Kieran Flanagan posted on LinkedIn:

SEO isn’t dying. It’s evolving into TV ads.

Everyone sees your Ad, and no one clicks it. AI assistants turn search into a billboard.

To which I added:

Getting a click or a sale isn’t the purpose of each individual ad or touchpoint. It’s about the aggregate impact.

Each exposure is a seed planted in the mind of the audience member. A field of flowers makes a bigger impact than a solitary bloom.

This can be an uncomfortable shift for performance marketers that have been mainlining real-time data and ROAS numbers for years. It’s harder to measure the impact of exposure and reach but we don’t want to stop at counting impressions or mistaking correlation for causation.

But I’ve been giving my Google Ads ecommerce team member a hard time for years that my social ads work with unimpressive ROAS numbers has been driving easy sales to his high performing channel. I put in the work, he reaps the glory. (It is a joke, but the best jokes are rooted in the truth (or complete absurdity, but that’s not relevant here).)

But now even a Google Search isn’t the obvious end point.

Our role as marketers is to tell a story across the channels we operate on for a brand to establish familiarity so that when a customer is about to make a decision we come to mind. Whether that happens via them actively seeking us out or anchoring on our name in a consideration set.

Make an impression. Provide value. Play the long game.