Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Just a few months after its 26th anniversary, Google faces more threats heading into next year than ever. The rise of artificial intelligence provides users with an alternative way to search. Regulators, legislators, and courts are trying to break its market dominance. And younger consumers, especially, increasingly turn to social platforms to find the answers they need.

And, yet, in the midst of these threats… Google just had the most successful quarter in its history.

So, what’s the reality? Is Google doomed in 2025? Or is its continued position as king of the hill assured next year and beyond? Most importantly, how will whatever happens in the year ahead affect your business?

I don’t think Google is doomed, far from it. But I do think their most likely responses to the changing marketplace isn’t necessarily in your best interest. If nothing else, you should expect the ongoing shift from organic to paid search to continue. And there’s no way that’s good for you.

So, whether or not Google is doomed, what should you do as you move into 2025? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 26m 21s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 440 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in.

I think we have a really, really cool show for you. I want to start by saying, A, this is a follow up to last week’s episode that looked at the future of computing and Big Tech’s earnings for Q3 of 2024. And what I didn’t do last week was spend much time talking about Google. With everything that’s going on with the world of artificial intelligence and the competition that Google is seeing from AI based startups and the like, the question that people keep asking me is, will next year be the end of Google?

And I want to get the big question out of the way right up front. There is no way that Google is dead by the end of 2025. And I don’t think it’s terribly likely that they are anything other than the dominant player by the end of next year. I’m not going to predict that SEO is dead. I will not predict that Google is dead. No way.

At the same time, I’m fairly certain that Google will be a vastly different company at the end of 2025 than they are today. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a decent amount of money that Google is not as dominant in your world by the end of next year as they are today. Let’s put this in terms that you can easily see.

Go to your website’s Google Analytics traffic acquisition report and change the duration that you’re looking at for the last 90 days or the last 12 months. You pick. It doesn’t matter to me. First, take a look at the total sessions you’ve received during the period you’re reviewing. Then, instead of just looking at the default view, which groups traffic by Session Primary Channel Group or something similar. Click the dropdown that shows Session Primary Channel Group, and change that to Session source/medium. Now, in the little search box after you do that, in the report, type "Google" and hit enter. This will show you how many sessions you’ve received during the selected period and, importantly, the percentage of traffic that Google, and especially Google/Organic, represents to your business. I want you to make a note of three numbers.

First, write down the number of sessions from Google/Organic. You can also note the total traffic from Google and its share of your total traffic. If you’re like most businesses, I’d expect Google’s overall share to be somewhere between 25 and 65% of your traffic, and Google Organic’s share probably to be no less than, say, 10 or 12%, and could be as high as 60%, depending on how much advertising you do or how much you rely on organic search.

I doubt it’s at the top end, though there are certainly edge cases where that could be true. The actual volume of traffic you get varies too widely by business and industry for me to hazard a guess at what the actual number will be. So right now I’m just talking in percentages. For my hospitality industry friends, keep in mind that traffic for Metasearch shows up under a different source/medium. It could be Sabre or Amadeus or Mirai or Siteminder or DerbySoft, ROIback, folks like that. We’re not going to worry about that traffic today.

Here’s the bet I’d be willing to make 12 months from now. The share of traffic that comes from Google/Organic will be down no less than 5 percent from where it is today, if not more. Your Google traffic overall and your Google/Organic traffic level might increase, but the share of organic traffic, that is, free traffic that you get from Google today, will almost certainly decline by the end of 2025. And I have four big reasons for thinking that Google will be a different company and that as a consequence, your organic traffic will decline.

The biggest is that Google needs to keep monetizing their search engine results pages. If your overall Google traffic goes up in the next year, It’s probably because you’ve traded some type of paid search, whether traditional CPC ads, metasearch, or something similar, For what is today free, organic search.

The second reason is because Google continues to increase the number of zero click search response pages. Those pages provide answers to customers and don’t drive clicks through to the sources of those answers. I’m really confident that will drive down the amount of organic traffic you get over the course of the next year.

The third reason that Google will be a vastly different company is what I started the show with. Google faces competitive challenges from alternative search engines and search experiences. One set of alternatives includes AI based options like ChatGPT’s new search feature and Anthropic’s Claude. Another is dedicated search engines like Perplexity and Bing. You have things like Apple Intelligence and iOS. And yet another alternative comes from consumers conducting more searches on social sites like TikTok or LinkedIn where we’re seeing a definite uptick, no pun intended — good thing because that’s a terrible pun — but we’re definitely seeing an uptick in that behavior.

And the fourth reason that Google is definitely going to change is that Google is facing some serious antitrust threats that might prevent them from responding as quickly as they traditionally have. Don’t misunderstand, I would be very surprised if their various antitrust cases wrap up by the end of 2025. I also don’t think that those cases will reach a conclusion that will force Google to change their business model or anything that we’ll talk about in a moment.

What I do think is true is that those cases will represent a distraction that will hurt Google’s ability to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace. It is awfully tough to run forwards when you’re looking over your shoulder with worry.

Now, before I address the first three reasons in more detail, I do want to spend a moment on Google’s antitrust situation. Remember, I’m not a lawyer. I could be stupendously wrong about what I’m about to say here. My sense, though, is that the antitrust thing is a big honking deal. It is, you know, huge. There are reports that the DOJ apparently wants to strip Chrome away from Google as part of its proposed remedies to the case. That’s a rumor at this point. We don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the kind of thing people are talking about. They’re talking about major substantive remedies, major substantive structural remedies to the way Google operates as a business. And that’s just the cases that Google faces in the U. S. Obviously, the UK’s Competition Markets Authority, EU regulations like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and lawsuits across an array of jurisdictions also affects the reality of how Google does business.

Sticking with just the U.S. for now, in any normal election year, you would expect that in an incoming Republican administration. would favor a hands off approach toward big business and that Google might be able to, you know, negotiate a settlement that’s favorable and quickly.

At the same time, this obviously is not a normal incoming Republican administration. Instead, they’re a highly populist one, and there’s plenty of evidence they’re no more fond of big tech than a typical Democratic administration might be. The consensus I’ve read from people who seem to know what they’re talking about is that the Trump administration isn’t going to simply walk away from this.

I’m going to read you a slightly lengthy quote for a moment here. This is a quote the speaker said, "I think my argument is actually even if you believe that there are network effects that make Google more powerful or make Gemini a more powerful tool within Google, There are actually some real, real issues here with just the integration. So does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all those other platforms that are built on top of or built underneath the Google umbrella?"

The speaker continued by saying, "I think there’s a really good argument that if we want to be pro innovation, we want to ensure that new insurgents can change these things up. That you want to promote as much competition as possible, and you actually want to separate all of those market verticals as much as possible. That’s where I think antitrust is probably the most useful way to think about a solution to what we face."

Would it shock you if I told you that that quote is from incoming Vice President JD Vance? That’s not the kind of rhetoric you typically hear. Would it further surprise you that Vance also said, "One final observation I’ll make just about this intersection between competition and innovation. If there’s a person within the Biden administration, obviously the FTC is an independent agency, but Lina Khan is the person that I would point to as the best person, in my view, within the Biden administration."

Now, Lina Khan is the person in charge of the FTC, and the FTC is the folks who’ve been going after Google in many cases. So, yeah, that’s not what you might typically expect.

Now, maybe the Trump administration will be more, well, let’s call it transactional, and Google can, for lack of a better term, "buy them off" by paying fines or God help us, making changes favorable to Trump’s policies or something. Trump’s rhetoric himself on the topic is decidedly mixed, so who knows, really? I’m going to link to a lot of this in the show notes. I do want to be fair, I’m not remotely going to make any bold predictions here, other to say that it seems unlikely that Google’s antitrust situation will simply go away without the company making some significant concessions or changes to how it does business. My confidence level on exactly what form those concessions and changes might take, I don’t And when they might occur, is pretty low. So, you know, take all of that with a grain of salt, but it does seem unlikely that those cases simply just, you know, vanish.

Turning back to my actual topic of expertise, which is the digital marketplace itself, there was a recent discussion at HospitalityNet and on LinkedIn about whether startups like ChatGPT and Perplexity pose a threat to Google.

First, there was no consensus among the panel of experts convened by HospitalityNet about whether or not others will beat Google. Personally, I lean towards Google continuing its dominance, at least in the intermediate term. If we return to last week’s look at big tech’s earnings, Google grew its revenues 15 percent year on year to $88.3 billion, and its profitability almost 34 percent to $26.3 billion. It was a record quarter for Google, both in revenues and in profits. The company is sitting on $97 billion in cash. They own one of the most powerful computing infrastructures in human history. They have one of the deepest pools of AI talent in the world.

There’s also some evidence, including articles in Reuters and The Information and on Bloomberg that improvement in new AI models is slowing down. In other words, it’s getting harder for AI companies to show improvement versus existing models like GPT 4.0 and Gemini.

If that slowdown holds true, success in the marketplace is not going to go to those with the most impressive model, because after all, the frontier models today are pretty good. You’re going to need to see dramatic improvement to separate yourself there.

Instead, success will belong to those who do the best job of providing a useful product. To their customers, and Google definitely has the edge there. Remember the revenue numbers I just said like 10 seconds ago? Google has an amazing existing revenue model that simply prints money. No disrespect to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude. But none of them today has a plan that makes anywhere near enough money as fast as they’re spending it. That’s not a formula for long term success.

So, you know, I’m not, I’m not bullish on Google maintaining its dominance necessarily because I think they’re the most innovative or because they’ve done the coolest things. I think they’re the ones that have the deepest pockets and the deepest pool of talent to keep turning to, as well as a model that already pays for itself.

That’s just going to be tough for folks to dislodge without a truly disruptive product. Obviously, if a new model comes out that, you know, blows up what we’ve seen to date, then all bets are off. But that doesn’t appear to be the direction we’re headed, at least at the moment. Barring any wildcards, I’m still going to put my chips on Google in this case.

Now, at the same time, Google must keep finding ways to monetize their search engine results pages. They’re not going to drive double digit growth year on year without it. And that’s not great for your business, because they’re continually converting formerly free traffic into something you pay for. That’s their right. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for you or your business in the long term.

Google keeps increasing the number of zero click search response pages, too. With its AI Overviews product, they’re giving customers answers without driving clicks to the sources of those answers. Again, that’s their right, but again, it’s not great for you or your business. Now, maybe customers will find that they prefer ChatGPT’s answers or Perplexity’s answers or Claude’s answers.

My question is, is that any better for you? I don’t think so. If they’re not linking to you, if they’re not driving traffic to you and driving clicks to you, that’s a problem for you.

And because of that, I want to go back to the bet I opened this episode with. I said I can pretty much guarantee you that your organic search numbers will decline. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead, by the way, it just means it’s going to be harder to drive traffic from those clicks where you used to get them.

And all of those reasons I just gave are the reasons I’m fairly comfortable making the bet that your organic traffic will decline. What I neglected to say, of course, was that you have more than a little control over what happens there. You don’t have to take that as a given. You don’t have to let anything bad happen to your business, even if Google’s position in the marketplace drops or they change how they’re routing traffic to you.

I am absolutely, 100%, recommending that you take action, today, to make sure that nothing bad happens to your business.

As I said in my Hospitality Net panel response, who cares what happens to Google? The real question is whether those changes represent a threat to your business.

Now is the time for you to consider how to diversify your channel mix, the mix of business that comes to your website and drives traffic and revenue for you. You need to start by working to improve conversion rates when traffic arrives on your web and mobile channels. I know I’ve been talking to this point about traffic, but what happens when traffic shows up is even more important.

Assume, for instance, that your digital channels produce 100,000 per month in revenue. If your current conversion rate is, say, 3%, even a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in that number equates to an extra 5,000 to 10,000 per month from the traffic already visiting your site. More importantly, it gets you more data about your customers that you can use to connect with them through other channels.

That’s also why you need to expand your horizons when talking about what conversions are on your website. For instance, conversion isn’t just a sale. It could be customers opting into your email list, or downloading a whitepaper, or following you on social media. Each of those has an economic value to you.

Imagine, for instance, that your average sale is 100. It could be 1,000, it could be 100,000 too. But for now, let’s make it a hundred bucks. Consider that maybe 5% of all email addresses you collect will turn into a sale within a year or so. That is what we tend to see at a minimum over time. That means that every email address is worth at least $5 to your business in future revenue. Even a social media follow is worth a buck if 1% of those folks turn into a sale over time, too. There’s tremendous long term value in turning your traffic into connections who can later come back and buy from you. So you want to put some focus there. And those conversion events increase the return on spend from your paid media activities, too. So it’s a win on that level also.

And, of course, email and social can then become a larger share of your traffic over the long term so that you’re less dependent on Google. It’s a win on every single part of the scoreboard.

Next, you want to think about the core and explore method that I’ve talked about before and will link to in the show notes so you can check it out. But put most of your efforts, maybe 80 to 90%, into core activities that drive the majority of your traffic and revenues today. So that could be things like content marketing, that could be things like SEO, that could be things like paid search. At the same time, you’re going to use the remaining 10-20% of your time and your energy and your budget to explore new opportunities. Those could be referrals from influencers or creators. It could be testing a new social platform or content campaign, something you haven’t done before. The idea is to try to improve your overall traffic and revenue from new sources and diversify the mix of sources driving traffic and revenue to your business.

One place you’re going to want to start exploring in 2025 is ranking in these alternative AI search engines as well. You can ensure you show up the places that your customers are starting to test so that if, in fact, people do switch to ChatGPT or do switch to Perplexity, you’ve got a shot at capturing those customers as well.

I’m already seeing clients getting small numbers of visits from those channels. And in my own case, we’re getting a very small but growing number of visitors each month from Perplexity, from ChatGPT, and from Microsoft Copilot. None are huge yet, but it’s a start. And it’s a sign that we’re doing the necessary things to capture customers who are making a switch.

Now the best part of taking an approach like this is that these actions ensure you win whether Google stumbles or whether it continues as the market leader. If Google makes changes that impact your traffic, you’re already working to offset those declines. If Google gets beaten in the marketplace by an AI startup or its antitrust challenges kick it in the butt, again, you’re already working to offset those declines.

And if they maintain their dominant position, you’re still growing your traffic and revenue from no sources. That’s a formula for success in any case, and it’s the place you want to be.

So I want to go back to where I started. I cannot see any way that Google is dead by the end of 2025. Next year will not be the end of Google. I still think, though, that they’re going to be a vastly different company at the end of 2025 than they are today.

If you assume that Google’s share of your traffic, and certainly your share of unpaid traffic, is going to decline, and assume that Google’s going to be okay with that, then the right activity today is to take actions now that diversify the sources driving your traffic.

