Tim Peter & Associates

The "Search Bar" isn’t dying; it’s evolving into an expensive gated community.

In this episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter (formerly Thinks Out Loud), Tim breaks down the economic reality of Google’s bananas $400 billion year. Despite the hype surrounding AI as a "search killer," Google’s 17% growth in search ads proves that the 800-lb. gorilla still dominates the discovery landscape.

We are also witnessing a structural shift from the “Age of the Card Catalog” to the “Age of the Concierge.” AI assistants and agents are turning into “context engines,” consolidating and connecting brand signals from across the web to provide direct recommendations rather than just lists of links.

To survive this latest phase of your customers’ "Digital Reset," brands must move beyond Big Tech dependency and reclaim their demand through clear, consistent content and experiences. And they must become brands customers will ask for by name.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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.

Running time: 17m 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.

Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As a marketer and digital strategist, there’s one source of Intel that I love to check out all the time, and that is Big Tech’s earnings calls.

Big Tech tends to know more about what’s going on with our customers than anyone. Where they’re making and spending money tells us more about the state of digital and where it’s headed than just about anything else we can look at.

Usually when I do this, I look at the Frightful Five as a collection. I want to see Amazon. I want to see Google. I want to see Facebook. I want to see Apple. I want to see Microsoft. Sometimes I even share thoughts from folks like Shopify or Spotify or Expedia or Booking.com to get a bigger picture of the state of digital.

This time, though, I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m only looking at the 800-pound gorilla that scares every other beast in the jungle. And that is Google.

I’ll get into some of the details of Google’s earnings and what they mean in a few minutes. For now though, it’s enough to say that Google had a giant, massive, mammoth quarter. Almost $114 billion in revenue, an 18% increase year on year. That is, in a word, bananas.

If it’s not immediately obvious, Google’s financials make all the chatter about them losing market share and mind share to OpenAI and ChatGPT look, well, downright silly.

I don’t mean to diss ChatGPT, they fired the first shot of the AI revolution. But as the saying goes, money talks and, well, other stuff walks. And Google is making serious money.

Another thing to recognize is that Google’s earnings mostly come from ads, which means that their 18% growth is pulled straight from your pockets. They’re charging more tolls in more places to more businesses and reaping the rewards. Gatekeepers gonna gate, don’t you know?

What else can we learn from Google’s earnings? What do their earnings mean for your business in reality? And what can you do to succeed in a world still controlled by the baddest beast in the entire jungle? This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

So yeah, Google got that bag last quarter, as the kids say. They generated $114 billion in revenue in Q4, up 17%. They also pulled in more than $400 billion in revenue for the year, their biggest ever, up 15%.

By the way, quick aside, I’m not trying to manage your portfolio. I’m only looking at this through the lens of where are your customers interacting with AI? All right, not stock advice, please.

Anyway, 15% growth is great when you’re a $25 million company. That would represent an extra $3.75 million in sales. I mean, that is good work, right? Yeah.

Okay, Google pulled in almost $53 billion in extra sales last year.

To put this in context, OpenAI made over $20 billion in revenue in 2025, according to their CFO. That means that Google’s growth in 2025 was two and a half times OpenAI’s total revenues. If you want your first big takeaway from this, it’s that Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Google also made $82.3 billion in revenue from ads in Q4, up roughly $9.8 billion year on year. That’s about a 13.6% increase. That $82.3 billion is fully 72% of Google’s total revenues. Hell, search alone represents 55% of Google’s total revenues. As CFO Ruth Porat said it best on their earnings call, “Search revenues really reflected broad-based growth across verticals. Search remained the largest contributor to revenue growth.”

Google’s ad growth happened despite lots of folks claiming that the company was under serious threat from OpenAI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others. Now, not to keep kicking OpenAI in the teeth, but YouTube and Google Network — that’s the non-search ads portion of Google’s advertising platform; it contributes just 16.9% of the company’s revenue — generated $7 billion more in the quarter than OpenAI did all of last year.

Damn.

Let’s just not forget though where that revenue came from. It came from you.

When you hear that Google had a great quarter or year, just remember it’s that it’s your ad dollars that paid for that. They’re collecting a toll from you to reach your customers. Google is in very good shape long-term here, built on your ad dollars. Now, I’m not saying that OpenAI is doomed, though I did hint at it at that towards the end of last year.

What I am saying is that they’ve got a long way to go if they’re going to compete head to head with Google’s money machine.

And all of that is before we talk about Google being the AI underneath the hood for Siri on Apple devices, which I broke down here on the show last month. So that’s two big takeaways.

The third major takeaway is that Google is using AI to improve its ad products in a big, big way. Philip Schindler noted on Google’s earnings call that, and this is a quote, “AI innovation across our ads ecosystem is core to every aspect of our product portfolio, from targeting, bidding, creative, measurement, and across campaign types.”

In short, Google is using AI. It’s heavily integrating AI into its core product to make that product better and better and better. Google’s ads alone produced four times more revenue than OpenAI did. Google is building an AI-enabled company, an AI-native company, and they’re reaping the rewards from it.

In a blog post talking about how the company is reinventing ads for the new era of search, Google’s VP and GM of ads and commerce Vidya Srinivasan wrote, “In 2026, this shift is turning search into a more powerful tool for discovery where ads can inspire an answer all at once. We aren’t just bringing ads to AI experiences in search," she writes. She said "we are reinventing what an ad is."

She goes on to say, "Take AI Mode, for example. It offers new opportunities for businesses to fit naturally into the conversation. That’s why we’ve spent the past year testing new ad formats that bridge inspiration and action."

Google is clearly integrating ads directly into AI Overviews and AI Mode that makes those a holistic part of the conversation with customers. That aligns with my idea that search is moving from being a card catalog to being a concierge. Google clearly intends ads to be part of that experience. Again, gatekeepers gonna gate and you’re the one paying the toll.

Now this might end up being more like a local business providing a spiff to the concierge for recommending their shop, then paying to present a separate card in the catalog the way ads have worked up until now.

The net result to you though is the same. You’re paying for that traffic. You’re paying for that customer.

We’re already seeing brands get on board with this approach. Marriott, Etsy, and Wayfair are already selling directly in AI Mode in Gemini. Google also claims that Shopify, Target, and Walmart are coming soon. And as you’ve probably heard, Google also introduced its universal commerce platform to, quote, “standardize how businesses connect with AI agents across the entire shopping journey.”

That’s powerful. It might get expensive for you, too.

Now, Srinivasan’s blog post and Google’s earning call ignored at least one big wild card that we want to an eye on, that you want to keep an eye on. I haven’t seen anything where Google tells us how much of its ads revenue came from AI Overviews or AI Mode.

They also haven’t told us how often searchers see AI Overviews or explicitly select AI Mode where they click the link to go into AI Mode. Google’s earnings release claimed that its Gemini app has more than 750 million monthly active users. And though sources vary on this, it’s likely that ChatGPT is somewhere in the rough ballpark of maybe one billion monthly active users. I’d call that a win in OpenAI’s favor at the moment, but not a massive one, not one that Google can’t overcome in time.

I strongly suspect that AI Overviews and AI Mode are bigger than both of those, really, and very possibly bigger than both of them combined.

We know that Google gets in the ballpark of maybe five trillion searches every year. If we just straight line that, that means they’re getting around 417 billion monthly searches. And given that most users search between three and four times per day, some quick back of the envelope math suggests that Google search has somewhere between three-and-a-half billion and 4.6 billion monthly active users. Though the numbers on this are a bit sketchy, AI Overviews appear somewhere around 40 to 60% of the time on searches.

Again, it seems most likely given these numbers that that’s the people’s most common source of AI interactions. We just need Google to confirm that. I’d surely like it if they would.

Now, it’s possible that the numbers are worse than they’d like, and that’s why they haven’t said anything yet. It’s also possible that they’re holding back on that until they’re ready to drop a huge number on us, like the five trillion number they shared. Time will tell, I guess. You can bet I’m going to be keeping an eye on that.

So the state of AI and digital, at least by Google’s reckoning, is great. It is huge. I think the financial data shows that they are undoubtedly winning the long term race. It definitely shows that they’re not losing it.

The last takeaway then is what you should do about it. And I’ve got a few quick points I’d like you to keep in mind.

First, remember that we’re moving from an era of card catalogs to an era of concierges. Search doesn’t point people to an answer. It tells them what the answer is. That’s the way search works in 2026.

I’d recommend that you regularly prompt your favorite AI to tell you about your brand. Better yet, prompt all of them. Try something along the lines of, “imagine that you’re a strategic advisor for the industry your business is in with a 180 IQ. Forget what you know about my relationship with my brand. Tell me the truth about this brand.”

See what those AIs say about you. Ask them to cite their sources. Those answers will help guide you to where you have a strong presence and where you have work to do.

Pay attention in particular to anything that these tools get wrong. Those are clear signs that the data about your brand in that area is either outdated or often non-existent. That provides you with a roadmap of what you need to improve on if you’re going to get recommended by the concierge.

Finally, Google makes money because they know what customers want and need. They’ve built product after product because customers literally told them what they wanted when they searched. That’s how the company became a verb. Customers don’t just search, they Google, right? That’s the idea behind your brand is the prompt in action.

Obviously your brand likely isn’t going to become a verb. I get that. I don’t want you to think like I’m living in some fantasy world where we’re all gonna get, you know, “Tim-ed” tomorrow.

But conducting a successful digital reset for your company is all about creating a brand experience that customers will ask for by name. And it’s much easier than you think.

Look at the amount of branded search traffic that you get today in Google Search Console or Bing Search Console. Clearly, some folks already know to ask for you by name. You’ve done the work already that makes that happen. Now it’s about building on that success for the next generation of customers.

If you get that right, you might not end up with $114 billion in quarterly revenue, sorry to say, but you’ll end up with a sustainable long-term business no matter where your customers ask for you. And I think that’s a takeaway we all can live with.

So the final takeaway here isn’t that Google is too big to beat, they’re not too big to compete with. It’s that the rules of the game have shifted some. We’ve moved from a world where you need to just show up in a card catalog to a world where you need to convince a concierge that you’re the right choice for your customers. A successful digital reset isn’t about fighting machines. It’s about ensuring your brand signal is clear enough so that the machines find you when your customers need you.

If this episode helped you cut through the noise a bit, please do me a favor. Send it to one colleague who is currently staring at their 2026 budget, wondering what to do next.

You can find the show notes and the full archive of these shows at TimPeter.com/podcasts. And if you’re ready to move beyond Big Tech, my book, Digital Reset, provides the roadmap to reclaim your demand. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

“Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Summary: In this episode, Tim Peter explores why we need to stop asking if AI is a replacement for social or search, and start seeing it for what it truly is: The Context Engine for your customers. As Tim explains in the episode, AI doesn’t just find links. It’s not a social site where your customers hang out. AI is a Context Engine that synthesizes your website, your social signals, your content, and your reviews to create a context that guests and agents trust.

The discussion outlines why social media and search remain critical as "human signal" providers that customers’ AI assistants and agents use to build a consensus view of your brand and business.

Key Takeaways for Leaders:

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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: 16m 51s

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 back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. So I wrote a piece the other day. I think people who watch this show regularly know that I sometimes contribute to a series on hospitality net that they call the World Panel, where we talk about various issues in hospitality marketing and in digital marketing more broadly. And there was a whole discussion around a

question that keeps coming up again and again and again, which is, you know, is AI replacing search? Is AI replacing social? Are chat bots the new social media? And what struck me about this is we keep asking whether one channel replaces another. And that’s almost never how this works. Channels don’t die.

They accumulate. And I can’t imagine that AI is going to replace them. It consumes them. And what I mean by that is it requires the information that comes from search and that comes from social in order to do what it does. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you can stop chasing shiny objects.

understand how discovery actually works right now, and then decide where you can focus so you don’t have to try to do everything. Sounds cool? Let’s dive in.

So let’s talk about what happens with regard to new channels coming up. Obviously today we’re talking about AI, but previously we could have talked about search. Previously we could have talked about social media.

If you think about it, we don’t see any channel completely wipe out another one all that often. TV did not kill radio. Some of you probably still listen to the radio pretty regularly. I hope you’re listening to this right now. Even podcasts didn’t kill radio. Social didn’t kill email. Texting didn’t kill email. Mobile didn’t kill desktop. Channels don’t.

die. What happens instead is that our customers make changes in terms of validating their decisions. They need different sources. They look for different sources to check, particularly for purchases that are more complicated, purchases that are bigger, purchases that matter more in their lives.

