There is a question we get from clients all the time: “Can you give us a list of the websites where our ads appeared?” Absolutely. We are happy to provide it. Transparency matters, and advertisers should know where their advertising is appearing.

But what often happens next is much more interesting. Someone starts going through the list. What kind of website is this? What industry does it represent? Why would our customer be there? Does this site have the right affinity? Should we exclude this one? Should we serve more impressions on that one?

I understand the instinct because marketers have been trained to think this way for decades. We selected publications. We selected programming. We selected websites and categories. We built demographic profiles and affinity groups. We decided where we believed our customers would be, and then we bought media in those places. In that world, where the ad appeared was an important part of why the ad appeared.

But that isn’t necessarily the world we are operating in anymore. When advertising is driven by real-time behavioral data, AI and purpose-built algorithms, the website can be the place where the right person happened to be when the opportunity to reach them occurred. That is a very different idea, and I have a story that explains it better than almost anything else I could say.

The Multi-Thousand-Dollar Bottle of Wine

Several years ago, we were working with a luxury wine importer. These weren’t inexpensive bottles of wine. Some of the inventory sold for thousands of dollars per bottle. One of those very expensive bottles sold at approximately 4:00 in the morning to someone in Oklahoma who was using a solitaire app.

Think about that for a moment from the perspective of a traditional media planner. Imagine walking into the client’s office before the campaign and saying, “We have a great idea. We’re going to advertise one of your most expensive bottles of wine on a solitaire app at 4:00 a.m. in Oklahoma.” We probably would have been shown the door, and understandably so.

Almost nothing about that placement would have passed the traditional marketing test.

The content wasn’t about wine.

The environment didn’t communicate luxury.

The time of day looked wrong.

The geography probably wouldn’t have been the first place someone planning a luxury wine campaign would have chosen. If we had been evaluating the opportunity based entirely on the placement, we could have found a dozen reasons not to serve that ad.

The technology wasn’t trying to find a website that looked like the perfect environment for an expensive bottle of wine. It was trying to identify the right consumer based on the signals available to it and reach that consumer when an opportunity existed. The solitaire app was where that person happened to be.

People Don’t Live Inside Marketing Categories

This is one of the problems with the way marketers have traditionally thought about audiences. We create personas. We create demographic groups. We create affinity categories. We decide what our ideal customer probably reads, watches, earns, drives, buys and does in their spare time. Those tools were useful because, for a long time, they were some of the best information available to us.

But real people don’t live inside our marketing categories.

People who buy expensive wine also play solitaire.

Someone considering a new HVAC system still checks sports scores.

Someone looking for a tax professional might be reading a recipe.

Someone considering cosmetic surgery might be checking the weather.

Someone thinking about joining a gym may be reading financial news.

A person’s entire digital life does not suddenly become about the product they are considering.

That seems obvious when we say it out loud. Yet marketers routinely look at placement reports and try to infer the value of the consumer from the subject matter of the page the consumer happened to be viewing. Those are two very different things.

Where We Found Someone Is Not Why We Selected Them

That distinction becomes increasingly important as advertising becomes more intelligent. A site list tells us where an impression was served. It does not necessarily tell us why that person was selected. Those used to be much closer to the same question. Today they can be almost completely separate.

That means the intelligence increasingly sits in the behavior of the consumer rather than in the category of the webpage. The website may be where we found the person. It isn’t necessarily why we selected the person.

This Doesn’t Mean Placement Doesn’t Matter

There is an important distinction here.

Brand safety matters.

Fraud matters.

Inventory quality matters.

Suitability matters.

There are environments where a brand should not appear regardless of how attractive an individual impression might otherwise be. Those are legitimate controls, and marketers should have them.

But brand safety is very different from looking at a perfectly acceptable website or app and deciding, “I don’t think our customer would be here.” That is where human intuition can unintentionally begin working against the intelligence we asked the technology to provide.

If we had decided that people capable of buying multi-thousand-dollar bottles of wine shouldn’t be playing solitaire at 4:00 in the morning, our assumption would have been perfectly reasonable. It also would have been wrong.

We Keep Trying to Turn AI Back Into a Media Plan

This is where I think marketing is struggling with AI in a much larger way. We say we want AI. We want machine learning. We want predictive intelligence. We want real-time optimization. We want systems capable of analyzing more signals and making decisions faster than humans possibly can.

Then the system makes a decision we wouldn’t have made, and our first instinct is often to make it behave more like us.

We want AI, but we want it to choose the websites we would have chosen.

