Everything will change, you ready?

In my LinkedIn post on Monday, I shared three bold predictions on how I think marketing will change because of AI agents:

😵 Say goodbye to e-commerce stores
🪦 Traditional digital ads are dead
😲 Brand marketing is the only form of marketing that will matter

I promised to explain them in my newsletter, so here we go!

😵 Say goodbye to e-commerce stores

E-commerce has fundamentally changed how brands sell their products, the market is approximately USD 25.93 trillion in size (2023) and is still growing at a rapid pace. The introduction of mobile, smartphones and apps made it even easier to buy your favorite products online. Soon, it will all disappear.

I am not saying we will stop buying products online, in the contrary. The way we are going to buy them will become even easier and that has mainly do with AI Agents (and live shopping, but I will talk about that in a later newsletter).

Who else finds it incredibly annoying when you are scrolling your favorite brand’s store, you click on an item you want to see closer and decide to go back to the results page. Only to find out, you either start completely back at the top of the page or having to do all your filters again. It suckssss! Or endless scrolling to find your perfect piece, only to find out it is not available in your size anymore or they don’t deliver to your country..

Why would I ever, and I mean EVER, visit another e-commerce store again when I have an AI Agent available to me 24/7 who can do all of this on my behalf. Not only that, he understands my sizing, my taste and my preferences.

What the possible user experience could be? I push a button and say out loud: “I need new padel shoes, can you find my suitable options”. A few minutes later my AI agent will share an overview with options, complete with pictures (both studio and "on feet” because it knows I like those pics), summary of reviews, summary of description / features, prices, delivery dates and more. I can discuss them with it directly and when I am ready to decide I tell it to buy my favorite pair. It will let me know when it succeeds, how much it paid, with what payment method and it will keep me posted on delivery date(s).

Next day I found out that I won’t be home on the day of arrival and I want to change it. So I push my button again and tell it to change it to send it to my preferred pick up location or reschedule it to next day. Few minutes later: DONE.

🪦 Traditional digital ads are dead

Did “click-through-rates” kill creativity? Maybe. What if nobody will care about this metric anymore in the new few years?

Digital ads, and with that I mean Google Ads, SEO and ads on social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The real “click here, buy now” type of stuff. (So NOT content). They will all disappear as ROI will massively crash to near zero. Why?

First the easy one, as this one we are already seeing: search is changing dramatically and Google is slowly but surely going to loose their search dominance. In February of this year, Gartner predicted that search engine volume will Drop 25% by 2026, due to “AI chatbots and other virtual agents”. To be honest, I think this is still a fairly safe number. ChatGPT has its search function, I utilize Arc Search on my phone (which summarizes an answer to my question instead of serving me links - highly recommend) and Perplexity is directly going after the search market, with success. The verb “Googling” might just disappear sooner than we think..

This also means, if you are a business who’s main product is SEO services, you need to act and pivot NOW. I am sorry, but there is no other way. Better to acknowledge it now then to be too late.

Second, back to AI agents. A lot of people find ads, especially intrusive ones for stuff we don’t really need or care about, annoying. If we go back to the early example of me needing new padel shoes. Why would I go through a pain of clicking an ad, going to a store, check for my size, add shipping, do payments etc? Instead of me telling my AI agent to figure out what the best buy is and where to get them cheapest?

Exactly, nobody. I understand that this will be a massive change of behavior and I also understand that changing peoples behavior is the hardest thing to do. But when are people happy to change? When things are much more convenient and will save time and money. This is why this change will definitely happen.

Ads are not dead yet, definitely not. Just keep in your mind that this change will slowly start to happen when AI Agents become capable of these functionalities. At least you have already thought how to potentially adapt.

😲 Brand marketing is the only form of marketing that will matter

In a world where all product buying options come towards a consumer, instead of a consumer having to consciously go to a specific store or brand, what impact is there left for performance marketing?

In today’s advertising world, most cool ideas never get executed because of a lack of clear conversion metrics. Brand marketing, therefore, is always hard. How do you measure your awesome, innovative, experience if it could only potentially add to me starting to like the brand and deciding to buy something from it two months later? I understand, it is impossible.

So why do I think brand marketing is exactly what all brands should focus on when we can’t rely on performance marketing anymore? For the last time, let’s go back to me and my padel shoes example. Let’s say my AI Agent has come up with three good options, based on all it knows about me. One is from Under Armor (the cheapest, decent quality), one is from Adidas (best quality, average price) and one is from Nike (good quality, most expensive). Me consciously deciding to not always go with the best price/quality option purely has to do with me loving the brand Nike. I WANT to wear Nike because I stand for what they represent and do. There is no other reason left.

So as a brand, show me why you are here, show me why and how you build exciting products, show me what you stand for, show me how I can identify with you. This stuff doesn’t happen with performance marketing, this is awesome creativity and awesome brand marketing. Exciting? Absolutely.

I hear you thinking; how can we serve ads in ChatGPT or advertise directly to agents? There is a (pretty big) chance that we will see ads in ChatGPT and others as a lot of AI companies are trying to figure out their business models. When it comes to AI Agents, this is exactly the reason why I hope there will be decentralized version of them. This would mean that 1) all the information we give it about ourselves (and the more personal, the better it will work..) won’t be exploited as it is owned by nobody but you and 2) you will never face the risk of somehow companies influencing your AI agent to recommend you certain products and keep your AI Agent loyal to you and you only.

Although there is a lot of hype about AI already, I still believe there is massive underestimation about the true impact it will have. This is so much bigger than beautifully generated pictures of videos, I hope my thinking above has showed you why. As the title said; marketing as we know it will die in the next few years and we have to go back to the drawing board to see how to build a brand in a world full of AI (agents).

Adapt or die 😉 

Here are some of the latest announcements and other things that I found interesting this week (underscore means clickable!):

• Last week we had OpenAI’s Sora release, this week we have Google dropping a second version of its video model called Veo and damn… It really feels like Google is turning its, very negative, tied with some strong releases to end the year. Veo 2 is looking incredible!!

• Blackmagic announces the first ever camera completely designed for filming Apple Vision Pro content. Interesting because Apple announced a while back they were slowing down the production of the headset, they did mention they would come back with a headset at a better price point. I still believe this is the future though, these cameras will only make it easier!

• Friendly reminder for everyone. All the world’s greats started from zero and probably looked stupid at their first tries. Who cares how you look, go try something new and expand your capabilities and life. It is to only way to grow. Be ready to fail and do it anyway!

  

• Remember the AI Agent AIxbt from last week’s newsletter? He had 100k followers then, he has 150.000 followers at the moment.. As a reminder: he tweets very interesting industry information about the latest projects, updates and more. Crazy growth.

• More Google, they are getting into the XR game! They just announced Android XR, an expansion of their Android operating system for glasses and headsets. Developed in collaboration with Samsung and Qualcomm.

I will probably send the next newsletter from back home (🇳🇱)! I will try to get one out right after Christmas. Additionally, if you are in The Netherlands and want to grab coffee, feel free to reach out.

Enjoy your Christmas days and make sure to put your phones away when spending time with your loved ones. They are much more important than anything happening on your feed ❤️.

^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

^{This newsletter is where I’ll bring all of that together—my raw thoughts, ideas, and emotions about AI, blockchain, gaming, Gen Z & Alpha, and life in general. No perfection, just me being as real as it gets.}

^{Every week (or whenever inspiration hits), I’ll share what’s on my mind: whether it’s deep dives into tech, rants about the state of the world, or random experiments that I got myself into. The goal? To keep it valuable, human, and worth your time.}