So what changes is not what channels get used, but how many sources our customers check. So obviously, when we talk about social and we talk about hospitality specifically, this is true in B2B, this is true in a lot of different industries. But we know that customers today check social media, they check influencers, they check online travel agencies in the case of travel, they check artificial intelligence, and all of those are growing. All of those are growing at the same time.

This isn’t a one-off. This is something that’s changing every single day. When people care about a decision, they don’t look in fewer places. They look in more.

So yes, AI is growing faster than any of those others, but all of them are growing. The funny thing is even TV grew a little bit year on year in terms of where customers look for validation of the answers that matter to them. And that’s a really important thing for you to think about. Because when we think about artificial intelligence, when we think about how it works with social or how it works with search,

It’s a synthesis engine. You know, it isn’t just a place. I’m going to pick all that up. I got to take a sip of water.

Ahem.

So when we think about artificial intelligence, it’s not just another place for people to get inspiration for the things they’re looking for. That absolutely happens. I want to be really clear. That is a thing that occurs.

What it also is, is it’s a synthesis engine. It is a place that brings together content from a variety of different sources and provides some context for your customers and provides some additional information for your customers. It helps them ask deeper and sometimes more meaningful questions that matter to them. But if you think about this for, you know, a minute.

recognize that where AI gets its information, where it gains its understanding from what you say on your website, it gets it from what you say on social posts, it gets it from what other people say about you on social media and in social posts and in ratings and reviews. And it gets that information from other third party mentions. So that could be PR, it could be…

you know, other kinds of press. could be other websites talking about you. It could be things like if you have an online travel agency or if there’s another kind of intermediary in your specific industry, mentions on those third party sites that tell the AI all about you and help the AI understand the content that confirms what it’s seeing in other places.

So social still absolutely matters. still a crucial component of what you do with your business because it provides human signals on top of things that maybe you said about yourself or I don’t know, maybe had an AI write about your brand.

Social provides human signals. It adds tone. It adds credibility. It adds consistency.

You know, when we think about search engine optimization and generative engine optimization, GEO seems to be the name folks are settling on these days. Obviously, we’re not optimizing around keywords. We’re helping machines understand who we are. And there’s fancy words, you know, when we think about things like entity relationships and entity graphs and the like that help connect.

the AI to your content and help make your content stand out or help your content be better interpreted, better understood by the AI. That’s really, really good. That’s really useful and something you need to think about. But we also have to recognize that artificial intelligence doesn’t replace social. It doesn’t replace your website. It doesn’t really even replace search. It learns from it.

I’m going to talk about this in a future episode, I Google just reported its earnings for 2025 and for Q4 of 2025 and had a monstrous year. was above $400 billion in revenue for the first time. Search ads grew 17% year on year, right? So they’re getting great growth here because customers are using those channels just as AI is.

all working as part of a whole in terms of how your customers understand your brand and your business and how they can actually find the products and services that work best for them. AI is a part of that for sure, but so is social. So is the experience your customers have with you so that they can tell a story about your brand and business on social media. So we need to think about

how we operate in this new world. I am still a big believer that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. It’s something I’ve talked about many times in the book and things along those lines.

We have to think about what we’re doing today with content. We’re not just publishing content. We are, that’s core, but that content creates signals. It creates signals that artificial intelligence can understand and interpret to learn about us.

that content creates signals in the social media. It helps customers understand us better when they come across us. And it might plant some seeds that when they’re talking about us on social, they’re talking about the things we’d like them to talk about, about our brand and our business.

Those signals have to represent what matters to our business, what we stand for, what benefits we provide to our customers. And it’s things like consistent positioning. Who are you and what do you stand for? It includes things like engagement and replies. When customers are talking about you on social, are you engaging with them? Are you commenting back? Are you part of a conversation?

or you’re just letting it happen to you. When customers are leaving reviews, the reviews and responses matter a ton. I said for years that when you were replying to a review on social media, weren’t, excuse me, replying to a review, you weren’t replying to a review for the reviewer. You were replying to a review for the person who read that review.

Well, now the person reading that review is an AI, right? The person is an artificial intelligence. So your response helps validate again the kinds of experience you offer your customers to the AI. I’m going to come back to that in one more place in just a moment. But signals look like consistent positioning, engagements and replies, reviews and responses, and of course, any third party validation that other people say about you.

Now I said I was gonna come back to reviews and responses. Again, I mentioned a moment ago, content is king, customer experience is queen.

Customer experience is where those reviews come from and those reviews are being ingested by artificial intelligence. So what the AI reads about you in those reviews is what it knows to be true about you just like was true for customers when they read those reviews. So it’s really important that you give the kind of customer experience that will cause people to write a good review about you or at minimum

least not write a bad review about you, right? Because if they write a bad review, what is the AI going to know about you? If they write a great review, what is the AI going to know about you?

And if you respond to those reviews, actually skip that, if you don’t respond to those reviews, what is the AI going to know about you? It’s going to know you’re the company that doesn’t reply to its reviews. You’re the company that doesn’t care about what people say about your brand of business.

Whereas if you do reply, it shows you care. It shows that those reviews matter to you. And that’s another signal that we need to pay attention to. The reason that this matters so much is because AI trusts patterns and it trusts consensus.

It knows what it sees about you everywhere. And if what it sees about you everywhere is people say, hey, this place is great. This business is amazing. They take care of their customers. They create great experiences. Guess what it’s going to say about you. Hey, this place is great. Hey, this place cares about its customers. Hey, this place provides great experiences. You see how those all connect.

If you’re in hospitality specifically, that’s why what it says about your brand, what it says about your property, online travel agency, or in reviews, or in social mentions, and what you say about yourself in your owned content on your website, all reinforce or contradict one another. And that’s true regardless of the business you’re in.

But if your website says one thing and your social media says another and your reviews say something else, the AI either doesn’t know who to trust or it’s going to believe the reviews. But I would bank on it’s going to be more of the former than the latter.

OK, so here’s how I would encourage you to think about this. We need to move away from asking the question which channel wins. We instead should say what story exists about our brand, about our business on the Internet? What story is the Internet telling our customers and their AI assistants and agents about our business?

It’s absolutely a good idea at this point to be doing the work to show up in AI. You want to be, you know, doing, setting up the right schema on your website and on your appropriate pages. You want to also make sure that you’re, you know, if you’re testing an MCP server or you’re feeding your data to an AI directly, that’s something worth testing. What we don’t want to do is chase the fastest

growing channels at the expense of the channels that continue to produce visibility and awareness and revenue for your business. And that includes search and social. What actually differentiates your brand and what will differentiate your brand and AI is clarity, consistency, and your humanity. You’ve heard me say many times, your brand is the prompt.

All of these things put together show why your brand matters more, not less in an era of AI.

If there’s one thing that I hope you take away from this, it’s this. AI does not make social media, search or content less important for your business. It makes clarity and consistency and customer experience more important.

The brands that show up when AI assistants and agents start making recommendations won’t be the ones that are chasing after every new channel.

They’ll be the ones that consistently show who they are, what they stand for, how they take care of their customers, and why they’re worth choosing, no matter where a customer starts their interaction or starts their journey with your brand or business.

If this episode has made you think about a brand you work on or someone on your team who’s wrestling with these questions, please do me a favor and send them a link. Make sure you tell them why it stuck with you too. That’s how these conversations spread. I want to remind you that you can find the show notes and the full archive of our episodes at TimPeter.com/podcasts.

And if you want to go deeper on this idea, my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Custom Requisition Beyond Big Tech, expands on how brands, platforms and AI intersect. You’ll find the links in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I really do appreciate you. And in the meantime, till we’re together again, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

“Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

I’ve never seen a single person with a tattoo for Marriott Bonvoy, the hotel brand’s “loyalty” program. Or, for that matter, for Hilton Honors (its loyalty program) or Wyndham Rewards (its loyalty program). Hell, I don’t have a tattoo for United Airlines MileagePlus, and I fly roughly 80,000 miles with the company every year.

But I’ve see a ton of folks with tattoos for Harley Davidson. And Fender guitars. And Disney. And Lego. And Nike.

Wouldn’t you think that more “loyal” customers would have tattoos for brands that depend on loyalty programs for their businesses? I know I would.

The fact is that loyalty often isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And, in the age of AI, that’s a huge problem. Because if your customers aren’t willing to ask for your brand by name, you might be in real trouble.

In this episode of the show, I take a look at:

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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: 16m 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 back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. I was honored to take part in a fireside chat at a hotel conference the other day, and at one point something I said got a much bigger reaction than I expected. I said that “I’ve seen a lot of Harley Davidson tattoos on people who love that brand. I’ve never seen a Marriott Bonvoy tattoo.”

First, some folks in the audience laughed. So, you know, that’s nice. I’m not gonna lie. I think it’s a funny line too. Then the room got really quiet though. Like pin-drop quiet. Curious, no?

Later, as I was signing books, person after person came up to me and said some version of the same thing. They said, “what you said really hit me because we spend so much time on loyalty, but we don’t really know our guests as human beings.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, this story isn’t just about hotels. Every company that deals with customers is going to face some version of this same story. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Because in a world where AI assistants and agents are starting to choose hotels on behalf of guests, where AI assistants and agents mediate the conversation between you and your customers, the difference between a brand people care about and a brand that’s just another option on a screen is going to matter more than ever.

Let’s dive in and look at this in detail.

So there was an amazing audience at this conference, an amazing group of people & hotel marketers and revenue managers and customer experience teams and reservations folks and IT people & just a wide array of people all focused on how they took care of their customers.

None of these people were, you know, “stuffy corporate types.” These are the folks who actually deal with customers with their guests when something goes wrong. They live in the trenches. Their job is to keep their customers happy every single day.

So I obviously I made the crack about Marriott Bonvoy and then I talked to people afterwards. And literally, to a person, people kept wanting to talk about how they’ve got all of these profiles, they’ve got all of these accounts, but they don’t really know what matters to the guests on a given trip, during a given stay, during a given interaction.

Does that sound familiar to you? Is that what it feels like when you’re talking to your customers? Because you’re not alone if that’s the case.

Here’s the dirty little secret about loyalty in hospitality and in airlines and in retail and lots and lots more. Most loyalty programs are really about points. They’re really about how many rewards your customer’s gonna get.

Real loyalty though, real loyalty to your brand. It’s about identity. It’s about customers who feel like you’re a part of them, who feel like you belong with them or not.

That Harley Davidson versus Bonvoy line isn’t a joke. It’s a warning.

People don’t get tattoos about discounts or perks or elite status. It’s just not a thing that actually makes them feel seen.

What do they tattoo? Who they believe they are.

In my book, Digital Reset, I share the story of how I realized that fact about brand tattoos. I used to go to this local brew pub where I lived, near where I lived & I didn’t live at the brew pub. I probably felt that way some days.

But, you know, on nice Sunday afternoons we might stop by. And there was a group of Harley Davidson enthusiasts who would pull in after enjoying their weekly ride. This was something they did all the time. The group were, generally speaking, contractors and construction workers and folks like that. And as I wrote in the book, “…one dentist with the heart of a rebel yearning to break free.”

But the thing is, that’s not a joke. He lived the concept of “live to ride, ride to live,” despite his otherwise, well, dentist-like demeanor. He didn’t like Harley Davidson. He lived Harley Davidson. This guy was a Harley Davidson rider, just like I’m a Fender guitar player or a Martin guitar player. Those speak to me.

And many hotel brands — hell, many brands overall — don’t give their customers a story about themselves. They give a transaction.

There are absolutely exceptions to this rule. Margaritaville Hotels and Resorts does this really well. 21C Museum Hotels, I think, does a great job of this. Very high end luxury hotels like the Ritz in London, the George V in Paris, or the Metropole at Monte Carlo, along with independent hotels like the Drover in Fort Worth, the Acoma House in Denver, and my friends and clients at the Wentworth Mansion, John Rutledge House Inn, King’s Courtyard, and Fulton Lane Inn all do this brilliantly.

There are loads of examples outside hospitality too of brands that customers adore even though some aren’t very large companies. All of which should signal that it’s possible to do this no matter who you are or how big your company is. And that should give you hope.

Because AI makes the fact that most businesses don’t do this, perilous for their long-term prospects.

Okay, so why is this perilous? Why is this perilous for long-term prospects?