Position yourself to win no matter what happens to Google. Ultimately, that’s a bet you should be willing to make. And if you take the right actions now, Google. A bet you’re almost certain to win.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 440.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

It’s time for Big Tech’s earnings once again. And, this time around there were some notable updates, particularly from Meta Platforms (i.e., Facebook) and Microsoft that hint at the future of computing — and, more importantly, the future of your customers’ digital experience.

Meta, in particular, shared a compelling vision of where they’re looking to go as a company, not only for the next few quarters, but for the decade ahead. I’m not convinced they’ll succeed. But I’m impressed by the clarity of vision Mark Zuckerberg and Susan Li expressed.

Microsoft, by contrast, has an entirely different approach to the market focused on enterprise vs. consumers. Two different visions, clearly expressed, and clearly focused on the future.

How will the future of computing shape your customers’ behaviors going forward? And, most importantly, what do these visions mean for your brand and business? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 02s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 439 of the Big Show, and thank you so much for tuning in. I think we have a really cool episode for you this week.

As you know, every quarter I like to look at Big Tech’s earnings and try to understand what those earnings calls tell us about the state of digital. Where are we? And where does big tech see us going? And if you remember last quarter, it was kind of, not that much had changed. There wasn’t a lot to report in terms of, “Oh man, there’s something really, really cool coming down the road.” Or something that we really need to be aware of that will shape our customers experience and shape how we market to them.

And then this quarter happened.

And I want to be fair, there wasn’t anything where you went, “Oh my gosh, this was unbelievable.”

But Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta Platforms, a company that I probably give short shrift to far too often around here, really went into detail on something fascinating to me, where he talked about the company’s, and this is a quote, “long term vision around AI and the future of computing.”

Which, when, when one of the big tech leaders stands up and says, “this is the future of computing,” I think as marketers, it’s a good idea for us to sit up and take notice and say, “Wait a second. Is that something we should be paying attention to? Is that something that might change the way our customers interact with our brands and our businesses over time?”

So, while not much has changed in practice over the last quarter, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta CFO Susan Lee’s remarks painted a fascinating view of where they think we are, what the future will be, where they think the next computing platform will be.

And here’s the vision as I understand it. Zuckerberg and meta by extension believes we will live in a different world in the not too distant future. That world won’t be dominated by phones as it is today. Instead, it will be dominated by smart glasses providing us information visually and audibly. More through augmented reality than virtual reality. Screens you wear on your face or your wrist will replace the screens you carry in your pocket.

This is their vision. And you’ve heard me say, I’ve been not necessarily skeptical about augmented reality, but certainly skeptical around virtual reality. And the fact that I don’t think that that’s a real long term winner. At the same time, they’ve got a very clear vision here, and I think it’s really worth talking about.

So they, they’re talking about augmented reality. And that these augmented reality experiences will be powered, in large part, by artificial intelligence. They see that these experiences will also be mediated through AI agents. So, you know, you’ll be wearing a pair of smart glasses. You’ll be walking down the street. You’ll be looking around and be given information about, oh, here’s a store, here’s a restaurant you might like. And you can interact with that to say, “you know what, hey, agent, go ahead and make me a reservation at that restaurant for next week.” And it will just take care of it for you.

They also think that advertising will be a core component of the content and the agent experience consumers receive. So we’ve got, we’re wearing smart glasses or smart devices of some kind that provide us augmented reality experiences powered in large part by artificial intelligence mediated through AI agents with advertising at its core.

Now the reason I find this so fascinating is because Meta is positioning itself to provide the smart glasses. It already has a partnership with Ray-Ban today where those glasses exist. It will provide the content recommendations, if not the content itself. It will provide the ads. And it will provide the agents used by both consumers and the businesses they interact with.

And because gatekeeper’s gonna gate, Meta stands to monetize as many of these interactions as possible. They intend to monetize as many of these interactions as possible. They’ll be selling the physical devices, whether they’re smart glasses, or smart earbuds, or some other form. They’ll be selling the ads. They’ll be selling, or otherwise monetizing, the agents that businesses use to support customers. And they might be taking a share of apps or other upgrades customers use to personalize their devices and make them more useful in their lives.

Now, any of that could fail. Starting with, of course, we have no idea if consumers want to be walking around wearing smart devices that are either flashing things in front of their faces or talking to them in their ears all the time. What’s also true is this is a remarkably complete and compelling vision of the future.

It’s also a playbook we’ve seen before. Specifically from Apple with smartphones, and as my good friend Mike Moran pointed out to me when we were talking about this, with the iPod prior to that. I’m going to be honest. Up until this earnings call, I used to think that Zuckerberg’s metaverse obsession was solely a defensive play. As you are undoubtedly aware, when Apple launched App Tracking Transparency a few years back, it cost Facebook roughly $10 billion in revenue in just the first year.

It made sense to me that Zuckerberg would want to reduce his company’s dependency on other big tech companies’ platforms, primarily Apple. But certainly on Google with Android as well.

At the same time, what he’s now articulating is a much more robust business rationale beyond just a defensive posture. In fact, Meta’s remarks, Zuckerberg’s remarks, and Susan Li’s remarks illustrate perfectly why I do these recaps in the first place. They’re not just telling us what they think might happen, they’re telling us how much time and money and human capital they’re investing to make it happen. Mark Zuckerberg literally is betting his company on a future he wants to make happen.

They had over $24 billion in capital expenditures this year to date, which is up from $20 billion in the same period last year. Their average R&D spend over the last four quarters has been fully 27% of the company’s revenue. More than a quarter, more than one in four dollars. That’s incredible. And that’s why we pay attention, that’s why we should pay attention to what folks like Mark Zuckerberg, and Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai say about their businesses.

Before you think any of this sounds crazy, because it’s easy to look at this and go, “Well, yeah, cool idea, but it will never work.” It doesn’t have to work completely.

I mentioned that this is a similar playbook to what Apple did with the iPhone and the iPod. iOS runs on roughly one in six smartphones in the world. But Apple’s services division generated roughly $26 billion in revenue this past quarter and about $96 billion in Apple’s just ended fiscal year, and about $71 billion in revenue. Services were roughly 25% of Apple’s total revenues and roughly 39% of Apple’s earnings in the last year. Almost 40% of their earnings come from services.

Now let’s contrast that with Meta, with Facebook, right? Meta has made $156 billion in revenue in the last four quarters and $62.4 billion in profit. In other words, Apple’s services division alone has made 60% as much revenue and 114% as much profit as Meta/Facebook does in total.

Even if you subtract the roughly 20 billion Google pays Apple to be the default search on iOS. Apple is still making a third of Meta’s revenues and 80% of Meta’s profits just from services.

Moving in this direction would help Meta diversify away from advertising, which is a much more volatile business and frankly the biggest strategic threat they have if consumers stop using Instagram to the same level that they do or stop using Facebook to the same level that they do — which there’s some evidence of — they stand to lose a ton of money. But if they can get people using the next computing platform, even if it takes five years, they’ve set themselves up for long term success as a much more interesting and much more robust company.

Those all seem like compelling reasons for Meta to want to win in the next device category. To define the future of computing.

Again, there’s no guarantee that they’ll succeed. Overall adoption of devices like smart glasses and VR headsets is still pretty low. I’ll believe people will trade their handheld devices for wearable devices when I see numbers suggesting a bigger trend in that direction. I have never been overly blown away by the concept. Even as somebody who’s generally interested in the idea, I mean, I’d love to have a hands free device. I also don’t want to make the “focus group of one error” and confuse my interest with overall consumer interest. At the same time — and I realize I’m kind of tying myself in knots here — smartphones also didn’t go anywhere for a while. You know, until they did.

So when Mark Zuckerberg is talking about the future of computing, he may be on to something here. I don’t think it’s going to happen right away. I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow. But they are setting themselves up for success with a very clear vision that could change the way our customers interact with our brands and with our businesses over the long term.

Now as we think about the future of computing, as we think about the future of how that might affect customers, I wanted to point out one other bit from the earnings calls this time that I thought was really interesting. And this one’s, again, a little less fully baked than some other things we might talk about here.

There’s a reason I call the show Thinks Out Loud. It doesn’t mean Knows Out Loud. I’m not 100 percent sure. But I have often felt that Microsoft has one of the most compelling strategies around artificial intelligence and around the way they’re bringing their products to market. And in many ways they do. In many ways they are setting themselves up to be a pick and shovels company in an AI boom, in an AI gold rush, right? Very smart play.

They may not be a platform that consumers turn to very often, though. And one of the reasons is because they always fall back to wanting to be an infrastructure company.

And we’re seeing this a little bit, where their relationship with OpenAI may turn out to be a long term, not negative, but not the positive I once thought it was.

For a long time, I assumed that Microsoft outsourced the risk associated with AI while still being in a position to benefit from the upsides.

That might be wrong. Instead, it seems that OpenAI can break the deal if and when they develop AGI. As somebody I follow on Twitter said, what’s to prevent OpenAI from simply declaring that the next version of GPT, whether it’s called GPT 4 Ultra or GPT 5 or what have you, is AGI and just exiting the deal?

I mean, it would lead to lawsuits, but theoretically they could do it. There’s also plenty of smoke, if no fire yet, that suggests the relationship isn’t quite as sunshine and rainbows as it had been, say, a year ago. I’m going to link in the show notes to Ben Thompson’s outstanding Microsoft earnings recap, um, for more details on that topic.

The short story is Microsoft is already discussing incorporating Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini into its existing platforms and products. They talked about this on the earnings call. Satya Nadella talked about giving their customers, who generally are enterprise customers, building artificial intelligence tools on things like Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. Because they’re starting to realize, “hey, that’s what we do. We provide the foundation layer, and then let customers use whatever they want.” Whether it’s OpenAI, whether it’s ChatGPT, excuse me, GPT 4 or GPT 4o. Whether it’s Claude, whether it’s Gemini, they don’t really care as long as you’re using their platform.

I want to be really fair. I’m skeptical that AGI is on the immediate horizon. That is a pure gut feeling, and I could be super wrong about it. But there is some early data that seems to suggest that you can’t simply scale large language models to a full artificial general intelligence. I also have to be completely honest about this for people who listen to the show to get deep insights.

What artificial general intelligence, AGI, will look like and when it may arrive is way above my pay grade. I have a pretty good feel for consumer products. I spend my days thinking about how customers adopt and use technology products. When I say consumer products, I also mean B2B, how B2B customers think about products.

It does not necessarily make me terribly expert at identifying core foundational technological breakthroughs before they make it to customers. In fact, my gut instinct might be worse than others because it’s so far outside my day to day experience. In other words, I’m mostly guessing here when we talk about AGI, so take any guesstimates then for what they’re worth.

What I will say is you can see from Microsoft’s behaviors and how they’re thinking about artificial intelligence that they really do like being a picks and shovels company. They really do. Thrive in that world and they’re beginning to realize that being dependent upon solely open AI as their core AI offering probably doesn’t benefit them in the long run. That’s almost certainly why you’re seeing them make the shift and say, you know what, we’re going to stick, we’re going to skip back to the thing that we do best and do well always.

So, I do think it’s interesting to see these two very, very different visions of the future when we look at Facebook and when we look at Microsoft. Where Facebook is saying, “we want to define the future of computing. We want to define the future of how customers will interact with artificial intelligence in the long run. And of course, we want to monetize that every single step of the way.” And Microsoft is saying, “we want to be the foundation on which every enterprise in the world puts artificial intelligence to work, regardless of what that artificial intelligence is, regardless of which artificial intelligence tool they choose to use to drive the experiences that their customers are looking for.”

So, very, very, very different visions for the future of computing and for the future of where these companies are going.

Now, you’ll notice I haven’t really talked about the other big tech firms. I haven’t talked about, you know Amazon. I haven’t talked about Google. I haven’t talked about Apple. I will, possibly next week’s episode, certainly a couple weeks down the road for sure, because Google in particular I think is doing some fun stuff that we need to be aware, and I think we need to talk about some of their competition’s interesting stuff that we need to be aware.

The one thing I will say is that, as you might have mentioned, they all had amazing quarters, they all made a ton of money, they’re all talking about a whole host of cool things, and of course, we will dive into those in more detail as we go forward.

The big takeaway for this time, though, is both Microsoft and Facebook have provided two They have provided two different, compelling visions for the future of computing. They have provided two different, compelling visions for how customers are going to interact with artificial intelligence. And they’ve provided a roadmap that we can be thinking about in terms of saying, what do we want to do to engage with our customers as the computing world changes around us, as the way that they interact with us on digital channels will move around us.

It’s something we’re going to watch really closely, and I do encourage you to keep tuning in to learn more about how you can do that for your brand and business.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 439.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post The Future of Computing? Big Tech Earnings and the State of Digital Q3 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 439) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Do artificial intelligence and digital more broadly scare you? Do their potential harms keep you up at night? In short, are these tools evil?

I don’t think they are. Truly. And, most of the time, neither are the people who create them.

That doesn’t mean that AI and digital can’t cause harm for your customers, for your business, and for you.

The question instead should be, “How can you keep these tools from causing harm in the world?” And that’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 21m 13s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 438 of The Big Show. And this week is Halloween, so I thought we’d talk a little bit about something a little more scary.

I am, by trade, training, and temperament, an expert in digital marketing and strategy. And I’ll explain in a minute what I mean by an expert, because it doesn’t always mean what people think.

Digital, of course, depends on technology of various stripes. And occasionally someone will ask me whether I’m afraid of technology. There are valid concerns that AI or the internet or what have you causes harms that outweigh their benefits. The question is whether these tools, AI or digital more broadly, are evil? And I mean, that’s a fair question. We see from time to time really terrible things being done here.

So let’s start with the landscape of what’s out there. Currently, the big innovation that everyone cares about, of course, is artificial intelligence. But there’s still social, there’s still mobile, there’s still the internet and email and websites and a whole host of other platforms and services your customers and you use every day. We’re also starting to think a bit about extended reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality, and how companies benefit from connecting with customers there.

When I say we, I mean me and my company. We’re paying attention to wearables like smart watches and smart glasses. We try to stay current at least a little bit on the state of IoT, that is the Internet of Things. We know that 6G is just over the horizon and will start showing up in your customers hands in about five years time. Like, that is the roadmap for mobile going forward, so that’s not a guess, that’s actually when everyone expects that will occur based on what the technology providers are working on.

Someday, maybe, there could be people implanted with chips. Seriously. The technology already exists, there’s already people using them. It’s just not commercial or at scale in any meaningful sense. What it’s going to take is some brilliant group of innovators to figure out the reasons why people might benefit, to bring those benefits to life, and to convince people that those benefits actually are, in fact, benefits. I’m not predicting that will happen, though I do think it’s likely that at least some people will benefit longer term, and some people will adopt them in the longer term.

I’m also reasonably confident that if these do hit the market at some scale, that what I just described is a fairly well known playbook that will create that reality.

Now, note that I’m not 100 percent sure about that last one that I just told you about. I don’t know that that product will exist. There are very few things that I’m 100 percent sure about.

