Zero Clicks #42: So long and stay gold

Welcome back to Zero Clicks where we’ve explored the interplay of AI, media and commerce. This is my long, drawn-out goodbye (for now) post. Thanks for reading over the last couple of years. I love you all.

So long (for now.) What’s next for Zero Clicks.

As you’ve perhaps deduced from my lack of galavanting in your inbox recently, Zero Clicks is going into hibernation. While the warrior poet in me wanted to Irish Goodbye this newsletter with a half-drunk, phantasmagoric fever dream about a cheeseburger, I’m told the mature thing to do is write a proper transition post.

First, some important housekeeping as I press pause on writing this newsletter:

If you’re receiving this message, you’ll be added to the distribution list for Martech Record’s flagship newsletter if you aren’t subscribed already. Mike McNerney has been the publisher of Zero Clicks from day one and he’s a damn gifted scribe in his own right who will be continuing to pull on the threads I did here at Zero Clicks.

You’ll get your first essay from him tomorrow (which we collab’d on) and his dispatches from Cannes next week. I promise you won’t be disappointed. 

So what’s next for me? In March, I started a new gig as the General Manager of Media at Alephic, a veteran team of entrepreneurs and forward deployed engineers who build custom AI software for the largest marketing teams in the world. Our clients include Amazon, Meta, EY, Disney, Colgate, Hilton and more. Our focus is on solving marketing problems that were impossible or unimaginable before.

We also own a portfolio of media companies at the intersection of AI and industry that now fall under my remit:

- BRXND: (Newsletter + Event) 

- Ride AI: (Newsletter + Event)

- Forward Deployed: (Podcast)

Ultimately, this was a unique opportunity to build on the rugged AI frontier and try this media thing full-time. Most of my writing these days lives on the BRXND newsletter which I write alongside Alephic’s founder Noah Brier and friends. If you’d like to continue to follow my work, I invite you to subscribe or connect with me on LinkedIn or X. 

BRXND’s flagship event is on November 5 at the Times Center in NYC. If you’re interested in attending, please put your name on the waitlist and I’ll do my best to get you in. Space is limited and we’re prioritizing brand-side marketing leaders. But I’ll do all in my power to get my old Zero Clicks readers in the room as old paisan.

Why Alephic? It will come as little surprise to those of you who know me that ultimately, I was less at home in corporate America than I am with small groups of scrappy iconoclasts who play outside the system.

But more importantly, I felt like it was time to explore again. Towards the end of my time at PayPal, I began to feel something visceral. AI was rendering many of the skills I learned in the last decade obsolete, inadequate, or pointed at rapidly contracting markets.

I can’t be alone in that respect. If you’re navigating a similar career transition and would like to chat, I’m a DM, reply or email away at [email protected] 

A final thanks: In many ways, I lucked out and fell ass-backwards into some pretty stellar branding for this newsletter when I named it Zero Clicks. Hell, Profound named their flagship conference after me and not to be outdone, Ryan Hudson went and rebranded his whole company in our image and likeness.

When I started this newsletter, Google was in the middle of their “glue on pizza” scandal and had first publicly hinted at their ambitions to answer queries without clicking out to external websites. But Zero Clicks was never meant to be myopically about just LLMs eating search. The bigger idea was to cover how the fundamental distribution of all media was changing and what it meant for all players in the ecosystem. That story is still in the proverbial top of the first inning.  

In my final edition for now, I hoped I’d land on a pithy 500 word bit that perfectly defined the current zeitgeist, drop the mic, grab a Big Arch and ride into the sunset. I wrote a couple drafts and landed on terms like “the new context economy” and “new media tokenomics.” Each made me think I was brilliant for about five minutes before I realized they were utter asinine bullshit. What I continue to love about writing is how quickly it disinfects bad ideas.   

So instead what follows is three thousand words of stream of consciousness on everything that I think in this current moment that essentially covers all the punchlines I would have written for you this year.

Naturally, it contains far more questions than answers.

If you read no further, know that my overarching take it’s that it is an unnerving but historically exciting time to be in the marketing or media profession. Prior to LLMs rewiring the form factor of the internet, our time was increasingly spent exploiting ever-shrinking arbitrage windows in and around media.This eventually became tedious as hell.