Well, when an AI assistant or agent chooses your business, it chooses your company, it chooses your hotel if you’re a hotel, it’s not going to ask who has the best vibes. It’s going to ask which business meets criteria it can measure.

Your brand runs the risk of being reduced to nothing more than a price, a location, an availability of your product or service or a room, or the points that you offer. You get turned into a commodity. Your brand becomes invisible. All that matters then is some very specific, tactical, practical, measurable summary.

And that’s what scares me. Not AI, but what happens to brands that never build anything that people care about.

I’ll repeat a mantra you’ve heard me say before: “Your brand is the prompt.” There’s actually a follow-on to that that I never really say out loud because if you don’t hear this, you should. “Your brand is the prompt… or you won’t exist.”

That’s a huge, huge reality that you need to be conscious about.

The other way you will get found by AI assistants and agents is for your customers to teach them that you’re the one that they love. You’re the one that they want. You’re the one that makes them feel like who they believe they are, who they are meant to be.

Part of doing this well depends on having great data. That’s absolutely true. It matters for the AIs too.

But making this happen depends two big steps.

The first is you have to drive data fluency among your team. And by data fluency, I don’t mean the ability to read reports. I mean that your team uses data about your business and about your customers to curate great experiences for those customers. I’m gonna have more to say about this point in just a moment.

As part of that data fluency, it’s critical that you help your team — whether they’re on the front lines, in the C-suite, or anywhere in between — to understand that when they’re putting data to work, they really, really, really have to be very conscious of the difference between being cool and being creepy.

You’ve undoubtedly heard me talk about the creepy line before and why it’s so dangerous to get too close to that line, or worse, cross it.

The example I always use is this. Let’s imagine you’re visiting a resort with your favorite traveling companion. Doesn’t matter who it is, but you’ve opted in.

When you get to the resort, you opt in to receive updates w hile you’re at the property. And your first full day on the property, you get an alert for a two for one margarita special at the pool.

Now, when you say that, when you get an alert that pops up on your phone that says, “hey, we have two for one, a two for one special on margaritas,” do you think that’s cool or do think that’s creepy? Remember, you opted in to receive these alerts.

Most people, when I ask this question, will say, “that’s cool.” Occasionally, some will say, “no, no, that’s a little creepy.”

OK, I’m going to give you the same scenario again. You’ve opted in all that jazz. You say, “I want this. I want to hear this.” And then you get an alert that says, “Hey, we saw that you and your traveling companion each had seven margaritas last night. How about a Bloody Mary to help you recuperate from that decision?”

Is that cool or is that creepy?

Usually people find this one creepy… even though the business’s ability to execute that experience relies on essentially the exact same data as the first one: We know you like margaritas.

But you can see how the first one demonstrates data fluency in action, while the second one demonstrates that your company is full of creeps.

Only when you get that first part right does it make sense to do the second thing that you have to do, which is invest in technology integrations that put that data in front of your team so that they can demonstrate good judgment and demonstrate good value to your customers.

Now, I can’t speak to every industry on this next point, but I can say that hospitality’s biggest flaw — and biggest superpower — has always been its people. Hotels and resorts have notoriously been behind the curve on technology. The technology investments sometimes lag, particularly when you’ve got a lot of hotels to deal with in your company. We hide that limitation behind human beings. We’ve been using people to paper over broken systems and still provide great experiences to guests for as long as I can remember.

Other industries can actually learn a lot from hospitality in that regard because you need to invest in great people or you need to invest in great tech.

If you scrimp on both, that all the guarantees that you’re going to end up as a commodity that nobody loves… because nobody will ever get a great experience. Worse, they may get a terrible experience and tell all their friends and family and fans and followers on social media about it. And then you’ve hurt the next generation of consumers, the next generation of customers.

Then what are the AI tools going to know about you? That you do a really bad job. So that’s a lose, lose, lose proposition.

What gave me the most hope after this session at this event I attended was how many of the event attendees who came up to me at the book signing and said, “we want to do this better.” These weren’t cynical burnt out execs or disgruntled frontline folks. These were sharp, sophisticated business leaders who care so much about doing right by their customers.

And “leaders” in this case had nothing to do with their job title. It had everything to do with their commitment to creating brand experiences that their customers will always remember, that customers will ask for by name — and that customers will teach their AI assistants and agents to choose each and every time.

The future of your business is not about smarter machines. It’s about whether you use those machines to give your people more room to be human. I can’t guarantee your customers will rush right out and get their brand tattooed on their bodies. But you might just build a brand your customers will ask for by name. And that’s pretty damn good too.

If this episode made you think about someone on your team or a brand who you work with, send them a link and tell them why it stuck with you. That’s how these conversations spread. You can find the show notes for today’s episode and the full archive at TimPeter.com/podcasts.

If you want to go deeper on this, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, expands these ideas into a practical framework that you can apply. Links are in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate you doing that. This show would not happen without you. If you have ideas for things you’d like to hear about here on the show, make sure you drop me a line at podcast.timpeter.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo… And Why That Matters in the Age of AI (Episode 482) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, last year was not about incremental change. Nope. It was all about dramatic change. We all started off last year “playing with AI.” Today? The question is if and when AI assistants and agents will be the norm for every interaction we have with our customers.

What do we need to do to act accordingly? How do we create experiences that work whether we’re talking with human beings or with machines acting on behalf of those human beings? Most importantly, how do we build brands worth asking for by name when people might not see the brand until their AI picks it for them?

In this “Best of the Show” episode, I try to answer these questions and place them into an actionable framework you can use, right now, and make sure your customers & and your business & both get to enjoy the benefits AI can bring.

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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 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 back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. This week looks a little different than normal. I’ve been traveling and speaking like mad, and instead of pushing out something rushed or half baked, I wanted to make sure you still got something that actually moves the needle for you and your business. Because as you’ve seen, marketing is at a turning point.

AI is not just another trend. It is an entirely structural shift in how customers discover brands, how they make decisions, and how businesses like yours continue to grow. So today I’m bringing you one of the most important episodes. We’ve recorded a conversation that pulls together what changed, what matters, and what comes next for anyone responsible for growth, brand or customer experience.

This isn’t a conversation about tools. It’s about how to make sure your brand still gets chosen when AI assistance and agents do more of the choosing. Even if you’ve heard this before, give it another listen with fresh ears, because the future I was talking about then is already here. Let’s dive in.

If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?"

Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence?

And the big idea here is that this has not been a year of incremental change. This has been a year of decoupling.

We’re seeing the decoupling of finding from clicking. We’re seeing the decoupling of discovery from awareness. And we’re seeing the decoupling of our brands and our websites from the people who traditionally have used them.

Now over the course of the last year, we’ve done 33 episodes of this show, and I’m going to try as best I can to synthesize those 33 episodes down into one actionable framework that you can use going forward. I’m going to cover a bunch of stuff. All of the realities that we’re seeing in terms of what’s happening with gatekeepers, why I think it’s ever more important that your brand is the prompt and in particular, why your digital reset is your core path forward in 2026.

So let’s start with “Gatekeepers gonna gate." You’ve heard me say this a gazillion times on this show. Earlier this year, we talked about all of the different ways that Big Tech gets between you and your customers and all of the things that they do to build that relationship. Not for you, but for themselves.

As you know, Big Tech isn’t here to help you find customers. Big Tech is here to help themselves find customers. They are here to keep customers within their ecosystem. Yes, they are dependent upon ads, so there will have to be clicks at some point in the process if they are going to make some money.

What’s also true is that for many years when we think about search or we think about social, we’ve been in a reality where some of those clicks, some of the time, were free. Increasingly, we’re entering a world where every meaningful click for your business may be paid from these folks.

In episode 467, we looked at the real story of zero-click search. And if Google provides an answer via an AI Overview or within Gemini, or ChatGPT provides an answer, or Claude provides an answer, or Perplexity provides an answer, your blue link, your organic search result doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Those days are gone.

The reality is that you aren’t competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with the platform’s desire and need to keep the user. You’re competing with Big Tech itself.

Now, as you well know, that means that the cost of rented land is essentially going up. You’ve heard me say — you’ve heard lots of people over the years say — "don’t build your brand on rented land.” The reality now is that everything is becoming rented land.

We’re in a crazy new world and it’s just going to get crazier. We know that Google is already testing ad products. We know that ChatGPT has tested some and may again and we just should expect more of that.

We also know, as we discussed in episode 456 of the show, that we’re in a strange economy. Things might be tough in 2026. You can’t afford to pay a toll to Big Tech on every transaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 percent. It’s more expensive than you want to have to pay in an environment where you’re probably going to be competing for every last dollar and if every last penny.

And so the key question that I think we have to ask ourselves, regardless of which member of Big Tech we’re talking about, is if Google or Meta or ChatGPT or Amazon, whomever, Expedia, Booking.com, Yelp, Yext, OpenTable, right? Any of these folks. If they turned off your traffic tomorrow, would your business survive another day?

That’s the world we’re living in now and that’s the question you need to ask. If Google turned off your traffic tomorrow, how long could you survive?

To me, that was the aha moment of the year. And it’s why I’ve become so convinced that your brand is the prompt. In an AI world, the notion of generic search, the notion of unbranded search is dead.

If someone asked an AI for best hotel, the AI is going to choose the winner. You really don’t get a lot of say in that. If someone asked for a specific hotel, "Tim’s Hotel in Charleston," "Tim’s Hotel in Orlando," you are the only answer. That’s where you’re trying to get to.

We need to think about our brand as the insurance policy that sets us apart from everybody else. As I mentioned in episode 472, "brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing." Your brand is the only thing an AI cannot replicate. It’s the only thing it can’t answer in place of you, right? When somebody asks for you by brand, aure, the AI might hallucinate, but that’s going to tell the customer pretty quickly that that’s not giving them the answer they’re looking for.

The other thing is your brand is a mental shortcut for your customers. It forces the AI to surface your business. That becomes even more important when we think about agentic AI, something I talked about in episodes 466, something I talked about in episode 470. We’ve moved from talking about chatbots to talking about agents. We’re entering a world where AI isn’t just software and programs that talk. They’re software that does. They’re software that acts.

When an AI agent is shopping for your customer, your emotional branding may not work, but your authority does. The data you have about your customer, the data that helps you talk to what your customer’s needs are, does. Your content becomes so much more important, not just in terms of being distinct, though that’s important.

But it makes it important that your content actually answers the questions your customers have. In episode 449, I talked about the death of content marketing. And I said, know, AI will only kill content if your content is generic.

If an AI can write your content, maybe you don’t need to publish that content unless it’s answering a very specific question. Your content has to be a 24x7x365 salesperson and a 24x7x365 customer service rep. It has to answer the questions your customer has and many of those questions have to be about your values:

When we think about the digital reset and how that plays into that — and obviously this is something I talked about in episode 458, 461, 473 — your digital reset is the core of my new book and it’s something I spent the back half of the year talking about.

What you want to remember is that your reset isn’t about ignoring AI. It isn’t even about ignoring gatekeepers. It’s about bypassing them. It’s about thinking beyond them every chance you get.

And we’ve talked about this many, many, many times that what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to have content, customer experience, and data that allows you to connect with your customers directly.

So I’m actually going to flip these on their head for a moment because first we want to talk about data. If you don’t have a direct line to your customers, whether it’s email, whether it’s SMS, whether it’s snail mail to your customer, if you can’t talk to them directly, you don’t own your business. A gatekeeper does.

You also need to own the experience. If your website, if your app, if however your customer is connecting with you isn’t distinct and isn’t easy for them to use and doesn’t solve their problem, you’re never going to give them a reason to come back. They’re not going to remember you. Your site isn’t a brochure. It isn’t content just for content sake. It’s a utility. It solves a problem.

And it might be that the AI is what interacts with that site. But at a certain point, they may come to your site and the site needs to be something that’s so useful they’ll want to come back again or at least direct their AI to it the next time that they have a problem that you can solve.

You also want to make sure that it’s designed to capture data from the customer and give them a good reason to want to give you their data and continue the conversation. Hugely important.

You want to give them a reason to come to you that an AI cannot summarize in a paragraph. And of course, all of this has to do with owning trust. In an age of AI fakes, a deep fakes, of AI slop, humanity, the thing that sets you apart, is a premium product. It’s a thing that your customers will remember. You need to be not just known, you need to be loved. You don’t just need to be found, you need to be sought out. That’s crucial.

You’ve got to share your face. You’ve got to share your values. You have to tell them the why behind the what. Because that’s going to be crucial for customers saying not just, "help me find a thing," but “Help me find your thing. Help me find you."