I mentioned a moment ago that I’m an expert. As an expert, that doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Far from it. My job isn’t to have the answers. It’s to explore the questions and help my clients find answers they can live with. And that’s kind of my point here today.

As part of what I do, I’m a perpetual student. I’m always looking to learn. I read and I listen to podcasts and I watch videos and presentations endlessly about these tools that companies use to connect with their customers and that customers use to connect with companies.

Part of that learning is continually realizing that every innovation has its pros and cons. I’ve shared the Paul Verilio quote many times, that “when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.”

And I will be completely transparent about this. I tend to focus on the benefits that technology provides, because I tend to focus on the best in people. My sense is that at least in the context of business and marketing, there just aren’t that many mustache twirling villains seeking to use technology to make the world a worse place. I’m not saying they don’t exist. I’m saying in the context of business, there aren’t that many of them.

I’m also, for purposes of our discussion today, going to ignore geopolitical rivals and outright criminals. Obviously, those folks exist, and they’re absolutely worth discussing. They’re not my core area of expertise, and I suspect not why you listen to this show.

I also have a much more relevant point to what this show tends to be about. And that is, when tech goes wrong, It’s usually not because the tech malfunctioned. It’s usually not because somebody planned for it to be evil. Instead, it’s almost always sloppy design by innovators who didn’t think through the context and the consequences of their applications and their algorithms.

Sometimes, it’s because users who push the tools in bad directions too, which again, could be a lack of forethought by the innovators and entrepreneurs and developers. You know, if you think about it, the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 didn’t need AI to think up their monstrous attack. And Google thought through a ton of truly awful use cases when it launched its Gemini generative AI to prevent it from doing harm. Those included things like pornography and other kinds of hateful material. Of course, they were so busy thinking about the worst things, that they missed lesser problems like misinformation that folks on the internet found and exploited within a couple of hours of Gemini’s release.

So, it wasn’t the technology that failed. It was people who failed. You know, are there exceptions? Do big companies sometimes deliberately make truly terrible decisions? Sure, of course they do. Invariably, there’s some jackass at some company who ignores the likelihood or the impact of a given approach or simply doesn’t care if those occur. You can absolutely find examples, but the notable cases where that does occur tend to be notable because they are, in fact, relatively rare. It’s not somebody being malicious. It’s far more likely that some hoodie wearing product manager made a snap judgment without thinking through what could happen.

That’s why when I’m asked if AI scares me, I don’t think it does. AI doesn’t scare me; people scare me. And not because I think people are terrible, but because they can’t see past their inherent incentives and biases and blind spots. Plus, of course, the actions of the occasional jerk. I mean, sure, I live in the real world, those folks do exist. But they’re not the majority.

Now you could argue when some of these failures, when some of these failures occur, it’s not especially important why it occurred if people suffer from it. You may have seen the recent story about a 14 year old boy in Florida who died by suicide allegedly with the encouragement of an AI chatbot. Clearly that is a tragic story and it’s entirely fair that if the chatbot has contributed to this boy’s death, it doesn’t matter whether the chatbot developer cut corners or simply overlooked a potential defect. They should still be held accountable if their actions or inactions caused someone to die.

But why those actions or inactions occurred matter, and I’m going to come back to why in a moment.

You also have to remember that stories like these aren’t limited to AI. We’ve all heard stories about social media bullying leading to awful outcomes, especially for girls. We know that search can surface misinformation, and so on. There’s plenty of these. It’s not hard to find them.

What I would also say is true is that tech, in and of itself, isn’t the bad guy. It’s people who create the tech, and market the tech, and use the tech, who keep me up at night. You have to remember that technology is easy, really. People are complicated.

You know, when the first commercial chip implants arrive, you’re not going to see me jumping in line to get one. It won’t be because I don’t trust the technology. Instead, it’s the innovators and other users who really scare me. And it doesn’t matter whether those tools are built with malicious features or simply due to the lack of forethought. We’re going to hear terrible stories of these tools go wrong, just as we do with AI and social and the internet itself.

Now, long time listeners of the show know that I like to keep things positive, I like to focus on the good aspects here. Not because I’m naive, but because there’s already enough negativity out there without me adding to it, which is why my point today is not to tell you technology is bad and you shouldn’t use it. Far from it.

Technology is in the world and it’s not going anywhere. It is a core component of the world we live in and we receive dramatic benefits again and again and again. And I would argue that we should look for the benefits of the ship while looking for ways to mitigate the shipwrecks, you know?

We’ve also seen what happens when people move to a remote cabin in the woods and hand type lengthy manifestos about the dangers of technology, right? That’s not really the path we should be heading down.

Instead, you have to stay informed. You have to keep learning. You have to be a perpetual student, just like I am. Not just of tech, but of people. Don’t just look for the examples of things that went wrong and say see, this technology is a bad thing.

Instead, try to understand why it went wrong. What happened? What decisions were made? And how could whatever happened have been done differently? This chatbot story I mentioned a moment ago, regarding the boy in Florida. It does matter what they did and why they did it, to understand how to not do it again. It doesn’t mean that that should limit their accountability if in fact they are responsible for this. It means we need to understand what decisions were made that led to this so that we can not do that in the future. So that others can learn from it and not do that in the future. Was this an engineering error or did someone overlook a problem that’s going to be obvious in hindsight? Those are questions we need to know.

You also need to be a smart consumer. Understand the ways that the tools you use can be used for you and used against you. And most importantly, as a marketing and business professional, make sure you are thinking about ways your choices can hurt customers and then do everything you can do to limit those harms. Including occasionally, if necessary, cancelling your program. Don’t do the thing you thought you were going to do.

There are some ways you can actually prevent yourself from making these errors. There’s a couple of techniques that I really like.

One is making sure you have a devil’s advocate in your discussions. If you’re not familiar with this, a devil’s advocate is someone whose job it is to argue against whatever you’re planning to do. It could be your lawyer, or it could be an operations person, or it could be an IT person. But their incentive needs to be to stop whatever you’re working on from moving forward. Their bonus can’t be based on releasing the product, or releasing the service, or releasing the campaign. Their bonus has to be based on, did we eliminate risks?

Listen to the concerns of those people, and then come up with plans to address those risks before they ever surface in the real world.

Another way you can do this is you can conduct a pre mortem or a risk assessment.

If you’re not familiar with a pre mortem, it’s an exercise where you visualize the aftermath of your product or your service or your campaign’s launch before you actually launch. You take a moment and look back and ask, what went well? What went badly? What caused us to succeed? What caused us to fail? What did we do that helped our customers? And what did we do that hurt our customers? Take the time with your team to think through all of those questions. And I’ll link to some others in the show notes.

Then create mitigation plans for the things that, you know, hurt your customers and caused you to fail. How do you take those out of the loop to make sure they’re not a problem?

A risk assessment is a similar concept. You assess how likely it is that something bad happens. You assess how much impact it will have if those things occur.

And again, you take steps to mitigate the things that are the most likely and have the biggest impacts before they ever occur.

When we look at the things that have happened in the world, the really terrible ones that have occurred over time, usually it’s because nobody took the time to ask these questions. They didn’t think through, what do we do? How does the system respond? How does the tool respond? How does the technology respond? How do we as a company take action before they happen so that they don’t actually cause real problems?

Finally, I realize this episode might seem like kind of a bummer. It might seem like kind of a drag. It is easy when you think about these things to get overwhelmed. It is easy to find yourself going, “Oh my gosh, this is terrible and nobody should use these tools.” When that occurs, it is absolutely okay to, as folk say, touch grass, right? Take a walk outside. Stick your phone in a drawer and go to the beach for a day. You know, it’s not just okay, it’s downright good for you to step away for a minute or two. Go for a hike in the woods. Just maybe don’t build a cabin and retreat there, right?

AI and digital are not evil. They’re not. And most of the time, neither are the people who create them.

They absolutely can cause evil, whether intentionally or through lack of forethought.

What’s also true is they’re not going anywhere. They’re in our lives and generally drive positive outcomes.

So if we know that they’re going to be in our lives, and we know that they have the potential for evil, our job is to keep learning about what these tools are, what their strengths and limitations are, how they can provide benefits and risks to ourselves and to our customers, and then take the actions necessary to eliminate the risks and to mitigate the harms. Our job is to ensure that they actually deliver the benefit that they’re supposed to.

So no, I don’t believe that AI or digital are evil. What I do think is true, though, is it’s our job every day to ensure that stays true.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 437.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and especially given what we talked about today, take care, everybody.

The post Are AI and Digital Evil (Thinks Out Loud Episode 438) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Some folks think that artificial intelligence is a white knight, coming to rescue their businesses from gatekeepers such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the rest. But is that true? Is AI the key to unlocking Big Tech’s gates? Or is it just another gatekeeper waiting in the wings?

In this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast, our company founder and president, Tim Peter, takes a look at whether artificial intelligence might play in helping you bypass gatekeepers, and how you can start connecting directly with your customers no matter what.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 22s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 437 of the Big Show and I think we have a really cool show for you today.

We know that gatekeepers gonna gate. You’ve heard me say this many, many times on this show. I’ve also heard a number of people proposing that artificial intelligence might bypass the gatekeepers. It might be the way that we finally get to take gatekeepers and shove them completely out of the way. You know, connect directly with our customers in every single situation.

For instance, the hospitality industry is continually looking for something that will bypass gatekeepers like Expedia or Booking.com or Google. By far, the most likely use case where that could occur in the next bunch of years is the emergence of AI agents. And I’d like to dive into that use case for a moment so you have a sense of what we’re talking about. Because this could apply beyond just travel, beyond just hospitality. This could be something you see in retail, this could be something you see in a B2B context. There’s all kinds of places where, in theory, this could take the place. This could let you connect directly with your customers.

And the premise here is that customers would have one or more agents that would search for, in this case, travel on their behalf.

For instance, I’m taking a trip to New York City in a few weeks for work. I need a hotel near the offices of the company I’m visiting. I’m also having dinner with colleagues while I’m there, so I’ll need flights and ground transportation that get me to my hotel and then back to the airport in time for the meetings that I have and in time to make my flight. I need all of the options that I choose to comply with my client’s travel policies. I need flights and hotel stays that also get me the most points in my preferred loyalty programs; if I’m traveling, I want to accrue my benefits. And of course, I want to optimize my time during the trip so I’m not out of the office or away from my family any longer than is necessary.

That is a case that I would love to outsource to an agent. Seriously. I would absolutely love to have this in my pocket or on my desktop right now. I’d love to be able to type a prompt that says, “Hey, agent, go do this. You know my preferences. You know what I need. Here’s where I’m going. Here is roughly when I need to go. Make that happen and report back to me with a couple of options I can simply say yes to or try again.” I mean, wouldn’t that be cool? And there are some interesting beta projects that I’ve seen. But an actual agent that I could give a simple prompt to and that understands my preferences does not exist today. Period.

We’re probably a couple of years away from that existing in real world terms. Probably. Maybe by the end of next year. Maybe by the end of 2026. But today, it doesn’t exist. And keep that in mind.

Another great agent use case that I’d love to see, this is my own personal one. I’d love a robust, cross device, cross platform search engine.

If you’re like me, you have conversations with customers, and with family, and with friends, across an array of devices and apps. You’ve got email. You’ve got social media, both public and DMs. You’ve got text and WhatsApp. You’ve got MS Teams and or Slack. You’ve got articles and newsletters you’ve read on Substack or LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram, and a wide array of websites.

And you probably find yourself asking from time to time, “Where did I read that? Was that in an email? Was it a text? Was it an article?” I know I do. Wouldn’t you love to have a way to search across all of those sources? Not for possible answers, not just a regular Google search, but for the actual thing you read or sent. Maybe make it time bound, like only things you’ve interacted with in the last couple of weeks. Based on conversations I’ve had with others, I don’t think I’m alone on wanting something like this.

And despite some good work in this area, the solution I’m proposing does not exist today. One of the reasons is there’s nothing that connects all of the various data sources of the two use cases that I’ve just given you. The one thing that might is something like the operating system either on your laptop or on your phone, and we’ll come back to that in a second.

The last use case where AI could have a major impact on the way people interact with brands and businesses in the future — or at least one last use case I’m going to explore today — is extended reality. So that would include things like virtual reality and augmented reality. Some folks refer to this as the final computing platform. This is what everything will be like at some point in the future. Think things like smart glasses or other wearables. That provide data about the real world as you interact with it in real time, creating content and immersive experiences on the fly, virtual reality games and education that continually update using generative AI to deepen the experience.

There is no question in my mind that generative AI undoubtedly will provide huge benefits in these areas. They can pull content from a wide array of sources. They can generate content on the fly and narrate it or provide visual cues as needed. Today, these types of experiences are definitely limited by things like robust connectivity, which is getting better all the time, the weight of the device, And very much related to that, battery life.

We are probably — I’m going to make a guess here; I’m clearly not the expert here, but I’m basing this on what other folks have said — we’re probably 6 to 10 plus years away. We’re talking the 2030s in all likelihood before this becomes a reality. Which is not that far from now.

I go back to the Bill Gates quote that I’ve used many, many times that we always overestimate the change we will see in the next two years and underestimate the change we will see in the next 10. So what things might look like in the middle of the 2030s, which shocker, is only 10 years away, could be a dramatic difference from where we are today.

Think about where we are relative to 10 years ago. In 2014, in late 2014, if I was talking to you about artificial intelligence and how people would be using it in their day to day lives, the fact that 1 in 9 people use it every single day and 24 percent of workers are using it at least once a week. That was unthinkable 10 years ago, now we talk about it very much like a commonplace thing.

So, we’re going to have technology challenges to overcome. We, I mean, we as a society are going to have technology challenges to overcome. Battery life and weight plus the ability to stream heavy visual content quickly are likely the big barriers that have to fall.

We also know it’s true that 6G mobile connections will start rolling out commercially in 2030, which could fix at least the streaming question. If battery life and battery weight and device weight fall pretty quickly as they are doing, you know, what we’re likely to see in 2034 seems plausible. And much like I talked about with agents, I’ve seen early stage companies working towards all of these.

I want to be clear, I absolutely welcome their potential success. I’m confident that somebody will eventually succeed at all of these. I also think it’s true that these tools simply don’t exist in any real form in the real world today. It doesn’t mean they won’t.

But the thing where I think we need to be really conscious is that none of these tools seem likely to come from some unknown startup. Some of the pieces, sure, but probably not the overall experience. And there’s a major reason why this is likely to be so, in my view.

The simple fact is that, at least right now, artificial intelligence favors gatekeepers. AI is expensive as hell. You need lots of money to make these models work. You need lots of data, which is expensive as hell. You have to have significant computing power, which, say it with me, is expensive as hell. You require brilliant researchers who are expensive as hell. And you consume massive amounts of energy to make these things work, which, again, is expensive as hell. Google and Microsoft literally are signing contracts for their own nuclear power plants to meet their energy needs. That’s not a joke. That’s a true story.

