Zero Clicks #33: ZC vs. The Reductionist-Industrial Complex

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

This edition of Zero Click’s is presented by Pictory. The Home of AI Video Editing Technology.

Here’s your TL;DR for what awaits this week: 

• The big picture: Marketing leaders are right more than they are wrong 

• Job posts: Who is leading commerce at OpenAI and Perplexity? 

• Two great reads: On LLMs, ads and publisher deals (what else?) 

• AI tool of the week: A search engine that actually understands shopping

It was incredible seeing many of you in New York this week for Martech Record’s Marketing Content & Commerce (MARCC) Summit at The Dream Downtown. A power 48 hours of moderating panels, European hours dinners, shaking 300 hands and throwing back a few negronis hits a lot harder on Wednesday morning than it used to. Highlight of my week was my interview with Profound Founder & CEO James Cadwallader which I’ll write a formal response to next week. For now, let’s get to the usual.

Video is the New Print: AI Video Creation with Pictory’s Marc Gawith

Our sponsor this week is special to Martech Record because we use their product almost everyday and love it. We have hundreds of hours of videos from webinars and interviews over the past 5 years and Pictory allowed us to reformat and republish this video to new platforms (we now have a YouTube channel!) at a fraction of the time and cost it would have otherwise taken. 

Check out our interview Pictory's Mark Gawith here. If you are an agency, marketer or ecomm brand - this is worth taking a look.

Pictory’s platform lets anyone—regardless of editing skills (case in point right here)—convert blogs, webinars, and even PowerPoints into polished videos in minutes. Gawith shared stories of agencies and enterprise teams creating entire automated campaigns.

Exclusive for Martech Record readers: Use code MARTECHRECORD for 40% off Pictory’s Annual Plan(case sensitive). Want a one-on-one demo? Connect with Marc via our Slack community or book a meeting with him here.

Against marketing’s reductionist-industrial complex

It has officially been one year, 33 editions and more than 50,000 words of Zero Clicks. To date, I’ve generally been on my best behavior and avoided stream-of-consciousness rants from my modest bully pulpit. But here’s the thing, unabashed diatribes are my natural vernacular. So I hope you’ll excuse and even enjoy this mild act of self-indulgence on my one-year anniversary.

The largest existential flaw of the modern internet — which LLMs in their current state serve to extrapolate — is that every incentive structure rewards the most reductionist rage-bait. Congratulations on saying the biggest number. 

Thus, the punditry of media commentary is a chorus of thinkbois talking past each other. The most viral takes tend to be grand and overly cynical proclamations— which ring true for for about 20% of readers and dead wrong for the other 80%.

These types of quips are a telltale sign that someone is not a serious person. You’ve heard them all by now, but they generally go something like this:

- All marketing attribution is pseudoscience, the only thing that can measure performance is incrementality holdout tests

- [Insert said DSP or programmatic platform here] is a ruse, siphoning off brand dollars to pay venture capitalists

- Onsite retail media…or Google search ads…or cashback offers…exclusively convert shoppers who were already going to buy

- Professional PR is a waste of money, just “go direct” with your message  

- Creative agencies are about to become obsolete because AI can (kinda) make videos

My personal favorite in this genre: the notion that Facebook ads vastly overinflate performance and that somehow Marky Mark and the Zucky bunch have hoodwinked an entire industry to a $2T market cap.

The travesty of this is that there are so many more nuanced, interesting questions that we can ask about Meta or any of the scenarios above.

Can you still build brands on Meta or only capitalize on brand equity built elsewhere? What societal tradeoffs are we willing to tolerate to effectively fund accelerated growth of certain types of small businesses? How are Facebook and Instagram continuing to provide exceptional value (which to be clear, it is) alongside declining engagement from humans?

It's valuable to have a healthy skepticism of how hundreds of billions of dollars in media are being spent, especially when much of the discourse is dominated by lapdogs who can’t muster a critical word. But somehow the nuanced takes just aren’t cutting through the clutter and in their place, we get a million variations of “x is dead” or “y is a racket.” 

Ultimately, these worldviews assume an incredibly patronizing and belittling attitude towards the marketing leaders who actually allocate the dollars across media. At best, they are sheep, led around by the tail by the border collies of big tech. At worst, they are just village idiots trying not to get fired. This directly insults my core readership and I ain't here for it.

I start from a very, very different place of analysis, which is to say that most marketers are sophisticated and smart, optimizing for business-pertinent KPIs pertinent that I do not understand. In aggregate, they are right in how they allocate dollars a hell of a lot more often than they are wrong. Once you look at the media tech ecosystem through that lens, everything starts to look a  lot more rational and sane.