It’s really about focusing on fundamentals, building a deep, meaningful, lasting relationship with your customers. As I said in episode 455, AI can’t save you from a bad strategy. This isn’t about looking for the ChatGPT prompt of the week. It’s about looking for how to make your customers’ lives better. It’s the only strategy that is truly future-proof.

Think of your favorite brands, ever. The brands you know and trust and love more than anything else. You don’t have to go ask an AI to help you find something like that. You already know them. You might tell your agent, go there, go get this for me from the people who I like. But you don’t have to ask the AI what the answer to the question is. You know the answer to the question. That’s what you want your customers to do with your brand too.

So 2025 was the year that we realized the era of SEO and social as we knew it is, if not over, certainly coming to an end. What takes its place is an era of brand autonomy, an era of brand differentiation and brand distinction and brands that customers ask for by name. Your brand is the prompt.

And I think there’s really three immediate actions as you go into 2026.

First, take a look at all of the places where you rely upon rented land today. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, it doesn’t matter if it’s Meta, it doesn’t matter if it’s TikTok, it doesn’t matter if it’s LinkedIn. If one of them were to change their algorithm tomorrow, how long would your business survive? You need to understand how vulnerable you are so that you can start to take the actions necessary to reduce the risk to your brand.

The next is that you need to focus your brand on being remembered, not just found. What are the things that set you apart in terms of your values, in terms of your face, in terms of your voice, in terms of your utility that genuinely differentiate you from anybody else in the marketplace?

You also need to think about your owned assets in detail. Are you investing in your email list? Are you investing in your SMS communications? Are you investing in ways to contact your customer directly and making them want to contact you directly? This isn’t about, you know, "hey, let’s scam them into giving us data they don’t want to give us." It’s about being a place they can’t wait to give us data that they want to talk to.

Invest in those and so that you can grow a connection with your customers over the long run.

We know that gatekeepers are gonna gate it’s what they do But they can only put those gates in front of people who don’t have direct relationships with their customers. It is time for you to stop being somebody on the wrong side of the gate. It’s time for you to be a destination unto yourself. It is time for you to be the brand that is the prompt. And if you do that all throughout 2026, I’m confident you’re going to do just fine.

 Thanks so much for taking some time to check out this episode. If there’s one thing that I want you to remember, it’s this: The brands that win will be the ones most worth choosing.

If this episode helped you see what’s changing in marketing, what’s really happening in marketing, please do me a quick favor and follow and subscribe to the show wherever you’re listening.

That way you won’t miss what’s coming next, and it will help more people like you find this conversation. If you’re watching on YouTube, please leave a comment, hit like, tell me what stood out for you. Those signals really do shape what we do here and help make the show a better experience for everybody.

We’ve got new episodes on the way with some practical ways to put these ideas we talked about today into action. Until then, stay curious, stay strategic, and be excellent to each other. I’ll talk with you soon.

The post AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

We’ve all known it was coming, but OpenAI finally announced its long-awaited introduction of ads into ChatGPT. Now, you can buy your way into ChatGPT’s chats so your brand can be seen by potential customers when they’re having conversations relevant to your business.

This is great, right? I mean, don’t you want to be the first company to sign up?

Maybe. But, maybe there’s a bigger picture that we need to look at too.

In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at:

And a whole lot more. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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: 17m 28s

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 back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. Well, it’s happening. ChatGPT is putting ads in its chats. We’ve kind of all known this was coming for a while. They’ve announced that they’re going to "start testing ads in the US for the free and Go tiers." That’s a quote. And that Go tier is a new plan that they’re offering for eight bucks per month. OpenAI also mentioned that their "Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads." That’s also a quote and more about that later.

We’ve all known that ads were coming to ChatGPT. The world of gatekeepers gonna gate essentially demands it. What we didn’t know was how those ads would work. And now we kind of do, at least in a few ways.

The question is, what do ads on ChatGPT mean for your business? Should you participate in these? Should you use these? What are these ads good for? And most importantly, how should you think about ads and artificial intelligence overall for your business?

This is episode 481 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

There are a few points that marketers should keep in mind for the moment when it comes to ads on ChatGPT. And I’m kind of going to go through these one by one. OpenAI says that, and this is a quote, "To start, we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation."

I’m gonna be abundantly clear. I think that that is a capital G, capital T, good thing. Aligning ads with relevant answers ensures that customers continue to have a positive experience with your brand and a positive perception of your brand. You’re not interrupting them, you’re not getting in the way of what they’re trying to do, you’re simply enhancing that experience. That’s great on a number of levels.

My colleague George Roukas pointed out on LinkedIn that customers at some point will be able to train their agents and AI assistants not to suggest given brands if they’ve had bad experiences with those brands in the past. That’s a huge deal. This obviously underscores my long-standing point that customer experience is queen.

It also shows why it’s so important that ChatGPT’s ads not give bad vibes to potential customers. For as much as I’ve talked about the downsides of negative reviews on social and other places online, I hadn’t really thought about how damaging it might be if your customers taught their agents never to buy from you, never to recommend you, ever.

So that’s a really great point, George. I really appreciate you bringing that one to the conversation. It’s definitely food for thought as you consider ChatGPT’s ads.

Now, another piece of good news is that I’ve always been a fan of search ads because they’re tied to what customers are looking for. Google didn’t make roughly $400 billion last year by ignoring what their customers literally asked them for. Google Ads is one of the most successful products in history simply because it actually solves a problem in a moment of need.

ChatGPT, following a similar approach, makes loads and loads of sense for them. It also has the potential to make loads and loads of dollars for OpenAI, too. I think it’s a really, really smart play.

So cool, that’s the good news portion of the program. I don’t want to say the next bit is the bad news portion. It’s that there are a lot of unknowns.

There is no indication yet of whether the ads in ChatGPT will link to your web presence or whether they’ll keep customers within the ChatGPT environment. I will tell you, I know which one I’m betting on long term.

You know, you may receive brand awareness, you may receive organic traffic or branded search volume from people finding you in these ads, but you still might not get many clicks or, you know, any clicks. Time will tell if they’re going to limit these solely to businesses connected via ChatGPT’s apps and whether that’s going to happen at launch or whether that’s going to happen in the future. I’m not gonna have much else to say on this one until we see how the ads work in practice, but you can bet I’m going to be watching.

Speaking of, ChatGPT has stated a number of principles around how they believe ads should work as part of their environment and why it matters so much to them to maintain user trust.

I think that’s great. I genuinely believe in this. And I believe them. Just like I believe that Google honestly meant “Don’t be evil” back when they used to say that. You know, keep OpenAI’s words I just said a moment ago in mind. “To start,” they said.

Keep that mind. This is a test. They don’t know how ads will work for users in practice, maybe not even as much as we do. It’s tough to predict too much about what you should or should not do in terms of their ads because they don’t really exist yet. They’re announced, but we haven’t seen them. What their ads product will look like when it launches and what it will look like 90 days later could be radically different. I’m going to bet it will be.

So you can bet I’m going to review what they’re actually doing maybe 30 days, 60 days and 90 days after launch to see whether any of that has changed. To say nothing of what might happen six months down the road or a year down the road

I have a pretty, pretty high degree of confidence that if ChatGPT’s ads don’t satisfy advertisers’ demands for traffic or contribute meaningfully to ChatGPT’s bottom line, they’ll almost certainly make sure those ads are featured much more prominently.

Now, it took a long time for Google’s ads to become as prominent as they are today. If you do a Google search, they’re all over the place. When they first started, they kind of appeared off to the side. I also expect that ChatGPT’s ads will evolve a lot faster than Google’s did. They’re competing in a much more cutthroat environment. There’s way, way, way more skin in the game today than there was 20 years ago or 15 years ago.

One big takeaway though is that you can’t really think of what’s happening here in terms of absolutes.

This undoubtedly will be a rapidly-evolving environment, one in which OpenAI has almost as much to learn as you do about how customers will use these. If there was ever a scenario where you want to test and learn and then test again, this is going to be that one.

I don’t know that there’s much of a first mover advantage in this case. Instead, I suspect that the one where folks learn and adapt fastest are the people who will see the greatest benefit.

Speaking of learning and adapting, I want to point out that that’s a huge component of what we help companies do here at Tim Peter & Associates. You can drop me a line at [email protected] if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you do that too.

I also talk about how your business can adapt and learn quickly in my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can find Digital Reset on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org.

Now getting back to the key points of what’s going on with ChatGPT and ads, don’t forget that Google is also testing ads within AI Mode, AI Overviews, and later this year, Gemini. They’ve announced all of that.

Ads in AI, aren’t going to be limited to ChatGPT, in other words. Google is going to be a player here too, and I expect they will be a really, really big player.

According to SimilarWeb, Google is steadily stealing market share and mine share from ChatGPT. It’s no secret that I think their deal with Apple and experience with advertising as a product, which I covered pretty extensively in last week’s show, positions Google for much better long-term success than ChatGPT does.

I also think that ChatGPT’s origins as a nonprofit entity hurt it. I’ve heard from a number of sources, I’ve talked to a bunch of people, that ChatGPT’s vision of commerce is not terribly focused or complete.

In one case, I heard from an executive e-commerce company that had conversations with OpenAI that were super frustrating from both sides. The discussions kept tripping up over relatively simple things because the OpenAI team simply didn’t have enough commercial experience. They were kind of stuck on how to actually give money and get money from the people they were talking to.

Now that’s absolutely a solvable problem for open AI. The question in the near term is how much of that is merely that they need to add talent and how much of that is its culture being too “science project-y” or “non-profit oriented” to fix quickly.

Just keep in mind that Google does not have that problem, not in any way, shape, or form. We know that’s true.

Google knows how to make money from this stuff. There’s lots of evidence of this, apart from just their $400 billion in revenue.

Take hotels, for an example. Google wrote in a blog post, something that they’re testing right now, they said, “just describe what you’re looking for to compare different flights or hotels and brown schedules, prices, room photos, amenities and reviews. You’ll be able to follow up and refine your options. And then once you’re ready, you can quickly complete the booking with the partner of your choice.” The blog post continued, there’s a quote, “we’re already working with partners, including Booking.com, Choice Hotels International, Expedia, IHG Hotels and Resorts, Marriott International, and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts to make this possible.”

That seems like a pretty big deal, no? And it illustrates that Google already has, a lot of these partnerships in place today. They’re in a much better position, I think, than ChatGPT is.

Normally, this is the point in the show where I outline a strategy around how you would use this new cool thing we’re talking about, like ChatGPT’s ads. In this case, though, I’m going to be really transparent. That feels premature. It feels early.

Again, for starters, the product isn’t fully live yet. Anything that’s too specific about, you must do this or you must do that will likely prove false eventually, possibly sooner than later.

Instead, I’d encourage you to take a step back and think about ads on ChatGPT as it fits into the big picture.

ChatGPT’s ads will undoubtedly offer you a great opportunity to explore reaching new customers. You can use our “Core and Explore” methodology, something I’ve talked about before, and I will link to that in the show notes so you can refresh your memory.

The other thing I want you to think about is that ads cost money. Now, I don’t mean that to be flip. Remember organic search though? Wasn’t it better when customers found your brand for free? Wasn’t it better when you didn’t have to pay for every customer? While it’s clearly a positive that ChatGPT is offering new ways for customers to find your business, to find your brand, it’s even better when they search for you by name, when they ask for you by name. Your mantra long-term still needs to be that “your brand is the prompt.”

Building a brand that customers ask for by name has to be at the core of your digital reset. Wyman Hawkins said brilliantly on my LinkedIn post, quote, “The ad mechanics will change. The need to be asked for by name won’t.”

If you’re chasing customers on ChatGPT or any other AI solely using ads, you’re simply trading one gatekeeper for another.

So as exciting as it is that ChatGPT is starting to offer ads, maybe we don’t want to go too far down that path without also building a brand that our customers ask for by name.

I’ll keep an eye on ads in ChatGPT and update you once you know more. I would encourage you to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts so you can stay up to date too. I’ll also remind you, you can find this episode, episode 481, and subscribe at timpeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcasts. I hope you’ll do that.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going. We all get smarter the more we have a chance to chat about this stuff.

If you’re looking for something new to read, mentioned it a little earlier in the show, but I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate that.

I want to thank you so much for listening this week and every week. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Apple just signed a billion-dollar deal to have Google’s AI power Siri and other AI experiences on its devices. This is a huge blow to OpenAI. It’s also fairly meaningful for your business too.

