Zero Clicks #30: The Audacity of Doing The Work

Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media and commerce. Here’s your TL;DR for what awaits this week: 

• The big picture: The virtue of doing the damn work 

• Job posts: High-growth startups pay big tech salaries now 

• The meme(s) are the message: One chart that shows the state of creators, tech and America   

• One great read: The only (other?) AI newsletter worth subscribing to

• Partner content: A conversation with Youssef Ahres, CEO of Flagship.

• MARCC NY Event on 8/4: In Zero Clicks #29, we went deep with the team at Profound on the AI Answer Engine Era. See their CEO live in conversation with Martech Record publisher Michael McNerney on August 4.

"Think of how much time is spent watching creators, versus marketing dollars that are spent on creators," explained Youssef Ahres, Founder & CEO of Flagship, a creator platform that uses AI to help marketers match marketing needs with creator outcomes in a recent conversation with Martech Record.

The creator economy has hit an inflection point. Marketers have been clear that creators are an effective means of building a brand and generating revenue. But, we are still at a point where we are waiting for a scalable discovery solution. Finding appropriate creators, negotiating contracts, tracking, paying, reporting and determining what worked and did not is still very manual. 

We sat down with Ahres to better understand where the creator market is today, how AI is changing the dynamic between advertiser and creator and how Flagship's new product Radar will help marketers focus on the more strategic aspects of their job. 

Ahres observation that creators have a difficult time building a sustainable business model because the major social media platforms own distribution and are able to squeeze margins led Flagship to build scalable way for brands to find creators that match their marketing objectives, unlocking efficiency for both brands and creators. 

Stream the rest of our conversation here.

The audacity of doing the work

If you’re someone who mostly writes words or numbers into a screen for a living – which is effectively any white-collar professional – and you aren’t feeling some small sense of ennui over AI eating the world, I’d appreciate a puff or two of what you’ve got in your corncob.

I’m back from a few weeks off from writing this newsletter for the birth of my second, and the time away triggered something of an existential crisis of why I even bother to do this. I have a demanding full-time job and two precocious rugrats to manage, and I spend my precious free hours agonizing over what adverb to use. It’s somehow both selfish and self-defeating. But I love the game.

The greatest irony of the LLM era is that when we do our best work, we ultimately commoditize ourselves. Every keystroke I pen is another piece of training data that is one step closer to putting me out of a job.

Hell, you can all write Zero Clicks now. To do so, follow this simple two-step prompt:

Step 1: Draft a 700-1,000 word essay on [x topic du jour], let’s say the three biggest themes in performance marketing on the eve of Cannes. 
Step 2: Now, please rewrite this in the style of Mike Mallazzo’s “Zero Clicks.”

For reasons above my paygrade, Chat-GPT and other LLMs seem to manage this best as a two step command vs. a one-step prompt. But I urge you to give it a try and reply back to me with the results of the experiment.

When you do, you’ll likely get a blurb from GPT that reads like this before it launches into the finished product:   

Here's a Mike Mallazzo–style rewrite of your channeling the voice of the Zero Clicks newsletter: smart, skeptical, cutting, media-obsessed, surgically analytical with a splash of dry wit and a ruthless eye for what actually matters. Think snappy headlines, sharp commentary, and a newsletter that reads like a drink thrown at a glossy industry party.

I’ve always found Chat-GPT penchant for over-indulgent flattery to be a nice touch. Gee, thanks boo. This little punk is kind enough to butter me up as it turns me into another battery in the matrix.

But here’s the most hopelessly depressing part: Chat-GPT does a good enough job to probably make 90% of you think it was truly me writing it.

Look, I’m under no illusion that you’re cuddled up with a single-barrel armagnac giving me your full attention as you read this. Most of you skim this newsletter on the subway, toilet or on a second screen in the meeting to align on the goals of the next FY2026 budget meeting. I generally live on the outer periphery of your attention span and as such, the diet LLM version of me can probably pass.

So why not just fire this thing up with a Chat-GPT or Claude prompt, lightly edit and toss in a banger dad joke or two and call it a day?

Ultimately, the reason to actually write is simple – the vast majority of the goodness I get from writing this newsletter comes from exerting the brain cells to do the damn work. The intrinsic value comes from not just coming up with a unique point of view but wrestling with the nuance of word choice, syntax and sentence construction.

Somewhere, I venture, there’s an analogous situation in your job. And therein lies the fundamental Catch-22 that the most ardent AI zealots have yet to answer. 

