Duel Tech

This is the shift happening in real time. As Glossy highlights, brands like American Eagle Outfitters Inc. and Gap aren’t running one-off influencer campaigns anymore, they’re building always-on advocacy platforms that blend loyalty mechanics with performance marketing. As Paul Archer (Founder and CEO of Duel Tech) put it in the piece: “If you’ve built an entire strategy around follower counts… it’s at the very least 93% wrong.” When most views now come from non-followers, the old macro vs. micro model stops making sense. The future looks a lot more like infrastructure. Great piece by Zofia Zwieglinska capturing where this is heading. Thank you for the feature.

[Live Tomorrow 🎥] Kindness Krew advocates aren’t just creators – they’re the center of Beekman 1802's growth. From packing a Times Square launch to starring in Ulta campaigns, these “Neighbors” drive real reach, content, and revenue. Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at how the 5X award-winning program drives 45% of Beekman 1802’s EMV. One live attendee will win a $100 Beekman 1802 gift card. 🎁 Register now: https://lnkd.in/e9p8nBhC

For years, brands scaled by optimising channels, paid, social, influencer, repeat. But influence no longer behaves like a media lever. It moves through people. Quietly. Compounding. Often invisibly. Next month, together with Building Brand Advocacy, The State of Brand Advocacy report 2026 will launch. Our most comprehensive report to date. Built on proprietary performance data, advocacy benchmarks, and insights from brand leaders and experts, it defines what’s actually changed and what to build next. Inside: - Why growth feels harder (and what structurally shifted) - The real participation data behind thousands of advocacy programmes - The Top 30 Brands in Advocacy (2026) ranked by system maturity, not fame - The economic model behind why Advocacy scales and the compounding advantage competitors won’t see coming Join the waitlist. Be first to read it. 🔗 in the comments #BrandAdvocacy #BuildingBrandAdvocacy #StateofBrandAdvocacy #BrandAdvocacy2026

Most brands are still chasing incremental gains across paid, social, and influencer campaigns. Meanwhile, Beekman 1802 invested in Brand Advocacy — turning community into measurable, repeatable growth that powers every channel. The result? 📹 A consistent stream of high-performing, authentic content 📈 $92,000 in affiliate and referral revenue in just six months 🏆 An award-winning program powered by real advocates — not rented reach In this live session, Jenny Borland (Sr. Director of Social & Influencer at Beekman 1802) joins Verity Hurd (Head of Brand at Duel & host of “Building Brand Advocacy”) to break down the strategy behind the “Kindness Krew” — and show how to design an advocacy program that drives real revenue, real participation, and long-term momentum. If you’re still treating advocacy like a campaign, this conversation challenges that. 👉 Register Now PS: Attend live for a chance to win a $100 Beekman 1802 gift card.

Glow up your 2026 marketing strategy with a Brand Advocacy Masterclass from Verity Hurd and Lisa Galt, alongside our friends at Beauty Connect Series. Details and link to register below! #BrandAdvocacy #BrandAdvocacyWithDuel

Some of the highest-converting content in the world is content most brand teams would never choose. It isn’t especially polished. It’s rarely textbook “on brand”. And it often comes from someone who doesn’t look like your usual creator roster, doesn’t speak like your copywriter, and wouldn’t be anyone’s instinctive first pick if you were curating for aesthetic or control. And yet, it drives sales. Repeatedly. The algorithm isn’t filtering for brand guidelines or internal taste. It’s responding to what real people actually watch, rewatch, save, search for, and act on. With most discovery now happening outside your follower base, the old idea of finding the “perfect creator with the perfect audience” simply doesn’t hold up anymore. This forces an uncomfortable bit of unlearning. Your taste isn’t the strategy, and tighter curation doesn’t give you more certainty; it just reduces the chances of anything breaking through. You can’t reliably predict what will work now, because the platform is always a step ahead of your planning. Brands need to adjust accordingly. Let more real people participate, pay attention to what the platform amplifies, and then double down after something works rather than trying to guess winners upfront. Less briefing and approving in advance. More activating, learning, and reinforcing momentum once it shows up. Verity Hurd and I went deep on this in the latest episode of Building Brand Advocacy, particularly the tension between staying “on brand” and doing what actually drives growth in 2026. If you’ve ever watched a piece of content outperform everything else and thought, I would never have picked that, this one will feel uncomfortably familiar. 🎧 Link in the comments. #BuildingBrandAdvocacy #BrandAdvocacy #MarketingTrends2026

Tech kickoff 2026! Last week was intense in the best possible way as the product, tech, and engineering teams went deep on the roadmap for how Duel delivers even more for brands in 2026 and beyond. Whiteboards, tight deadlines, and a very clear brief. Define the radically new, AI-native platform we’ll be building over the next 12 months. Super Exciting! Some people have been shaping this product for years. Others had been in the business for 24 hours (well, less than 12 in one case!). Straight into the deep end, working through foundations, dependencies, and the hard trade-offs that show up when the ambition is genuinely high. The speed at which that group aligned, and the quality of the thinking, was impressive to see. Equal parts pride and a healthy dose of “we’d better not mess this up.” I'm really excited to share the vision externally soon. We’re not building a set of features. We’re reimagining how Advocacy programmes are built and run in the age of AI, shaped by more than a decade of experience and constant feedback from the brands we’re lucky enough to partner with. From the Advocate experience through to the Advocacy Systems Engineer behind the scenes, this is about helping brands win in a rapidly changing world of social, community, and consumer behaviour. The vision is bold, the timelines are tight, and the opportunity is huge. Slightly terrifying in the best possible way. More soon. Much more. Blake Moseley Joe Mathews Matthew Roberts Neil Archibald Lewis Smallwood Adam J. Daniel Sutton Alex Bainbridge Lizzie Lane Dominic Birch Donna W. Javiera Olivero