These things require a ton of expensive resources in terms of money, in terms of data, in terms of compute, in terms of researchers, and in terms of actual power. That’s crazy. So it’s not super likely you’re going to see small companies come out of nowhere with these things. Probably.

If you think about who the huge big, uh, if you think about who the big AI players are, well, we’ve got Google. Obviously, they’re a big time gatekeeper. We’ve got Microsoft. Again, a big time gatekeeper. We’ve got Amazon. Ditto. Facebook. Ditto, ditto. We’ve got OpenAI. Who is the parent of ChatGPT? Well, they’re a disruptive startup, for sure, originally set up as a non profit, with massive funding from, uh, Microsoft, who’s a big time gatekeeper.

Okay, so what about Anthropic, the makers of Claude? They’re another disruptive startup, featuring a bunch of ChatGPT alumni, and they got massive funding from, oh wait, Amazon and Google. Huh.

You’ve got Perplexity. Perplexity is another disruptive service, and it features founders from Meta and OpenAI, and they’ve had significant investments from, among others, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the late YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean.

That’s kind of interesting, right? And if VR, AR, and extended reality, XR, come along at scale in the next 5 to 10 years, well, who do you think is going to provide that? I mean, let’s see, the current VR devices come from Facebook and Apple. Augmented reality on mobile phones mostly comes from Apple, Google, and Samsung, the last of which runs on Google’s Android OS. Smartwatches, which are another potential AR delivery mechanism, come from Apple and Google and Samsung. Again, more or less running Google software. And the most popular smart hearing devices, another potential AR or XR delivery mechanism, come from Apple and Google. Are you beginning to notice a pattern here?

The reality is, big tech is working to remain a gatekeeper. They’re trying to close off all the avenues by which someone else could come in and shove them out of the way. Even the startups are deeply connected to big tech players. In addition to their own efforts, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have invested in organizations like Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity that are most likely to shove them out of their membership in Big Tech.

Almost all of these folks, plus the other players in AI, are also using either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud to run their servers. Again, Big Tech still collects a toll in those cases. And remember how expensive it is to run a real, robust, and relevant artificial intelligence.

Even if OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic wins, they’re still going to need to fund their ongoing operations. I also don’t think Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and their other investors Put all this money into these startups without expecting a return on that investment. They’re going to want some payback here.

In other words, if OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic wins, do you think it’s likely you’re going to be any better off than you are today? In short, there isn’t a white knight coming to rescue you from big tech with artificial intelligence. AI isn’t a key to unlock the gatekeeper’s gates. It’s just another way gatekeeper’s gonna gate, even if it turns out to be a different gatekeeper.

It’s unrealistic to expect some new technology to suddenly disrupt and completely bypass Big Tech. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Big Tech has a lot at stake. They’re gatekeepers. They’re not going away without a fight.

If you want to bypass Big Tech, you’re going to have to take a lesson from Jose Serrano, a character in the classic baseball comedy Major League. And to paraphrase his famous line, “do it yourself.” It’s up to you to create a direct relationship with your customers. It’s up to you to create memorable experiences that will bring your customers back to you again and again and again. It’s up to you to create a brand that customers will seek out by name.

Think about it. I regularly quote Jeff Bezos famous question, “What won’t change as we go forward?” Even if the platforms and technologies and tools that your customers use change, They’re still going to seek out businesses and brands that they trust… or not. You’re still going to need to separate yourself from your competition… or not. You’re still going to need to find a way to get customers to connect with you directly… or not. You get the picture.

AI isn’t a key. It’s another lock if you’re not continually looking to build direct relationships with your customers. You’re helping the gatekeepers keep their gates in place. You’re helping them build those locks. Your job is to get customers to connect with you directly. That’s the key to unlocking gatekeepers’ gates. I’m going to link to a couple of episodes in the show notes where we talked about how you can do that. And yes, you can and should use AI to help you do that more efficiently and more effectively. I’m going to link in the show notes to a few episodes on how you can do that too.

The last thing that I would encourage you to do is to keep listening for more ways you can build those connections with customers. Because the other big key to bypassing big tech is to keep learning.

I’m confident you can do it. I’m confident you can bypass Big Tech. And I’m looking forward to seeing how well you do it. The thing you have to remind yourself is AI is just one more place the gatekeepers gonna gate. If you want to unlock those gates. You’re going to have to do it by connecting with customers directly.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 437.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 437) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

AI might kill your brand — but probably not. It’s far more likely that AI will kill Big Tech’s brands, and in particular, Google. The search giant faces more threats to its business right now than at any time in the last decade-plus.

What are the big threats facing Google’s dominance? Why do those threats matter to your business? And, most importantly, how can you make sure that the four big threats Google faces next year don’t become threats to your business too? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using the travel rig: Shure SM57 Cardioid Dynamic Instrument Microphone and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 22s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 436 of the Big Show, and thank you so much for tuning in.

We’ll I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you this week. I had been spending a lot of time between last week’s episode of, that last week’s episode that asked, “Will AI Kill Your Brand?” And doing a bunch of prep work this week for a class that I teach at Rutgers Business School on AI and Marketing about will AI also kill Google’s brand?

Will it kill other big tech brands? And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that A.) this is a super complicated topic and not something that can be covered in a single episode. And B.) that the brand most at risk is Google. And it’s not just because of AI. In fact, there are four big threats that Google faces.

Plus a bonus threat that I’m going to tell you about in a minute. But the four big threats are artificial intelligence, obviously, competition, antitrust, and privacy. I’ll talk about each of these in order and then come to the bonus threat. But I want to start with artificial intelligence. AI is clearly a huge opportunity for Google.

It is a massive opportunity for them to increase their market share and make even more money than they do today. It’s also a big threat. And it’s a big threat for a very specific reason. The reason is that it’s very tough for them to monetize AI today. And you don’t even need to think about this from Google’s point of view.

You can look at this from the other AI companies and their, their inability to profitably monetize what they do because the cost of making AI work is so expensive. It’s just that Google has it much worse because they already make a lot of money. Bright Edge has research, that I will link to in the show notes, that shows Google isn’t displaying its AI overviews features on searches that make the most money for Google.

Why? Well, I believe it’s because they haven’t figured out how to get customers to click on ads when Google has already provided a good answer. Google’s going to make somewhere over $300 billion this year in revenue. And roughly 57 percent of that comes from search ads. I usually round the revenue down to %300 billion and their revenue percentage up to 60% to call it an even $180 billion in revenue from search. It’s just an easy number to hang on to. If they give customers, if Google gives customers great answers that don’t require searchers to click on their ads, Google stands to lose a tremendous, tremendous amount of money. At the same time, it’s tough for them to avoid including AI in their search results.

Why? Well, because then customers may switch to services that give them better answers and better experiences. Right? People don’t go to Google because they want to go to Google. They go to Google because they want an answer to the question. Whether that’s a site that the Google links to, or whether that’s just a flat out answer.

If ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity or Claude or someone like that gives customers a great answer and Google is unwilling to because they’re afraid of hurting their revenue streams, then people could switch. I talked about this in an episode a couple of weeks ago, which I will link to in the show notes.

At least on paper, though, Google is trapped in a classic innovator’s dilemma. Move too fast towards the new thing, and they undermine their entire revenue stream. Move too slowly, and they could see existing customers switch to a new competitor, and then Google would lose its revenue stream anyway. That’s, you know, not a great place for them to be.

Which brings us to the second big threat, competition. Google is probably seeing more competition today than they’ve seen in decades. I mean that sincerely. Decades. Not years. Decades. Think in terms of their competition, not as traditional search engines like Ask or, you know, Yahoo, necessarily. Instead, I think in terms of where customers get their information.

Remember, Google gets almost 60 percent of their revenues and probably 100 percent of its profits from search ads. Every time a customer gets their information somewhere other than Google, that’s potential lost revenue for Big G. If they make $180 billion in revenue from search ads, even a 1% decline in search volume equals a loss of $1.8 billion.

That’s a huge sum of money. If my back of the envelope calculations relying on census data are right, only about one one hundredth of one one percent only one one hundredth of one percent of companies in the United States make more than a billion dollars per year. Google could lose that amount of money with less than a one percent swing in its revenues.

That’s insane. Like, that’s impossible to get your mind around easily. And Google faces competition from a wide variety of sources. First, coming from the AI players, you know, OpenAI and ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Claude. They obviously continue to face challenges from traditional vertical search engines like Amazon or Booking.com or Indeed or Zillow. Google and each of these are improving their capabilities using AI. And then there’s some competition for search coming from social. You know, Facebook and Instagram’s meta AI experience. So again, AI working on this. And TikTok with just over 40 percent of its users saying they have searched and they like to search on the social platform.

And these sites also benefit from, say it with me, artificial intelligence capabilities. And then, of course, we have some of the more traditional general search engines like DuckDuckGo that focus on privacy. More on that in just a moment. It wouldn’t take much shift for Google to feel genuine pressure.

All they’d have to do is fail at making good product choices or take their eye off the ball. And one thing that might cause them to take their eye off the ball is the next big threat, which is antitrust. I’m going to say this right up front, I actually don’t think antitrust is going to be a major factor in the next year. Probably. It’s going to take probably until 2027 or longer to play out in practice. I’m not the one saying this. Reuters has said this in the existing antitrust trial that’s going on right now around Google and search; there’s also a whole ad tech one, but I’m going to put that aside for the moment.

The government and Google are submitting documents to the court explaining how to remedy their monopoly behavior, Google’s monopoly behavior, by the end of 2024. The court will then hold a brief trial in April of 2025 to let Google and the Department of Justice argue their points. And then the court will issue its ruling in August of 2025.

After that, Google will appeal. Remember, they’ve already lost the first trial. This trial in April is just to determine what the penalties are. Google will appeal as soon as the judge issues, uh, his ruling in August of 2025. And they’ll probably appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court because they can’t afford to lose this case.

All of this also ignores the possibility that a new presidential administration and a new Attorney General could just choose to back off the case. Stranger things have happened. Um, I had an episode about the antitrust trial a few weeks ago. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes. But we know because of the various appeals that this is going to take us well into 2026, if not 2027, if not further out than that.

So it doesn’t worry me a ton for 2025, unless Google lets it distract them. The bigger distraction for them is our fourth threat, which is privacy. Now, when most people think of privacy, they tend to think of regulators. I would put myself in that category. I would say, though, in this case, it falls into the same bucket as antitrust with a big wild card.

After the election later this year. Multiple states and other jurisdictions could pass laws increasing privacy regulation. Already 19 states, plus the EU, Canada, and a host of other countries around the world, have laws that are either in effect or will take effect in 2025. They have laws on the books that that’s going to happen.

Google is okay at handling this. I think they’re going to manage that. Pretty easily. Instead, what I’m concerned about, or what I’m questioning, is if all the attention from regulators and from legislators passing these laws and promoting these laws will cause consumers to think more about privacy, and if so, will that cause them to

And that’s really what leads to the bonus threat, the fifth threat, which is changing customer expectations. Now this is tough to gauge. So far, we’re not seeing it. Um, if you look at the data from places like SimilarWeb, Where you look at the data in terms of where people are getting traffic to their websites today, Google’s still pretty much the dominant player.

At the same time, it could change on a dime. Customers can be fickle. And switching costs away from Google are effectively zero. Google’s users could start searching on ChatGPT or Bing or Perplexity or DuckDuckGo tomorrow relatively easily. They just have to type in a new address to their web browser.

The big blockers that I see to that is that most of the growth on search, in search, continues on mobile right now. That’s where we’re seeing most of the growth. And most people don’t switch from the default search engines. You open up your browser, you type in the search in the address bar, and it just goes to Google.

Obviously, Google is going to be the default on Android. And Google pays Apple billions of dollars to remain the default there. That actually was a major component of the antitrust trial Google just lost. Hell, Apple’s Eddie Cue said Apple wouldn’t switch from Google even without pay because Google is so much better than every other option. The judge in the trial said that Google is better than so many, every other option, which is how they established a monopoly in the first place. This could change. I’m just not seeing that happen yet.

I cannot emphasize enough how quickly I could end up being wrong here. It’s not like everyone has to go buy a new computer, or a new phone, or a new device to use something other than Google. They just have to type a different address into their browser. If we all woke up tomorrow and wanted to use something other than Google, it would be remarkably simple. That’s the fact about this that keeps me up nights. And if you think this is ridiculous, you think there’s no way that happens, I’d point out that Microsoft had 90-plus percent market share for computer operating systems as late 2008, almost two full years after the iPhone came out. So, this can change quickly.

Now one of the questions I would ask you to think about right now, is how much would you bet on these? How much would I bet on each of these? And I’ll tell you, for AI, by far, the most. I’d bet a lot that AI forces Google to change its product even more than it’s done so far. Frankly, it’s among the top things I’m working on with my company and on behalf of our clients. So in a sense, I’m betting a fair share of my company’s revenues on this one. I’m really confident we’re going to see major changes to the product set over the course of the next year.

In terms of competition, I’d bet a bit, maybe $250, maybe $500, that within a year, Google loses at least some small amount of market share to one or more competitors. I don’t think they’ll lose a lot of market share. But remember, each point of market share is roughly $1.8 billion to Google’s top line. That’s not nothing, and I think it’s plausible, if not downright possible.

On antitrust, yeah, no bet, no way. Too many variables, too many unknowns, too long a timeline, and I just don’t think much happens next year that matters in real terms.

Privacy? Eh, I might bet a little bit on this one. I might bet a hundred bucks that it hurts them. Maybe. I’m not super convinced. But I’d say privacy gets its hearing in 2025 and Google responds in some sense. And we’ll see where we go. As for customer behavior, well, I’ve already bet on this one in a sense.

I’ve said that Google will lose at least some small amount of market share. They can’t lose that share if customers don’t switch. So, put this one in the same boat as competition. In fact, if we’re being frank, it’s tough to pull these apart. If even a small share of customers switched to using, for instance, DuckDuckGo or ChatGPT, it might be tough to tell whether it was because of privacy, a better search experience, concerns about Google’s monopoly, or some combination of all of these.

That’s why I think it’s likely and why I’m willing to bet That Google does in fact lose some market share. There are enough factors against them that makes it seem unlikely that they won’t feel some effect. I don’t expect a large shift. That doesn’t mean I expect no shift at all. And that’s something we’re going to pay a lot of attention to over the course of the year.

Keep in mind, Google is still massive and I can’t imagine that they lose majorly in 2025. Notice, in none of these did I say Google’s going to give bad answers or customers are going to stop searching.

Yes, competition is increasing. Yes, I’ve also heard some rumblings that people are somewhat dissatisfied with the results.