Now, all sorts of existential questions linger over the space that will require true first principles thinking.

How can I influence how my brand is perceived by AI search engines? What in the world is going on with ChatGPT’s ad engine? Can media survive a world in which the battle is not for human eyeballs but for agentic selection at the time of inference? What even is the core function of marketing in this era? 

Hanging over all of it is this idea that LLMs are fundamentally going to reshape the way that consumers discover products and build brand preferences. Agents (most of which today in fairness are still dumb scraper bots) now outnumber human visitors to most websites and mass-scale consumer agents haven’t even really hit the market yet. Anyone who confidently claims to know exactly what persuading an agent will look like is either a prophet or a charlatan.

If nothing else, hopefully the agentic web can be the catalyst to end marketing myopia and put so many of the tired old discussions about incrementality at the margin to bed. Or, you know, we can spend another decade shouting at each other about multi-touch attribution fugazi while the whole damn charade gets erased. I’m looking forward to having better conversations

Despite my general optimism, I do worry first and foremost about what happens to the current publisher and creator ecosystem if we can’t rapidly figure out new ways to incentivize the content that is the very lifeblood of AI  It’s not lost on me that arguably the most popular edition of this newsletter was my argument that AI was becoming a “Malthusian Trap.” 

But in this arena, companies are taking bigger and more audacious swings to sustain quality media that at any point I can remember in my career. Pay attention to what Cloudflare announces next week at Cannes. Take a look at what Parallel Web Systems is building with Index.

There’s hope yet for an internet that doesn’t devolve into solely walled garden fiefdoms.

Few terms trigger a Pavlovian instinct to wax nostalgic among tech xillennials quite like the “open web.” But what even is the open web, really? Any one of these definitions is defensible:

- The open web is the lifeblood of a modern democracy, a free exchange of intellect, and a platform where the best ideas, no matter how esoteric, can reach people who want to engage with them.

-Per Parallel, the open web is modern humanity’s living memory…and the ecosystem that made modern AI possible in the first place.

- The open web is the portion of the internet built on shared public standards, namely HTML, CSS and HTTP.

- The open web is a corrupted morass of arbitrage hacks from a bygone era that have rendered media utterly impossible to consume, most proverbially when you look for a simple chili recipe and have to read 5,000 words about how Grandma Ethel survived dysentery on the Oregon trail before you even get to put the onions in the pot. 

- The open web is a graveyard of entities who long ago mortgaged their future for a few pints of pennies from programmatic advertising….. and a few thousand tech companies circling and feasting on their carcasses.

As a larger idea grounded in free expression and ubiquitous societal access to high quality information, the open web is something we should fight for. In its current iteration of barely loadable websites, blogs and forums, who the hell cares?

Historically, the greatest trick the devil has played was to make it seem like each of the facets of the open web above was utterly impossible to decouple. And in the absence of a demonstrated business model to sustain much of the quality media ecosystem, perhaps he had a point.

The dawn of the agentic era should make us pause for a moment to reconsider all of these assumptions. As agents overtake humans as the primary consumers of information online, are there first principles business models that can sustain open access, high-quality, intellectually diverse media?

Said another way, can AI help recapture the spirit of the circa 2004 internet so many of us miss?

But if there’s one group that can meaningfully help solve this problem, I expect it to be many of you all. I look forward to seeing what you build.

One theory I have is that a decent chunk of the negative sentiment towards AI among some marketing leaders stems from the fact that AI is a narrative fire that sucks all the oxygen out of the ecosystem. Even if Sam and Dario remained in blissful bromance building a non-profit and never launched a consumer product to the world, we’d still be living through unusually transformative times for marketing and media.

Beyond AI eating the world, here are a few other major trends I’m watching closely:

GLP1s reshape the American consumer: Craig Fuller at FreightWaves has an early contender for underreported stat of the year. Snack companies have already taken out one million fewer truckloads to date. In addition, Frito-Lay has closed two plants, Campbell’s shut its chip factory in Massachusetts, and Smuckers took a $1B loss on Twinkies. One molecule is quite literally reshaping American consumerism and culture.