We want algorithms, but we want the audiences to look like the affinity groups we already understand.

We want machine learning, but we want to manually approve the conclusions.

In other words, we want new technology operating inside old assumptions. At some point, those two ideas collide. If the only decisions we allow an intelligent system to make are the decisions we would have made ourselves, we have eliminated much of the reason for using the intelligence in the first place.

Marketing Has Always Had Trouble Letting Go

This isn’t the first time we have done this. Last-click attribution may be the clearest example. More than a decade ago, Google was already publicly arguing that marketers needed to move beyond last-click attribution. The problem was straightforward: giving all the credit to the final interaction ignored everything that happened before it.

And yet marketers still struggle with this today. A customer can see advertising, encounter a brand repeatedly, visit a website, leave, return later, conduct a branded search and finally convert through Google. The CRM records Google, and suddenly Google “created” the customer. It didn’t necessarily create the customer. It recorded the last measurable step.

We know customer journeys are more complicated than that. We have known it for years.

Site lists can do the same thing. This website looks right. That website looks wrong. This affinity makes sense. That one doesn’t. It feels like control, and sometimes what feels like control is really just familiarity.

The Marketplace Doesn’t Care What Makes Us Comfortable

This may be the bigger lesson. Marketing organizations can take years to change their thinking. The marketplace doesn’t. Consumers changed whether we were ready or not. Privacy changed. Search changed. Media consumption changed. The customer journey changed. The amount of behavioral information available to sophisticated systems changed. And our ability to identify patterns inside those signals changed dramatically.

We can continue evaluating this new environment using frameworks created for an earlier era. But doing that doesn’t force consumers to behave according to those frameworks. It just limits what we are willing to see.

Control Hasn’t Disappeared. It Has Moved.

None of this means marketers should turn everything over to a black box and stop asking questions. Quite the opposite.

Humans should define the business objective.

Humans should determine what success looks like.

Humans should establish brand standards, geographic boundaries, budget parameters and unacceptable environments.

Humans should demand transparency.

Humans should challenge performance. Humans should make sure the technology is solving the right business problem.

But there is an important difference between establishing guardrails and micromanaging individual decisions. The role of the marketer is increasingly to tell the system what we are trying to accomplish and what boundaries it must respect, while allowing the technology to discover patterns within those boundaries that we may never have found ourselves.

That is still control. It is just control at a different level, and I think that distinction is going to become increasingly important as AI becomes more deeply embedded in marketing.

Sometimes the Surprise Is the Point

I sometimes wonder what would have happened with that bottle of wine if we had been given a traditional placement plan to approve before the campaign. Luxury publications would have made sense. Wine publications, of course. Food and travel, probably. Affluent lifestyle content would have seemed like an obvious choice. But a solitaire app at 4:00 a.m. in Oklahoma? We probably would have deleted it, and we might have deleted the customer along with it.

That is the part marketers need to think about. When an intelligent system discovers something that doesn’t fit our assumptions, our first reaction shouldn’t always be to correct the system. Sometimes we should question the assumption.

Because the real promise of AI isn’t that it can execute our existing marketing ideas faster. It is that it can sometimes see patterns we wouldn’t have thought to look for at all.

That requires a different relationship between marketers and technology. Not blind trust. Not unlimited freedom. But enough trust to allow the system to do what we built it to do.

We have spent decades deciding where customers should be. Today, increasingly, we can identify where the right customer actually is. Sometimes that’s exactly where we expected them. And sometimes it’s a solitaire app in Oklahoma at 4:00 in the morning.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Search is becoming more AI-driven. Advertising is becoming more automated. Advertisers are giving algorithms more control over targeting, matching and creative decisions. AI Overviews and AI Mode are increasingly answering questions without requiring someone to leave Google at all. Individually, each of these changes can look like another Google product update. Taken together, they tell a much bigger story.

Google is changing its role in the customer journey

For most of the history of search, Google performed a relatively straightforward job. Someone had a question or a need. They searched. Google presented a collection of links. The user clicked one and continued their journey somewhere else. That model created an entire marketing industry built around earning the click. SEO tried to earn the organic click. Paid search tried to buy the click. Websites were built to receive the click. Analytics platforms measured the click.

The standout message is this: Google doesn’t need to send the consumer anywhere.

AI Overviews and AI Mode allow Google to answer questions inside Google’s own environment. Maps, Business Profiles, Local Services and other Google products have already been moving in this direction for years. The website isn’t disappearing, but the assumption that search automatically leads to a website is.