Why is that? What does the Apple/Google AI deal mean for your business?

In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at:

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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: 18m 07s

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.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show.

You may have seen the news that Apple has signed a deal to have Google provide AI capabilities for Siri and its devices. As New York Magazine put it, “Apple is buying an AI strategy from Google.”

And I posted on LinkedIn about why this is really, really bad news for OpenAI and ChatGPT. But this isn’t a story about Apple or Google or OpenAI or anyone else, really. It’s a story about your brand and your business and why this matters. Why? What makes this deal matter to you?

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 480 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

My first reaction when I saw the Apple/Google AI news was that OpenAI, the folks that make ChatGPT, is screwed. And let’s be clear, I still think that, by the way. It’s just not the most important part of the story. To get to the most important part of the story though, takes a little bit of setup. And here’s why.

I have argued for a while that OpenAI is in big trouble. OpenAI and Google, along with others, can only drive adoption of their core AI technologies by offering customers useful capabilities, getting those capabilities into customers’ hands, and then finding a way to make revenue and profits from that.

Those are the three legs of the stool anytime you offer a product or service: utility, distribution, and monetization. ChatGPT clearly provides utility. But its distribution and monetization plans have been, well, to put it mildly, lacking for some time.

I talked about this a few episodes ago, which I’ll link to in the show notes, but that’s why they have introduced a browser and they’re talking about making physical devices. They need a way to put their tools in more customers’ hands, sometimes literally.

The deal that Google and Apple have just announced absolutely destroys one of their best paths forward for distribution and monetization, which would have been to develop a deep partnership with Apple. Google has taken that away.

Clearly Gemini was always going to be the default on Android devices, right? Google simply wasn’t going to use someone else’s AI on their hardware. Now Gemini is going to be the default on Siri and more importantly, more broadly on iPhones and Macs and AirPods and Apple watches and Apple’s ecosystem overall.

Being the default matters. There’s a reason that Google pays Apple over $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. That’s how they ensure that customers use their products on Apple devices. People use defaults way more than we’d like to think. Safari is one of the top browsers in the world because it’s the default. Apple Mail is one of the top email tools. And even Apple Maps gets more use than you might expect. Regardless of what the stories tell you, there’s a lot of folks out there using Apple Maps.

I’d originally assumed that being the default was so important that Google was going to pay Apple to be the default. Apparently not though. According to some of the stories I’ve seen, Apple’s going to pay Google about a billion dollars.

And while that might sound like a lot of money, Fast Company’s Mark Wilson put it best. He said “Apple just straight up robbed Google.”

Wilson continues by saying that,

”…increasingly, AI is a commodity. That’s one reason that, for Apple, this deal with Google is a steal. While headlines focus on the shocking nature of Google-powering Siri, it’s a fact that I suspect most iOS users will forget about in day-to-day use as they encounter more and more touchpoints of ‘Apple Intelligence.’”

I completely agree.

I’ve been saying for some time that AI isn’t a product all by itself. Instead, it’s more like the internet or social media. It’s an enabler that makes other products or services better.

Apple’s revenues already are around $400 billion. And now it’s going to have even better AI-powered products for the low, low price of one-quarter of 1% of its annual revenues. That is dirt cheap.

Even better for Google — forget the billion dollars that they’re going to get from Apple — is that they already have a way to pay for this.

Google prints money. Their Ads platform is one of the all-time great revenue generation machines in history. It’s turned them into a company valued at more than $4 trillion. That’s trillion. With a T. That’s an astonishing amount of money, the highest market capitalization for any company ever.

Now Google’s introduction of AI to consumers and their use of AI within their Ads platform simply make that machine, that revenue generation machine of theirs, even more effective, even more valuable. They’re already starting to add personalized ads into AI so they can get even more money here.

Yes, it’s for the user’s benefit. If we have to see ads, I would argue we’re absolutely better off seeing ads we’re interested in

What’s also true is that we’re more likely to click on ads that we’re interested in and drive more revenue for Google. These guys did not get to a $4 trillion valuation by mistake. Again, they know how to turn traffic into money.

And as I’ve already said, this is a huge blow to OpenAI in the longer term. And that’s why this matters to your business.

Because this is another example of gatekeepers gonna gate in action. OpenAI is getting shut out by gatekeepers cutting off its access to customers. That’s what gatekeepers do. They’ve done it to brands large and small for years. Of course they were going to gatekeep the next company trying to gain access to their club.

That’s what they do to you too. Your brand is almost certainly downstream of these gatekeepers. It probably has been since many of these folks came into existence.

You’re well aware that Google and Apple make money by standing between you and your potential customers and charging you for access to those folks via ads or their app stores, the revenue share that they get in the app stores. That $20 billion that Google pays Apple for search and the billion dollars that Apple is giving back to Google for its AI doesn’t come from their pockets. It comes from yours.

Well, what should you do about this? If this is the case, what should you do? As I’ve argued in my book, Digital Reset and other places, your best path to success is to make sure your brand is the prompt.

Your job is to build a brand that your customers ask for by name, no matter which AI tool they use. I might be wrong about which AI platform your customers will end up using for the long term and which one will succeed or which ones will succeed in the marketplace. OpenAI has a ton of smart people working there. Maybe they’ll find a way to bypass big tech gatekeepers like Apple and Google, and maybe they’ll end up on top.

What’s also true is that you need your customers to ask for you and find you. Gatekeepers be damned.

Remember our core framework that says “content is king, customer experience is queen, data is the crown jewels.” That’s how you build a brand your customers seek out and choose again and again and again. The alternative is to pay again and again and again to talk to your own customers. At which point, this isn’t just a problem for OpenAI. It’s your problem too.

Content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels, all start with a focus on your customer. Your content needs to address your customer’s needs and how you solve those needs every single time. Think about these questions. I’ve shared these with you before, but think about:

If your content isn’t answering those questions for your customers regularly, it’s not going to show up in AI answer engines and it’s not going to do its job when and if customers come to your website or interact with you on other channels.

Speaking of other channels, you need to think about your content from a content distribution perspective too. To paraphrase my good friend Mark Schaefer, great content doesn’t work if no one ever sees it.

Well, how do you get your content in front of your customers? In the age of AI, content distribution, weirdly, should start with your CRM. Your job is to show up in the places your customers already ask for content, their email, their text inbox, their social messaging inboxes.

That means that your website then has to focus not just on closing the sale when people show up, but getting customers to sign up to hear from you directly. In an ideal world, everyone who visits your website would sign up for your email and would sign up for your SMS. So think about your website, not just in terms of selling your products, but your conversions should be also around encouraging customers to connect directly with you via email, via SMS, or via social follows. Ideally, all of those.

Look at the chat on your site and your website search too, so that you’re providing the same experience customers increasingly expect when they connect with any company anywhere.

Now, of course, your own website is still going to be a place where your content lives, but you need to make sure your content is available on social media for customers too, given how frequently customers spend their time there. It might be Instagram, it might be YouTube, it might be TikTok, it might be LinkedIn. The key point is that your content has to be where your customers can see it.

Most importantly, you need to ensure that your customers tell a great brand story on your behalf when they’re connecting with friends and family and fans and followers on social media too. And that’s why customer experience is queen.

I want to ask you a question. Have you ever had a great experience? I’m sure you have, probably somewhere along the way. Did you tell anyone about it? Probably a couple folks, right? Most people do.

Okay, now think back to your most recent bad experience with a company. Did you tell anyone about it? Of course you did. If you’re like most people, you tell everyone about it.

Customers tell their friends and family and fans and followers about experience that they’ve had good or bad — and especially the bad ones — in almost every social opportunity. It happens online, it happens in group chats, it happens in face-to-face and sometimes even random casual encounters. You know, if you’re at standing in line at the coffee shop or waiting to board a plane, I guarantee either you’re telling somebody about a story you’ve had with a brand or they’re telling you about a story they’ve had with a brand. I mean, if you’ve got a good story to tell, you know you’re going to tell it.

That’s why it’s so crucial that you make sure the story they’re telling, that your customers are telling, about your brand is a positive one. That’s why customer experience matters so much. It’s why customer experience is queen.

Last, but by no means least, pay attention to your data. Obviously, we’re starting to see shifts in traffic from AI or AI browsers. We’re seeing traffic show up in all kinds of ways. And to understand where this is coming from, we’re paying increasing attention to a metric that we call prompt brand equity.

Does your brand show up when your customers prompt AI? Are customers asking for you by name?

It’s so important that you start keeping track of how often your brand is cited by AI answers, both when they’re asking for you by name, but also when they’re having high intent discussions without referencing anyone’s brand.

The frequency with which your brand is cited, sourced, or mentioned within an AI-generated answer and the context it’s mentioned in is hugely important for your business. Prompt brand equity helps you measure how often the AI thinks your brand is a relevant answer for a given customer’s needs.

And obviously, it builds true equity in your brand with those customers going forward.

So yes, the AI deal that Apple and Google just signed matters a ton for Apple, Google, OpenAI, and frankly, the rest of the AI ecosystem. But what it signals about how gatekeepers go to gate matters even more to your business.

Gatekeepers gonna gate is the core argument in my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Gatekeepers are always looking for new ways to charge you and OpenAI and everyone else for access to your customers. Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen and your digital reset is all about ensuring that it doesn’t.

Remember that content is king, customer experience is queen, data is the crown jewels, and that your brand is the prompt. And you’ll have a pretty good shot at succeeding, no matter what happens with Big Tech.

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

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 480, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate that.

Finally, I want to thank you so much for listening. I know I say this just about every week, but this show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

ChatGPT has opened up its app platforms to all businesses. In general terms, that’s a Good Thing. Seriously. The question is whether this general good thing is specifically good for your and your business.

In this episode of the podcast, host Tim Peter looks at ChatGPT’s apps and addresses the following questions:

All that and more in this episode of the show. Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of “Digital Reset”

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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 19m 17s

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.

You probably saw the news right before the holidays that ChatGPT has opened up its apps to, well, essentially everyone. I think that this is a good news story generally and one that also illustrates where we’re likely to head long term. Because I’m really comfortable that we’ve all seen this movie before.

In my view, we’re definitely headed for another gatekeepers gonna gate reality. Why? Well, that’s what this episode is all about.

I’m going to look at ChatGPT apps, as well as the future landscape of apps in Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and talk a bit about what those mean for your business today and longer term.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 470 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

So yeah, ChatGPT now lets developers submit apps to their platform. That is almost certainly a good news story. It’s certainly far more good news than bad. It’s very cool. It levels the playing field for most businesses. One of the biggest problems in my opinion of the launch of apps in ChatGPT was that it really favored large companies. It was limited to large companies. And it heavily skewed towards intermediaries like Zillow, OpenTable, Expedia, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, DoorDash, Instacart, and Spotify. Y’know, gatekeepers of some size or other.

But by opening apps up to the world — and of course with moderation to ensure that your app meets their various guidelines — now apps in ChatGPT aren’t just for Expedia and Booking and Zillow and the like any longer. There are some downsides, and I’m gonna come back to that shortly, and more importantly, what you can do about those downsides.

But overall, this is a really good thing. This is really, really beneficial and puts you, at least in theory, on an even playing field with some of the biggest players in many different verticals.

Another huge benefit is that it’s almost always great when potential gatekeepers are forced to compete with one another. You have more opportunity to show up and usually have lower cost to do so, at least in the short time, when there two or more big players in a space.

So having ChatGPT provide all these different apps puts a little bit of pressure on Google in some ways that could make your costs lower there in the near term.

When ChatGPT limited the apps to its partners, it automatically positioned them as gatekeepers. And that’s not great. Why? Well, say it with me now: Gatekeepers gonna gate.

One of the reasons that Google and Facebook and Amazon have gotten away with treating businesses and advertisers and sometimes computers like crap for so long is that there really isn’t another significant player in the areas they work in to keep them from treating people like crap.

Back in the dark ages of hospitality and commerce, the very early 2000s, Expedia was a bit of a bully to hotels in the United States because Expedia simply didn’t have a credible competitor to prevent that from happening. When Booking.com showed up in the US, though, suddenly Expedia became a much better partner and the overall ecosystem has been healthier for it over the long term.

And of course, both Booking and Expedia really became great partners once Google became a major player in the hospitality value chain. So “yay, competition!”