If you’re reading this as the brand manager of Pringles, Kool-Aid, or KitKat, thinking deeply about how to reposition your product when the fundamental way that millions of humans experience desire shifts beneath your feet is probably costing you a little more sleep than say….how your brand shows up in ChatGPT. But demand creation always finds a way and for every dollar lost as GLP-1s tame the reckless pursuit of satiation, new ones will be minted building brands that cater to a more active and vice-free lifestyle

The ubiquity of GLP-1s won’t just reshape the CPG landscape. It will also push meaningfully downstream into media, entertainment and consumer technology. (Author’s note– god dammit, sometimes this AI slop sentence construct is just the one you need.) I have absolutely no idea what this will look like, but am keen to dig in much further.

The extended golden age of the creator as arbiter of culture: Much like Jim Barksdale’s quip that the only ways to make money are “bundling and unbundling,” influence over a populace tends to be constantly shifting on a pendulum between institutional and individual power. Two or three years ago, it was reasonable to posit that we might be hitting a peak cycle in the creator economy. We could fully touch grass again, and the creators minted in the last era were themselves becoming massive institutional media powerhouses. Hawk Tuah’s 15 minutes of fame mercifully came and went.

However, the creator middle class—something I incorrectly pegged as a pure COVID-era phenomenon—has proved shockingly enduring and impactful for brands. Companies like ShopMy have opened up more monetization options than ever for creators and helped the channel cross the chasm into being a true performance play for marketers.

Creators are the perfect antidote to the slop cannons dominating feeds in that their humanity and individual taste is ostensibly why people are drawn to them in the first place. Ironically, this “humanity” is uniquely powerful training data that right now mostly lives within a few walled gardens (YouTube, Meta, Tiktok) and thus, could only be used as an essential signal to an agent on those platforms. This is a big advantage for Hatch.

Given all the former Meta leaders building ChatGPT ads, it’s safe to imagine OpenAI is acutely aware of this and working to incorporate creator reviews as both a contextual relevance signal for ads and likely creator storefronts as a front-end user experience in future versions of the platform.

The internet is dead, everything is fake, and we’re in the golden age of grift: Last Friday, New York published a great piece titled “The Feed is Fake.” Naturally, it was flippantly mocked by the “ultra-online” crowd, who basically argued, “ya bro, everything online has been virality schemes all the way down since at least 2021.” I personally don’t believe most of this reporting is common knowledge.

In a saner world, all the dead internet and fake engagement tactics would have mostly commoditized and no longer be effective. But with each passing day, more and more of what goes viral in both consumer and B2B is a product of pure synthetic form, a weird internet cesspool of clippers, pay-to-play boosters, and engagement pods. Often, the few arbiters of culture with gravitas left (i.e. New York Times reporters) mistake the pay-to-play traffic for signal and mainstream a trend that simply does not actually exist. It’s all the mid-2010s era manipulating the media Tucker Max stuff on speed.

I’ve fielded many inquiries on these tactics from friends on this who know my less scrupulous growth hacker roots. Truthfully, I know little tactically of this game. But it’s hard to see the straightest shooters feeling immense pressure to capitulate to the bullshit.

Where this really gets interesting is that the savviest builders of the Potemkin Village are now moving on to a new hustle. Their bet is that in the near future, they won’t be trying to influence people at all but that faux engagement schemes will be catnip for persuading agents. The theory is that agents will look for the simplest heuristics when they act on a user’s behalf. Thus, flooding the zone with shit to make “number go up” will convince an agent something has momentum.

It’s a tidy hypothesis but one that may well prove to be wrong. The models are weird– predicting what they will actually be persuaded by with any confidence at this moment in time is a fool’s errand.

Everything under the sun is truly an ad network: Few analysts have seen their takes age better over the years than Eric Seufert, the pro-advertising provocateur extraordinaire. He insisted that ads were coming to ChatGPT even when Sam Altman was in dogmatic denial, has called the many resurrections of Meta, and most notably coined the notion that “everything is an ad network.”

It’s only extrapolated from there: United, 7-Eleven, JP Morgan, Shell, Lyft, and Ace Hardware are all in the ad sales business. Practically, this means that 100+ CMOs across the FORTUNE 500 are now buyers and sellers of media. One of the core functions of a marketing leader is now to drive demand not just for your products but for your ad services as well.

