Zero Clicks #38: Barbarians at the gate, Leviathan in the village

Welcome back to Zero Clicks, where we explore the interplay of AI, media and commerce. Here’s your TL;DR for this week:

• The big picture: OpenAI, Amazon and what’s left for the rest of retail 

• Job posts: Product marketing gets a glow-up

• The meme is the message: Michelangelo vs. B2B SaaS

• One great read: Local journalism vs. the free market

Hope you all had an excellent Thanksgiving! I spatchcocked for the first time and then cooked a riff on Molly Yeh’s five-spice turkey, sweet-and-sour glaze and citrus gravy. The stuffing made from the fresh stock from the backbone was a particular hit this year, as was our pumpkin spice tiramisu. Smash that reply button for any recipes.

Now, let’s get back to delivering stakeholder value…

Barbarian at the gate, Leviathan in the village

The thing you need to know about modern retailers is that they are media businesses masquerading as purveyors of goods. While Best Buy drives most of its topline revenue selling wares like Dell and HP laptops, selling ad slots to brands like Dell and HP generates the lion’s share of profit.

One of the more interesting narrative violations of the past five years is how many mid-market retailer stocks have outperformed Amazon, which has only risen 43% since this date in 2020. This dynamic cuts across categories and includes the likes of Lowe’s, Ulta, Tractor Supply and Dick’s Sporting Goods, the latter of which is up 273% since Dec. 2020. If you want to break the brain of anyone who works in Silicon Valley, calmly tell him that Dillard’s has had a better five-year run than NVIDIA. 

The retailers that are growing in Amazon’s shadow have two things in common:

1) Differentiated brick-and-mortar businesses that compel shoppers to buy in real life 
2) Thriving vertical ads businesses that command significant allocations of media spend from the top brands they carry

Effectively, compelling in-store offerings and media businesses are what prevent modern retailers from becoming commodities. Both could be upended if LLMs eat more of product search. But whatever, in the grand scheme of things, that’s tomorrow’s problem.

If OpenAI is the potential barbarian at the gate for retailers, Amazon is the leviathan that is already slamming its suckers down and crushing the village. In aggregate, Amazon is not only continuing to win market share against retailers in selling goods but increasingly, it is poised to further dominate the ads ecosystem as well, especially as it swallows more of the open web.

But if the core primitive of Amazon is just a search engine with a warehouse attached and OpenAI does product search better than Amazon, could ChatGPT distribute some of Amazon’s market power back to other retailers? Au contraire – while Amazon and OpenAI look like competitors in commerce, they share a bizarrely symbiotic strategic relationship.

Based on Andy Jassy’s comments on their Q3 earnings call, it sounds like Amazon is gearing up to eventually partner with OpenAI. On the surface, this is a bit of an odd take from a company that is blocking all crawlers and suing Perplexity for daring to shop on its website. Over Black Friday, Amazon flexed considerable muscle and showed OpenAI how futile it is to try to find shoppers the best price on an item without Amazon data. 

In the past, “walled gardens” referred to blocking advertiser access to your consumers and ad inventory. Now, Amazon is expanding the definition to blocking shoppers of agentic browsers from purchasing products altogether. That’s basically putting the Gardens of Versailles inside the Bastille.

But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether Amazon takes a long-term cooperative or combative stance with OpenAI. The rise of shopping on ChatGPT will be a net tailwind for Amazon’s strategic position because it solves Amazon’s only persistent Achilles heel. 

Over the years, Amazon has made several half-hearted attempts to solve discovery and by extension, become more of a demand-creation vs. pure demand-capture platform for advertisers. Now, they can choose to continue pushing that boulder up the hill or just outsource that function to ChatGPT and reap the benefits of new, incremental eCommerce traffic.

If the emergence of OpenAI as a shopping discovery engine shifts the eCommerce adoption curve even slightly, Amazon further solidifies its position against the rest of retail. Every additional question that can be handled by ChatGPT instead of inspecting a product in a physical store ticks the balance of power ever so slightly in Amazon’s favor.

Again, it’s important to remember that retailers today are media companies, and the physical store is the one advertising medium they have that Amazon doesn’t. Without a best-in-class advertising business that can generate demand for brands, a retailer’s business is reduced to becoming a commoditized logistics operation…and nobody beats Amazon at logistics.

Shopify has long claimed to give brands leverage against Amazon, famously saying the goal is to “arm the rebels” against Amazon. But its one key historical blind spot has been directly helping merchants find profitable growth via advertising. Shopify outsourced this function to Meta, which worked like a charm for a decade, but is now in flux as Meta CPMs creep perennially higher. 

So, what does this all mean for anyone in the business of helping retailers and brands grow? Really, there’s just one question that matters as we start to turn the page into 2026 planning.

How do I help my merchant partners create leverage against OpenAI, Amazon and the strategic union of The Two Towers?

Head of GTM Narrative, Anthropic
Since I started my career in tech, “product marketing” has been the hot career path for non-technical kids who are witty and erudite but want to live a half step above the grind of slinging SaaS.

For all the prestige of the position, it’s a weirdly nebulous and stale term that needed a glow-up. Anthropic, I really like what ya did here! 

Account Executive, Agency Partnerships, Best Buy Ads
I’d feel remiss to open a piece by saying that retailers are media companies now and not mention that the titular example is hiring for a bunch of roles across its ad sales division.

Best Buy has long been one of the most sophisticated retail media operations in the game and is a great landing spot for hungry media sellers.

Art Director, Gear and Merchandise, NVIDIA
If we are indeed at the top of an AI bubble, historians will point to NVIDIA hiring a Chief Swag Officer as our Joe Kennedy shoe shine boy moment.

Recruiting Coordination and Ops Specialist, Thinking Machines
Thinking Machines, the AI lab founded by former OpenAI exec Mira Murati, is in talks to raise a new round at a $50B valuation and well, nobody really knows exactly what the hell they are building. Their first product, a training API for fine-tuning open source models called Tinker, launched in October, and some academics seem to be using it enough to leave testimonials?

Anyway, they are hiring a bunch, mainly across engineering and deeply technical product roles. But here’s what appears to be an entry-level job posting that pays up to $190K. Everything is fine.

Not a meme per se, but I saw this ad on my commute to work yesterday. Can you imagine how much better the world would be if, instead of wasting his talent on frivolous pursuits like the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo sold B2B SaaS?

Half of me wants anyone who worked on this campaign to have their tenth-grade self stuffed in a locker as penance, and half of me begrudgingly admits this is solid B2B marketing.

Journeymen, Hobbyists, Superstars, Byrne Hobart, The Diff

“If there's a job people will do for money, but also for fun and social status, then a more efficient labor market will tend to price out professionals and replace them with hobbyists.” 

Awkwardly looks in mirror…

Byrne Hobart is a frustratingly superb finance and tech writer. Here, he just meanders into my lane and writes what is probably the best holistic summation of the forces underpinning media I’ve ever read. Really obnoxious, brah! Particularly refreshing is his contrarian position that generative AI has a relatively small impact on the broader macro forces replacing journalism with hobbyist commentary.

Ultimately, it’s pretty simple: the market for media has become too perfectly competitive, which is to say, it’s given us more of what we want. That isn’t necessarily a good thing.

The news oligopolies of the 20th century had their flaws, but they were a hell of a lot better at force feeding us broccoli than what we have now.