Most marketing-industry gatherings this season (and a few before and probably for many years to come) are focused on the same thing, in the same urgent voice: agentic commerce is here, and you are not ready. LinkedIn is a wall of it. It is noisy and it feels like truth. What it is is a stampede, which is never about the thing ahead, it’s just about where everyone else is running. We’ve seen this before and not terribly long ago.
How performance marketing left brands homeless on rented land
Last time, the darling was performance marketing. It promised certainty, measurability, and a dashboard that made you feel in control. Brands poured budgets into renting audiences on platforms that raised the rent every quarter. I lived the bill coming due when I ran a women’s health brand and woke up locked out of the platform we had rented our whole audience from — flagged, frozen, no recourse. It was resolved five days later. Five days of very uncomfortable conversations with the CEO. That is when you learn the truth about rented land. Rising costs were painful, being erased overnight was the real rent.
The channel has changed and the reflex hasn’t.
Mastering discovery in the age of the flipped funnel
Discovery takes three things: agency, surprise, and value. You choose, you are delighted, you come away with something worth having. Agentic commerce keeps the value and has a hard time engineering the other two. It’s more like retrieval than discovery when an agent fetches the most probable answer to the question it was handed.
The consumer took one step back, behind an agent they now rely on — not just trust, rely on — to choose for them. The funnel flipped to match. It used to start with the brand pushing down toward a person; now it starts with the person’s intent, and the agent reaches up to meet it.
So of course there is a new darling. The same voices, the same rooms, selling the fix: get seen by the machine, rank in the model, don’t be left behind. The trap: two very different things are being sold as one. Making your data legible to a machine — structured, accurate, readable — is real, knowable work; Adobe found the average retail product page is only two-thirds readable by machines. That is a real problem with a solution.
And then, there is the mirage that is the stampede’s destination. Pour yourself into chasing where the AI is and you will do exactly what performance marketing trained you to do: optimize the channel until the strategy is gone, and lose the consumer while you stand there staring at their shadow. Tech readiness is not a strategy.
Unlocking the strategy the models cannot touch
The good news is, what you control didn’t go anywhere. Your strategy — who you are for, and why — is still yours. The relationship is yours: community is how you earn the data nobody can buy, content is how you stay legible and current, and comms is the third-party voice the model trusts more than your own precisely because it isn’t yours.
The biggest benefit of those pillars is that none of them resets to zero when the budget stops. They are compounding investments. A rented audience is gone the day you stop paying. A real one waits in line. (Ask anyone holding a months-long spot on the Rancho Gordo club waitlist. For dried beans.)
If you’re focused only on the new tech, nobody is minding the store, which means there’s a consumer you stopped watching and there is a strategy you set down to chase a channel, again. Future growth is dependent on understanding how new tech can serve your strategy (not the other way around). As we see tectonic shifts in both platforms and consumer behaviors, we can expect massive shifts in brand surfaces and where brand leverage sits. It’s a good time to map all your real estate, rentals and how they are evolving.
Watch your six. Mind the store. Stay out of the stampede.