Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce. In each edition, we explore…

• The big picture: A quick essay on the current vibe

• Job posts: A few open jobs that are microcosmic of broader trends in the industry

• The meme is the message: An original, hopefully dank meme

• Cocktail hour (!): New for 2025, a cocktail (sometimes mocktail) recipe to improve your home bar game

Many of you have found your way here from the podcast episode I did with Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting on the end of affiliate arbitrage. It’s great to have you. It will mystify me until the end of my days that people will listen to me (or anyone) ramble for an hour but I love you all for it. Now, back to my preferred medium…

Finally, if you are interested in attending one of our live events we’re heading to Denver on the 23rd of this month and LA on March 13th.

Existential questions 

Two weeks into our brave new year, I’m exhausted by all the predictions in my inbox. Too many thinkbois prognosticating, too few employing the Socratic method with their readers.

So in the interest of breaking cliches for the first piece of the year, here are the six existential questions hovering over media, marketing, and commerce.

Can retail media create or just capture demand?

As is often the case with nascent technology, the cynical and idealistic take on retail media are effectively the same.

To the cynic, retail media is simply capitalizing on latent demand, creating no real incremental “content” and simply creating another tax for brands that wish to leverage marketplaces for distribution.

To the idealist, we are so beautifully early. Retail media networks have created $100B in incremental revenue without even yet doing the dirty work of actually making any media! Imagine what will happen if, as Keith Bryan at Colosseum Strategy says, “2025 is the year that many retailers stop being media companies in denial.”

Said simply, 2025 is the year that retailers selling to brands have to prove that they can generate and not just capitalize on demand. That probably means they have to be, well, media businesses.

Can Facebook keep printing cash as a ghost town?

Once again, we’ve been treated to a PR masterclass from Zuck who managed to stir up an internet shitstorm over ending fact-checking (de facto dead at Meta for quarters) and saying companies aren’t manly enough (?) to blow away a far more existential piece of news. The company quietly nerfed an initiative to spin up AI avatars who would create and engage with content on the platform because well, humans aren’t doing that anymore.

While the 2016 narrative permanently dominated the airwaves, Meta’s existential threat isn’t politics or amplifying inflammatory content– it’s the fact that the core product is barreling into irrelevancy. If you’re still on the platform, I challenge you to look at how many people wished you a happy birthday this year vs. even five years ago.

And yet, Facebook’s ad business is booming. How much longer can this paradoxical trend continue?

On a one to two-year horizon, I’d expect additional improvements to the Meta advertising algorithms from Zuck’s focused AI push to outweigh the financial impact of additional enshittification. The road to financial ruin will be further paved with people who– reacting to rational and obvious degradation in the quality of his product– make an ill-fated bet against Zuck.

Does social commerce exist without TikTok?

If the clock does indeed strike midnight on TikTok, what becomes of all the brands and dopamine-addled brains that depend on its existence? The lazybrain take here is probably the correct one– a TikTok ban makes Meta & Google considerably more powerful. Instagram and maybe even Facebook get a major jolt and YouTube barrels towards further monopolization of video. Social commerce enters the annals of history as “a cute thing to show in board slides and temporarily reduce CAC from 2020-2024.”

Or, can a US-based company fill the void and launch the next great consumer product? Last year, I wrote the bull case for Flip, a UGC-based marketplace that has rocketed to #4 on the app store, closely behind two other Chinese-based TikTok clones. But if I’m being honest, Occam's Razor for Flip still looks a lot like an eCommerce ponzi scheme as most of their massive growth events are heavily subsidized by referral credits. Live streaming platform Whatnot has ridden VC TikTok FOMO to a fresh $265M in funding and a $5B valuation. Though through my years in the business, I’ve yet to meet someone who has talked about buying or selling an item on Whatnot.

Calls for Chinese-style social commerce to move West have been a steady drumbeat amongst the punditry for more than a decade. Wake me up when anyone besides TikTok achieves it at scale.

Is AppLovin actually incremental?

Desperate for a viable alternative to Meta, marketing leaders in commerce essentially tried to meme AppLovin glory into existence in the back half of 2024. This created humanity’s unlikeliest $100B company and for my money, the most fun trend to follow last year.

Data on whether AppLovin is the marketer’s messiah should start to become reliable by the midpoint of this year as incrementality studies and holdout tests reach scale. Furthermore, AppLovin restricted access to its platform to brands that were spending >$20K/day on Meta. This effectively ensured that they were picking off the creme de la creme of high-growth DTC brands who naturally were best positioned to see profitable growth on any platform.

The company is slowly opening up its gates to the commoners starting in Q1, who have smaller budgets, less sophisticated performance engines, and, overall, are just generating less demand on Meta. If that archetype of an advertiser can reach new customers on the platform profitably, then commerce might find itself worshipping at the altar of Candy Crush.

Do LLMs increase overall yield in commerce? 

