and bring it to life as a cosmetic brand identity that captivates the market? It starts with one conversation.

Have you noticed the headlines keep swinging? One week, founder-led content is the key to authenticity. The next, the founder-led era is declared done. If you're on LinkedIn, you'll know the hot takes were relentless. 

The data from The Business of Fashion's "The End of The Founder-Led Era" showed that founder-led marketing isn't a primary purchase driver for consumers, and that's no surprise to us. The report showed that only 13% of consumers say the founder is a key reason they buy. From the brands we work with, founder content consistently drives the highest engagement on social media. But engagement and conversion are different jobs, and conflating them is where most of the confusion starts.

The more useful question isn't whether founder-led content works. It's what role the founder's voice should play as the brand grows, and how that role needs to evolve.

Brand leaders are facing a similar problem. The channels that built their brands are getting more expensive and less predictable. Meta's rising CPMs, increased competition, and the pressure to find sustainable growth without endlessly increasing spend keeps leaders up at night. That tension is driving more teams to explore YouTube, not just as an awareness play, but as a full-funnel growth channel.

The challenge we see is that some brands are spending on YouTube, but few are using it strategically. Most indie brands are still approaching the platform through creative strategies and automated campaign structures that aren't designed to play into the platform's specific strengths, and they're missing what makes YouTube fundamentally different from other channels in the first place.

If you find yourself planning another discount promo just to hit revenue targets, keep reading on.

The pattern we see with some brands: discount offer, new collection launch, repeat. Most already know that when discounts become your default growth lever, customers start waiting for sales instead of seeking you out year-round. But sometimes the quick win is hard to resist. If it's time to break the cycle, the answer lies in brand moments that build equity over time.