INDemand Consulting

INDemand Consulting At INDemand, we help small businesses grow with expert marketing, innovative tech, and hands-on managed services. Let’s grow your business together!

From consulting to our all-in-one platform, MktrHub, we deliver tailored solutions to meet your goals. INDemand Consulting is a leading marketing agency based in Cicero, IN. We specialize in helping businesses of all sizes reach their full potential through strategic marketing solutions. Our team of experts offers a wide range of services including branding, social media management, SEO, and digital advertising. We feature a breadth of our marketing solutions on our very own MktrHub technology platform. Whether you are looking to increase your online presence or drive more traffic to your website, INDemand Consulting has the expertise and technology to help you achieve your marketing and growth goals. Contact us today to learn more about how we can elevate your business to the next level.

From HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing report: 61% of marketers say this is marketing's biggest disruption in twenty yea...
09/19/2026

From HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing report: 61% of marketers say this is marketing's biggest disruption in twenty years. 🕰️

I don't argue with the sentiment. I'd just point at the phrase everyone skims past.

Twenty years.

If this is the biggest since about 2006 — then there was a comparable one in 2006. And it looked like paid search eating the media plan, social arriving with no rulebook, the print budget quietly dying, analytics making every assumption in the building checkable, and plenty of senior folks announcing that none of it would stick.

Here's what I notice about that 61%: calling something unprecedented says more about the speaker than the event.

For a lot of the field, this really is the first structural upheaval of their career. That fear is real and fair.

For the rest of us, it's the second or third. And the second one is genuinely easier — not because you know what's coming, but because you've learned the difference between a real shift and a vendor in a hurry.

That's not nostalgia. That's a working instrument, and it's in short supply.

What did the last one teach you that's helping now?

Deloitte surveyed 3,235 IT and business leaders across 24 countries this year. Only 21% have a mature governance model f...
09/18/2026

Deloitte surveyed 3,235 IT and business leaders across 24 countries this year. Only 21% have a mature governance model for agentic AI. 😬

And of the agents that actually reach live workflows, separate research found 36% run with zero oversight. Gartner expects a lot of companies to pull the plug on autonomous agents within a year — after an incident, not before one.

Put those together and the real failure mode shows up. It's not that the models are bad.

It's that nobody wrote down which decisions the agent can make alone, what it has to escalate, what gets logged, and who answers for the result.

Anyone who has onboarded a capable, slightly overconfident new hire already knows this document. We just never had to write it down — a person picks up the boundaries by reading the room.

An agent can't read the room.

So the skill this moment actually rewards isn't prompting. It's knowing where delegated authority ends. You can't take a course in that. You assemble it from watching things go wrong.

If an agent made a costly call tomorrow, who's accountable?

09/18/2026

“You are not worth less than you were five years ago.

You are being priced in the wrong unit.”

That may be my favorite line from this week's Marketing Encore.

We've spent our careers thinking the ultimate way to monetize our experience is through one increasingly senior full-time job.

But what happens when you take those same 20 or 30 years of experience and sell your judgment differently?

Not as a $250K+ annual headcount decision.

As expertise a company can access when they need it.

That’s a very different conversation — and potentially a very different career.

I unpack the idea in the full video:

Watch it on YouTube

09/18/2026

Thirty-four percent of Americans now say the mail on their kitchen counter feels more trustworthy than anything that shows up on their screen.

That's up nine points in a single year, from a study Lob fielded in July with 2,000 adults. The reason isn't nostalgia. Sixty-two percent say AI has made them more skeptical of digital ads, because they're wading through slop every time they open a browser. A printed piece can't be generated in four seconds by someone who's never heard of your company, and people have started to notice.

But the finding I keep coming back to is the generational split. Baby Boomers respond to practical shopping context — the offer, the price, the comparison. Younger buyers respond to personalization and life-stage targeting. Which means if your customer base skews older and you've been spending money on merge fields and dynamic name insertion, you've been optimizing for somebody else's audience.