At this point, AI has obviously proven that it is exemplary at automating tedious, mundane work. This is exceptionally valuable! But with OpenAI valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that’s basically priced in at this point. To truly be worth trillions, at some point, LLMs have to prove that they can actually advance thinking in the enterprise…and at this juncture, I’d argue they are creating negative enterprise value in this respect.

Here’s why:

Beyond just repetitive tasks, in any corporate job, there is a deluge of work that is seemingly worthless insofar as it does not drive any obvious discernible value. But when you look closer, this “worthless” work is actually two things being conflated.

1) Pure Corporate Theatre/Bullshit: Work that has absolutely no value and is done strictly to appease the perceived whims of bosses or pass the time.

2) Mental Gymnastics: Work that has no practical value to the overall enterprise other than to further shape the thinking of the person doing it.

Despite the crippling cynicism that grips white-collar America, I actually believe that pure bullshit work is generally rare, at least outside of 100-hour per week meat grinder industries like investment banking, consulting and big law. However, we all spend a lot more time than we care to admit doing work that falls into the second bucket. If I’m being honest with myself, it’s 10+ hours of most of my weeks.

There’s the strategy memo your boss didn’t read, various flavors of OKRs/KPIs, the risks and opportunities memo for a deal that never happens etc. etc. But here’s the thing – all those tiny little moments of doing the work compound and inform a major decision somewhere down the line. That is, of course, unless you outsource them to LLMs.

The travesty of AI – at least insofar as it is currently applied by most people in the enterprise – is that it subtly transforms mental gymnastics into pure bullshit corporate theatre. Massive one-way door decisions that could impact millions of people are made based on strategy memos or slides that nobody ever read or wrote. Corporate strategy outsourced to lowest common denominator thinking.

Smarter people than me can argue about whether AI will eventually invert this equation or fully make better decisions than the lived experiences of human leaders. Until then, there is a very easy way to stay relevant: Do the damn work.

Head of Growth Marketing, Decagon
In terms of companies most dangerously close to killer enterprise AI apps, Decagon is a name to know. They’ve recently expanded to NY and are hiring for a slew of roles across growth and marketing in addition to sales.

And they are on the cutting edge of another trend worth highlighting: while reasonably early stage, the cash compensation on their roles generally falls between $200-$400K, commensurate with the cash comp for similar levels in big tech. There’s a trend here– comp at top startups is beginning to fall more in line with FAANG type roles, a major win for the ecosystem if sustainable.

Head of Growth, Imprint 
And just like that, here’s another generously compensated early stage growth gig!
Imprint is a company for the most shamelessly erudite among us, existing solely to help people form a deeper understanding of complex topics. I’d say a more cerebral world is something I can get behind.

Senior Director, Play, Fetch
If the continued meteoric rise of AppLovin has taught us anything, it is that mobile gaming – from Candy Crush to Wordle is 10x bigger than you think it should be. Given the insanely lucrative economics of gaming, the next step of this adventure is likely white labeled arcade experiences…in every mobile app imaginable. Already gaming heavy, Fetch seems to be taking early steps to expand this business which will likely throw off more hordes of cash.

Core Strategy Lead, Faire
On principle, I feel like I have to help out a fellow newsletter thinkboi who also has a full-time job type dude and Dan Hockenmaier is among the best in the game.

His Substack is elite, his LinkedIn posts are (gasp!) genuinely useful and his little side gig as the Chief Strategy Officer for Faire seems to be going great with 9 new openings. On the whole, Faire is a fascinating business that while coming down from its frothy pandemic boom seems to have carved a major seat at the table in the next generation of commerce. But massive questions around whether their marketplace can stay relevant with the coming AI tides remain. Good to see them bringing on ten new smart humans to figure it out. 

Senior Finance Reporter, Secret CFO
The future of media in one JD. Here’s a former CFO, now writing a pseudonymous trade publication looking to hire a proper reporter from the traditional press to pursue more capital J journalism.

I dig it – whatever it takes to hold the powerful to account.

Not a meme, per se, but this chart succinctly explains the current state of the creator economy, technology and society better than any 10,000-word think piece can.

The Silicon Panopticon, Evan Armstrong, The Leverage

Quality AI-centric media simply has not kept up with AI’s torrid pace. As a result, we’re basically forced to choose between idiotic hype marketing masquerading as analysis or Ed Zitron writing the same exact anti-everything fever dream essay for the 19th time.

Evan offers a rare voice somewhere in-between, proving to be both a curious AI-booster and a thoughtful critic when warranted. If you’re going to pay for a new publication, make it his.