Countdown clock says 34 days until BRXND NYC 2026 at the Times Center on November 5. Space is starting to get tight so if you’d like to join us, I highly recommend grabbing a ticket well in advance of the date. If you have any questions or requests, I’m always an email away at mike@brxnd.ai.
The Golden Age of Marketing
If I could concoct a perfect stew of macroeconomic conditions for the advertising business, it would look something like a technological platform shift that:
1. removes the bottleneck of shipping code, unleashes a Cambrian explosion of new consumer apps, and turns distribution into the existential challenge of our era
2. radically strips OpEx out of businesses, juicing contribution margins and leaving far more room “below the line” to spend on growth
3. onboards more than one billion people into new surfaces where the cost of compute to remain on the frontier permanently outpaces revenue that can be earned from subscriptions or taking a cut of transactions.
4. powers algorithms that get ever closer to becoming “perfectly competitive arbitrage machines” that maximize “performance” for advertisers and take rates for the platform.
Advertising, which historically has hovered at ~1% of GDP since the 1930s and was declining in relative contribution through much of the last decade, is now the largest share of the economy it has ever been. Everything is already an ad network…….. and there are about to be a lot more ad networks.
This is the golden age of marketing. While this may sound like unbridled fan service, I wholeheartedly believe that marketing is going to have the biggest seat at the proverbial table that it has in any of our lifetimes and careers. Yet, as I talk to marketers in my orbit, the prevailing mood leans a bit more towards angst than excitement.
It’s a bizarre paradox. While it’s clear that our industry is going to get a hell of a lot bigger, there’s also the most uncertainty I’ve ever felt about what exactly the advertising business will look like.
The old guard is clearly fading. The Trade Desk– a solid proxy for the advertising business of yesteryear– has seen its share price plummet 90%+ since roughly the precise moment that ChatGPT effectively became a search engine (less than two years ago on Halloween 2024 if you can believe it!) and is now fully blocked from Safari. The entire holding company model looks wobblier with each new ads CLI that gets launched. Even conventional retail media is under threat from the notion that agents bypass sponsored listings entirely.
At the same time, Meta is booming, Google’s ads business is stubbornly resilient and OpenAI has set the foundation of an ads business that elegantly navigates the tension between monetization / commercial utility and user trust. Even if the conversation stays within the Overton window of advertising existing to primarily serve the purpose of persuading humans to buy a product or service, we seem set on a path where advertising could easily exceed 2% of GDP.
But the conversation won’t stay there for long. It feels almost inevitable that the most hotly contested battleground on the modern web will be trying to influence agents at the point of inference, via both organic and paid tactics. Even though the idea of advertising to agents lives rent free in my head, I don’t have a satisfying framework for exactly how this will play out. So far, my favorite take on how this world will take shape comes from Antonio Garcia Martinez of Chaos Monkeys fame.
The fact we now have a routing intermediation layer on AI token usage means we’ll soon see a ‘regular’ version where you pay full price, and a subsidized version where results on commercial prompts like ecommerce/travel are skewed slightly in exchange for cheaper token costs (or have outright ‘sponsored’ results that display separately).
AI-enabled consumer apps with weak monetization (compared to money-gusher enterprise usage) will opt for the sponsored token pipe to float their computation costs. The third-party AI ad exchange of the future will be injecting the ‘sponsored’ part of the subsidized results into the token stream, combined with an attribution loop around the sponsored AI result that credits the app layer for surfacing the result.
The commercials might even be a rev-share on the downstream monetization, much like referral agreements, combined with dynamic bidding from the merchant on agentic attention (based on human user history, managed in a GDPR-safe way, in which the app owns the user data and relationship).
Trillions.
As ads geared towards agents become a reality, I expect we’ll see an increase in both brand and performance marketing budgets as a relative share of corporate expenses. Over time, the latter will become more and more about agents executing buys to influence other agents with humans increasingly getting abstracted from the process. But as the alpha from that discipline slowly erodes, I suspect brand marketing budgets will be where spend truly skyrockets.
Let’s take the proverbial AI search for “best running shoes” here as an example. If you’re a marketer, you can try to win by spending calories optimizing your PDPs for agents, jamming your product feed full of semantic search terms and generally making your product or service legible to the machine. Or you could spend calories investing in channels that reach real humans so that they tell their agent to “buy Adidas Hyperboost Edge in size 10.5, make no mistakes.” It’s a painfully obvious statement but bears repeating– the best hedge against the uncertainty of agentic commerce is a brand that shoppers actively seek out or tell their agents to seek out.
In any event, these are the best times to be in this business. The cash is flowing, the problems are more complex and murkier than ever and there’s a real need for wacky, first-principles thinking. Sure as hell beats trying to squeeze an incremental dollar out of marginally better keyword targeting.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
— Mike