🧐 You can have whatever internet you want, just not that one

FWD Edition 110: Part One of What We Gained and Lost in 2024

The Big, Bad News of 2024 (no, not that)

If you've read this newsletter this year, you know I've pulled no punches on the slow and bloody multi-car pile-up that is digital marketing and the "open internet" it's built on. For trust businesses in knowledge industries, the post-COVID decline in digital has been particularly painful. The full thesis is best found in "The Web-Ending Wimper," but here's the gist:

The whole idea that you can go online, make content, buy ads, post on various socials, and then have those people pour into your website and then eventually into your book of business is... a fantasy.

It worked for a minute. Really well. It's still working in rare corners, but only for three groups:

1. Recognized, incumbent players who are leveraging established brands.
2. People spending 20%+ of their gross revenue on digital advertising
3. Very creatively defined niches: "Lawyers for people with unneutered male dogs in Soho", etc.

The AI overlay is the permanent crack in this Make Stuff ➡ Get Customers failure and some of the greatest minds and researchers have documented this. Your SEO agency will not talk with you about this because their livelihood depends on them ignoring it. Your marketing leadership will not talk with you about this because they are too busy on the 10th review of the blog post they wrote last week to pull their head up and notice things aren't working.

I've seen groups paying so much for lead gen it will take them seven years just to break even. I've seen others spending 5-6x their industry averages on content and agencies, only to bring on a handful of new customers. And, of course, others who are paying millions for leads from vendors and partners because the prospect of facing the digital black hole is too much to bear.

The tiredest thing in marketing is mass digital content creation and distribution. And almost every business we talk to is burning money, time, attention, and sanity trying to win a game that is dramatically rigged against them.

The Joyous Reset

Last week, I promised you we would spend November wrapping up what changed in 2024. The above situation didn't really change; it just got worse. But you have to accept the above and demonstrated fact to even see the loaded-up like a Christmas Amazon truck (more on that below) opportunity for value-first brands coming our way.

Before the web-ending whimper, marketing was a mass production, mass distribution game. Make stuff, fill it full of keywords the algorithms like, distribute links everywhere.

We are now firmly in the Choose-Your-Own-Internet era and this is GOOD NEWS for people like you who want to deliver value and not play silly games to win silly prizes.

There are no mass distribution platforms; there are only curated, trust-based walled gardens. And you, who are masters of earning trust, know how to get invited in. You just have to forget everything you know about the old internet.

Today, users under 30 barely open a web browser. They prefer the apps built on top of it. They don't Google things. They search for their fav influencers on TikTok or YouTube. They'll never see that podcast episode you made in their carefully curated For You Pages (FYP). Their older siblings in their 40s and 50s are shifting this direction in droves.

Old Internet: Click Me driven.
New Internet: For You driven.

The internet's platforms are either fading into the background, only to be used for AI fodder (Facebook is the prime example, but LinkedIn is on its way) or being designed to create echo chambers where I only see what I want to see from the people I want to see it from (X, Threads, and BlueSky all thrive here).

Your future customers are cozy in their FYP digital spaces, designed to keep you, your podcast, your social media posts, and your ads out. So time for a Plan B.

Re-prioritize 2025, starting now

Get your brand right. You can go to one more conference session about the "Sea of Sameness," pay for one more giant website rebuild, or you can put brand where it belongs: at the center of your business strategy. Your ability to standout with meaningful difference (not just more volume) will be the primary vehicle for growth in the near term. Firms have avoided this for a decade. Time to address the elephant in the room.

Align your leadership. As you can see in the chart above, if you're still passing off lead gen to marketers and saying, "work your magic," you're sure to be disappointed. Growth will be less expensive, more successful, and more sustainable in the future, but only if the C-suite is bought in and not pushed to the corner for the arts and crafts + internet hacks to handle. Almost every founder is at least a decade behind on where organic growth is happening, and they need to be brought up to speed, or they'll unintentionally undermine the whole project.