Fifty-six percent said useful information matters more to them than seeing their first name printed on the page. And 45% said they'd throw out a piece that tries to sound urgent. "Final Notice" isn't pressure. It's an opt-out you paid the printer to produce.

Three more from today's 90-second rundown:

• Seventy creator-economy acquisitions closed in the first half of 2026, up 23%, with Accenture buying Whalar for $500M+ and CAA and TPG launching a $250M company that exists to buy creator businesses. If your whole creator program runs through one agency, one deal changes your rates, your team and your roster at the same time.

• Google added four ad-clutter metrics to Chrome this week — ad count, screen share, bandwidth, processing load — for any site with an ads.txt file. It's public, it's free, and it's the first time you can check a publisher's page density without taking their word for it.

• EA now sells ads across FC 27, College Football 27 and skate in a single buy instead of one game at a time, timed to a holiday stretch when its engagement rises 25%. Gaming was never hard to justify. It was hard to buy. That just changed.

Full breakdown on all four in today's video. 👇

One more thing on the mail study nobody's talking about: 55% of financially strained consumers said a piece from a brand they'd never bought from made them more likely to purchase — versus 32% of everybody else. The people with the least room in the budget are the most open to a new name in the mailbox. That is the opposite of what most prospecting models assume, and it's worth a second look at who you've been suppressing.

09/17/2026

If you’re over 50 and looking for your next senior marketing role, here’s the hard truth:

The line got longer.
The door got narrower.

The answer may not be rewriting your résumé for the ninth time or applying to another 60 jobs.

It may be finding a different route.

Your 20 or 30 years of experience didn’t suddenly become less valuable. But the way you package and sell that experience might need to change.

That’s what I dig into in the full episode of The Marketing Encore — including why fractional consulting and AI are creating a very different opportunity for experienced marketers.

Watch the full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z-bkaPX1zg

A number from this year's AI Overviews research that turns "getting cited" from a vanity metric into a budget conversati...
09/17/2026

A number from this year's AI Overviews research that turns "getting cited" from a vanity metric into a budget conversation:

Brands cited inside an AI Overview earn about 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands on the same queries. 📊

Same search. Same page. More than double the clicks — decided by whether the model named you.

That splits apart two things we've always measured as one. Ranking gets you onto the page. Citation gets you chosen.

For most of our careers those showed up together, so nobody needed the distinction. Now a competitor can sit below you in the results, get named in the summary above them, and take the click your position supposedly earned.

The good news? The inputs are unglamorous and in your control. A clear answer near the top. Real sources. A named author with real credentials. A current date. Enough specificity that the page is worth quoting instead of paraphrasing.

Doing the work properly and gaming the system have finally converged. Took long enough.

Do you know which of your pages get cited today?

09/17/2026

Sixty-five percent of shoppers click the brand they already knew.

Bazaarvoice asked more than 3,600 people what they actually do when an AI assistant hands them three options. Two-thirds clicked the familiar name. Twenty-four percent clicked whatever the tool labeled its top match. Eleven percent went for the cheapest.

Then the part that should reorder somebody's Q4 plan: 57% said they would only switch to an unfamiliar AI-recommended brand if it cost at least half as much.

We have spent two years being told AI search would level the playing field for small brands. This says the opposite. The machine builds the shortlist, and the name your customer recognized before the machine opened its mouth still wins it. If you're an established brand, that's a moat you didn't know you had. If you're the challenger, winning the recommendation bought you a spot on the list and a 50%-off coupon.

Three more from today's 90-second rundown:

• Perplexity is staffing a creator program with budgets in the millions, and the brief asks creators to build something with the product on camera rather than endorse it. Worth copying — a demonstration is checkable, a compliment isn't.

• Google is testing paying publishers when their content feeds an AI answer, and shows a single earnings number in Search Console with no math behind it. If you've got years of blog posts on a server, someone else is setting the price on them.

• 61% of Americans have used an AI assistant to shop in the past three months, and CMOs are using that number to argue for bigger brand budgets. Good argument — just bring a baseline to the meeting instead of a headline.

