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

• The big picture: On agentic commerce, affiliate and ads

• Job posts: Selling media at a retailer up 500%+ in five years

• The meme(s) are the message: Google’s tough week in court   

• One final read that’s worth your time: Made, sold and marketed by China

But first, a quick poll to see who is living it up on the French riviera in a few weeks and a word from Sovrn.

How will agents actually shop?

If you really want to simmer your brain in a stew of cognitive dissonance, I recommend reading these two viral AI pieces back to back:

- AI 2027, which argues that the impact of AI over the next decade will exceed the Industrial Revolution

- OpenAI is a Systemic Risk to the Tech Industry, which argues that the generative AI bubble is due for imminent collapse and will take much of tech down with it

I have humbler ambitions than opining on how AI will upend geopolitics. I simply seek to understand how AI will transform the little cottage $6T industry that I work in known as retail. At this stage, this is much more about asking the right question than professing any answers.

And currently that question is simple: how will agents actually shop?

Currently, the retail business is all in on agentic commerce but there isn’t really any kind of agreed upon definition of what the hell agentic commerce actually means. Best I can sort, “agentic”  is currently an umbrella vernacular that covers three related, but slightly different applications of AI.

1) A “frontend” application where an agent completes a purchase on behalf of a shopper

2) A “backend” application where an agent orchestrates a set of processes to show the most relevant products and offers to a shopper. (Dylan Whitman describes this well here– it’s effectively agentic commerce as the next generation of collaborative filtering) 

3) A hybrid application where large language models enable an answer engine to provide a relevant response to a semantic search query (i.e. find me the best pot for cooking great 20 minute meals for a family of four) for a shopper.

Each of these scenarios can exist independently or can intertwine as a user attempts to procure an item. But they share one thing in common– any definition of agentic commerce threatens to either commoditize, disintermediate or generally upend most of the tricks of the trade that brands use to try and stand out to shoppers during the purchase journey. 

For now, let’s look at a very simple scenario: As a shopper, I simply would like an agent to execute a purchase of a specific item they are looking for. “Buy me a 3L Instant Pot that can get here in three days or less.”

Sounds like a simple enough task for an agent. But where should the agent buy the Instant Pot from? Conventional wisdom says whichever retailer provides the best value. But what does it mean to provide the best value?

Is it just whoever is the cheapest? What about shipping timelines? What about return policies? What if some merchants offer cashback rewards on an Instant Pot while others don’t?

Already it’s hard enough to get to an objective “best value” merchant without even beginning to take into account user preferences. What if I have a credit card that offers 5% back at one select merchant? The entire value equation above could change on a dime. 

It is of course, not lost on me that many of my readers will see obvious applications of tried and true affiliate marketing tactics in the questions above. You are not alone– here’s Sam Altman last month in conversation with Stratechery.

“The kind of thing I’d be much more excited to try than traditional ads is a lot of people use Deep Research for e-commerce, for example, and is there a way that we could come up with some sort of new model, which is we’re never going to take money to change placement or whatever, but if you buy something through Deep Research that you found, we’re going to charge like a 2% affiliate fee or something. That would be cool, I’d have no problem with that. And maybe there’s a tasteful way we can do ads, but I don’t know. I kind of just don’t like ads that much.”

The irony of Sam viewing affiliate as a revolutionary new business model notwithstanding, there’s a really interesting concept in here. In an experience where conventional advertising is not a clear lever that merchants can pull to incentivize purchase, all that’s left are affiliate tactics. The humble cashback or rewards offer could be the defining heuristic that an agent gravitates towards when recommending which merchant should fulfill a purchase or even which product to recommend.

This would be a nice little shift towards more efficient marketing spend for merchants if it transpires; using rewards as a lever to win the agentic buy box is a hell of a lot cheaper than having to pay for sponsored products on Amazon. Expensive ads will inevitably come to agentic commerce eventually— if there’s a chance to win market share with just generous affiliate rates, brands should pounce at the opportunity.

That said, I’d be careful to treat agentic commerce— or at least the version of it where AI completes a purchase on behalf of a shopper— as a foregone conclusion. There are myriad orders of complexity that exist in an agentic search even when you tell an AI exactly what product you want. These increase exponentially when agents have to actually select products for shoppers.

Conventional search experiences that just show me a grid of products and let me sift through the chaos to outsource this mental load to me as a user; AI agents have to absorb all this information and deliver an acceptable result.

For now, we’re stuck with an existential catch 22. To truly satisfy my query and complete a purchase, the agent probably has to ask me a series of follow-up questions that likely will take longer than me doing the sifting and buying the item myself. The magic will truly start when that time to value equation flips.

Director of Sales, Media Network, Dick’s Sporting Goods

Here’s a stat for you…if you put $100 into Dick’s Sporting Goods stock five years ago, you’d have $554.16 today, a cool 5X+ return. Amazon is up just 43% over the same period and even darling retail stocks like Tractor Supply haven’t come remotely close to matching Dick’s run.

Dick’s feels like the kind of retailer that is in a challenging no man’s land for a retail media network where they don’t have quite enough scale to be a dedicated line item for brands. That said, if recent performance is any indicator, I wouldn’t bet against this team, especially with such an ardent shopper base.

Every (earnings) season starts at Dick’s

Director, Six Eastern

Emilie Gerber is an absolute powerhouse of modern media and her PR firm, Six Eastern is the narrative engine behind many of the best brands in tech. No PR leader better grasps the era of balancing “going direct” with comms & continuing to strategically leverage institutional media to build a brand.

Flacks outnumber hacks something like 8 to 1 these days— I’m a side hustle writer and I still get upwards of 5 pitches per week often sent to my personal email. The game is harder than ever.

If you work in PR, check out the work the Six Eastern team is doing…and consider throwing your hat in the ring.

Senior Brand Manager, Frida Baby

Frida has absolutely taken over the parenting aisle over the past decade and shows no sign of slowing down. To think it all started with the humble snot sucker.

If you’re a brand manager who wants to launch bold campaigns that change the narrative, you won’t do any better. Hard to find too many brands who will let you do this. 

Corporate Development Lead, Washington Post 

It’s been a weird couple of years at the Post. The business is struggling mightily, the paper’s national influence is being subsumed by the Times and a certain previously hands-off relentless billionaire has decided that only columns in support of “personal liberties and free markets” may grace the opinion pages.

Amidst the tumult, it’s good to see that the Post is still seemingly staffing up to look at M & A and big swings at growth. The Post is an important American institution, a bigger version with more gravitas is good for democracy.

This week’s news brings back a variation on the first meme I ever made for this newsletter…back when only a fraction of you were here.

Made, sold and marketed by China

When historians look at the seminal economic shifts of our era, this piece from Marketplace Pulse will be essential canon that gets referenced over and over again.

I try like hell to keep my essays to 750 words or less but almost always fail because capturing the sentiment of a week inevitably takes more ink. Joe needed just 691 words to capture the sentiment of an entire century. Incredible writing through and through.