Here’s a classic example of where we talk around each other. For brands under $100M in revenue, a very reasonable school of thought suggests that the ONLY thing that matters is gross margin and a relentless focus on mastery of Meta and YouTube conversion funnels (and all the tactics like creator partnerships and whitelisting that roll up to that). Most of the buzziest, profitable DTC brands founded since 2020 have grown this way, reaching nine-figure valuations incredibly quickly with ultra-lean teams. 

But of course, there's a point where that myopic thinking breaks down entirely; I wouldn’t lecture a brand manager at Procter & Gamble on why they should opt out of 90% of their paid media to  dump more fuel on the Meta fire. Tactics and channels that might be a gross waste of money for one brand are a daft arbitrage opportunity for another. 

Where there are seemingly gaping flaws in the system that lead to wasteful marketing spend, it is largely a function of organizational design that unnecessarily siloes the most talented marketing operators in a company. As I’ve written about before, marketing does not really have a senior individual contributor track which inevitably means that more than other functions, the bosses get abstracted away from the work, no matter how talented they are. There's no malice or incompetence here — these are just tough problems in the enterprise.

So the next time you see a viral tweet thread or dimestore Gary Vee persona that confidently declares that in 2025, you should only work with AI avatar waifu influencers, remember this: 

Your feed is a funhouse mirror. Ignore the provocateurs and trust you know your business better than any best practice. You’re doing a great job.

Plot twist: we're spotlighting the most interesting jobs in the business that aren’t publicly listed but are definitely being filled behind closed doors.

?????, Ads/Commerce/Shopping, OpenAI

If I planned on taking the premier consumer product of our generation and monetizing it via advertising and commerce, I’d probably go out and…well I don’t know…hire the executive who ran two of the greatest ad businesses of this era before her 40th birthday? Then maybe I’d beef up my personalization and recommendation capabilities with a couple of stealthy acquisitions. And then…profit?

OpenAI’s ambitions in advertising and shopping are now quite clear, but the company has a grand total of zero public jobs listings that mention commerce, shopping, advertising, retail or CPG. The same goes for Perplexity, which is allegedly staffing up its advertising push under former Captiv8 CRO Taz Patel, but still has no public jobs tagged with advertising or shopping. 

While the obvious take here is that most of these roles for nascent divisions get filled in non-public processes, you wonder if keeping the job posts out of the public eye is an act of strategic posturing in and of itself.Job posts offer a fascinating window into corporate strategy and, for many reasons, it seems like OpenAI and others want to keep that glass as opaque as possible right now.

Product Manager, ProfAI, Section
Tired: “McKinsey, Bain and BCG face existential threats from AI”

Wired: McKinsey, Bain and BCG face existential threats from lean, AI-native consulting firms that are piggybacked to B2B media companies, in this case Scott Galloway’s No Mercy, No Malice newsletter, which reaches 500K professionals.

Vice President, Agentic Strategic Business Development, Mastercard
Brace yourself, the job posts that use “agentic” 5+ times are coming!

Are ads all you need?, The Leverage
One of the great ironies of advertising as an industry is that it often lacks the courage to vociferously advocate for its own profession. It often takes an outsider like Ben Thompson to do it best.

This time around, it is Evan Armstrong who lays out the utilitarian case for LLMs to become primarily ad-supported products.

The other way to monetize AI summaries, The Media Copilot
Per usual, Pete Pachal’s analysis of Gannett’s decision to join Perplexity’s publisher partner program (after eschewing licensing deals with OpenAI) is right on the money. Effectively, Gannett is the first publisher in nearly a year to make the bet that advertising in LLMs will be a significant enough business for a share of ad revenue to be meaningful. Whether or not they are right is likely to have major ramifications on the future business model of media writ large.

Daydream
Few operators in commerce have a resume that holds a candle to Daydream founder Julie Bornstein’s. In addition to C-suite stints at Nordstrom and Stitch Fix, Bornstein already launched a vertical discovery engine based on semantic search (The YES) and sold it to Pinterest…pre-LLMs.

While The YES was a good idea arguably a few years ahead of the technology, Daydream is launching right at the perfect moment as OpenAI plans its big commerce push. Thus, Daydream is one of the more interesting bellwether companies for the broader thesis that vertical players will win out in massive markets that LLMs pursue directly.

I’ve played around with Daydream a bit to date and there’s a deep, almost erudite appreciation of shopping that isn’t yet present in OpenAI and Perplexity. While Dan Frommer gave a thoughtful, critical review in the New Consumer, I was pretty impressed at the agent’s ability to handle some funky queries, including my new mission to find dress shirts that look good with shorts.

The beta product has an almost dogmatic obsession with highbrow fashion, and even me — a guy who legitimately thinks Target Goodfellow v-necks are fancy — saw something here. I would love it if some of my more (classically) fashionable readers could give it a shot and let me know what they think!