Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

Time to rewatch Mad Men.

Because marketing is back to the 1960s. 🍸

Rand Fishkin saw it coming over a year ago,
and his piece is even more relevant today.

Marketing is undergoing a massive reshuffle.
In many ways, it’s going back to the old glory days.

Yet a lot of “modern” marketers are still in denial.
They can’t accept the shift.

I started my career nearly 10 years ago, right in the peak of the technical marketing era.

Back then, ROAS was the mantra.

But now…

Attribution is dead.
Clicks are dead.
Keywords in search are dead too.

That hyper-granular campaign structure I mastered for years? Irrelevant now.

Targeting specific user groups or positioning single products is now virtually impossible.

Broad Ai-driven campaigns like Google Performance Max are greatly over-performing any traditional campaign.

If you disagree with this statement, sorry but you're in denial too.

So where does this leave us?

Back to what the Mad Men did best!

Bold creative ideas.
Broad reach.
Simple, yet effective lift experiments.

That’s going to be the new (old) mantra of the Ai age.

Because everything else, the tech stack, the targeting, the mechanics, has already become a commodity.

Marketing as we know it is dead. ⚰️

RIP clicks.
RIP traffic.
RIP cookies.
RIP attribution.
RIP user targeting.
RIP marketing ROI?

So who's the killer? 🕵️

You'd think Ai.
And you'd be right. But...

the truth is,
Ai just joined a crime scene that was already crowded.

Social platforms and Google killed clicks long before ChatGPT.
They don’t want you to leave their walled gardens.

And when you do, they hide referral info.
Ever heard of “dark social”?

GDPR and privacy regulations buried cookies and tracking years ago.

Marketing attribution?
Let’s be honest. It never really worked.
Last-click was a lie, and by the time better models arrived, it was already too late.

Now, AI is simply accelerating the inevitable.

ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews are designed to keep you within the walls of a single conversation.

They often handle entire purchase journeys without sending ANY traffic.

Attributing sales to Ai conversations without traffic is virtually impossible.

We're left with lot of open questions and very few answers:

- How do we target users within Ai conversations?
- How do we target users who opt out of tracking?
- Do we even need to "target" users??
- How do we measure ROI without traffic and clicks?

We're at the beginning of a whole new era of marketing!

Who will find the answers first, will win.

Last week I presented what I call "The Great Marketing Reshuffle".

It's by far the biggest revolution in Marketing of the past 20/25 years.

The new age of Ai is completely reshaping the consumer journey and with it the way we do marketing.

Many things are dead:

- cookies are dead
- channel attribution is dead
- clicks are dead
- traffic is (almost) dead

Now consumers can perform the whole purchase journey within one single Ai platform. Without EVER clicking and visiting external sites/apps.

This happens in ChatGPT, Gemini etc, but also on Google itself with Ai Overviews and Ai Mode.

And if you add GPTAgent to the mix, then you really have a revolution unfolding before your eyes!

It's a huge disruption, that impacts every aspect of marketing.

From content, to media buying, to user targeting, even to how marketing teams are organised and their role within organisations.

It also impacts marketing measurement.
How can we prove marketing ROI without clicks or traffic?

I tried to make sense of all of this last week and I really enjoyed the deep discussion we had afterwards. Lot of food for thoughts!

But we're just at the very beginning of this revolution and I'm looking forward to what it'll bring next!

🚨Perplexity offers to buy Chrome!

If this isn’t the AI wars at full play I don’t know what else is.

Google was deemed a monopoly after loosing an antitrust trial earlier this year.

Splitting the giant up is one of the options on the table of antitrust officials.

Chrome could be separated and so Perplexity is making proposal.

The goal is to create the largest AI-powered browser on earth.

I strongly believe the internet of the near future will look very different from now!

🚨 SEO-hack alert.

Create a GPT conversation about yourself (or your brand) and make it discoverable.

Hopefully it'll rank on Google and serve as another piece of content.

Or maybe it's just a BS tactic? 😂

Workday you should do better!

HR had to revert my $1b salary increase because of you!

Imagine turning down a $1'000'000'000 offer 😅

And you're not Cristiano Ronaldo,
with all due respect to AI researchers.

What's even happening out there??

Now Meta is targeting the newly-founded Thinking Machines Lab for its hiring spree.