One final positive for apps existing is that they provide marketers and e-commerce folks and businesses overall a much better path to make sure that they show up on ChatGPT. There will be less uncertainty, less guesswork around how you can actually appear on ChatGPT. A lot less smoke and mirrors and I would assume a lot less BS around the kinds of, “you have to post on Reddit three times a day to show up” nonsense we’ve all seen far too often over the last year or two.

In short, apps on ChatGPT are a positive development overall, in my view.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud, right? We’d be foolish to overlook the potential downsides here and what they mean for your business.

The biggest downside is that early adopters will probably get some quick wins, but longer term discovery is going to be a challenge for everyone.

Why? I’m glad you asked.

Let’s say that some tiny share of the 200 million actively maintained websites in the world, maybe 1-2%, deploy MCP servers to expose their content and data to apps in ChatGPT and to other AI agents or answer engines. For comparison’s sake, by the way, there’s roughly 2 million apps in Apple’s App Store and maybe 3 to 4 million in Google’s App Store. So, you know, 1-2%.

That two to four million apps matters. Remember when I said that ChatGPT is going to moderate the apps allowed into its app store? There is no universe where that moderation is anything other than automated. There will be far too many apps for human moderation to be the norm. That’s what Apple and Google do today. And I’m going to come back to that in just a second.

I think this is going to be true for pretty much all the AI answer engines, by the way. This isn’t just about apps and ChatGPT. Today there is a community maintained MCP Registry and some private MCP registries to find MCP servers so that, you know, various tools can find MCP your servers.

But what happens when the number of servers scales up to the single digit millions, if not the tens of millions? Human moderation starts to break once you get past a certain point.

Take Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia has about 50 million articles. They are also the first to acknowledge that many of those 50 million articles are pretty low quality and they have almost 300,000 editors. Okay, in practice, there’s only a few thousand who are super active, but still it illustrates the problem.

You don’t want a whole bunch of low quality crap if you’re ChatGPT or if you’re Perplexity or if you’re Claude. You don’t want apps coming through that just aren’t going to be all that good. There is simply no way where ChatGPT or any other serious player lets that happen with apps on their platform. No way, no how, nuh-uh. I’m 100% confident on that one.

So how are apps or MCP servers going to get discovered? Well, the likely volume strongly implies that there’s going to have to be some sort of search engine, an MCP server search engine, an AI answer engine app search platform. And that implies another gatekeeping opportunity.

ChatGPT is going to become that by default for apps on its platforms. They have to, or the experience is gonna be total garbage and people won’t use ChatGPT. We just know that. I’m pretty confident the same is going to happen for any other AI platform that offers apps. And those that don’t offer apps create an opportunity for a new MCP search engine to fill that role.

In short, each of these scenarios creates a new opportunity where gatekeepers gonna gate.

Also, there’s a lot of money to be made here for those who step up. mean, ignore Google for a second. We know how much Google makes by finding the right answer to the question. And even if you only look at Apple’s App Store, Apple has noted in many press releases over the years that they have facilitated over $1.3 trillion for their App Store partners. While they don’t break out their App Store revenue, they don’t tell you exactly how much they make, their services revenue, of which the App Store is a big component, is somewhere over $100 billion per year. That’s not nothing. That’s a pretty big deal.

Being found in app stores is a reality unto itself too. There’s a whole category of app store optimization techniques that exist for Apple and Google’s app stores. If you’re not familiar with these, they’re like SEO, but for apps. If you want your ChatGPT app to be found, at some point, you’ll undoubtedly have to learn how to optimize for their algorithm once it exists.

Or you’ll have to pay them for visibility.

Or, and hear me out here, you’ll have to convince customers to search for your app by name.

Probably all of the above, if we’re being honest.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

I don’t actually think I’m making a bold prediction. I think this reality is inevitable. Now, usually in the show, this is the part where I tell you why I could be wrong or what my confidence level is or how much would I bet on this specific thing coming to pass. And I fully recognize that when you have a hammer, sometimes everything looks like a nail. So sure, I suppose that I could be applying my thinking that I’ve done in other situations to a fundamentally different situation.

I just don’t think that’s likely in this case though. I feel pretty good about this one.

And the reason I feel pretty good is because this is a fundamental pattern of information products, just being applied in a brand new context. As I talked about in my book, Digital Reset, the world has gone through this same pattern again and again and again. Libraries and card catalogs, phone numbers and phone books, the internet and search engines, beings and social networks, mobile phones and app stores, and so on.

Once a sufficient volume of information exists, books, phone numbers, websites, human beings, apps, what have you, the problem isn’t that the information you want isn’t out there. The problem isn’t that the information you want doesn’t exist. Instead, the problem is finding the information you want and, of course, for businesses, for marketers, is being found among all the other choices that exist. That’s the actual problem.

ChatGPT apps and MCP servers are all simply sources of information. So the same pattern is going to apply. We’re obviously not there yet. mean, ChatGPT only announced this a couple of weeks ago. But at some point, and probably sooner rather than later, making sure that your app or MCP server gets found by whomever you want to find it is going to be your single biggest challenge of making these work for your business. Just like SEO or just like App Store optimization if you’re doing that.

Most commercial platforms tend to solve for this longer term problem, you know, by charging for preferred placement. Again, sound familiar? Gatekeepers gonna gate, man, that’s what they do. And they’re going to drive up your cost of being seen.

So the question I would be asking right now, the question I am asking right now, is what do we do about all of this? What should you do about all of this? Well, first, you probably should be thinking about whether a ChatGPT app makes sense for your business.

Spoiler, I’d argue that it does, not least because you’ll need an MCP server for a ChatGPT app or essentially any other AI answer engine out there that you want to show up on. An MCP server is rapidly going to become table stakes. Maybe some technology surpasses it in the longer term, but today that is the game.

Second, I would take some time and review ChatGPT’s app store guidelines. I’ll link to them in the show notes and this shouldn’t surprise you given what I’ve been talking about, but they look remarkably comparable to existing app store guidelines for Apple and for Google. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Third, and most importantly, you’ve also got to work on making your content and experiences ones that your customers will seek out by name. I call it “your brand is the prompt.” Otherwise, you’re just moving towards a world where you’re going to have to pay ChatGPT or whatever AI tool your customers prefer for your brand and business to get seen, just like we did with search, just like we did with the internet, just like we did with, I don’t know, just about everything else that’s happened over the last 20 years.

So maybe this time we plan ahead to make sure we don’t have to pay for every customer. Maybe this time we start building a brand our customers seek out intentionally where customers ask for you by name. That’s how your cost of acquisition goes down longer term. That’s what I mean when I say “your brand is the prompt in the age of AI.” That’s why “your brand is the prompt” matters.

So to sum all of this up, I think that ChatGPT apps opening up to everyone is a Good Thing for brands and businesses that want customers to connect through ChatGPT. I think it’ll also likely push other AI engines, answer engines to do something similar. And it’s almost certainly worth doing the work and testing for your business.

But it’s not going to answer all of your prayers and guarantee that customers or guests or clients find and choose you every single time. In fact, what it does is it ups the ante on making sure your brand is the prompt. If you don’t, you’re putting yourself right back in the same position you’ve been in for years.

So maybe let’s not do that.

The time to act is now. I’m confident you can succeed at this. And I can’t wait to see how you do.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, which is episode 479, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives in today’s topic in even greater detail. Make sure you pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate your support.

Finally, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I say that all the time, but it really, really matters that you’re here. I’ll be back with a new episode next week and until then please be well, be safe and as always be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Anyone who’s read my writing or listened to the show knows that I’m generally bullish on the potential benefits of AI for customers and brands. Where I’m far less bullish is when “experts” tell you that AI will prevent you from building meaningful connections between your brand and your customers. Whether they mean to or not, they’re describing a world where every brand becomes a commodity. And, frankly, I simply refuse to go along. That view is simply nonsense. Brands exist so that customers can easily identify the products and services they know and trust. That was true 100 years ago. It will be true 100 years from now.

Or, at least, it will be if we do the work, right now, that will teach customers to ask for us by name. Getting that right depends on building brands customers care about, that they’ll love, that they’ll demand. Put simply, in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Why is brand “the only thing” in the age of AI? Why does it matter? And what can you do to ensure customers ask for you by name?

That’s what this “Best of the Show” episode is all about. Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 15m 49s

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.

The single biggest story in marketing and customer acquisition this year has been artificial intelligence. That’s no surprise for anyone listening to this show. What I think is a shock and a surprise, though, is that more people don’t recognize why AI makes building your company’s brand more important than ever.

AI is already disrupting relationships between customers and your brand. Right now. Today. And the typical advice around what you should do is to make sure you show up in the answer engines.

That’s fine. You should do that. It’s also not enough.

Let me state this right up front: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning next year — and beyond! — is to build a brand your customers want to ask for by name. Which is why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Customers use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok,MetaAI, Google Gemini — and, more critically, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode every single day. These tools lead your customers to products and services and brands that meet their needs. Ideally, the products, services, and brands these AI platforms offer are yours. Unfortunately, far too often, they’re not.

The discussion of where what that means for your business often misses a crucial point. Because many of the people talking about this shift to AI and this shift to your customers using AI for shopping and buying and engaging with brands as though the only way to win on AI is to appear in AI — solely, purely.

You want to appear there, of course. But it can’t be your entire strategy. We can’t be all in with AI the expense of your website, your CRM, and your other owned channels or experiences. We can’t be all-in with AI at the expense of building a brand that customers are willing to ask for by name.

How did Google get so dominant? How did Facebook? How did Amazon? Because for many businesses, they focused on appearing on those channels without working equally hard to get customers to engage directly.

I refuse to concede this point. Again: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning is to build a brand your customers want to ask for by name.

In this Best of the Show, I looked at why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Let’s dive in.

Intermediaries in the digital space are nothing new. I grew up in the hospitality industry and watched intermediaries like Expedia and Booking(.)com get between our guests and our hotels all the time. They were the first big tech that I really experienced. They were the intermediaries that inspired the original research that led to my book, Digital Reset. I then watched these digitally-native powerhouses slowly lose share to the real Big Tech players like Google and Facebook or Instagram, which only drove the point home further. The lion’s share of Booking and Expedia’s marketing spend every quarter goes to Google and to social media like Instagram or Facebook.

Quick aside:, the way, Kayak and Trivago’s core business is known as the travel industry as Metasearch. They display rates from a wide array of sources so that travelers can see how much they’d pay based on where they book their reservation. I’m deliberately not referring to Facebook as "Meta" to avoid confusion with the kinds of metasearch offered by Kayak and Trivago, which are owned by Booking(.)com and Expedia, respectively.

Okay, so sure, AI is a different kind of platform. It’s a different kind of threat. It might be the first and only place your customers go to find what they need.

But it’s not just a threat, it’s also an opportunity.

In fact, I’d suggest that the interaction with AI is starting to look more like the interaction with phones than the interaction with, for instance, search. Your customers have a lot of apps on their phones. And many of these apps allow for them to search for different things. They have Google. They have Amazon. They have Temu. They have Shein. They have Safari or Chrome. They have YouTube. They have Instagram or TikTok—or I guess if they’re over 45, Facebook. They have Spotify. They might have Expedia or Booking(.)com.

The point is that they choose the app that works best to find what they need in that moment. But they don’t start by opening the app. They start by picking up their phone.

Consumers increasingly are treating AI like it’s a device. It’s where customers start before they choose the app or before they buy. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that ChatGPT calls its integrations with other companies "apps," not integrations. They’ve partnered with companies like Expedia and Booking and Zillow and Spotify and Canva and Figma to offer apps within the ChatGPT experience.

They’ve also launched its browser, Atlas, and it’s why they’re working on physical devices. They want to be the first place people go. This is why Perplexity has launched its Comet browser that, to quote the company, "works for you." Note the emphasis. It’s doing the work, not you, not your customer. The AI—or if you’d rather call it this, the agent that’s built into the browser—does the work. And there are others that are coming.

These companies want and need to be the first place that customers start, every time, if they have any hope of replacing Google or Apple as the first place customers start every time. As I mentioned in the intro, that’s our opportunity: to be the place that people ask for when they pick up that phone when they pick up that app, when they look into the device, when they start the conversation with AI.

That’s why AI will only hurt your relationship if you let it.

The key to winning is to build a brand that your customers will ask for by name. I’ve said it another way in the past. I’ve said that the brand is the prompt. The last thing you want is for AI to turn your brand into a commodity. The last thing you want is to let AI turn your brand into a commodity, differentiated only by price or sales channels. That’s just not a way to win. You’ve heard it said for years, "don’t build your brand on rented land." And this just isn’t that much different from that perspective.

