Zero Clicks #34: Advertising to Humans on the Agentic Web

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

This is a special bonus edition of Zero Clicks, written without the discerning pen of my trusty editor Mara. If this feels unusually self-indulgent and verbose, be sure to hug an editor today. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week with a Q & A feature that I’m realllly excited about + job posts and all the usual good stuff.

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Advertising to Humans on the Agentic Web
Two weeks ago at Martech Record’s Content and Commerce Summit, I interviewed Profound CEO James Cadwallader live on stage at a hotel in Chelsea, quite literally in the shadow of Google’s colossus New York office. You couldn’t ask for better poetic irony.

Our conversation still lives rent free in my head. Essentially, James put forth the same worldview as his head of growth espoused in edition #29 of this newsletter, which I’ve found myself wrestling with ever since.

“Brands, companies, and agencies are no longer marketing towards human eyeballs, they are now marketing to machines. AI agents are now your most important customer, and if you aren't catering towards them, you are likely missing one of the great customer acquisition shifts of all time.”

More than any other early stage AI startup, Profound is a microcosm of the biggest shift in our industry since Google famously "fucked with the magic" 25+ years ago.”  Sequoia and other top VCs apparently agree with me– last week Profound raised a $35M Series B, amidst a litany of fundraises from similar companies such as Evertune ($15M Series A) and Bluefish ($20M Series A). In the immortal words of Major Lazer, “bubble butt, bubble bubble bubble butt.”

James and the Profound team are incredible builders and I commend their audacity in telling marketing and media leaders that the very notion of their profession must be rethought first principles for the agentic web. I agree with the Profound team that we’re on the precipice of a tectonic shift in how the consumer internet functions. I believe that every marketing leader at any brand that has invested in SEO should be smashing the “request a demo” button with Profound and several other companies in the space.

However, I vehemently disagree with the idea that AI agents are a brand’s “most important customer.” Paradoxically, the dawn of the agentic internet will usher in the long overdue decline of advertising’s algorithmic arbitrage era and restore the lost art in advertising of influencing people.

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I hate to break it to you but so long as there has been an algorithmic internet, you’ve essentially been “marketing to machines”, even if a human clicks to complete the purchase at the eleventh hour. 35% of purchases on Amazon come from recommendations (to say nothing of PPC), Meta traded being a social network for being an ad server 10+ years ago and the best place to hide a dead body is in any Google organic result.

All the agentic web really does is commoditize the transactional, downfunnel moment where a human takes the final action, placing a premium on the all precious moments of real user action that build brand affinity and drive consideration.

It took well north of a decade for performance marketing tactics to largely become a commodity; “marketing to agents” will get there in a few short years.

In light of that, here’s where I expect savvy marketing leaders to make bets in the quarters ahead to reach human eyeballs: 

Out Of Home / IRL: The agentic web will be kind to billboard salesmen as opportunities to reach shoppers and drive brand loyalty when people are literally touching grass will be at a premium. The somewhat redundantly named AdQuick and Adgile Media are two companies to watch very closely in this era.

Curated Creator Events: If I ran a brand that even peripherally sought to be adjacent to the yuppie zeitgeist, I’d write Emily Sundberg a blank check. When less of the online world is real, diverting some of that budget to where people hook up IRL is always a good bet.

Creator / Social Whitelisting: Meta is poised to dominate the next few years of digital advertising, even as it becomes more of a synthetic hellhole that tries to get you to flirt with AI stepmoms and Russian girls. The contrarian play is to double down on authentic, expert creator reviews that are less meticulously optimized for downfunnel conversion and introduce brands and products in all their messy, human glory.

Gamified Apps: Expect AppLovin mania to persist and spread as AI eats even more of the desktop and mobile web before apps. It’s still gonna be Aunt Karen and not her bot playing Candy Crush and those 20 seconds of purely undivided human attention where you hijack her attention while she waits for level 37 to load are going to be worth more and more with each passing quarter.

Community Based Publishers: Outside of OpenEvidence, we haven’t really seen vertical LLMs pop up at scale. Here’s my take— the verticalization of AI search will be led by publishers who have a deep relationship with their audience building LLMs that exclusively train on their data. If you’re a brand, you want to have a relationship with these entities.

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One of the incorrect assumptions that the market is making about agentic advertising is that it will essentially be a more ‘roided out version of the performance marketing driven era that came before it. That absolutely could be the route that OpenAI chooses to go and it is certainly the cynical Occam’s Razor. ChatGPT is a far more powerful intent engine than Google and the personalization and targeting capacity it offers could be leveraged to incredible effect. But bear this in mind– from Substack to OpenAI, the next generation of ads businesses is going to be built by leaders who have expressed outright contempt for the current iteration of digital advertising.

OpenAI has a near infinite line of capital and the ability to build whatever it wants from first principles. To assume they will simply capitulate and echo the current interfaces that Google, Meta and Amazon built but…optimize them for agents (?) does all of the smart people that work at these companies a major disservice. I expect that there is far more blank slate thinking happening behind closed doors in these companies right now as to what advertising will look like on these platforms.

To better understand this dynamic, I implore you to listen to Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko’s episode on the excellent “Intelligent Marketer” podcast hosted by Greylock partner Mike Duboe and Fermat CEO Rishabh Jain. Dmitry is stunningly transparent about Perplexity’s early struggles to launch an ad product, pointing out that many users revolted over their initial ad offering which was grounded in allowing brands to sponsor follow up questions to a user’s initial query. I agree wholeheartedly with Dmitry that this was one of the least intrusive, most elegant ad products imaginable and it still provoked a viscerally negative reaction among many Perplexity power users. The anthropomorphic nature of LLMs means that the bar for incorporating advertising into the core UX without alienating people is orders of magnitude higher than it is in an interface like Google search. We have to build new things. Otherwise, our business becomes data entry into MCP servers.

As a natural skeptic, I’ve been struggling to understand my inherent gravity towards bullishness on AI. I finally comprehended thyself when I read this piece by Evan Armstrong in The Leverage. Much like it is for technology writ large, AI is a chance at a “cosmic do-over”  for the marketing industry which lost its mojo and panache in the Google and Meta dominated era. This is our chance to remember that the core of this business is to win hearts and minds.

Ultimately, it’s the last generation of marketing that belonged to the machines. This will be the era that humans take the advertising industry back.