More will come. The ability to generate digital rectangles out of thin air and sell them at 90% gross margins is truly one of the miracles of capitalism. Given how unwieldy this will ultimately be for CMOs trying to understand the landscape, many smaller players will get rolled up or sold through middlemen– Barksdale for the win again.

It’s easy to take the cynical frame on this but there’s a better question here. With all the free cash flow that ads create for a retail, travel or finance business, what kind of bolder, capital-intensive innovation bets are you going to use that found money to unlock?

TikTok Shop grows up: For most of its existence, a reasonable read on TikTok Shop was that it would be an utterly weird, multibillion-dollar marketplace that no real enterprise marketer had to worry about. A few cracked internet entrepreneurs you knew in high school would get hilariously rich selling knock-off curling irons. And then maybe the whole thing would get shut down.

Free of existential regulatory concerns, TikTok Shop now looks primed to hit another gear. The company is now on pace for $25B in sales in 2026, and Ralph Lauen, Olaplex, and Ulta have recently set up storefronts on the platform, joining Crocs and L’Oreal.

There really is no other social commerce play in the West with any viable scale (Whatnot, I guess?), and as the cost to create ungodly amounts of creative come down, it’s hard not to see more and more brands flocking to a net new distribution medium. I’d be sweating a little if I were Walmart and Target here.

AppLovin comes for commerce: There’s a natural tendency to look at AppLovin, no matter how big it gets and say that in the grand scheme of commanding consumer attention, “you are not serious people.”  Down 20% YTD, the company is currently buying back its own stock by the boatload because nobody else will. Occam's Razor here is still that Google and Apple strike with fury the moment this moves beyond mobile gaming arbitrage.

And yet, at $160B, AppLovin’s market cap is more than double Reddit, Roku, Pinterest, Snap & The Trade Desk combined. The company, for lack of a better phrase, has that “dawg in it” and its sights squarely set on the $100B+ in commerce spend that flow though Meta and Amazon.

If the company does crack the commerce flywheel, the pareto distribution of gains for a small set of enterprise brands will be enormous. 90% of large marketers won’t touch this…..creating a nice pot of gold for the 10% who do.

 When I started my career in tech, going to work in this silly business was a conscious career choice to take a different path from your peers who went to work in traditional meat grinder industries like finance and law. The first half of my career before COVID was essentially defined by levity and irreverence.There were periods of extremely hard work but overall the air just felt lighter.

While I’m acutely aware that I was 24 then and I’m 34 now, so much of the silliness feels like it’s left the building. Maybe it’s the longterm uncertainty around AI’s power or the sheer amount of capital on the line but the discourse and vibes just feel too damn serious.

My over-arching concern about AI in the workplace is that it will ultimately burn people out much faster, less due to the frenetic pace that it empowers individuals to work at but because it has a gravitational pull towards empowering you to work alone. There are many things that I used to have a junior member of my team do that I can now do myself in Claude Code or Codex in a fraction of the time (I have to- I’m a pure IC for the first time in quite a while.)

But to some degree, the speed of the work was never the point. Even if it took 5X the time, I lived vicariously listening to a newly minted NYC transplant regale me with tales of the dating scene in Murray Hill. Codex has never had a drunken dollar slice at 3AM.

The broader point I’m making here is that I think most people neither love nor hate their jobs. Most of us generally like what we do but derive our quotidian happiness in the workplace from surrounding ourselves with people we enjoy and jamming on problems together even if it is not the most efficient way to get work done. The more years I spend in the business, the more I realize who you work with is orders of magnitude more important than what you work on.

AI products may become more multiplayer in time but for now, the operating model is largely you, a machine and ever increasing pressure to accomplish more with the new powers that technology unlocks. This is good for GDP. But it’s lonely.

Thus more than ever, I think there’s going to extremely accelerated opportunities for people who get their shit done but are uniquely good at making work fun for others. There’s a quip that goes around on X every so often that companies die when the funny people leave. It’s more true than ever. We’re just making a bunch of computers do stuff after all.

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If you’ve made this far, a novelty McDonalds menu item and a Four Loko are on me, name the time and the NYC parking lot or bodega corner. Let’s keep the spirit of this hot Knicks summer alive.

Please do stay in touch!

Mike
[email protected] / [email protected] 
516-404-8447