Future Gazing: 2026 with Simon Vericel, Founder and Managing Director of Influence Matters
COLLECTIVIST: For 2026, what do you think the best tech brands or the best marketing managers are going to do differently compared to this year?
Simon Vericel: Let’s start with the best marketing managers. The best marketing managers are going to work a lot closer with their AI companion-whatever that is-and will use their AI companion as a team member.
They’re going to develop plans and strategies with smaller teams and smaller budgets because they’ll put more of that budget into the tool.
The tool will become a central part of every marketer’s planning and strategising for any communications.
That’s something I see very clearly, so clearly that we are building our own PR companion to use internally (and maybe externally in the near future!).
Slightly further ahead, I believe that in the next three to five years, agencies and in-house teams are going to shrink in size, because individual consultants will be able to manage, alone or with a very small team, quite a few clients and deliver very advanced strategies with the right AI companion that’s properly trained. We won’t have those big WPP-style agencies anymore, with hundreds or thousands of people. The power will shift to freelancers and small specialist agencies like ours that collaborate with clients with an AI at the centre.
COLLECTIVIST: I was going to ask how AI will impact our campaigns next year, but you’ve already started answering that. I feel like AI will impact every facet of what we’re doing?
Simon: It is going to impact how we ideate the campaigns and how we plan for them. We’ll be a lot more efficient in delivering a campaign, because we’ll be able to write content faster, develop messages faster, and digest client information faster.
But in the end, I don’t think campaigns will fundamentally change in the next three to five years.
That’s why I call AI a “companion.”
AI is going to help PR teams and marketers deliver campaigns that aren’t very different from the ones we’ve delivered over the past 10 years.
The result is always the same: we’re looking for awareness, we’re looking to get a message across, we’re looking for results in the right press with the right influencers, and we’re looking to connect with the right people.
We’ll just be able to do that more accurately and faster with the right AI companion.
COLLECTIVIST: As you mentioned campaigns, tell me what’s going to be happening in China and Indonesia next year. What are people talking about locally?
Simon: There are a few things happening in the way companies are approaching China and Indonesia, and really any market in APAC or globally.
China is complicated because of geopolitics. Some industries and companies simply cannot communicate publicly in China if they’re foreign companies. Depending on the technology, companies might not want to communicate in China because they don’t want their American or European investors to know they’re actively communicating there. Business still happens, but companies will opt for very targeted, less public communication.
So, we’re doing a lot less traditional PR and fewer big media conferences but far more one-on-one briefings and customer events around major trade shows in China.
We’ll see more relationships between China and Southeast Asia, less with Europe, and almost none with the U.S.
Automotive is the big focus right now for any foreign technology supplier. Whether it’s semiconductors, materials, chemicals, aluminium shaping—everyone is targeting the Chinese EV manufacturers.
More broadly, China is still developing as a global economy, especially in Southeast Asia. Chinese companies are expanding and looking for service suppliers – HR, accounting, payment systems, fintech, ad tech, etc.
Indonesia is becoming the largest economy in Southeast Asia (aside from Singapore) and is a major target market for Chinese companies, especially in e-commerce and fintech.
COLLECTIVIST: You briefly mentioned trade shows. What’s coming up next year? Are they still a big thing locally?
Simon: They are very much a big thing. We invest more in trade shows now, and our clients do too. That shift happened after COVID. With no shows during COVID, companies realised they really needed in-person customer contact in China, and trade shows are the best way to do that.
They might not have massive booths anymore, but there’s still a huge amount of activation around shows – media outreach, customer events, offline technology presentations, and investor meetings.
There are around 10 truly important shows for our clients in Asia, half in semiconductors and the rest in automotive and fintech. For example:
- China Auto Show (alternates Beijing/Shanghai; next year in Beijing)
- SEMICON China
- electronica China
- IC CAD (for IC design companies)
- CIIE (China International Import Expo) in Shanghai
- Computex and SEMICON Taiwan
- Singapore FinTech Festival
- SWITCH (Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology)
They are all are still very well attended.
COLLECTIVIST: What will the ideal client or ideal campaign look like next year? I know you love startups and companies thinking far ahead.
Simon: Every one of my clients is a dream client once they become a client!
At Influence Matters, we like working with companies that are changing the world in some way.
That means companies innovating something that will fundamentally change the way something is done today.
It might be new battery technology. It might be quantum computing; we have a client innovating heavily there, and their technology could change computing within five years. That’s one of my dream campaigns next year: continuing to support them across the region and helping them meet investors and researchers.
The dream campaign is connecting our super-innovative clients with people in Asia who truly need their technology for a groundbreaking application.
It might also be fintech—a new way to process payments between South America and China, more efficiently and safely, bypassing banks entirely. We look at clients based on how their technology can help change the world.
COLLECTIVIST: Will the way we measure campaigns change next year?
Simon: AI will make a difference in how we calculate ROI.
More than simply responding to client expectations, we’re leading the shift with our Golden Circle of Influence framework.
Our AI tool—built around our Golden Circle of Influence framework—identifies the top influencers for our clients: journalists, analysts, in-house engineers, and others. We quantify their relevance to our clients’ business or product lines (AI-supported). Based on that quantification, we can benchmark campaigns and measure results against that benchmark.
It doesn’t fully solve the challenge of connecting PR to sales, but it shows where the budget is going and why we prioritise certain influencers over others—sometimes rejecting influencers the client thinks are important.
It helps funnel budget toward meaningful activities, showing clients they’re spending where they should be instead of guessing—which is how PR has often worked.
COLLECTIVIST: Last question: if we have this conversation again at the end of next year, what will be the agency’s biggest success? What will you be most proud of?
Simon: Good question—I’m working on our objectives for next year right now.
They’re not set in stone yet. The biggest success would be to have grown as a business—somewhere between 50% and 100% growth would be good.
Part of that growth will come from the activation of our Golden Circle of Influence methodology, with the integration of our own AI companion as part of multi-market campaigns.
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