Zero Clicks #1: Meet Zero Clicks

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

Zero clicks. That’s how much traffic Google wants to send outside its walls. The old world of digital marketing, media and commerce is gone and the future is more uncertain than ever.

For the last fifteen years, marketing has essentially been a Faustian bargain with Meta, Amazon and Google. The triopoly offered unprecedented growth opportunities for nascent entrepreneurs and FORTUNE 500 enterprises alike…if you built your brand in their form factors. The medium was the message…and the medium of brand building was sponsored squares and rectangles on three platforms that clicked out to websites.

In a purely utilitarian sense, this will be a tougher era for marketers than the one that came before it. Without the massive tailwind created by a billion new humans coming online, growth will simply be much more expensive. But in a creative sense, the end of arbitrage makes our jobs truly fun again. Brian Morrissey calls this the twilight of the hegemon. I call it liberation. The rules that have governed marketing since the end of the financial crisis are falling. Anyone who knows what comes next is a charlatan with something to sell you.

In some ways, the new marketing landscape is an uncharted new world. What the hell will buying an ad from Perplexity and SearchGPT look like? Do I launch my new hero product as an exclusive with a Substack or TikTok creator? How many retail media networks do I need to care about? God help me, my boss wants a Quora strategy?!?

In other ways, it’s simply a return to the ethos of the early internet when forums, niche communities and MONSTER fueled open-source projects ruled the web…..and the business model was basic affiliate marketing. There’s excellence in both the simplicity and permanence of affiliate as the means of monetizing this whole internet thing.

Through it all, as Nike learned when it sewed what its obsession with myopic performance marketing reaped, the only defensible moat is brand storytelling. With the platforms no longer pumping out gaudy ROAS numbers, storytelling is once again the most en vogue skill among marketing leaders. Welcome to the resurgence of the raconteur.

This newsletter will focus on three main themes:  

• The changing relationship between brands and big tech platforms, with an initial focus on navigating the new and (not so improved) Google

• The convergence of media and commerce and how that impacts organizational structure, measurement & incentives. 

• AI: the good, the bad and the bullshit 

For the next ten weeks, we'll be focusing primarily on the biggest platform shift around; the changing nature of distribution after Google's core update and the rise of GenAI. In an inbox full of tactical growth hacks and reductionist tropes, I won’t claim to have any easy answers. But hopefully, I can help you ask the right questions to chart your organization’s path forward.

Throw out the last decade’s playbooks and let Zero Clicks be your consigliere as you dream up new ones for the tumultuous tides ahead. This is gonna be fun.  

Director of Growth Marketing & Community, Nemah

Nemah is a great disruptor brand solving a real problem in creating clean skincare products purpose designed for both mom and baby. But for the purpose of this newsletter, I’m fascinated that they’ve combined growth and community– generally siloed roles in brands– under one flag. This is the future, folks. In the post platform arbitrage world, community if going to be the #1 skillset that marketers need to have. Two years from now, posting won’t need to say “Growth marketing & community.” The latter will be implied in the former.

Media Partner Manager, Open AI

While Open AI removed the formal job posting, the company seems to be quietly staffing up a partnerships team to manage the partner ecosystem around SearchGPT. This is a good thing–the internet will be a considerably better place if Perplexity, OpenAI and Google bring on leaders who deeply understand the nuance of the publishing and affiliate ecosystems. Much more on this next week.

GM, Inventory Development, The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is the most important company on the internet that everyone seems to forget about. Whatever becomes of Google’s cookie opt-in, the proliferation of retail media and AI eating media buying, The Trade Desk will be in the middle of all of it. This role– essentially overseeing all key supply partnerships – makes the person who takes it one of the low key most powerful people in all of media.