I mean, sure, we’ll use these tools to increase the reach and awareness of our brands. But we cannot let AI replace our brands. Keep repeating to yourself that in the age of AI, "brand isn’t everything, it’s the only thing."

We should be thinking of these tools as ways to build our brand, not replace them. Look at current customer behaviors. Customers ask AI questions, then come directly to your website by typing in the URL or by searching on your brand name. Obviously, over time, that’s going to change some.

First, more features, more integrations, more apps within AI platforms will allow your customers to buy or book or connect with your sales team without leaving that experience. Second, as agents emerge, the agents themselves will be able to buy or book or connect with your sales team without the human being being involved all that much, or at least they won’t bother them until the very end of the process.

Our job as marketers and e-commerce leaders then is to make sure that they’re either choosing to buy or book or connect with our sales team on our owned web channels or to make sure they’re asking for us by name when they buy or book or connect with sales teams within the AI platforms. That should consume almost all of your energies right now, driving that behavior now. Because it’ll be much harder later to change customer behaviors once they get accustomed to bypassing you to just working through the AI.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before. We know what it looks like when customers buy through a third party and then we have to spend the time and energy and expense to get them to choose us directly. That is super hard. So maybe let’s not do that part.

Now, it’s entirely fair for you to ask, okay, how do you get your customers to ask for you by name?

First, you’ve got to build direct demand, on connecting with customers now. Push your loyalty and CRM. Push email and SMS to connect with customers directly. Focus on improving on-site conversion now so that they know to come back when they’re ready to buy. And then treat your industry’s various marketplaces and social media as paid shelves to fill gaps in demand as it’s needed.

Next, make your content AI ready. Build structured offers through schema and product or service feeds. Look at MCPs as a potential way to make your content—especially your structured data—available to the large language models. Lean into concise, clear, well-structured content like FAQs and authoritative explainers that AI tools and agents can cite to their users.

Next, diversify your channels. Balance search with social or YouTube or outdoor and print media. Look at some high intent partner channels. Who’s connecting with the people that you want to connect with? For each of these, make sure that you’re measuring the incrementality of these channels. We want to measure whether they’re delivering additional benefits or if they’re just taking credit for things that would have happened.

Finally, you’re to want to test some of the new messaging commerce functions that exist out there. Stand up a WhatsApp or iMessage flow where it’s appropriate. And look at blending service and sales into a holistic experience. Remember the idea that we’ve talked about so many times on the show that customer service is queen.

If you can do these things, if you can start to make sure your content and your experiences and the engagement you have with your customers is such that they actually like you and actually want to work with you again and again, you’re increasing the odds that they’re going to ask for you by name. You’re increasing the odds that you will not become a commodity. You’re increasing the odds that people actually want you.

The bottom line remains that AI will only hurt relationships with your customers if you let it. And the key to winning is to build a brand that your customers ask for by name. Again, and finally, remember that in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, which is episode 472, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives in today’s topic in even greater detail. Make sure you pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week and until then, please be well, be safe and as always, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Podcast) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

The holidays are a great time to catch up on some of the big ideas we’ve covered on the podcast this year. And one of the biggest is the notion that “Your brand is the prompt.” That idea is even more important now that ChatGPT has opened access for any business to release their own app on the ChatGPT platform.

Once businesses start taking advantage, your biggest problem won’t be getting ChatGPT to find you. It will be getting them to show you instead of the millions of other businesses who also want ChatGPT to show them.

If only there was a way that companies could stand apart. If only there was a way to ensure customers found you, every single time.

Oh, wait. There is. It’s called building a brand.

I’ve studied how we can build brands beyond Big Tech for over 20 years. That’s the core of what my book Digital Reset is all about.

Building a brand that works in the age of AI is exactly what “your brand is the prompt” really means for your business. And it’s what this Best of the Show episode of the podcast is all about.

We hope you’ll enjoy revisiting this topic. We’ll be back with new episodes after the holidays. In the meantime, here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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 09s

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.

 2025 reinforced many of the lessons from my book, Digital Reset. One of the biggest revelations is the idea that “your brand is the prompt.”

In the book I talked about why your brand is a moat that protects you from competitors and gatekeepers alike. Well, news from ChatGPT highlights exactly how important this is.

You see, just last week ChatGPT announced that it’s opening up its app store to essentially anyone. I’m going to have a full show about this after the holidays, but I think we’re overlooking one key point when we only look at the upsides of ChatGPT making apps available to any business.

Turns out that there are almost a billion websites in the world, roughly 200 million of them actively updated. If we assume that even one-tenth of those actively updated sites makes their content available as an app, that would create essentially 20 million apps within ChatGPT’s App Store. That’s 20 million apps that ChatGPT would have to index and curate and expose when customers asked for the services or needed the services that those apps provide.

That’s not going to be managed by human beings. It’s going to be managed algorithmically. There will be — there will have to be — some form of “app store optimization” that you or your team will need to learn for you to have any chance of potential customers finding your app.

Don’t believe me? Well, that’s how showing up in Apple and Google’s mobile app stores works today and they only have roughly two and 4 million apps, respectively.

Put another way, visibility today depends on an algorithm when we’re talking about a scale, roughly one-tenth the size of the apps that ChatGPT will likely have.

Now in our best of show episode that we’re revisiting today, I shared a story from my friend Mark Schaefer, who noted earlier this year that,

Amazon has limited the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day.

As I said at the time:

Three books per day?!? I’m an author. I wrote a book. Imagine how tough it is for my book to be seen when a single AI “author” — and I’m using that term loosely — focused on my topic can “create” — again loosely — then upload roughly 1,100 books per year. And that’s only one person. If a thousand people do this, that’s essentially 1.1 million books every single year.

That’s what I said at the time. What I didn’t share then was ChatGPT apps, or those on any other AI platform, because mostly they didn’t exist at the time. Sure, we knew they were coming. But most of the business implications were largely hypothetical.

Well, they’re here now and it is time to take those hypothetical implications seriously.

The good news is that there’s an easier way to ensure you get found among ChatGPT many, many, many apps, and that is that “your brand is the prompt.”

When you create a brand experience that customers and clients and guests love so much, they’ll seek you out by name. And “your brand is the prompt” is the topic of today’s Best of the Show episode.

We’ll discuss what your brand is the prompt really means for your business. I hope you enjoy it.

AI slop is here today. exists. Mark Schaefer’s story about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day illustrates the point perfectly. Almost all of those books are, to use a technical term, crap. They’re just absolute garbage. But they’re garbage that every decent quality book has to compete against just to be seen. So you’d think that’d be the doom, that’d be the end of books, right?

If you look at Amazon’s best-selling book list, though, you won’t see a whole lot of AI slop. You’ll see well-known, well-regarded books by authors we’ve all come to know and trust. Hmm. That sounds important, don’t you think? These are authors who’ve built reputations good enough that their readers ask for them by name.

Cool. Keep that in mind.

Now let’s shift this discussion to AI answer engines and agents. We know that technology shapes customer behavior. Customers are starting to use AI agents and AI answer engines differently than the way they’ve traditionally used search engines. They’re having more robust, more detailed, more personal, more intimate conversations than simply a search query.

As a result, lots of folks are focused on teaching you how to show up when your potential customers have these conversations with their favorite AI tool. And that’s a good thing, by the way. Sometimes I’m one of those folks. You should 100% do the work to show up in those contexts. No two ways about it. What’s also true, though, is that we need to flip this idea on its head. Because customer behavior also shapes the technology.

For instance, tech that doesn’t meet customer expectations doesn’t get adopted ever. History is littered with great technology that failed in the marketplace because it didn’t meet its customers’ needs.

Supposedly, Betamax was a better videotape format than VHS, which won in the marketplace. AOL got everyone on the internet and then promptly vanished. Blackberry was a smartphone before anyone called them that. MySpace was social media before Facebook came along. Google Glass was smart glasses before Ray-Ban’s Meta AI glasses. And, you we’re gonna have to see if those will stick around.

But you see the point. We know the ideas work because most of those technology concepts still exist. We still have video, we still have the internet, we still have smartphones, we still have social media—for better or worse—and we’re seeing an increasing number of smart wearable devices in day-to-day lives. Even if the Ray-Ban Meta partnership ultimately isn’t the winner, I strongly suspect that the format is going to live on and probably for a long time to come.

The technologies, the tools that live on are the ones we know by name. YouTube, Verizon, and AT&T, iPhone and Android and Samsung, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. These brands are the brands we know and trust—or okay, more or less trust—to help us meet our needs.

You may not know this, but were you aware that one of the top searches on Google is YouTube? Another is Facebook. Another is Amazon. Customers aren’t just going to those websites, they’re "searching" by typing in a name they already know. They’re not asking, "Where should I look for video? Where should I look for my social network?" They’re telling Google, "Take me to the place I already know." These services have built reputations that are good enough that their users, their customers, ask for them by name.

Again, that’s the key lesson. I’m convinced that AI is going to work, will work the same way because humans have needs.

We talk about agents getting between our businesses and our customers as though it’s inevitable. Bullshit. I don’t believe it’s inevitable. I believe it’s only inevitable if we let it happen. Instead, we have to make sure that our customers know and care about us enough to ask for us by name. There’s this belief that the tools will provide the perfect, true, one and only answer that meets customer needs every time.

How exactly do you think that’s going to happen?

I said a couple of minutes ago that customer behavior also shapes the technology. That happens first. I’m convinced that will happen here.

An AI answer engine or agent cannot give you the perfect, true, one and only answer until it knows what’s perfect and true for your customer. The AI is going to have to learn.

Sometimes it will learn by inference. It will watch customer behaviors, for instance, in an AI-powered browser like Atlas, Comet, or Chrome, and it will figure out what your customer likes best. Sometimes its learning will be explicit. It will ask, "do you like option A or do you like option B?"

But until it learns, it can’t possibly recommend the perfect, true, one and only answer. Our job is to get our customers to teach their AI tools that our brands are the ones that they want. And the time to do that is right now before our customers teach AIs to recommend someone else.

It’s easy when we do this to focus on what our business needs first. That’s why we’re putting so much attention into things like GEO. And we should do that. We also have to pay attention, we must pay attention to what our customers need and find the intersections between their needs and our own.

The Venn diagram of those two needs will never be a perfect circle. For starters, customers will almost always want to pay less than you want to charge. The point remains that the more you can make that Venn diagram overlap, the better a chance you have of getting customers to ask for you by name.

I’m going to give you an example from the hospitality industry where I’ve done lots of work over the years. The first time guests travel somewhere new, they choose hotels for a combination of four reasons:

Those four attributes—price, proximity, quality, qualities—make up our P’s&Q’s model. We’ve used this for years.

There is a fifth attribute that I don’t talk about as much, which is brand. Brand absolutely plays a key role in many cases, and especially for the next time a guest chooses a hotel in the same city or town, or the same brand in a different city or town. A well-known, well-regarded brand provides an easy short-cut to understand the P’s&Q’s that matter to me as a traveler. Guests say "I really liked the Four Seasons when I stayed in Orlando. I’ll probably like the one in Chicago, too." That’s the reason why so many of the hotels in the U.S. carry a well-known, franchised brand like Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt or Wyndham or whomever. It makes it easy for someone who wants to open a hotel to tell guests whether or not the hotel is any good without them having to do a whole bunch of other work first.

In any case, hotels build brand equity first by being a good fit for their guests, P’s&Q’s. The best hotels then reinforce that by offering amazing, memorable experiences. As you’ve heard me say, customer experience is queen. That’s kind of where that came from.

Many hotels also offer loyalty or reward points to keep you coming back. And those are particularly important when your experience isn’t as distinct, it isn’t as differentiated. If I can’t make you remember the place, I can at least remind you that you’ll get paid for staying with me. The point is that great experiences that guests remember help guests remember the hotel and ask for it by name the next time they’re heading to that town.

Other businesses and other industries have their own versions of the P’s&Q’s. They’re not going to be exactly the same. But, know, Jeff Bezos famously built Amazon by always providing "broad selection, fast shipping, and low prices." Walmart did something similar in the days before e-commerce without having to worry about the fast shipping part. Nordstrom’s famously focused on remarkable customer service for every single shopper, every single time. FedEx was built on fast delivery. Apple focused all their energies on what they called "insanely great products." Google provided the best search results. And Facebook originally was the one place where all your friends and family were online. You see the same pattern again and again.

