An Imbalanced Ecosystem

Back to our working hypothesis.

If you think about Customer Media Marketing as a YouTube / TikTok / AI centric video/search platform fused with Community, you immediately see that "traffic" has to flow into those avenues and ultimately flow out of Direct Response Marketing.

This flow out of "traditional search + traditional social" creates an imbalanced ecosystem.

Think about it this way ... pretend you have 100 customers in the old ecosystem. 10 of the 100 customers leak out into YouTube / TikTok / AI, leaving 90 customers in the old ecosystem. The marketer notices that response is 10% worse because the marketer spends money but 10% of the traffic is "gone", driving down ROAS, driving down profitability.

The marketer has two responses here.

The marketer likely notices that certain responsive keywords are "more expensive" ... and they are more expensive because every other marketer decides to go after the responsive keywords, de-emphasizing low performing keywords. The competition is good for the old ecosystem, in that the old ecosystem has pricing authority, but is bad for the marketer, who now pays more and gets less.

As long as the marketer fails to realize that Customer Media Marketing is "a thing" ... a fusion of Video / Community / AI ... problems exist in the p&l. If the marketer is "advertising dependent" (and many of you are), performance is bad, the top-line contracts, and most importantly, it becomes terribly hard to find new customers because customers have leaked out of the old ecosystem into the Customer Media Marketing ecosystem.

The imbalances in the old ecosystem will correct over time, but the correction process can be painful.

Many of you (look at your new customer counts) are dealing with this correction process.

P.S.:  If you want to see an example of a company dealing with this correction process, read this email message ... show me where the merchandise is? Or the community? Or video? Or any way to create awareness?

• In their defense, they are directing you to Insta and some of their Reels have a reasonable number of views. They're leveraging a decade-old style of social. Better than not leveraging it, sure.

P.P.S.:  Back in 2007 one of the commenters on my blog mentioned that big/old companies were too stupid to leverage social media properly and they'd be DEAD in a few years (emphasis on dead was hers). No brand dies quickly unless there is a ridiculous level of financial mismanagement. Instead, brands die very slowly, they participate in an imbalanced ecosystem that drains their blood one drop at a time ... for a long time.