Zero Clicks #14: The great retreat

Brands leave politics to politicians, Zuckerberg wins again, and Amazon’s creator ambitions come into view.

It’s Election Day in America, the culmination of our uniquely long, arduous, and all-encompassing political zeitgeist.

From the perspective of marketing leaders, 2024 has been an interesting vibe shift as FORTUNE 1000 brands have mostly chosen to steer clear of politics, a sharp reversion from the 2020 energy. In the aggregate, large corporations are cold, calculating, and rational creatures. They crunched the data on (publicly) participating in large political narratives and realized it was bad business.

Dogma can only effectively and genuinely be wielded by challenger brands. As an upstart, having a bold and pronounced worldview is an asset. When you reach a large enough scale, it becomes a liability.

Mollie Baz’s collaboration with Bobbie is a perfect example of a campaign only a challenger brand could run. With one ad, Bobbie boldly waded into two hot-button discussions around both combo-feeding and breastfeeding in public. They put a billboard in Times Square that was sure to offend many people… who probably weren’t going to be Bobbie customers anyway. Bobbie’s ad is elegant, thought-provoking, and downright real, the opposite of every big company attempting to play politics.

Faire Chief Strategy Officer Dan Hockenmeier recently wrote a great LinkedIn post comparing corporate values from 1980s Nike and modern-day Procter & Gamble that inadvertently illustrates this conundrum. Ostensibly, the point was supposed to be that Nike espoused a bold, contrarian worldview that would attract innovators while Procter & Gamble uttered a smattering of meaningless clichés. I’d argue that both company values serve their purpose perfectly.

The whole point of P&G is to be sort of an efficient, anonymous, vanilla conglomerate that is unknown to the consumer. So vapid corporate clichés are perfectly on brand. I’m very cool with my toilet paper and laundry detergent not having some grand philosophical worldview, so long as they commit to product quality. And hey, whatever P&G has been doing since 1837 seems to be working out nice and swell.

Speaking of doing just fine, Meta’s stock just hit another all-time high at >$1.4T market cap, as the company has managed to be miraculously absent as a punching bag for either the Harris or Trump campaigns.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Meta made a bunch of deliberate product decisions that put rage engagement bait political content front and center. To try and manage the fallout in 2020 Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars to “election integrity efforts”, which once again put the magnifying glass on his company. In 2024, Meta has made a calculated attempt to withdraw from the political process as much as possible, a masterful stroke from a CEO we should know better by now than to doubt.

Broadly speaking, in two short years, Zuckerberg has brought Meta back from the edge of the abyss. In November 2022, the company’s stock was down almost 80%, and the “metaverse” concept it had bet the company on was the punchline of every tech joke. Since November 4, 2022, the stock is up more than 6X.

Separating politics and social media isn’t the only reason for Meta’s turnaround but pulling Facebook and Instagram out of the political mud made the rest of Facebook’s product decisions (read–relentless focus on ad tech and AI) possible. Democracy, Facebook’s advertising ecosystem—and by extension the aggregate health of American eCommerce brands– is in a healthier place with Meta as a nonfactor in American politics.

Our country hasn’t seen a retreat this great since George Washington at the Battle of Brooklyn, evading capture by the British Army thanks to a miraculous fog that covered his early morning retreat back to Manhattan. The destiny of nations is forged by the thinnest of margins.

Happy Election Day, America. I trust you’ll make it to the polls without the National Football League, Coca-Cola, or Tide telling you to do so.

Business Development Manager, AI Partnerships, Meta

My most strongly held opinion on marketing and commerce is that on a long enough timeline, Zucky Zuck always wins. As perfectly laid out by Ben Thompson here, Meta is the sleeping giant in the AI wars with all of the data, capital, and distribution advantages to outflank both OpenAI and Google. If you can work anywhere near Meta’s AI ambitions, it’s wise to do so.

Also, it's super cute of Facebook to list the salary range for this job at $130-180K. With bonus and equity, I’d bet total compensation here easily clears $400K. And if the stock continues at its current pace, you’ll do just fine.

Sr. Sales & BD Tech Manager, Monetization, Creator Growth, Amazon

Speaking of sleeping giants, it continues to mystify me that Amazon Creator Connections hasn’t yet launched into the stratosphere. Amazon has every conceivable advantage when it comes to creator-led commerce, but the pieces just haven’t all come together yet for an Amazon native influencer network, allowing startups like Levanta, Wayward, and Archer Affiliates to fill the void.

Ultimately, Amazon just hasn’t yet been able to connect the dots between its massive ad business and native creator campaigns. While you have to imagine there’s some internal tension here– dollars that brands spend on creators aren’t spent on more lucrative PPC ads– savvy marketers want to move their retail media up the funnel, and creators do just that.

In any event, whether it’s through acquisition or continuing to build in-house, you have to think Amazon eventually gets this right. Wouldn’t be a bad place to work when they do.

In case this hasn’t been clear to date, all of the memes you see in Zero Clicks are originals. We can’t write a newsletter bemoaning the amount of derivative content on the internet and then copy memes :)