But Google hasn’t yet shown that it’s losing much in the way of traffic, much in the way of market share, or much in the way of revenue, at least not yet. But it is something that I’m going to watch closely over the course of the coming year in quarterly earnings from Google and the rest of Big Tech. And in fact, I’ll have an update on that by the end of the month, by the end of November.

The point is, in all of this, is what do you do about it?

Well, first, it’s time to start planning in case Google does take a hit. Don’t let Google’s problems become your problems. You need to start thinking about diversifying your source of traffic.

I will go ahead and give a link in the show notes to a two part episode I did on the Core methodology earlier this year for diversifying your traffic. You should be planning today to not be so dependent on Google. It doesn’t mean you want their traffic to shrink. It means you want the other sources to grow faster.

You should test the various tools out there for yourself and see which ones you like and whether any work better for you, because if you find they work better, your customers may find they work better too.

You need to pay attention to your analytics to see if you see a decline in Google traffic, which might be happening anyway due to the volume of the growth in volume of zero click search results. If you’re already losing traffic from Google, you need to think about how you diversify where your traffic comes from.

Next, you should listen to what your customers are saying about their behaviors and whether they’re changing what they do. You should also keep learning. Obviously, here at Thinks Out Loud, we’ll keep working on this topic to help you be ready no matter what happens.

So yes, there are four-plus big threats that Google faces. There are artificial intelligence, competition, antitrust, privacy, and a potential shift in customer behaviors. Your job is to make sure that no matter what happens that those don’t become threats to you, too.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 436.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Artificial intelligence will shape the way your customers interact with your brand. That’s undoubtedly true. In fact, it’s possible we’ll see cases where the customer might not interact directly with your business, letting their AI agent handle the transaction on their behalf. OK, that’s still probably a few years away. But it’s clearly on the horizon.

And that potential behavior might mean trouble for your brand. In theory, it’s possible that AI could kill brands for good. Or could it?

As it happens, I don’t think AI will kill your brand. At least not if you do it right. What does it mean to “do it right” in the age of AI? How might AI shape your customers’ behaviors in the not-too-distant future? And how can you make sure that AI doesn’t kill your brand? That’s what this week’s episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 19m 06s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. This is episode 435 of the big show, and thank you so much for tuning in. I very much appreciate it. I think we have a really cool show for you today.

I was talking with someone recently about artificial intelligence, and we got going on the idea of what artificial intelligence will do to brands, and more specifically, will artificial intelligence kill your brand? Will the flood of low cost, decent quality content overwhelm customers and pretend them from ever finding you? Will AI agents lead customers away from your products and services?

So let’s see, that’s three questions:

The answer, I’m pretty confident, is no, no, and no. I feel pretty strongly about this.

Now obviously, I’m a fan of artificial intelligence. I’ve talked about AI and its potential impacts to your customers and your marketing a ton over the last bunch of months. But AI isn’t going to kill your brand. At least not if you do your jobs properly, because on the contrary, brands are the mechanism by which you’re going to compete in the era of AI, in the age of AI. And I want to dive into this a bit and explain what I mean.

For starters, keep in mind that AI agents are coming. We’re still in the early innings of artificial intelligence, particularly with regard to how customers will use AI. Most people still haven’t used AI very much. Only about half of people use it regularly.

If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of an artificial intelligence agent, you can think of AI agents as software robots that will perform tasks for you. So instead of interacting with a chatbot or performing a Google search to research a product or service, you’d get an agent to do the legwork for you.

Agents will undoubtedly aid discovery. That’s absolutely true. And appearing in the answers that agents provide will make a difference for many, many businesses, just as search is a difference maker for many businesses today.

At the same time, I don’t think those agents are going to kill good brands. There’s a few reasons for this, and I want to start with customer behavior.

Think about it. Do you think people will use agents to say, “Hey, agent, find me some random thing I’ve never heard of before?” Or, “hey, agent, book me a trip to someplace warm that I don’t know anything about.” Right? I mean, maybe some people, some of the time, will do that. They’re certainly going to aid discovery where we, today we have topics we don’t know anything about. We might say, “hey, AI agent, I’ve got this problem I’m trying to solve. What can you learn about it?” That’s true. That’s absolutely true.

But most people, when they’re ready to buy, most of the time, we’ll say something more like, “Hey AI agent, can I get a better deal at Amazon or Walmart on my favorite brand of moisturizer?” They’ll say, “Hey AI agent, what can you tell me about the consulting firm Tim Peter and Associates?” (Which by the way, you can find more at timpeter.com if you care to.)

But you get the idea. We’re mostly going to ask questions of these agents to help us understand, can we buy the thing that we’ve actually become interested in?

I think what the agents are more likely to do is supplement or shove aside what today we consider non-branded search. It’s going to be that top of the funnel activity. And then when we get to the bottom of the funnel, it’s still going to be a branded experience. It will remain where the money is.

If you look at the bottom of the funnel today, if you look at when customers buy on your website, or they buy through your app, or they buy in your stores, it’s because they already know your brand. They’re asking for you by name when they’re ready to buy. I really don’t see how that’s going to be any different in a customer behavior sense when we are using agents for that. We’ll just ask the agent to take care of the transaction for us.

It’s certainly possible that branded activity will occur in ChatGPT, or Copilot, or Siri, or Apple Intelligence, or Alexa, or MetaAI, or some other agent we haven’t heard of yet, instead of Google search. And maybe you’ll conduct that search with your voice more often than not. Maybe it’ll be a dialogue rather than just typing into a search box.

My friend Stuart Butler just had a great line that I love, that “we’re moving from an era of information to an era of conversation.” I love that. It is so good. And I think that’s probably right.

But if you’re doing your job right as a marketer, customers will still be looking for you. They’ll be engaging in a conversation about you.

Second, I suspect the agents will be molded by their principal’s behavior. By principal, in this case, I mean the person, the customer, on whose behalf the agent acts. We’ll all be principals of one or more agents at some point. It could be two years from now, it could be five years from now, it could be later this year. But at some point, we’ll start using agents to do these things on our behalf.

We’d also expect our agents to act in our best interests, or else why would you want to use the agent in the first place? Those agents will be influenced heavily when determining what our best interests are, by things like ratings and reviews and other trust signals. They’re going to need to. They’re going to need to understand “what is the right product, or service, or company, or brand for my principal.” And they’re going to have to go to trusted sources for that. I’m going to come back to this in a little bit more detail in a moment. The point remains that customers will almost certainly use agents to discover new brands. And they’ll use agents to interact with brands they already like.

But the brand will still need to be discoverable and likable. That’s the key takeaway here for your brand to stand out. When these tools start to come online, you have to be discoverable and you have to be likable, just like you do today. Just like brands have done for businesses for 150 years or more.

The thing you want to remember is that you don’t need technology to kill your brand. You don’t need AI to kill your brand. Bad brand activity is what’s most likely to kill your brand. You don’t need AI’s help to do that.

You’ve heard me say many, many times on this show that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. What happens to that framework when you add artificial intelligence to it?

Well, using AI to create boring content will kill your brand. I’m really confident that that’s true. Using AI to create bad experiences will definitely kill your brand. Again, we don’t need any help. Using AI to cut costs without listening to what your customers need will kill your brand. The problem isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s how people, how marketers, how business leaders choose to deploy AI, just as it is with everything else in the world of marketing and branding. It doesn’t take AI to do a bad job of that. People have been managing to do that for years all by themselves, right?

Let me give you a couple of real world examples to think about.

It is very well known within the hospitality industry that using pleasant fragrances in lobbies and guest rooms boost business. There was a post on the Cvent blog about a year ago that noted that 91% of surveyed hotel guests stated that pleasant hotel smells positively impacted their experience, with 67 percent noting that it made them more relaxed.

You don’t really need a survey to tell you that. If you walked into a hotel room, or you walked into a hotel lobby, and it smelled bad, right, you’re probably pretty likely to turn on your heel and immediately walk out the door. That doesn’t take AI to figure out. It didn’t take AI to do. It took understanding what matters to your customer.

Similarly, Retail Brew reports that 2 out of 3 shoppers won’t buy products in locked display cases. According to the article, this is actually one of my favorite things I’ve read about this. Retail Brew’s article said, “Most end up trying to find the product in another store.”

That is a remarkable quote if you think about it. Because to put that in a different light, creating a bad experience is the same as creating an advertisement for your competitors. Creating a bad experience is the best way to tell your customers to buy from someone else. Seriously.

That’s true because we’re always dealing with people here. Great experiences matter when building your brand. And great experiences will help customers to seek you out, no matter how they actually do their seeking, whether they continue to use search forever, or whether they switch to artificial intelligence and AI agents over time.

We also know that when people have great experiences, customers will still tell their friends and family and fans and followers about the brands with which they’ve had great experiences. We know creators will absolutely tell their fans and followers about brands providing great experiences. That’s how they get paid. That’s their whole business model.

I also suspect customers will still create reviews — or maybe have their artificial intelligence agents take care of it for them — telling the world about their experience with brands that they enjoy, and with brands that they hate.

I told you earlier I’d come back to where the agents are going to look to trust signals. I’m fairly confident that those reviews will be a key source of content that AI agents will use to understand the brands that work best for their principles, just the way that regular, ol’ human beings do today.

The agents have to understand from some place whether or not the product or service or brand or business that they’re looking at is a good option for the person on the other side of the glass, for the person on the other side of the screen. Where are they going to get those signals from? They’re going to get them from the content on your website. They’re going to get them from ratings and reviews.

So you still need to create great content. You still need to create great experiences. Because that’s how you build a brand.

I also have one more teeny, tiny piece of evidence that brands will still matter in terms of artificial intelligence. There was a news article on The Verge that said Google is testing verified check marks in search results. When you do a search for specific brands, and they used Microsoft as an example; they also used a couple of others that I’m not recalling off the top of my head, but the link will be in the show notes for you to check out.

Anyway, when you searched for specific brands, when the brand was in the search result, there was a little check mark right next to it saying that Google certifies this is actually the brand. It’s not some counterfeit. It’s not some squatter. It’s not somebody trying to deceive you. It is actually the correct brand that you’re looking for. Google clearly wants to convey to customers that the item they’re linking to, that the resource they’re linking to, is the real deal. And most relevant to this discussion, Is the brand the customer wants to find.

Google has more data around customer behavior than just about anybody because they get billions of searches every single day. Customers tell them what they need and they know how to react. So Google understands, hey, we really need to let people know when this is the actual brand that people care about. And they’re at least testing the idea of making it clear to customers that this is, in fact, the brand you’re looking for.

What I take from all of this is that AI is a tool that you can use to create better, more relevant content for your target customers. That’s a fact. AI is a tool that you can use to create more engaging, more delightful, more memorable experiences for your target customers. That’s a fact. AI is a tool that you can use to listen to what customers are saying about your products, about your services, about you as a business, and about you as a brand. AI is a tool that you can use to interpret data about your customers to create better content and better customer experiences — or, if you choose not to do those things.

So when I come back to the question of will AI kill your brand, the real answer to me is “only if you let it.”

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 435.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Just as I talked about in the episode, reviews help other listeners, and possibly their agents, find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners, and possibly their agents, understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community, and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot. But you have a lot of choices of where to get your information and insights on podcasts and on the internet more broadly. I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so very much to me. You’re the reason we do this show.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information, and insights, and content, and community that work for you, and work for your business.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care everybody.

The post Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Digital gatekeepers always work to get between you and your customers. That was true five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago. And it’s still true today. They kill organic traffic to raise their revenues and gain greater profits. That hasn’t changed in decades, and I don’t believe it’s going to change anytime soon.

What can you do about it? How can you bypass the gatekeepers and grow your business? That’s what this repost of a prior Thinks Out Loud episode is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 20m 41s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

If you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I believe gatekeepers are the single biggest risk your business faces. Always. I usually lump those gatekeepers together under the mantle of big tech. I also refer to them as AgFam. You know, the AgFam. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.

Because those guys are the biggest gatekeepers at the moment. And they are hurting your business every day. They’re far from the only ones. In travel, you’ve got Booking.com and Expedia. In entertainment, you’ve got Netflix and Spotify and Live Nation and YouTube, and so on. Every industry has gatekeepers.

The job of those gatekeepers is to build a wall between you and your customers and control the only gates that let those customers through. They then charge you a fee. A toll, a tax, every single time they let someone through, always. That’s their whole business model. And yes, some of them are facing antitrust investigations and regulatory oversight and the like.

I would argue, though, that they’re mostly holding their own in those cases. Even Google’s recent antitrust lawsuit is going to need until next year, next August, before the penalty phase, after which they’re going to appeal, they’re going to fight this case. All the way that they can, all the way to the Supreme Court, because they can’t afford not to.

Their entire business depends upon being able to charge a toll, to charge a tax to you for every customer they let through. And while they’re fighting this, before we even get to that point, you’re still paying a toll for every customer they let through the gate. For all of them, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Booking.com, Expedia, Netflix, Spotify. The AI companies are going to want to do it too at some point, though they’re not there yet. But that’s the whole gig. That’s what you try to do. Ben Thompson refers to it as aggregation theory. You aggregate demand, and then you control who you let it pass through to, and the people you let it pass through to are people like you.

So what can you do about it? How can you compete in this environment, especially as a smaller company? Well, that’s the subject of a prior episode, which I’m going to repost for you right now, all about digital gatekeepers, the death of organic traffic, and what you can do about it. I hope you give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it.

Well, hello there everyone, welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital marketing expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. And as ever, I really appreciate you tuning in.

It means so much to me to have you here. Now, today we’ve got a lot to cover. We need to see the show notes for this one. There’s like, I don’t know, 30 links in it or something along those lines. because there’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot. You know, I talked about this weeks ago, in the episode, why Google is the beast that scares your industry’s 800 pound gorilla, And a piece I wrote both for Hotel News Now, as well as the blog, all about how,Google really represents the hotel marketing and distribution trend you care about most this year.

But I want to make this less about Google. And more about the rise of gatekeepers generally, how digital is beginning to enable gatekeepers in ways we’ve not seen in the past. Now, obviously Google is one of the biggest gatekeepers there is. But so is Facebook. So is Instagram. Obviously, Instagram being part of Facebook.

So is YouTube. Oh wait, that’s part of Google. And so is Amazon, which isn’t part of any of those, but certainly competes head to head with them. And I think we can say the same about Apple, as well as Android, which, oh yeah, that’s Google again. You’ve heard me talk about Apple, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, others in the past and how much control that they have and how much they.

I don’t want to say get in the way between you and the customer and your customer, but certainly they represent a gatekeeper between you and your customer. And I’m going to focus mostly on Google in this discussion, but everything I’m going to say here applies equally to Facebook. It applies equally to Amazon.

