The Forgelight Beacon Newsletter — Issue No. 8

📚 Advertising | From Digiday

Advertising has been built around one assumption: somewhere on the other side of my advertising message is a person (aka. my target audience).

That assumption may be about to change.

As consumers increasingly ask AI assistants to compare products, recommend services, and help make purchasing decisions, advertisers are preparing for a new target audience - AI agents.

Time, the magazine and publisher, recently started serving ads on its webpages that were catered to AI agents rather than human readers. Ads worked by serving AI-friendly, FAQ-style content inside of the markdown versions of pages.

Perplexity, one of the key AI search engines, pushed back against this approach and blocked those kinds of ads from influencing its search engine, describing content shown differently to AI bots and human visitors as “cloaking.”

The dispute introduces a new advertising frontier and complicated discussions. An uncomfortable ethical question we now have to ask is: is optimizing information for an AI assistant simply the next evolution of marketing, much like SEO was for search engines? Or does it become manipulation when a machine receives messaging the consumer never sees?

If AI agents become the new gatekeepers between brands and buyers, businesses may soon find themselves marketing to two audiences at once: the person making the request and the machine deciding which answers that person receives.

📱 Social Media | From Metricool

Instagram in 2026: Our 15 Biggest Takeaways

Metricool recently released a comprehensive study & report analyzing 24,364,803 posts from 375,118 accounts worldwide, comparing January–February 2025 with the same period in 2026. Below are our 20 most interesting findings:

15 Instagram Stats to Know

1. Brands published 24% more Instagram content in 2026.
2. Instagram views increased 27%, while interactions rose 19%.
3. A repeat view now counts as another view.
4. Only 8.93% of accounts grew enough to move into a higher follower category.
5. Accounts below 10,000 followers were the most likely to advance into a larger category.

Key takeaway: Meaningful audience growth is possible, but it's far from automatic. A larger content library does not guarantee a larger community. (p. 9.)

6. Single-image posts increased by nearly 12%, carousels by 24%, and Reels by 35%.
7. Carousels received 142% more reach than single-image posts.
8. Carousels generated 143% more views than single-image posts.
9. Carousels produced 819% more saves than single-image posts.
10. Carousels generated almost four times as many interactions as single-image posts.

Key takeaway: Carousel posts ask the audience to participate by swiping, learning, and following a sequence. That deeper experience translates into more activity. (p. 14.)

11. Despite outperforming single images across every measured category, carousels were posted 37% less often.
12. Huge accounts lost 43% of their single-image-post reach and more than half their engagement rate.
13. Reels were shared 67% more frequently than in 2025.
14. Average Reel watch time increased 118%.
15. Total Reel viewing time increased 139%, while average views remained relatively stable.

Key takeaways: Flat views can conceal major improvement. A video watched longer by the right audience may be far more valuable than one collecting shallow plays. (p. 20.)