While we’re rightfully excited by the novelty of LLMs as a product discovery engine, there’s still this pesky open question about whether or not they get you to actually buy stuff. Much like the ruthless efficiency of ten blue links in Google, conventional eCommerce search experiences are nothing if not, really good at building relentlessly efficient purchase funnels. LLMs might offer a more conscious shopping experience, in a sense, which isn’t necessarily great for retailers.

There’s a further complexity that could stunt LLM adoption at scale–how well do conversational commerce ambitions play with the fact that most large retailers are becoming advertising businesses masquerading as purveyors of widgets? Even if these LLM-based experiences improve conversion rate and offer objectively better online shopping, does the ARPV go up or down when you factor in less surface area for ads?

Watch what Amazon does with Rufus very, very closely. Andy Jassy’s Amazon is highly unlikely to let an experiment that decreases average revenue per visitor continue to scale. If Amazon is still aggressively deploying Rufus in H2 of this year, it’s a hyper-bullish sign that the unit economics of LLM-driven commerce work better than conventional experiences. If Rufus starts quietly slinking back into the doghouse, pump the brakes on the AI hype train.

Is Sherwood the future of business & tech journalism?

“Every company is now a media company”, long the piece de resistance of LinkedIn thinkboi psychobabble bullshit is now a somewhat valid notion. In an era of astronomically rising short-term CACs, audacious long-term initiatives are en vogue.

No project is more ambitious though than Robinhood’s Sherwood News, a full-fledged newsroom that consists of several award-winning editors and reporters, doing more or less exactly what they did when they worked at traditional media outfits. More interestingly, there isn’t a wildly obvious straight line on how a lot of their reporting helps Robinhood make more money (i.e. by encouraging its customers to open brokerage accounts or make more degenerate trades). Most of the stories are just cool vibe trend pieces, and by all accounts, Sherwood is trying to be a profitable business in and of itself. Sherwood is doing great work but does it actually help Robinhood’s acquisition flywheel? Is it even meant to?

While brands launching media companies for obvious content marketing purposes is a tale as old as time, Sherwood is something distinctly different. Companies like Robinhood have immense resources to fill a lot of the gaps left as traditional business media fades but unclear business rationales for doing so. Will others follow suit?

I think they will if for no other reason than this is a follow-the-leader business and some large company CEO is going to get FOMO looking at what Robinhood has pulled off.  The information space will be better for it.

Growth Marketing Lead, Anthropic

For an elite and scrappy B2B marketing leader, Anthropic is an absolute dream. The company is valued at $60B but is still very much the challenger brand in its space that desperately needs to level up its marketing game across both brand and performance. The company's existential risk is that it becomes the proverbial better product that loses out to better marketing so it’s barely hyperbole to say that this might be the single most important role in determining whose models power 2025’s major AI deployments. No pressure.

Head of Agency Partnerships, East Coast, Best Buy Ads

Nothing says retail media is growing up quite like the consummate Minnesota company deciding to fully open an office to put boots on the ground in NY. Best Buy has always been one of the most innovative and forward-thinking retail media shops so no surprise to see them make bold moves before much of the competition.

Head of Ad Sales, Duolingo

I was all jazzed to drop the “everything is an ad network” quip but Eric Seufert beat me to it. If you’re a Stratechery reader/listener, his interview with Ben Thompson is the smartest thing published on the state of digital advertising last year and top of my personal jealousy list.

Manager, Product Management, Nordstrom

Much like Best Buy with Ads, Nordstrom was often ahead of the curve in testing innovative digital experiences amongst its peer set. After being taken private, I’d expect a healthy jolt of “move fast and test” energy that should make this a fun gig for product leaders in retail.

Director, Content Business Development, Meta

Imagine being the person responsible for managing Meta’s relationship with media companies right now.

Director, Commercial Asset Development, LA 28 Olympic and Paralympic Games 

It’s hard to fathom now but LA is hosting the Olympic games in three years in a spectacle that will show the world the city’s resilience and magic.

I have a personal connection to the hiring team on this one so if anyone reading here is interested and remotely qualified, please simply reply and I’ll put you in touch. 

For readers that make it this far, we have a new treat… a weekly cocktail recipe. It’s the doldrums of winter in NY so to cheer up, I’ve been capturing the spirit of the islands with the ultra manly… tropical cosmopolitan. If Carrie knew about these, she would have picked a man much more interesting than Big. 

Here goes:

• 1.5 oz white rum (I like Wray & Nephew overproof but any rum will do)

• .5 oz Cointreau (Triple Sec is probably fine but I’m a snob here)

• .5 oz GOYA guava concentrate (more notes on this below)

• .25 oz Velvet Falernum

• The juice of half of a robust lime 

Shake vigorously and enjoy. This drink is sweet and the complexity comes from the Velvet Falernum so no need to use your good rum here. Even Bacardi (!) is fine.

These cartons of GOYA are an absolute mixology godsend. Essentially, they are concentrated fruit purees that are injected with liquid sugar for maximum flavor. Most importantly, they are not cut with other cheaper fruit juices like many store-bought brands. At >35g of sugar per 8oz serving, it’s an absolute travesty that these are marketed and sold to children but they have no equal in drinks like this. Use sparingly, a little goes a long way.