A $4 Video Is Quietly Crowding Out an $800,000 Ad

A few days ago, I was at a packed conference. People up on stage, talking. People in the crowd, asking questions.

Someone handed me a mic and asked, "So what, in your view, is the future of marketing?"

I said, look at this first.

I pointed at the phone in every person's hand in that room. The screen.

All eight billion people on the planet — almost everything they consume every day now reaches them through that screen. And on that screen, the thing that grabs attention most aggressively is social media.

A lot of people have believed this in private for years; they just wouldn't say it out loud. This year, it's time to own it.

The Algorithm Turned the Page

Let me start with something I've been tracking for a long time.

The algorithm turned the page years ago. Since then, platforms no longer just show you "what you follow." They show you "what you might like." You might think that's a small thing. It's the opposite — it rewrote the rules of the game beneath everything.

It produced a result that stings a little, but also feels awfully good:

Free reach is now measured by relevance, and nothing else.

In the past, whether your content was good was a matter of who vouched for you — awards, connections, old-style influence. Now the data tells you directly. Creativity can finally be tested, and it can finally be scored.

For that alone, I want to applaud this era.

Four Dollars and Eight Hundred Thousand

Now the second thing: cost.

Once AI arrived, that cost bar got kicked straight to the ground.

In the past, shooting a decent piece would cost you hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, plus several months of your time. Now, with AI, you spend a few dollars, run it for a few dozen minutes, and end up with over an hour of video.

Guess which one is more likely to blow up?

Not the expensive one.

I like to call this doing the math. A 30-second commercial can burn millions on production and then millions more on media — all just so a room full of people can nod and say "what brilliant creative work."

That math no longer adds up. So here's what I'm saying: social creative is turning from a "side dish" into "the main course." Over the last few years, the social creative retainers my company signs have gone up tenfold, even twentyfold. The money moves faster than anyone expects.

What the Industry Needs Is a Slap

There's a story I still remember to this day.

About eight or nine years ago, around two or three in the morning, at one of those hangouts where the whole scene shows up, a drunk creative director swayed over, pointed at my nose, and said:

"Bro, I honestly hate you."

I asked why. He said, "You don't care about the work at all."

I looked at him and answered:

"I'm the one who cares the most about the work."

That shook him awake. We talked all night. And by the end, I came to understand one thing: this industry has gotten "the work" wrong.

What the industry calls good work is awards, the applause of insiders, the kind of posture that "anyone would like". But what I call good work is when a real person truly sees it, and a real person actually buys it.

Why has so much marketing flowed back in-house over the years? Because we weren't good enough — that's the honest truth. Information keeps getting more transparent, the barriers keep getting lower, and the days of living off connections and information gaps are done for good.

The industry is in desperate need of a slap.

A One-Sentence Framework

People ask me, so what do you actually do?

Let me give you a dead-simple framework, three words:

Platform, algorithm, culture.

If you want to sell into a market, think hard first: where does that market's attention live? How does the platform's algorithm push content? And what content unit are you going to use to catch it?

Here's a homework assignment you can copy right away.

One image, posted to a consumer goods brand's European page on a platform, reached maybe eight thousand people. That same image — I turned it into a one-second video, identical content — and the views jumped to a hundred thousand, with a dozen or so extra comments on top.

One second. That big a difference.

And those extra comments? Free consumer insight. That's where real craft lives. The industry loves to throw the word "craft" around, but craft isn't about throwing big budgets at lavish production. Craft, in the end, is obsessing over relevance.

Luxury Is No Exception

Then somebody asks: we're a luxury brand, does this work for us too?

To the extreme.

Once, in a meeting with an ultra-luxury brand, they opened by telling me, "We're a hundred and fifty years of history here — don't talk nonsense about what you don't know."

I didn't push back at all. I opened that platform's search bar, typed in their name, and projected it onto the screen.

Twenty-four hours. Nine hundred pieces of content about you.

I turned and asked them: do you still think you're controlling your brand?

You post once a week, and what's out about you turns into nine hundred posts a day. "Controlling your brand" is the fantasy written in a book from 1991 — a book that came out the year the internet didn't even exist.

So a luxury brand should run dual accounts: the main account stays composed, and you open a second one for the creative team to play freely in. After all, the algorithm stopped caring about your follower count a long time ago.

Stop trying to control your brand. The only thing you should be competing on is relevance.

The Hardest-Hitting Move: The Comments

Here's one more move I'll pass on to you — the one that built my little liquor shop.

In 2007, on that platform I was on, I replied to every single comment. The good and the bad, not one skipped.

Someone asks: but what if your comment section is all people hating you?

Take responsibility. Admit the mistake on the spot, refund them, and send a little something. What can't be fixed, don't fight in the comments — take it back to the office and handle it seriously.

Those harsh comments aren't trouble; they're free consumer insight. Keep working on it every day, and within a year that insight pays for everything. My company's early growth wasn't built on buying stacks of fancy reports — it was pulled, line by line, from the honest words people posted in the comments.

Two Opportunities Not Yet Fully Exploited

Let me tell you about two opportunities I've been watching for a long time, neither of which has been fully explored.

The first is the B2B influencer.

LinkedIn is a seriously underrated card. For everyone selling food, beauty, sneakers — why treat LinkedIn like it's invisible? The free reach of content on it is startlingly huge.

Today, finding a genuine B2B influencer on LinkedIn is hard. And that's a good thing — it means this is still a gap waiting to be filled. And the gaps get filled by whoever gets in first.

The second is the AI influencer.

Let me be direct. A few years ago, influencers took down the celebrities. Next up: AI influencers taking down the influencers.

You may not even realize it, but a lot of you in this room have already watched content made by an AI influencer — you just took it for a real person. In two or three years, the story flips: why wouldn't you own an influencer of your own? It doesn't get moody, it doesn't jack up its prices, the intellectual property belongs to you, and it grows your business along the way. Then, before you know it, the world's eight billion people face eight billion influencers, and all that's left of attention is supply and demand. The ones who charge in first eat their fill; the ones who lag a step behind will be scrambling for a mouthful of soup.

Everything I've been circling around lands on the same line:

Stop worshipping TV ads and award trophies. Any marketing that doesn't end in actually getting somebody to buy is just a game of self-indulgence.

There are 8 billion people in this world, and their attention stops at that screen. Whoever reads it earliest wins the next round.

I don't claim to have all the answers, either. But this is a road worth walking down together.

Here's to you: may you pick out the best of every sliver of attention, and turn it into the opportunity that's yours.