Stop pretending to be a media company producing audio, video, written posts, and emails... diluted content across a dozen platforms and then twisting into pretzels to prove attribution of the three new customers that probably would have hired you anyway.

Get hyper-focused on who you want to talk to and about what. Have a very narrow target and a POV. Not a tagline. Not a hashtag. Not a quippy set of jargon we all have to swim through to understand you (hypocrisy alert! I'm guilty of this). A real perspective that some people will like and others will hate. This isn't just about niching; this is about building networks of relationships with intention, clarity, and value.

Know where your people are and who is influencing them. Just posting links to your videos on LinkedIn and hoping people will notice is going to get you nowhere. It's not 2015. (Those were the days...) Work with a set of peers, collaborators, partner firms, and influencers that impact your particular customer and support the shit out of them. You're not trying to get them to click. The click-me internet is cringe and over. You're here to give them radical amounts of value that you feel a little stupid giving away. Every action has to be a trust-building action in the closed circle of where your prospects already are.

Earn every inch of the inbox. Email is your friend. It's the most underused platform for delivering value. And it's also the place that gets the best response rates because it's not being screened out by Musk or Google or anybody else's algorithm. Email is the last bastion of true trust-based distribution on the internet, but you've got to earn your place. Open rates above 40%, engagement over 15%. People should reply.

Reset Your Perspective

Your next era of growth is participatory, collaborative, and driven by leadership, not tacticians. You cannot outsource growth to a marketing team and some agencies and say "do your magic." Organic growth in the next three years is full of possibilities, but ONLY if its driven from the C-suite at a strategic level.

CEO and Founders: Take growth as your personal responsibility. 2025 is your year to relearn how it works in today's world.

Marketing leaders: You are one part of a CX with sales and service that owns delivery of value. Collaborate to align value from lurkers to raving fans. We are marking human to human now. Not algorithm to algorithm.

I don't see how this is done well without outside disruption from a third party. In-house thinking on growth is so often stagnant, full of assumptions that are only harming brands and the results they're searching for. You can save hundreds of thousands on ineffective marketing by spending a fraction of that on a fresh strategic perpsective and a counter-trend action plan.

There will be many tailwinds (our topic for next week) available for knowledge industry, trust-based, growth-driven brands in 2025. You'll want to be there for the action.

(FYI - I'm probably gonna stop doing free 1:1's after the New Year so this is a good time to click that button before it goes away.)

Other stuff of the moment:

In each week's FWD, I always like to hit some fun notes from the Zeitgeist. Here's some stuff I loved this week.

• Don't Google It: Some of the Trump cabinet people may be willing to continue the FCC's anti-monopoly streak. And we know the big guy loves to blow up any big company that doesn't bend the knee. If Google is forced to sell Chrome by the DOJ, take everything I said above and 1ox. Any semblence of the "Click Me" internet is dependent on Google using Chrome to spy on you. Without it... Google selling Chrome?
• Lawyer Up, Media: I'm a big fan of the The Verge for all things digital, not the least because its founder, Nilay Patel says what no one else will say. This week he told Status founder, Oliver Darcy, (another great sub) what no one else is willing to say about the state of media for the next four years.
• Santa Prime: Turns out this year's big Christmas flick, Red One, is a "shocking" piece of Jeff Bezos propaganda about a muscled bald guy who runs a humanless industrial complex that magically delivers packages all over the world whose moral is that bad people aren't as bad as they seem. Oh yeah, and its about Santa Claus. Amazing. All credit to The Big Picture podcast for their take. And for the Amazon Prime people for being so shameless to spend $250M making it so it could rake in $35M at the box office last week.
• Defying Gravity: The reviews are out for Wicked, and it turns out its not just for theater kids like me. A surprising wave of Oscar Buzz is building for a musical about singing witches? What a world. Go see it with your sons like I am.