TML was founded by Mira Murati, former CTO at OpenAI.

It seems that so far NOBODY had accepted the offer.

Including the one for $1'000'000'000 😨

Marketing is EASY.

And AI is reminding us of that, loud and clear!

Until recently, marketing was all about complexity.

We were told it had to be about:

→ Overly complex campaign structures
→ Granular tracking and hyper-segmentation
→ Complex attribution models
→ Endless loyalty retargeting loops
→ Growth "hacking"

Technology and over-engineering hijacked marketing.
Overshadowing creativity and fundamentals.

But marketing scholars (like Byron Sharp) had already warned us:

If you want to grow your brand,
focus on maximising your brand's "mental availability".

Prioritise branding, mass-reach always-on advertising and mass marketing initiatives. Instead of over-targeted campaigns and loyalty loops/hacks.

Looks like those academics got it spot-on.

Fast forward to today,
two forces are pushing us back to the fundamentals:

👉 Privacy regulations killed granular targeting and reporting.
👉 AI rewrote consumer behaviour and advertising operations.

AI makes things simple again:

→ Consumers have a chat with AI bots instead of performing granular searches.
→ AI-driven campaigns outperform old-school media buyers.

Eg PMax and Demand Gen in Google Ads just need strong creative and a budget (more or less).

No complex targeting, personas, attribution etc.

Just press a button and enjoy 🏖️

But there's more.

The latest GEO (Generative AI Optimisation) guidelines emphasise omnipresence across digital and offline spaces, rather than SEO engineering and hacks.

AI doesn't care how meticulously your site is SEO-optimised.
AI cares about one thing:

💡 People talking about your brand.

On social media, Reddit, forums, reviews, offline interactions,
and subsequently, in AI-bot conversations.

The more your brand is discussed,
the higher the chance AI chatbots will mention it.

It's a virtuous circle even a kid could understand. 🔄
Brand Popularity → AI Mentions → More Customers.

What a news! 😅

So we're transferring human "mental availability" to an AI's "brand availability". (just because AI doesn't have a mind, yet!)

This leaves us with two choices:

1. Embrace the new reality and get back to the fundamentals of brand building.
2. Keep doing what we've done for the past 15 years and cross our fingers.

Any marketers out there with a different take?

In 2027, humanity will face a choice.

Which path will we choose?

According to the "AI 2027" academic project, our future will be decided by one of two paths.

1️⃣ The AI Race.
We continue the sprint towards AGI.
It becomes independent and sees humanity as an obstacle.
Result: Extinction. 💥

2️⃣ The AI Pause.
We slowdown development, manage misalignment risks, and unlock new human-friendly scientific breakthroughs.
Result: new age of prosperity. ✨

↳ Scenario 1
feels crazy, but plausible.
The geopolitical AI race with China, combined with the power-hunger of tech leaders and politicians, points in this direction.

AI development has to be hyper-centralised because of the immense resources it needs. This means power in the hands of a tiny few.

And this is not the future.
It's the present.

↳ Scenario 2
requires those few to give up power for the greater good.
Likely?

This isn't sci-fi.
It's a potential timeline resulting from thousands of simulations.

I'm not smart enough to evaluate the quality of the research,
but judging from their website, you can tell there's some brain behind it.

Which path do you think we will choose?

Sunday thoughts:
"Working in a cafe is still working. Whether you're in a Starbucks in Swindon or a beach bar in Bali."

What a news 😂

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a fan of office work, as opposed to remote.

But digital nomadism is on another level of remote.

And it will inevitably wind down.

It's sold as a dream by social media remote "performers", whose real lives and struggles are seldom disclosed.

But the reality is that it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people.

We all crave for connections.
With a place, with people, with a community. With a job?

This is especially true in our careers.
Personal connections are, like, 90% of professional success.
Prove me wrong!

Office colleagues for employees,
or local groups from university, startup accelerators, co-working mates for self-employed.

Every one of these connections needs time to be built and maintained.
You need to "consistently show up".

Something digital nomads definitely don't do.

That's why it should be treated as a rare exception.
Not a dream to be sold to everyone.

Tell me how I'm wrong.

Just to put things into perspective 😅

Ruoming Pang will make more money than all the major tech CEOs combined.

Meta, where do I apply?