Last month, my colleagues Logan English, Rhea Mathew, and I joined our founder, Drew Benvie, in San Francisco for Battenhall’s third Year Ahead in Social dinner of 2025 in the US and our first on the West Coast. 

These gatherings are far more than networking dinners. We’ve aimed to create a space where senior marketing leaders can surface the strategic questions that are keeping them up at night, and begin sketching answers together.

Over the course of the evening, the themes that emerged were less about ‘what’s trending’ and more about what’s enduring, what’s worrying, and what’s shifting beneath the surface. Read on for some of the top tensions I heard, along with stats, context, and thought-starters that will help frame where each theme could go as we head into 2026. 

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1. LinkedIn, YouTube, and platform strategy: What still works?

One of the clearest threads was around platform strategy.  Brands are wrestling with how to play smart, not loud, on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube. Several attendees asked: “Is LinkedIn organic going to scale? Should we double down on YouTube short-form or long-form?”

• The broader media context supports this tension. Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report shows that social video platforms are now competing directly with traditional TV and streaming, forcing brands to reallocate media spend.
  
  
• YouTube itself has become a central anchor: longer content still plays, but creators and brands are also experimenting with multi-format strategies.
  
  
• On LinkedIn, the debate is whether executive thought leadership should be treated as its own content vertical, or simply an organic arm of broader brand content.

Ultimately, success won’t come from chasing algorithms, but from meeting audiences where they consume and engage, and tailoring strategy accordingly.

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2. Creators and their ROI 

In our dinner, the biggest rhetorical question was: “Are creators still a viable use of budget?” The short answer from the room: yes,  but only if you treat them as strategic partners, not just amplifiers.

• In 2025, 80% of brands will maintain or increase influencer/creator budgets, with 47% raising them by 11% or more.
  
  
• Brands are favoring micro- and mid-tier creators for their stronger engagement-to-cost ratios.
  
  
• However, the creator economy is evolving under pressure: Digiday calls it a “survival playbook” era, where the emphasis shifts from virality to sustainable, accountable content systems.
  
  

My takeaway: Don’t just buy reach. Think co-creation, joint content pipelines, content ownership, and longer-term partnerships. Build mechanics (bonus incentives, recurring formats, shared KPIs) that allow creators to scale with you.

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3. Gen Alpha and raising the stakes

One of the most compelling moments in the discussion came when we previewed recent research conducted for Raise (a non-profit initiative created by our founder) on how under-16s view social media, platforms, and AI. Though the research is still in progress, the insights we glimpsed reinforced just how rapidly the social landscape is evolving, especially for Gen Alpha. 

• Nearly two-thirds of U.S-based Alphas ages 8–10 spend up to four hours per day on social media already.
  
  
• Gen Alpha screen time is climbing: Children 8–12 now average 4 hours and 44 minutes of daily screen exposure.
  
  
• Social video is dominant. Gen Alpha spends 78% of screen time on social video vs. other formats.
  
  
• On a platform lifecycle trajectory, only 15.9% of Gen Alpha are social network users in 2025, but that’s projected to jump to 40.3% by 2029.
  
  

My takeaway: Brands that want long-term relevance need to see Gen Alpha not as a distant consumer, but as a shaping force in social media’s evolution. How do you create for them now – in tone, formats, and safety, while navigating regulatory, trust, and maturity challenges? This is where the conversation is headed next. 

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4. Why these dinners matter (beyond the meal)

What makes these dinners more than just talk is how we talk. When you bring senior leaders together in a setting designed for openness, the conversation surfaces risks, constraints, and unknowns that often don’t get aired publicly. For example:

• We heard real budget debates, not generic “more content” statements
  
  
• We heard concern about algorithmic dependencies, changing data attribution, and creator ecosystem stress
  
  
• We heard early-stage ideas for co-op pilots, longitudinal content experiments, and hybrid content investment models
  
  

This provides fertile ground for translating insights into frameworks, experiments, and industry narrative.

The San Francisco dinner didn’t conclude a conversation: it launched one. The tensions surfaced are real, and the stakes are rising. Over the coming months, we’ll continue translating dialogue into experiments, and eventually into our Year Ahead in Social 2026 report, which will aim not just to forecast, but to offer maps for navigating what’s next.

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Keen to find out more? Email our team – hello@battenhall.com – to speak with one of our experts.

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