Full breakdown on all four in today's video. 👇

One detail from the fine print: Bazaarvoice pulled that sample from Influenster, the review community it owns, and it sells review software. Meaning the people answering already read and write reviews for fun. The direction of the finding holds. The size of it, I'd cut.

The 2026 numbers on AI Overviews are finally detailed enough to be useful — and the average was hiding the real story. 📉...
09/16/2026

The 2026 numbers on AI Overviews are finally detailed enough to be useful — and the average was hiding the real story. 📉

Broken out by site size, search referral traffic fell:

• Small sites (1K–10K daily views): about 60% • Mid-sized: about 47% • Large publishers: about 22%

Zero-click searches hit 68%, up from 60% in 2024.

Real damage everywhere. Wildly unequal.

And the inequality is the lesson. Big names held up better not because their articles are three times better, but because they're the recognizable sources a model reaches for. Brand equity turned into a citation moat. Everyone else got summarized instead of sourced.

So if you're at a small or mid-sized company: you're not losing to Google. You're losing to being interchangeable.

The fix isn't expensive. Stop writing the broadly useful overview a model can squeeze into two sentences. Write the thing only your company could say — your data, your experts, your customers, the counterintuitive lesson nobody else has learned yet.

What does your company know that nobody else could have written?

What if the problem isn’t your age, your résumé, or your experience?What if you’re just selling 30 years of experience i...
09/16/2026

What if the problem isn’t your age, your résumé, or your experience?

What if you’re just selling 30 years of experience in the wrong unit?

For most of our careers, the goal was pretty straightforward: build experience → move up → land the bigger full-time job.

But the market is changing.

Senior jobs are expensive. AI is filtering more applicants. And the line for those jobs is getting longer.

So in my newest Marketing Encore, I explore another option:

Instead of selling your experience to one employer by the year, what happens when you sell your judgment to multiple clients by the month?

I’m doing both right now — the 9-to-5 executive role and the 5-to-9 consulting practice — and there are some things I’ve learned that nobody tells you about fractional work.

Including why AI might actually give experienced marketers an advantage in building it.

Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/8z-bkaPX1zg

Full-time seat or portfolio? Which one are you building toward?

09/16/2026

Kroger's grocery sales are basically flat this year. Its advertising business just grew profit 24%.

That's from the quarter that ended August 15. Full-year same-store sales guidance got cut to somewhere between 0.2% and 0.8% — call it flat — while Kroger Precision Marketing, the retail media arm, posted its strongest profit growth since 2021.

Anyone who has sat on the brand side of a grocery negotiation knows what those two numbers together mean. When the shelves stop growing and the ad business compounds, the next dollar of margin has to come from somewhere, and it comes from your trade and media budget. The flat-sales environment gets presented to you as the reason you need to spend more.

The move is to ask for incrementality in writing. Before you commit the annual number, get a matched-market or holdout test into the agreement. A network printing record margin can afford to prove its lift. It just has no reason to offer.

Three more from today's 90-second rundown:

• The US Open credentialed about 100 creators this year, double last year — and after play stopped over flash photos during an Osaka match, the backlash hit creators generally. If you sponsor events, measure your existing customers before and after the activation, because that's where the damage hides.

• LinkedIn now ranks comments by relevance to each reader instead of by time posted. One analysis of 57,000 posts found 30% of comments were entirely AI-written. The race to comment first is over; the reply with a real number wins.

• Researchers gave 140 adults aged 60 to 89 twenty minutes with an AI companion. The more human it sounded, the less they wanted to use it. If you're building one for an older customer base, lose the fake name.

Full breakdown on all four in today's video. 👇

One detail from the Kroger release that didn't make the cut: e-commerce sales grew 20% and media monetization improved 88 basis points. Those two move together, because the digital basket is where the ad units live. The grocer isn't just selling you media — it's rebuilding the shopping trip around the inventory it can sell you.

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