It applies equally to Apple. And it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about search or social or mobile or apps. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about search or mobile or apps. When there is a single gatekeeper or just a few gatekeepers, suddenly the world changes. I mean, you could talk about Netflix and it is the same way if you’re in make video,Steam or Epic, when we talk about video games, Archive and Elsevier, when we’re talking about, you know, academic papers, these are all the new gatekeepers.

And a lot of the changes we’re seeing are related to the fact that these gatekeepers have a lot of power, have a lot of control, you know, everybody’s famous, everybody’s familiar with Stuart Brand’s famous saying that all information wants to be free, but it seems increasingly like we have to turn that saying on its head and say, does all information want a paywall?

You know, if you think about it, even Google’s ads are a paywall of a kind. So I’m going to kind of break this down for you. And I think why this is so important. And I want to start with a fantastic article written by Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media Studios. It’s a tremendous, tremendous article for those of you who care about Google and search and things along those lines.

But he has done a brilliant job of archiving and cataloging how Google’s changes to the search results are changing how customers find you. So he gives three examples of how the number one ranking has changed, not in terms of ranking on Google search results, but instead in terms of placement. Where the average placement of the three examples he provides, the number one ranking has dropped roughly about 570 pixels lower on the consumer’s screen than where it was three or four years ago.

So three separate examples, it doesn’t matter where it was placed. These were all number one, but number one moved from being somewhere around 350 pixels on the screen 350 pixels from the top to being roughly about 920 pixels from the top on the screen. As he says brilliantly, rankings are durable.

Placement is not. Now what’s causing the drop? Well, the fact that Google has added maps and ads, other Google features like related questions, featured snippets, videos, and so on, where what you’re seeing is we just keep getting pushed lower in organic terms in favor of either other Organic Types of Media, Maps, Featured,, Featured Snippets, et cetera, or Paid Media like Ads, or as we’re starting to see, there’s a tremendous, um, article about this on Search Engine Land, things like Ads, For my business listings or ads on maps.

And I’m going to link to these in the show notes, various examples of these. Now, this shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. Again, this is something I’ve been talking about going back a long, long ways. I’ve got, I’ll put some links in the show notes,dating back to, I think, 2011.a Biznology article that talks about whose brand does Google want to build, which of course the brand they really want to build is Google.

And,I, this one just struck me as funny, given the topic of today’s show, titled should marketers really trust Google in 2014? And if I could read one quick excerpt from that post, You know, I’d written at the time that these changes effectively reduce your opportunities to get in front of customers via organic search, RSS feeds, and email.

These were changes to Google reader, Google, changes to,Gmail. Etc. But I also said at the time, now none of this is evil. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google all have a right to do whatever they believe is best for their business. And as public companies, one could argue, have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase revenues and profits however they’re able.

So this isn’t new. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is something that’s been ongoing for years. You know, again, the oldest post I’m linking to today goes back to April of 2011, so this really shouldn’t come as a shock to you, but what’s increasingly important is the fact that Google has. Made more and more changes that make it more and more difficult for you to show up in front of your customers when you want, quote unquote, for free.

And you’re going to see your costs rise. Unless of course, you’re smart about how you react to this and do some really simple. But really intelligent things to continue to do well, even as these changes occur. You know, so a few things I want to talk about that you can do to adapt to this reality, you know, the first is thinking.

Pay attention to how your customers react to the changing marketplace. Pay really close attention to where your traffic comes from on your site. Are you seeing a drop from organic? Are you seeing a drop from organic channels? And I mean, organic search, organic social, things along those lines to understand, is it affecting you yet?

In all likelihood, it is. If in fact it is, you need to be really clear on where are the biggest drops and what do you need to do to address that. You also need to think in terms of growing your email list. That’s incredibly, incredibly important. If you’ve noted the growth of email newsletters over the last couple of years, most of that, in fact, is driven by reporters, journalists,writers, thinkers, publishers, et cetera, saying, we don’t want to be dependent upon email.

These giants like Google or Facebook or any of those other players, for the bulk of our traffic, we need to connect with them directly. The other thing you need to do is pay close attention to improving your conversion rates. The reality is it’s always going to cost you something to get customers to come to your sites.

No matter where they come from, if you’re doing it through organic search, if you’re doing it through organic social, if you’re doing it through any of the other things that I’m going to talk about in a moment, there’s at a minimum, a labor cost associated with it. And so you damn well better make sure that when customers come to your site, they convert.

It doesn’t matter whether they come to your website. It doesn’t matter whether they call you. It doesn’t matter whether they walk into a store or, you know, work through one of your third party channels. The reality is that every lost opportunity increases your cost. So you want to take a close look at where those customers come from and how effective you are at turning those direct contacts into action, into revenues and into profits.

You really want to work on improving those results. So you continue to get the best return on your spend. You also want to look at ways to unleash what I’ve always referred to as your secret sales force. And what I mean by your secret sales force are your best customers. How do you turn your customers into advocates for your business?

It’s one of the reasons why customer experience is queen is a constant mantra of mine. It’s all about helping customers have a great story to tell, how, how you can get them to participate in the creation of a positive brand story for you and share with their friends and family and fans and followers, whether it’s via email or social or texting, or just talking to them on the street about how much they like working with you to build your business.

It’s You can also look at building a dedicated referral program or an advocacy program for your business to engage that secret sales force even more effectively. And when we’re talking about our secret sales force, another portion you want to consider are your employees. Look at how you can engage your employees in addition to your customers in telling that positive brand story.

You know, there are tools like LinkedIn Elevate for building those employee engagement programs and are well worth taking a look at. And of course, the other thing you need to do is look at applying agile or lean practices to your business. When you’re in a rapidly changing environment, that’s not, that’s not something that’s going to change anytime soon.

I’ve talked about how speed is the biggest change we’ve seen in marketing and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. So, the best response isn’t necessarily to just anticipate every possible change, but instead to learn how to quickly respond, even if you’re anticipating, because maybe you don’t always get it right.

And so when we talk about things like Agile or Lean or Scrum or other IT development methodologies that have become fairly popular over the last bunch of years, those also work for digital marketers and digital strategists and can help you adapt more easily, more efficiently, and more effectively.

That’s incredibly important. And of course, the last thing you need to do is keep learning. Obviously this isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple are going to do whatever they need to do to do what’s right for their customers. And more importantly for their business, you need to do the same.

And so that’s why you want to focus on continue learning, improve your conversion rates, engage your secret sales force, enlist your employees, test and learn, and just keep learning.

The post Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Consumers are adopting AI at a remarkable pace, as fast as they adopted computers and the internet. And we’re only starting to see how that might shape our businesses in the longer term. Part of the problem is that it’s not always easy to know which customers are using artificial intelligence and how they’re using it.

One way to think about it though is to look at how a single individual uses AI, not as a representative sample, but to get a clearer picture of some of the possibilities of AI use. For instance, what does a day in the (AI) life of a marketing and digital strategy consultant look like? How are your customers using artificial intelligence in their day-to-day lives? And what does that mean for your business? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 27m 08s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

  Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 434 of The Big Show. And I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today.

I want to start by talking about the fact that artificial intelligence adoption among your customers is crazy fast. I’m going to tell you how fast in just a moment. There’s new research from Alexander Bick of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Adam Blandon of Vanderbilt University, and David j Deming of Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research that found in August of 2024.

So just last month, 39% of the US population age 18 to 64 used generative ai. More than 24% of workers used it at least once a week. At least once in the week prior to being surveyed, and nearly one in nine used it every workday. The paper went on to say, and this is a quote, Historical data on usage and mass market product launches suggest that U.

S. adoption of generative AI has been faster than adoption of the personal computer and the Internet. So that’s really very, very fast. I mean, quicker than the personal computer, quicker than the Internet. One last point that they made in their paper that I found fascinating is this. They said that generative AI is a general purpose technology in the sense that it is used in a wide range of occupations and job tasks at work and at home.

And I’m going to come back to why I think that is a huge deal before we wrap up here. No matter how you slice it, a good chunk of your customers use AI every day. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about some ways that some people are using it. For me, the simplest way is to talk about how I use AI in my daily life as a marketing digital strategy consultant, I want to be very transparent.

This is not a representative sample, not by any stretch. I am obviously a bit of an early adopter. It’s likely that many of your customers will be a bit further behind the curve and some undoubtedly will be a bit ahead of the curve, particularly in specific areas. Think of this, though, as an ethnographic study, a little tiny ethnographic slice of life from the perspective of an early adopter.

I’d also recommend that if you’re not already, Start talking with customers to see how they’re using AI in your day to life, in their day to day life, and see how that lines up with what I’m going to say. First, I see it as part of my job to understand these tools so I can better help my client. Unlike consultants and plenty of other folks who think that AI will steal their jobs, I think I’m doing a disservice to my clients if I’m not using AI.

I think we as a company are doing a disservice to our clients if we’re not using AI. How can we reasonably advise clients about These tools and how their customers will use these tools if we’re not using them ourselves. Again, we always have to remember, we’re not the customer. We want to back this up with real research, but we want to have a good sense of how you can use these tools in practice.

I’ve long said, That AI won’t take your job, but that smart people who do use AI will. I’ve recently updated to say that some dumb people using AI can take your job too. There is a lot of research that shows that lower skilled folks get the biggest gains from using AI. I sometimes think of artificial intelligence like a ladder.

Tall people don’t need ladders as often as short people do. And they might only need to go up a step or two to reach what they want. Shorter people might have to go to the top of the ladder to reach what they need. And they might, as a consequence, be more shaky, less confident. They also have more to lose if they fall.

But the ladder still helps them reach it. And it makes them more capable than they would be if they didn’t have a ladder. Right? AI brings the average up by making the least skilled people more competitive with people who have greater experience and greater expertise. You do have to remember that you have to have at least a little bit of experience and a little bit of expertise to know whether these tools are actually working for you.

Ladders aren’t very helpful at all. www. larryweaver. com and might be actively dangerous if you try to stand on the very top step or if you try to use them without a proper foundation to rest them on. You’re very likely to fall and hurt yourself. As long as you have some qualifications though, using AI well offers a significant benefit.

It makes you better at what you do. So, let’s talk for a minute about some of the tools that I’m using. I use Google Gemini, both the standalone application called Gemini Advanced, and in Google Docs, mostly. I use ChatGPT a lot, and as a quick aside, I just got a new iPhone and assigned its action button to ChatGPT’s voice mode.

I use ChatGPT a lot, and as a quick aside, I just got a new iPhone and assigned its action button to ChatGPT’s voice mode. I’m going to give you a quick example of how I use it at work. The action button for those who don’t have an iPhone or don’t have a recent iPhone lets you just press a single button to open up an app.

I haven’t opened up ChatGPT’s voice mode. So I’m going to do this. I’m going to give it a prompt and let it answer the question. Full disclosure, this is a live demo, so I’m going to grade its output after it finishes and see if it’s any good. Okay, so this is real world scenario. Microsoft I’m pressing the action button, and now I’m asking my question.

I’m giving it my prompt. Imagine that you’re a skilled marketing professional with years of experience in the hospitality industry. What are some key elements of a marketing plan for a 100 room, city center, independent hotel to drive more direct revenue? Drawing on your hospitality marketing expertise, you’d want to focus on a few crucial elements to drive direct revenue for a 100 room, independent hotel in a city center.

Start by enhancing your online presence with a user friendly website. and a strong SEO strategy to capture those looking for accommodations in your area. Then, leverage social media and content marketing to showcase your unique selling points. Like local experiences or special packages. Also consider a direct booking incentive program to encourage guests to book through your website rather than third party platforms.

Finally, don’t forget to utilize data analytics to continually refine your marketing strategies based on what drives the most direct bookings. So it just gave that answer and I think that was okay. I don’t think it was the best answer I’ve ever heard. But it was solid in terms of at a high level.

There’s nothing that you can criticize about that answer. Obviously it’s lacking in detail, though obviously I could continue the conversation to get a deeper dive and more insights that it provides. It doesn’t scare me as a consultant. I didn’t listen to that and go, wow, this is going to take my job away.

If that’s all I’m offering my clients, if that’s all my company is offering our clients, we need to do a better job. But it certainly wasn’t a terrible place to start. Nothing that it said was untrue. I’d also point out that that was a live response. That was not a question I’d asked it before. It was not something that I rehearsed with ChatGPT.

That’s literally the answer it gave. So, you know, I’ll give it a solid B, right? B In terms of other tools, we also use MidJourney for image creation. I just started testing a tool called Beautiful. ai for making presentations. I haven’t yet used it for a real presentation, but I’m testing to see whether or not I could, and I’ll have more on this in a moment.

Those are the primary tools that I use, and those are the primary tools that I know my team uses. Obviously, I’m leaving out things like any of the AI capabilities within Google Ads, or Google’s AI overviews in Search, and that’s it. Or things like that. These are the primary tools we’re using on a day to day that we deliberately use AI.

How am I using AI? Well, a bunch of different things. One is brainstorming. When I’ve got something I’m testing out an idea, I might sit and have a chat with ChatGPT, or I might, you know, pop some ideas into Gemini to kind of refine my thinking a bit. Use it a lot for note taking, though there are some legal considerations to be aware of there.

Depending on the clients you’re working with, so you’ve got to be conscious of that reality. I use it for summarizing documents. Again, you’ve got to be careful there. But generally speaking, that’s a pretty common use we have around here. I use it for transcribing text a lot. The transcription of this podcast every week is pretty much mostly done with AI.

We’ll do a spot edit afterwards, but we more or less take it the way the AI provides it. I will use it for editing support. So, for example, I will often run outlines of either speeches or presentations or full writing through ChatGPT or Gemini to get their critique on my thinking, you know, where are there gaps in the thinking, where are there logical connections that could be stronger.

We use it a lot for image creation. The images on these podcasts and other places, such as LinkedIn, are often created using MidJourney. The team is using social is using AI for drafting social media posts, so a lot of the LinkedIn posts that you’ll see for the company, at least the initial draft came from AI, though it’s again frequently edited after the fact.

There’s some, we’re using it for some very high level market research. I, I kind of dig this marketing research and competitive analysis GPT plug in that my friend N. Saint Ong just turned me on to. It’s far from perfect. But it’s a solid tool to do some additional legwork when evaluating new clients and evaluating their competitors.

It saves us time and certainly cuts down on the number of Google searches we’re doing. And I mentioned Beautiful. ai, which is an AI powered presentation tool. This is not something I’m using day to day. This is something that I’m testing right now. I also think it’s a really interesting tool to think about where we might be going.

You give Beautiful. ai a prompt, and it creates an entire slide deck, in my experience, somewhere between about 10 and 15 slides, typically, that you can then edit. You can also have it create individual slides from the specific prompts you give it while you’re working through the deck. As its name suggests, many of its templates and its slides are genuinely quite beautiful.