And if you notice, these are all brands that we know and love. Well, okay… brands we know.

Besides that, what do these brands all have in common? Well, they’re all different; you have to be different. They all have values and you have to have values, authentic values. To be fair, most companies, most people aren’t that authentic. They’re presenting "processed cheese authenticity," a version of themselves designed for mass public consumption. Unless folks and brands are willing to stand apart and take the risks associated with that stance, they’re going to drown in the flood of AI slop.

These brands that we know don’t just meet the P’s&Q’s. They’re great at something. Customer experience, product quality, executing flawlessly every time. They’re memorable. They’re different. They stand apart from their competitors. They’re authentically who they are.

My friend, Mark Schaefer, calls this practice of standing apart this way, being audacious. He talked about this in his book Audacious. The title alone models the behavior. He could have called the book "Different." He could have called it "Distinct." He could have called it "Authentic." Because you do need to be different, distinct, and authentic.

But Audacious? That’s literally putting it out there. That is drawing a line in the sand and saying this is what matters.

By the way doing this strategy isn’t just coming from me. Google has said, Danny Sullivan at Google has said, "are you doing the things that are useful for human beings? That’s what we want to reward." Perplexity is, and this is a quote, "advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old fashioned brand marketing."

Focus on your customers. Build a brand that customers love. How about that?

I don’t think people like Mark have to worry about getting lost behind AI slop. I don’t think the great hotels I work with do either. I don’t think Nordstrom’s or Apple or BMW or Fender or a host of amazing brands have that concern. They know that their customers will ask for them by name.

Their brands are the prompt.

And that’s really the key. That’s what you have to do.

Pick one area to be great at:

Then focus your content and your customer experience on reinforcing that point every chance you get. Ask your customers to connect with you directly through your email, your CRM, what have you, so you can talk directly with them and bypass AI and bypass Big Tech overall. That’s how you teach customers to ask for you by name. That’s how you get them to teach their AI agents that you’re the one they want. That’s what "the brand is the prompt" means. And that’s why it’s so critical for your digital reset, your brand and your business long term.

It’s not just "the brand is the prompt." It’s "your brand is the prompt." When your customers do that, it won’t matter whether they use traditional search, AI, or whatever comes next, because they’ll always end up coming to you.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 474, and an archive of all of our past episodes.by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something to read about this topic in more detail, I’d love to suggest my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, that you can find on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Best of the Show: What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Podcast) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

2025 has not been a year of incremental change. We’re living through dramatic changes. Most marketers and e-commerce folks started the year “playing with AI.” Now we’re considering when it will replace everyday interactions with our customers.

This much change, this fast, requires us to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve learned in the last year, why it matters for our businesses, and what we need to do to deal with whatever comes next. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Most importantly, I try to wrap up these lessons into an actionable framework you can use, today, and make sure your business gets the benefits of AI, not just the costs.

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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 39s

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Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As the year wraps up, I wanted to do something a little different than what I usually do. This is not a "best of" episode and it’s not about tools or trends or predictions. Instead, it’s about the ideas that kept coming up no matter what was going on in the headlines or the news all year long.

Because when I look back at 2025, we talked about AI, we talked about Google, we talked about content and SEO and brand and platforms and jobs and just a whole host of things. But underneath all of that, we were really talking about three big ideas:

So this episode is a recap of what changed this year, why it matters more than most people realize, and what I think you should do about it going into next year. This is episode 478 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?"

Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence?

And the big idea here is that this has not been a year of incremental change. This has been a year of decoupling.

We’re seeing the decoupling of finding from clicking. We’re seeing the decoupling of discovery from awareness. And we’re seeing the decoupling of our brands and our websites from the people who traditionally have used them.

Now over the course of the last year, we’ve done 33 episodes of this show, and I’m going to try as best I can to synthesize those 33 episodes down into one actionable framework that you can use going forward. I’m going to cover a bunch of stuff. All of the realities that we’re seeing in terms of what’s happening with gatekeepers, why I think it’s ever more important that your brand is the prompt and in particular, why your digital reset is your core path forward in 2026.

So let’s start with “Gatekeepers gonna gate." You’ve heard me say this a gazillion times on this show. Earlier this year, we talked about all of the different ways that Big Tech gets between you and your customers and all of the things that they do to build that relationship. Not for you, but for themselves.

As you know, Big Tech isn’t here to help you find customers. Big Tech is here to help themselves find customers. They are here to keep customers within their ecosystem. Yes, they are dependent upon ads, so there will have to be clicks at some point in the process if they are going to make some money.

What’s also true is that for many years when we think about search or we think about social, we’ve been in a reality where some of those clicks, some of the time, were free. Increasingly, we’re entering a world where every meaningful click for your business may be paid from these folks.

In episode 467, we looked at the real story of zero-click search. And if Google provides an answer via an AI Overview or within Gemini, or ChatGPT provides an answer, or Claude provides an answer, or Perplexity provides an answer, your blue link, your organic search result doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Those days are gone.

The reality is that you aren’t competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with the platform’s desire and need to keep the user. You’re competing with Big Tech itself.

Now, as you well know, that means that the cost of rented land is essentially going up. You’ve heard me say — you’ve heard lots of people over the years say — "don’t build your brand on rented land.” The reality now is that everything is becoming rented land.

We’re in a crazy new world and it’s just going to get crazier. We know that Google is already testing ad products. We know that ChatGPT has tested some and may again and we just should expect more of that.

We also know, as we discussed in episode 456 of the show, that we’re in a strange economy. Things might be tough in 2026. You can’t afford to pay a toll to Big Tech on every transaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 percent. It’s more expensive than you want to have to pay in an environment where you’re probably going to be competing for every last dollar and if every last penny.

And so the key question that I think we have to ask ourselves, regardless of which member of Big Tech we’re talking about, is if Google or Meta or ChatGPT or Amazon, whomever, Expedia, Booking.com, Yelp, Yext, OpenTable, right? Any of these folks. If they turned off your traffic tomorrow, would your business survive another day?

That’s the world we’re living in now and that’s the question you need to ask. If Google turned off your traffic tomorrow, how long could you survive?

To me, that was the aha moment of the year. And it’s why I’ve become so convinced that your brand is the prompt. In an AI world, the notion of generic search, the notion of unbranded search is dead.

If someone asked an AI for best hotel, the AI is going to choose the winner. You really don’t get a lot of say in that. If someone asked for a specific hotel, "Tim’s Hotel in Charleston," "Tim’s Hotel in Orlando," you are the only answer. That’s where you’re trying to get to.

We need to think about our brand as the insurance policy that sets us apart from everybody else. As I mentioned in episode 472, "brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing." Your brand is the only thing an AI cannot replicate. It’s the only thing it can’t answer in place of you, right? When somebody asks for you by brand, aure, the AI might hallucinate, but that’s going to tell the customer pretty quickly that that’s not giving them the answer they’re looking for.

The other thing is your brand is a mental shortcut for your customers. It forces the AI to surface your business. That becomes even more important when we think about agentic AI, something I talked about in episodes 466, something I talked about in episode 470. We’ve moved from talking about chatbots to talking about agents. We’re entering a world where AI isn’t just software and programs that talk. They’re software that does. They’re software that acts.

When an AI agent is shopping for your customer, your emotional branding may not work, but your authority does. The data you have about your customer, the data that helps you talk to what your customer’s needs are, does. Your content becomes so much more important, not just in terms of being distinct, though that’s important.

But it makes it important that your content actually answers the questions your customers have. In episode 449, I talked about the death of content marketing. And I said, know, AI will only kill content if your content is generic.

If an AI can write your content, maybe you don’t need to publish that content unless it’s answering a very specific question. Your content has to be a 24x7x365 salesperson and a 24x7x365 customer service rep. It has to answer the questions your customer has and many of those questions have to be about your values:

When we think about the digital reset and how that plays into that — and obviously this is something I talked about in episode 458, 461, 473 — your digital reset is the core of my new book and it’s something I spent the back half of the year talking about.

What you want to remember is that your reset isn’t about ignoring AI. It isn’t even about ignoring gatekeepers. It’s about bypassing them. It’s about thinking beyond them every chance you get.

And we’ve talked about this many, many, many times that what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to have content, customer experience, and data that allows you to connect with your customers directly.

So I’m actually going to flip these on their head for a moment because first we want to talk about data. If you don’t have a direct line to your customers, whether it’s email, whether it’s SMS, whether it’s snail mail to your customer, if you can’t talk to them directly, you don’t own your business. A gatekeeper does.

You also need to own the experience. If your website, if your app, if however your customer is connecting with you isn’t distinct and isn’t easy for them to use and doesn’t solve their problem, you’re never going to give them a reason to come back. They’re not going to remember you. Your site isn’t a brochure. It isn’t content just for content sake. It’s a utility. It solves a problem.

And it might be that the AI is what interacts with that site. But at a certain point, they may come to your site and the site needs to be something that’s so useful they’ll want to come back again or at least direct their AI to it the next time that they have a problem that you can solve.

You also want to make sure that it’s designed to capture data from the customer and give them a good reason to want to give you their data and continue the conversation. Hugely important.

You want to give them a reason to come to you that an AI cannot summarize in a paragraph. And of course, all of this has to do with owning trust. In an age of AI fakes, a deep fakes, of AI slop, humanity, the thing that sets you apart, is a premium product. It’s a thing that your customers will remember. You need to be not just known, you need to be loved. You don’t just need to be found, you need to be sought out. That’s crucial.

You’ve got to share your face. You’ve got to share your values. You have to tell them the why behind the what. Because that’s going to be crucial for customers saying not just, "help me find a thing," but “Help me find your thing. Help me find you."

It’s really about focusing on fundamentals, building a deep, meaningful, lasting relationship with your customers. As I said in episode 455, AI can’t save you from a bad strategy. This isn’t about looking for the ChatGPT prompt of the week. It’s about looking for how to make your customers’ lives better. It’s the only strategy that is truly future-proof.

Think of your favorite brands, ever. The brands you know and trust and love more than anything else. You don’t have to go ask an AI to help you find something like that. You already know them. You might tell your agent, go there, go get this for me from the people who I like. But you don’t have to ask the AI what the answer to the question is. You know the answer to the question. That’s what you want your customers to do with your brand too.

So 2025 was the year that we realized the era of SEO and social as we knew it is, if not over, certainly coming to an end. What takes its place is an era of brand autonomy, an era of brand differentiation and brand distinction and brands that customers ask for by name. Your brand is the prompt.

And I think there’s really three immediate actions as you go into 2026.

First, take a look at all of the places where you rely upon rented land today. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, it doesn’t matter if it’s Meta, it doesn’t matter if it’s TikTok, it doesn’t matter if it’s LinkedIn. If one of them were to change their algorithm tomorrow, how long would your business survive? You need to understand how vulnerable you are so that you can start to take the actions necessary to reduce the risk to your brand.

The next is that you need to focus your brand on being remembered, not just found. What are the things that set you apart in terms of your values, in terms of your face, in terms of your voice, in terms of your utility that genuinely differentiate you from anybody else in the marketplace?

You also need to think about your owned assets in detail. Are you investing in your email list? Are you investing in your SMS communications? Are you investing in ways to contact your customer directly and making them want to contact you directly? This isn’t about, you know, "hey, let’s scam them into giving us data they don’t want to give us." It’s about being a place they can’t wait to give us data that they want to talk to.

Invest in those and so that you can grow a connection with your customers over the long run.

We know that gatekeepers are gonna gate it’s what they do But they can only put those gates in front of people who don’t have direct relationships with their customers. It is time for you to stop being somebody on the wrong side of the gate. It’s time for you to be a destination unto yourself. It is time for you to be the brand that is the prompt. And if you do that all throughout 2026, I’m confident you’re going to do just fine.

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

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? And let them know what you think, too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 478, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, something that goes deeper into this topic, I would love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives into today’s topic in even greater detail. Please pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and l let me know what you think once you’ve read it. I would genuinely appreciate hearing from you.

Finally, thank you so much for listening, not just today, but all year long. This show, I’ve said this many, times, but this show simply would not happen without you.

We’re going to take the next two weeks off for the holidays. I hope you all have a fantastic holiday season. We will post some of the best of the pod over the next couple of weeks for you to revisit some topics you might remember. But until then, I hope you have a wonderful holiday. hope you please, please, please be well. Please be safe and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.