Zero Clicks #11: The mindless pursuit of more

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

My least attractive trait as a romantic partner is that I genuinely love LinkedIn. I started my career at the professional network and just two years there left me with several lifelong friends and transformed this renegade young man into a mostly presentable corporate citizen. Thus, it causes me visceral pain to watch Microsoft fumble the bag so hard.

As Twitter spirals into a doom loop, LinkedIn has a chance to become the pre-eminent media platform of our era by doing the unthinkable: rewarding quality content. Instead, Microsoft is squandering this generational opportunity to become the front page of business in favor of a sea of hustle porn videos. The r/linkedinlunatics run the asylum, and they are turning their post volume up to 11.

Perhaps inadvertently, the tsunami of slop unleashed by AI creates the perfect moment to reverse the tide, not just at LinkedIn but across the internet at large. It’s hard to see now, but there’s a reckoning coming for the mindless pursuit of more content.

For as long as I’ve been alive, winning Google as a publisher or brand was largely a volume game. Hell, at this point, I’m not sure there’s a single long tail keyword that Red Ventures or Dotdash hasn’t written a “what is X” article on. Massive respect to both of them– this is how the game was played for the last decade. And they mastered it.

It’s not the game anymore because anyone can play it. One of the great blessings of generative AI is that it profoundly commoditizes the practice of creating mediocre content.

For two decades, cranking out a frightening volume of banal thought leadership or how-to guides across mediums was an incredibly marketable skill, especially at the institutional level. Now, it’s effectively available to anybody with $20/mo.

While this reset will cause pain to the generation of marketers trained at the altar of Gary Vee, the promise of AI to create incentives that reward fewer pieces of quality content created is the single best development for the next generation of the internet. Chasing arbitrage through sheer scale of content creation is already on life support as more and more content creators chase a finite amount of intent; the ubiquity of gen AI will end it. When everybody can play the scale game, nobody can.

Already, we’re starting to see these changing incentives lead to a new, healthier generation of businesses.

One such example is Healthyish, launched publicly last week by Derek Flanzraich. Derek previously founded Greatist, a mid-2010s, scale-chasing, high-volume publication that ultimately sold to Red Ventures. He’s back in the game with Healthyish, which promises to help health and healthcare companies create “best answer on the internet” caliber content.

Healthyish has a strong business proposition because brands are now winning real estate on the SERP previously reserved for media companies. Plus, it has the chance to scale to an AI-first search world. If Perplexity and Search GPT are going to show one answer with a couple of sources instead of 10 blue links, you better create great content to have a shot at being worth citing.

Fewer pieces of content done better is the way.

AI Brand Manager, Bark

Reading between the lines, the title here is mostly marketing bluster. Ultimately, the role sounds like a hybrid of pretty conventional paid media, retention, and CRM marketing, with a focus on being hands-on keys in journey-building and personalization SaaS.

The irony here is that while I believe that gen AI will fundamentally transform retail over the next five years, the only function that I think won’t be AI-first is true brand management. If brand management is simply the practice of using software to accomplish tasks– AI-powered or otherwise– we’ve lost the plot.

VP Paid Media, Condé Nast

In the Zero Clicks world, one of the most important roles at any publisher is going to be the person in charge of paid media, both on search and social.  The challenge is that publishers need someone who can execute both the here-and-now arbitrage tactics and see ahead to how to drive paid traffic in a fragmented search and AI-first ecosystem.

Thus, it’s no surprise to see Condé Nast offering up to $250K and a VP title to try and bring in strong talent.

One other trend I’m watching here— I’d expect more large publishers and potentially even brands to start outsourcing traffic to commerce content to tech entities like Halyard. It’s only getting tougher to buy traffic profitably, and unless you can make an absolutely elite in-house hire, partnership is the way to go.

Director of Executive Platforms & Narratives, Microsoft

A couple of weeks ago, we highlighted what I thought was the best-written job posting I’d ever seen. Seems only fitting this week to feature what I truly believe is the worst. I absolutely dare you to count the buzzwords in here. Might want to clear your calendar.

The irony is that once you parse it all out, the job sounds awesome. The role is basically the “evangelist” gig that was prominent at large tech companies in the mid-2010s. A very highly compensated thought partner or sort of narrative consigliere to sales teams. Honestly, a great gig.