They’re really very lovely. It also changes layouts and adds elements to individual slides more easily and with less pain in the rear than any presentation tool I have ever used. I have long complained about how challenging it can be for Non designers, like me, do add elements to slides in PowerPoint, Google Slides, and to a lesser extent, but still true, Apple’s Keynote, without royally screwing up the layout.

It’s, it’s a huge problem that I run into. You know, on a regular basis, it’s not the biggest problem in the world, it just comes up so frequently that it’s really annoying, nobody has come up with a better response before now. Beautiful AI does that part really well. So I’ve been using it for a little over a week, week and a half, couple weeks, mostly on dummy presentations, not real things, but when I’m working out, you know, the beginnings of a presentation.

And so far, I think it’s a pretty solid outlining tool. The general outline for the slide decks that it produce produces are not bad. They’re a little generic, but they’re not a bad starting point. I also would use some of its individual slides without hesitation in presentations to clients or during speak engagements.

I certainly wouldn’t use the whole deck as it creates it. But for a single slide or two, it could be a really useful tool. Full disclosure, for one test presentation, it generated a single slide that solely highlighted William Gibson’s quote, The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Long time listeners probably recognize that quote since I use it a lot. And I feel seen. Clearly I need to up my quote game soon. Smart people who use AI indeed, right? Here’s what I don’t like about the tool. It’s, it’s, it’s a solid tool, but here’s what I don’t like about it. First, as I mentioned, I thought that the outline it produced, the outlines it’s producing are very generic.

Much as what we’re seeing with AI tools, just like we saw with the ChatGPT example I gave a moment ago, it didn’t do a bad job. There just wasn’t anything special about it. There wasn’t anything that made me sit up and go, Wow, that’s something I couldn’t possibly have come up with on my own with just a little bit of work.

Even the Gibson quote that I trot out less frequently these days. is simply because it’s become a bit hackneyed. So, I would say a lot of the work it produced was solid, okay, a little generic, and leaning towards hackneyed. I’d expect similar quality work from a smart, relatively junior employee, or a particularly sharp, recent college graduate.

Not A plus work, I’d grade it as a C plus or B minus. And its outlines might make for decent starting points that you could then upgrade with a little bit of effort. I’d also use, again as I mentioned, some of its individual slides without hesitation. They were solid, they were really, really good. It provides a decent foundation that you can build off of and significantly improve upon.

One thing I do like to note is, of course, it was much faster. It produced these outputs in minutes as opposed to waiting, you know, days from our recent college graduate or relatively junior employee. That obviously opens up the risk that we’re going to hurt learning opportunities for those folks. So what I might encourage those people to do in an organization is use it, but then improve it.

How do you make it better? How do you get a better result than what it gave you out of the gate? One other last point that I want to make is I now also want PowerPoint and Google Slides, and for that matter, Word and Google Docs. To adopt its intelligent formatting tools. As I’ve noted in other episodes, in other writing, we judge the experiences we receive against the best experiences we have everywhere.

If office suites don’t add features to work more like the way beautiful AI handles adding elements to a slide, I could easily see myself switching down the road just for the improved formatting assistance. Remember, customer experience is queen. Thinks Out Loud. This experience, though, also demonstrates why I still think we haven’t had our true AI moment, and this is the big point about what we, what it means for AI in the day of the life of your customers and of me.

Improved document formatting is very nice. But it’s not a game changer. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have its killer app yet. Killer apps, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, are applications that make some other general purpose tool a must have. The classic example is when software publishers introduced spreadsheets to the public back in the 70s and 80s.

Prior to that, there simply wasn’t a big need for most people to own a computer. When spreadsheets came around, though, suddenly, almost everyone could see why they’d want a computer. Spreadsheets made computers useful for the average user and drove demand for the category as a whole. Mobile phones had a similar situation with cameras and app stores and social media.

Before that, a mobile phone was just a phone you could carry with you. Certainly a nice convenience, particularly for people who traveled a lot. Not something you couldn’t live without. Give people the ability to take pictures at any time, anywhere, and through social media, a way to share those photos with friends and families.

To include the people that matter to their lives in moments, regardless of whether those moments were everyday or extraordinary. And suddenly, everyone wanted a mobile phone. We haven’t yet seen that for AI. And as a result, we haven’t yet seen everything that AI can and will do in our lives. To that end, I want to go back to the paper from Bick, Blandin, and Deming about AI adoption.

Despite its fast adoption curve, most people haven’t used AI. 39 percent of the U. S. population 18 to 64 using generative AI, and more than 24 percent of workers using it at least once in the week prior to being surveyed, and 1 in 9 using it every day. Means that 61 percent of the population has not used generative AI, at least so far as they’re aware.

That 76 percent of workers didn’t use it once during the week prior to being surveyed. And that 89 percent of people don’t use it every day. So, for as fast as its adoption has been, most people still aren’t using it all that much, again, at least so far as they know. And I think this is the reason why.

Remember the last line of the excerpt that I talked to you about at the beginning of this episode? They said, Generative AI is a general purpose technology in the sense that it is used in a wide range of occupations and job tasks at work and at home. Generative AI is still, even a couple years in, a general purpose technology.

It’s more akin to mobile or social or the internet broadly, or computers, than it is to an iPhone or Instagram or Excel. It’s not the end tool in and of itself, it’s the platform that those tools will be built on top of. Steve Jobs once called the Mac a bicycle for our minds. What he meant was that the computer made us able to think faster, to get to the places we wanted to go more quickly.

And it expanded our ability to go places that would have been too hard or taken too long to reach. Kind of like a ladder does. But the ladder and the bicycle analogy only go so far. Dope pun intended. AI is more than a ladder, it’s more than a bicycle for our minds, it might be a motorcycle for our minds, or it might be a car, a rocket, a spaceship, or some other conveyance that we haven’t even thought up yet.

Even the metaphor is framed by what came before. What I think is going to be truly interesting is when someone moves AI from a general purpose To a specific purpose technology, when they introduce the killer app that makes us all want to use artificial intelligence in our lives every day. The same way that we use social and mobile and the internet and computers.

I don’t think it’s going to be prettier slides, no matter how useful that may be, that’s going to drive that change. We still haven’t seen the driver of that change. And I think we have a little bit of time to go before we get there. As you saw in my conversation with ChatGPT using voice mode, AI agents that I can have a conversation with, that our customers can have a conversation with, and set them off to do tasks in the background, Could easily be that killer app.

I suspect it’s the most likely scenario. We just have to have, you know, time will tell, since there aren’t any true AI agents yet in the wild that work in practice. What we’re seeing now are mostly proof of concept, or mostly some demos. We haven’t seen the real world of agents yet. I can’t wait to see what those look like when we do.

What I will say is that the day in the life of a marketing and digital strategy consultant is likely to be a very different place. And I think that’s going to be true for you, and for your customers, and for society as a whole. I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we have a long way to go. But I will tell you, I think when it happens, it will happen fast, just as we’ve seen with adoption overall.

And I, for one, can’t wait to see what it looks like.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 434.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

A listener of this show told me recently that, “People are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage.” That’s a real challenge, on that can make it tough to find the time, resources, and budget to break up with Google, Facebook, and the rest of Big Tech.

And that’s a problem. Because reducing your dependence on Big Tech is core to driving more profitable revenue for your business in the long term.

So, how do you do it? How do you diversify your marketing mix when you’ve already got too much to do? How can you make the most of your existing channels and find new ways to reach customers when you’re already overwhelmed? Most importantly, how can you reduce your dependence on Google and Big Tech without killing your business? That’s what this week’s episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 43s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 430 of The Big Show and thank you so much for tuning in.

In some ways, this episode is a follow up to the episode we did last week about how Google lost its antitrust case and why that matters to you. And the reason I say in some ways is because I’ve talked at length both in that episode and in a bunch of other episodes this year about why you need to think about diversifying your traffic, why you need to think about becoming less dependent on Google.

And it led for a marketing manager to send me a comment and ask, "people are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, the list goes on and on. How is it possible to really do this? How is it possible to manage all of these different things and, and, you know, diversify away from Google?"

That’s a really fair question. I do think people are already overwhelmed. I do talk to people all the time that go, "I just can’t keep up." So I understand that completely. And I thought it would make sense to talk a little bit today about how you can do this very effectively. And there’s a few things that I don’t want to say they’re simple. But they require a certain level of focus, a certain level of attention, and they can help you manage it a little better.

First, you’ve heard me mention Core and Explore many times over the years. Core focuses on the things that always work. The channels that deliver the most business to you today, the channels that deliver the most revenue today, and the channels that tend to have the best return on spend for you today. And that could be spend in terms of actual dollars that you’re putting out in terms of buying, you know, paid search ads or paid social ads. Or it could be in what are generally referred to as soft dollars. Like your people’s time, the amount of time that they spend on those things.

Core is going to take up roughly 75 to 80 percent of your time. That’s just a fact. That’s why you want them to be the things that are most productive for your business. So, right out of the gate, if things are not generating really good return for you, or they’re really not benefiting you, they should be moved out of the core, pretty much immediately. You want to focus on those areas that work best for you. The

Explore phase of the Core & Explore methodology is where you try new things. And Explore is going to take up maybe 15-20 percent of your time. These channels, these areas, may be things that you haven’t figured out how to use yet. You know, you might be testing something new to think about and see if it works. But you’re learning to see is this something that works for us and is it something that I need to get better at. So you’re going to spend only 15 to 20 percent of your time there. And again you’re going to be somewhat judicious in how much time you put into each of those things.

It’s reasonable to ask how do you find the time to explore? You’re already doing so much. As my commenter noted, “people are already overwhelmed.”

Well, it starts with knowing where you are. It starts with knowing where your time actually goes. Sometimes it’s tough to know where you’re spending 75 of your time or 20 percent of your time if you’re not actually aware of where the time goes.

When I was younger, when I was earlier in my career, a mentor of mine sat me down and said, “It’s really important when you’re overwhelmed to take an audit of how you’re spending your time.”

You can just jot it down on a piece of paper, you can type it into a spreadsheet, you can use one of the many, many fine time tracking apps that are out there, and you can track in increments. Maybe 10 minute increments, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 5 minutes, depending on what’s important to you. But it’s worthwhile for a few weeks to simply note where your time goes. Just keep a record of it. Then take a look at where you’re spending your time.

For some people, and in some cases, many people, it’s not that you don’t have enough time. It’s that, you don’t know where it goes, or you’re not making tough choices about where to spend it. So, it starts by getting that picture of where are you today.

Once you see where your time goes, you can then prioritize. And sure, we’ve all heard about, oh, setting priorities and things along those lines.

But I would argue that truly prioritizing means deciding what not to do. It’s not about saying, “this is the most important thing.” It’s about saying, “this is the least important thing. This is something that is not worth my time.” And deciding to either put it aside for now… or choose not to do it at all.

If you think about this, the word decide is the same root word as things like homicide. You’re literally killing options when you decide. You’re saying, “nope, that’s gone. I’m not going to worry about it.”

I legitimately have a “to don’t list.” When I write down things that, you know, I start to think about that I could do, I’ll put them on a list of “to don’t.” These are things I’m not going to focus on because they’re a distraction from the things I do need to focus on.

Warren Buffett has a similar exercise he recommends. He says that you should make a list of the 25 things that are most important to you. Then you want to order the items on the list from the most important to the 25th most important. Once you’ve got those written down on a list, what you’re going to do is you’re going to throw away number 6 through 25. Just cross them off.

And the reason you’re going to do that is, either you don’t have enough time to do them, so you’re probably not going to do them anyway, or they’re going to distract you from doing a great job on the things that are most important to you, the five things that are most important to you, or, if you’re like many people, a little bit of both. You’re gonna do kind of a bad job at everything because you’re trying to do too much.

Of course, if you finish your five most important priorities, if you succeed on accomplishing your five most important priorities, you can always move on to numbers six to ten, and then again, eleven to fifteen, and then again, sixteen to twenty, if you get there.

I’d argue it’s much more likely you’ll get there if you focus on numbers one to five. So go ahead, just put them on your “to don’t” list. Don’t worry about them.

To bring this back to your marketing activities, You don’t have to be on every social platform or every marketing channel that exists out there.

You’re much better served doing a fantastic job in just a few places than doing a half assed job in many, many places. My company’s entire marketing strategy focuses on a relatively small number of channels. We focus on our website and blog. We focus on this podcast that we do distribute through Spotify and YouTube, along with a few other channels to get it more traction. We focus on email marketing, which is powered primarily by our podcast and blog. We focused on LinkedIn. And we focus on guest writing for a few other online publications in hospitality and digital marketing. That’s it. That’s all we do.

We don’t really do an Instagram. We don’t really do Facebook. They’re just not that important to us, so we don’t really worry about them. Those areas that I mentioned are where our customers live. So that’s where we focus.

There’s another great prioritization method that I want to talk about that you can also use called he “Four D’s.” Same basic

If you notice, we’ve already kind of talked about the Delete and to a lesser degree Defer. When we talk about a “to don’t” list or we talk about deprioritizing those items 6 through 25, you’re deferring them or deleting them.

What I want to talk about, though, is delegate. When we think about delegation, we think, “Oh, well, we delegate to somebody on our team.” You know, we delegate to somebody who reports to us. But that’s not really true. You can delegate down, obviously. You can delegate sideways. You can delegate up, and you can delegate outside your organization.

As a friend of mine puts it, "Think who, not how." It’s about getting help, not just figuring out how to do the thing yourself.

Now in marketing, and especially in social marketing, there’s a lot of people who can help you. There are influencers and creators, which are a tremendous way to improve your social media presence without you doing the work. 7 to 10 people, 69 percent of all Americans aged 16 to 54, follow creators and influencers.

And of those that do, 55 percent researched a brand’s website after hearing about that brand from a creator. 46 percent followed a brand on social media after hearing about it from a creator. 43% — 43 percent! — purchased from a brand after hearing about it from a creator. And 42 percent recommended a brand to someone.

That’s fantastic. This is a remarkable opportunity for you to reach out to creators to help you tell a great story on your brand’s behalf.

You don’t have to do the work. You can delegate the work. And there are literally tens of millions of creators using social to connect with their audiences. The largest share of creators, those with 10,000 followers or less, make around $14,000 per year. Even those creators with 10,000 to 50,000 followers average less than $50,000 in income. In other words, these levels of creators can be very affordable for individual marketers to work with.

The key is that you’re not really looking at the creator. You’re looking at their audience. You’re looking at, is their audience your audience? Do these creators talk to the people you want to talk to? Do they help you reach the people you want to reach? It doesn’t matter how many people are in the audience. It matters that they’re engaged and they’re the customer types you want to engage with.

There’s lots of great ways to find these creators. There’s tools like SparkToro. Or you can simply ask your customers where are the places where they follow people on YouTube, or they follow people on Instagram, or they follow people on LinkedIn, who they find interesting. Because those are the people you want to talk to. They’re all about helping you reach your customers better without you having to do all the heavy lifting.

