In 2019 they laughed at the dancing app. Today they all run ads on it.

01The same joke comes back every few years

Before the internet, a business promoted itself on television, radio, newspapers, banner ads, trees, walls, paintings and posters. That was the whole list, and it worked. So nobody felt they needed the internet.

Then the internet came and it changed how a business gets found. Then social media came. And owners said they did not need to be on YouTube, because nobody is going to watch a 20 minute episode when a 1 minute ad slot on television is the thing that matters.

Look at Facebook. A couple of years back owners said it was not for them. Right now Facebook ads is the number one platform to promote on, and every business is trying to hire a performance marketer who can run Meta ads.

02How I tell a fad from a shift

This is my own test and it is simple. A fad asks you to act like somebody you are not. A shift changes where your buyer is standing. The dancing looked like a fad. The buyers moving there was the shift.

Ai looks like a fad because of the noise around it. It is a shift, because the way people look you up has moved there. That is the only part I care about.

So the question is never whether a new thing is cool. The question is whether your buyer has started using it. If the answer is yes, you start this week, even badly, because being bad early still puts you years ahead of starting late.

You are not early. You are on time. It only looks early because people are still joking about it.

03Ai is standing in that spot right now

I hear the same 3 lines in almost every meeting. Owners are not being lazy when they say them. They said the same things about the internet, about YouTube, about the dancing app, and they were wrong each time.

Here is how I see it. Ai is just another way of branding and marketing, because it is a part of tech. The internet was a part of tech. Social media was a part of tech. The tool is new every time. The job is the same every time, which is getting your brand in front of the person who is about to buy.

Ai is not a new job. It is a new place to do the old job.

04The newest version of this joke is AEO and GEO

Watch it happening live. People still think brand building means writing website articles, doing keyword research and running Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest and the rest of it. Useful tools. But they are forgetting the part that was always the real work.

Topical authority. Being the expert on your subject, out loud, again and again, until people and machines both agree that you are the one. That is how an honest brand has always been built.

What changed is where that proof lives. It is no longer only on your website articles, your blog, a forum, Quora or Reddit. It is across the whole internet now, social media included. Google Search Console lets us index and crawl Instagram pages and TikTok pages. Instagram pages are showing up in the top 10 results of Google.

And all of it is built from one boring thing. What you post about your business, day after day. There is no setting to switch this on. There is only what you have been saying in public.

05Life is a macro niche

I firmly believe there is nothing like a micro niche. Life is a macro niche. Everybody's life is their own macro niche. There are moments in it, things in it, tastes in it, small niches in it, and you should be talking about all of them.

Say you are in real estate. Somebody who is going to buy an apartment from you one day has not come to you yet. You love badminton, you play it well, and you talk about it. Your prospect also plays badminton. They watch that, and they feel connected to you.

Then 8 or 10 or 23 days later they see you talking about real estate out of nowhere, and they recall it. Oh, this is my badminton guy. Let me just speak to him. 50% of the connection is already made before you say a single word about property.

Most owners post only what their business sells. Business content, business content, business content. That is the mistake. People were making it on every platform before this one, they are making it with Ai now, and they will make it on whatever comes next.

People think they have to talk about what their business sells. The job is to build a brand.

06Founder led brands win the next decade

Anybody with a human led brand is going to win big over the next 10 years. Founder led brands. Not logos. People associate with people. People connect with people. That has not changed since we started selling things to each other.

Think about the founder of the biggest platform we all promote our business on. He was not on camera for years. He did not need to be. In the past 1 or 2 years he is suddenly posting. Why. Because his competitors are not only other social platforms any more. They sit in the Ai space now. Everybody is competing at everybody else's level, so the founder himself has to show up.

You do not need a studio or a crew. You need your own face, your own voice and your own opinions, in the place your buyer is already looking, before everybody else gets there and the price of attention goes up.

07Questions, answered