Speaking of customers, your customers, in a way, are creators and influencers, too. They create reviews, they talk to friends and family on social about great experiences that they’ve had. And ultimately, everything we do is about our customer. Given all the changes around AI and technology more broadly, the way we can compete is focusing most on how we help our customers.

I’ve said for years that social is people and all marketing is social. My friend Mark Schaefer likes to say, “the most human company wins.” I think he’s absolutely right. When you give your customers a great experience, they’re going to tell their friends and family and fans and followers about it. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve talked about things like we need, we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. It’s the core of everything you do. It’s another way of saying something you’ve heard me say many times on this show that customer experience is queen.

You’re trying to encourage your customers to work on your behalf to tell a really positive brand story. I can tell you I’ve sold really great products and companies in my life and I’ve sold really not so great products or companies in my life and selling a great product is so much easier. Right?

It’s much easier to tell a great story that cost about a product or service that customers love. And it just makes the marketing easier. You don’t have to work as hard or work your butt off to be on all of these channels. Your customers and creators will be falling all over themselves to do it for you. So, focusing on your customer experience is an amazing way to improve the value of everything you do.

Now, you might say, sure, but isn’t providing a great experience expensive? It is, it absolutely is, or it can be. It’s also much cheaper than providing a bad experience. Are guests canceling their reservations at your hotel or restaurant cheap? Are returns of your product cheap? Are refunds because people weren’t satisfied with the service you gave them cheap? Do you think that bad reviews don’t cost you money? Do you think you’re going to drive business value if you don’t take care of your customers?

Your customers rely on their friends and family and influencers and creators to help them find products and services that work for their needs. You’re going to have such an easier time reaching them if people are telling a great story on behalf of your brand.

So the fundamental point here is that you need to focus on customer experience so that you don’t have to work so hard to market in the first place. Then, when you are marketing, I go back to saying:

Ultimately, that will make your job a lot easier and will prevent you from being overwhelmed or struggling to figure out how to reach the folks you want to reach. And that will help you diversify away from Google over time. Because what people will search for is not a company in your niche or a solution to their problem. They’ll come looking for you by name. And no matter what happens to Google in the future, you’ll be well positioned because you’ll be in all of the places your customers need you to be without having to do so much work to be there.

That allows you to gain the benefits that you want, to grow your business, and to do it without being so overwhelmed. And that’s the best place to be.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 430

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast, and we’ll see you Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community. And they mean the world to me personally. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot. But I want you to know how thrilled I am, and I really am thrilled that you listen to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show, you are the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you just as I did with the commenter this week. I want to hear what’s going on in your world and learn how we can do a better job building all the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please, be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Revisiting How to Diversify Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google faces enormous threats to its business. New entrants using artificial intelligence may provide a better search experience for their customers. Those same new entrants are also competing for Google’s massive ad revenues. And, of course, the search giant is fighting for its life in a government antitrust case. Those are major challenges — and a giant signal that Google might not win the AI economy.

At the same time, they’re still one of the world’s most valuable brands and a key driver of traffic and revenue for most businesses. So, which is it? Should marketers continue to bet that Google will win in the AI economy? Or is it time to chart a different course? That’s what this week’s episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 19s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 433 of the Big Show and I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today.

I want to start by talking about Perplexity. If you haven’t heard of Perplexity.ai, it’s an artificial intelligence powered search engine that focuses heavily on providing great answers.

I’ve said for years that “people don’t want a search engine, they want a find engine. “ And what we’re seeing happen in the marketplace right now, whether it’s people like Google’s AI Overviews or Bing Copilot or Perplexity, we’re moving towards a legitimate answer engine where the tool is simply answering the question for you. Of course, ChatGPT belongs in there as well.

The challenge for Folks like ChatGPT and Perplexity is that they have to find a way to pay for their product. If you think about Google, it is one of the most profitable businesses ever built. It’s an extraordinarily profitable company. And folks are trying to figure out how to monetize the answers they’re providing.

Well, according to Digiday, Perplexity has come up with one answer — and shocker — it’s advertising. According to Digiday, Perplexity’s new advertiser pitch deck shows how the “AI search startup hopes to win over advertisers later this year as it works to set itself apart from competing startups like ChatGPT and giants like Google.”

The article continues,

According to a copy of the pitch deck obtained by Digiday, the plan is to integrate ads within users, queries, and answers, potentially as soon as the fourth quarter of 2024.

It finishes up by noting that “…although the pitch deck didn’t talk about pricing, a source within Perplexity confirmed the goal is to target CPMs north of $50.”

Now for those of you not familiar with CPMs, that’s a very traditional way of selling advertising where CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions or cost per mille. You know, because so many marketers speak Latin as their first language. It’s a thing that’s existed for a very long time, though, and it really is what it stands for, cost per mille or cost per thousand. Keep that CPM point in mind, because we’re going to come back to that in a bit.

Nonetheless, Perplexity’s pitch deck is the most aggressive approach that I’ve seen so far to going after Google’s massive ad revenues, to hit them where they live.

As a reminder, when we looked at Google’s earnings a couple of weeks ago, Google had just shy of $85 billion in revenues last quarter and almost $24 billion in profit.

Among the five big tech players who I pay the most attention to — Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft — Google’s profits were the highest among any of them. So going after their ad revenues is an important first step for anyone who’s looking to challenge Google as king of the hill and bump them out of big tech.

Think about it. If you’re a marketer, you have limited budgets. That’s generally the truth. There are only so many places where you can afford to spend your ad dollars. I’m not usually a zero sum thinker. But marketing budgets in practice tend to be somewhat zero sum. Every dollar you spend with a new marketing channel is one dollar fewer for Google.

So this is a potential threat to them that’s worth taking seriously. And it fits into a larger pattern of all of the threats that Google is facing right now. And that brings up a question of, are you willing to bet, as a marketer, that Google wins the AI economy? Are they the ones who are going to win in the long term?

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know the answer to this. I tend to think in bets a la the great book, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, the poker player. And I don’t know that I would bet a lot one way or the other at the moment. I’d call it roughly 50/50.

To be fair, I think Google has the best odds of anyone of winning. They probably have a 50% chance of winning. I think maybe Microsoft and OpenAI have a 25% to 35% percent chance of winning. And everyone else combined makes up the last 15% to 25%. Perplexity is in that mix, but they’re only a very small part of that mix, in my mind, at least for now.

To break this down a little bit, SimilarWeb shows that Perplexity got 57.8 million visits last month. Bing, by contrast, got 1.78 billion. That’s billion with a “B,” to Perplexity’s 57.8 million with an “M.” Google got 83.5 billion.

Google is almost 50 times larger than Bing, and over 1,400 times larger than Perplexity. So, it’s tough to see Perplexity as a big threat today.

That could change. They could grow. They could grow really fast. But they’re a long way from being a major threat at the moment, even if they do take a couple of ad dollars away from Google.

So it makes it tough to bet against Google. At the same time, let’s talk about why I wouldn’t bet for them. Let’s start with why I wouldn’t bet for them.

First, they have a fairly fragmented product strategy. Just to think of all of the places they’re working to put AI and the different names they’ve tagged all of these with.

Even Gemini, their primary product, they offer in four tiers. There’s Ultra 1.0, Pro 1.5, Flash 1.5, and Nano 1 0.

Lots of these tools, lots of these things I’m talking about are very cool. They’re also incredibly difficult for the marketplace to understand and keep up with. I do this for a living. I spend a lot of my time researching various products and services that are available to my clients and to marketers and other business leaders. And it’s really hard to keep up with their whole product portfolio.

If you think about this from a pure marketing perspective, that’s not a great marketing message. It makes it really difficult for potential customers to keep track of what they’re doing and what they offer and what the benefits are to you as a customer, which makes it tough to choose them sometimes.

By contrast, lots of the competition that they’re facing, like Microsoft and OpenAI, are well funded and have much clearer product strategies.

Microsoft’s entire product strategy is wrapped up into what they call Copilot. You’ve got Windows Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Copilot, Excel Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Outlook Copilot, and so on. Microsoft also has enormous enterprise sales capabilities, so they can get their corporate customers, their biggest group of customers, to keep using them.

Google also has this little problem with the antitrust suit that they’re facing right now. And not doing a great job of it. They just lost the first phase of it. I had a whole episode about that a few weeks ago, which I will, of course, link to in the show notes. It is tough, however, to run forward when you’re looking over your shoulder because, you know, you might be big tech, but big government is gaining on them, at least at the moment.

Most importantly, and the biggest challenge I see for Google here, is that ads placed alongside AI search results, a la the Perplexity deck, might not be cost per click or CPC ads, which Google has always done. But might be CPM or cost per thousand impressions. If you’re Google, that could be a big problem.

CPM ads are not anywhere near as lucrative as CPC ads. They’ve never been. Facebook, which is the third most visited site in the world and the second biggest seller of advertising after Google, made $39 billion in revenue last quarter and almost all of that from ads. Again, I mentioned Google made $84 billion overall, $48 billion of that from search ads alone. That is, mostly from CPC. It made another $36 billion from other sources. Still mostly ads. They make a ton of money on this, mostly on CPC. And you probably know this, but CPC ads print money because they hit customers when they’re ready to buy. They’re right there, they’re as good as any other search result, or as bad, if you choose to look at it that way. They’re a good answer to the question, and people click on them, and Google makes a ton of money.

If AI results begin to overtake traditional search engine results pages — and the ads alongside them — Google could see a decline in revenue simply because the new ad formats or new ad models may not work as well as what they have today. That may be great for consumers, but it might not be great for Google’s business. It also might not be great for your business as an advertiser, so something you want to think about here.

This reality underscores the challenging path that Google has to navigate. They can avoid building AI into their most lucrative search engine results pages because they don’t want to lose clicks on ads. But that could cause customers to switch to a better search experience on Perplexity, Bing, ChatGPT, or whomever, which would hurt Google’s revenues.

Or, they could build AI into their most lucrative search results to keep customers on the SERP, on the search engine results page, and lose clicks because customers get an answer or don’t find the ad necessary. Which could hurt their revenues.

Google could be in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.” That’s a very real problem for market leaders generally, and for Google specifically. Even if they win at keeping the most traffic, they could lose from a revenue perspective.

Now, I’m not convinced that either of those are entirely likely, but they are plausible.

There’s obviously a third scenario where Google successfully incorporates very high value ads into the search engine results that work both for consumers and advertisers and grow its revenues. They have enormous incentive to find solutions that do that. I wouldn’t bet against them finding that, to be honest, because it’s existential that they do.

They cannot afford to lose.

And they have a whole bunch of positives in their favor of why they could win.

The first is that they have an enormous, enormous amount of money available to play with. Google is sitting on about $100.7 billion in cash. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think there’s a lot you can do with $100 billion to support your business. I’m pretty sure I could find some things to do with it, right?

We know that they have amazing technology and significant computing capabilities. We know that they have a ton of talent whose core job, whose whole reason for being at Google every day, is to solve this problem.

And they also have one other massive advantage that we always have to keep in mind, which is their brand equity.

We all “Google” every day; It’s a verb. It’s a core behavior we all do. Gmail also is one of the biggest email platforms in the world. Billions of people use Google Docs and Google Drive to manage their work and their lives. Billions of people use Android phones and so on. That’s a lot of human behavior to change, to get people to switch away from doing.

I spend time as a marketer trying to get people to change their behavior. It’s really hard. Think about it: If you’re trying to get somebody to do something they’ve never done before, that’s a difficult proposition. Whenever you’re trying to get people to change — and this is true in marketing generally &mdsash; that’s the biggest competitor you face.

Is inertia, getting people to take on a new behavior, getting them to take a new action, is really, really challenging. And getting people to stop using Google and start using something else, even though all they have to do is type in a different URL, is difficult. We just don’t see it happen very often. Note the difference in traffic that Google gets versus Bing, who’s been competing with them for 20 years.

Even on the antitrust side, I’m not convinced this is a long term threat to Google. It’s a, it’s a distraction. It’s definitely a problem. But I don’t know that the antitrust thing is going to be that big a deal in the long term.

Benedict Evans made a compelling argument in his most recent newsletter that it doesn’t matter if they lose. Apple probably isn’t going to move away from Google to use Bing or Perplexity. This is a quote from Apple’s SVP of Services, Eddie Cue, that Benedict Evans highlighted in his newsletter, where he said,

“There was no price that Microsoft could ever offer to make the switch because of Bing’s inferior quality and the associated business risks of making a change.”

This is the quote from Eddie Cue.

“I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered us to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.”

Cue continued,

“We’re not going to take something that isn’t as good and provide that to our customers. Our customers are too important to us. One of the reasons Apple’s been so successful is the fact that we treat the customer as the most important thing in the world, much more important than the revenue.

Again, that’s Eddie Cue, Apple’s SVP of Services, on why they might not switch, even if Microsoft no, excuse me, Google no longer pays them billions of dollars every year to use Google as their main search engine. Google is just a better product.

So it might not actually matter that much in terms of what’s happening there. And, just to put some further context around this, the judge in this case will not be proposing remedies in terms of what they might do to Google until August of next year. That’s 11 months from now before we figure out where their antitrust situation is going.

Additionally, their competitors aren’t winning. I mean, look at the numbers we just talked about from Bing or that we talked about from Perplexity; Google is still the dominant player. There’s data that comes from a variety of sources that show Google’s market share really hasn’t budged in months, so they’re doing pretty well. And they may continue to do pretty well for some time to come.

The question for me becomes, how much are you willing to bet? This, to me, is a 50/50 proposition. Maybe you think I’m wrong, and that the pros in favor of Google are much higher, and they’re the ones who are going to win. Or maybe you think, “wow, there’s a lot of problems that Google has to face and so they’re going to lose.”

But are you willing to put all of your eggs in Google’s basket and expect them to continue delivering the bulk of your traffic and revenues? Or are you going to move away from them entirely and hope for the best that it works out, that somebody else takes their place?

Or, are you ready to do what I tend to recommend, which is something like a core and explore strategy, where you test new ideas to drive traffic and revenue from other sources, while continuing to do some of what you do today?

As I noted, I wouldn’t bet too much on either scenario. I don’t think it’s a winning strategy for you to bet on either outcome right now. Instead, it’s about how you succeed no matter what happens to Google. It does mean diversifying your revenue and traffic. It does mean trying new channels and new ideas.

It does mean listening to your customers and building greater connection with those folks to drive more business from alternative sources like email or social. Most of all, it means placing a bet on your business, and on doing what’s right for you… so that no matter what happens with Google, its antitrust problems, or its competitors, you still win.

That’s the bet I would encourage you to make, because it’s the one that’s most likely to pay off in the long run.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 433.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Will Marketers Bet that Google Wins the AI Economy? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 433) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.