Something similar is happening on the paid side. Google has been steadily moving advertisers away from manually controlling individual components of campaigns and toward AI-managed systems. AI Max is another step in that direction. Google’s systems can increasingly determine which searches are relevant, which creative should appear, how messages should be customized and which users are most likely to respond.

The end of keywords as we know it

That may make Google’s demand capture engine considerably more efficient, but it also changes where marketers can create an advantage.

If everyone is using increasingly automated tools inside the same ecosystem, differentiation cannot come entirely from manipulating the machinery inside that ecosystem. Some of it has to happen earlier.

I think that is where this gets really interesting.

Search feels like the beginning of the customer journey because it is easy to see. Someone searches for a tax preparation service. Someone searches for a Pilates studio. Someone searches for AC repair. Someone searches for a particular brand. Google records the search. The ad platform records the click. The CRM records the lead. It creates a beautifully measurable chain of events.

Why are they searching in the first place?

It doesn’t tell us why they searched for one category instead of another. It doesn’t tell us why a particular company name was already familiar. It doesn’t tell us what they saw, read, heard or experienced during the days or weeks before that search.

Search often isn’t the beginning of demand. It is where existing demand becomes visible.

At MarketStorm, we have started thinking about the modern customer journey as an interaction between two different layers. The first is what we call the Intent & Influence Layer. This is where consumers recognize problems, encounter ideas, discover brands, compare possibilities and gradually form preferences.

Intent and influence aren’t sequential steps in a traditional funnel. They feed one another. A problem creates intent. Intent makes someone more receptive to information. Information creates influence. Influence changes what they investigate and consider. That investigation strengthens or changes intent. The consumer moves back and forth between the two until eventually the need becomes actionable demand.

Then something different happens.

The consumer enters what we call the Demand Capture Layer. They search Google. They ask an AI assistant. They open Maps. They visit a marketplace. They type in a brand name. They call a company. The intent that has been developing becomes an action that a platform can finally see and capture.

Google is becoming exceptionally good at operating in this second layer. MarketStorm is deliberately focused on the first.

We aren’t trying to build a better Google. We don’t need to. Google has enormous amounts of data, extraordinary AI capabilities and one of the strongest expressions of consumer intent ever created: the search itself. Our job happens earlier.

Intent creates influence. Influence changes behavior. Changed behavior creates new signals. Those signals help us understand where the consumer may be in the journey. The cycle continues until some of those consumers become active demand. Very often, when they do, they go to Google.

That’s not a failure of the marketing that happened before the search. That’s how the actual customer journey works. This is also why I think the industry’s obsession with last-click attribution is going to become increasingly problematic.

Imagine someone sees a brand several times over two weeks. They see a connected TV ad. Later they encounter a display ad while reading an article. They hear the company’s name again while streaming audio. Perhaps they don’t click on any of them. Then the problem becomes urgent. They pick up their phone and search for the company.

Google gets the last click. The CRM says “Google.” But did Google create the customer? Not necessarily.

Google captured the demand at the moment the consumer was ready to act. Everything that happened before that helped shape what they eventually did.

There are two very different marketing functions

Those are two very different marketing functions, and as Google’s ecosystem becomes better at keeping users inside Google, automating advertising decisions and capturing transactions, separating influence and intent development from demand capture becomes even more important.

Agentic AI could accelerate this even further. Today we worry about consumers never clicking through to a website because an AI Overview answered their question. Tomorrow, the consumer may not need to conduct much of the search themselves. They may simply tell an AI agent what they need: find me the best option, compare these companies, book an appointment, buy this product, schedule the service.

When that happens, the distance between intent and transaction becomes remarkably short.

And that raises what I think is one of the most interesting marketing questions of the AI era:

I believe much of that work will have to happen before the transaction begins.

Brands will need to be known before the agent starts comparing. Trusted before the recommendation is made. Remembered before the search occurs. Considered before demand reaches the capture layer.

This isn’t about fighting Google. In fact, I think marketers should do the opposite. If Google can become better at capturing existing demand, let it. Use the technology for what it does exceptionally well.

Don’t confuse capturing demand with creating or influencing it

The opportunity is to build a marketing architecture in which the two layers work together. MarketStorm operates across the Intent & Influence Layer, identifying emerging intent and building familiarity, relevance and preference before the final action. Google and other lower-funnel platforms operate exceptionally well in the Demand Capture Layer, converting that intent when the consumer is ready to act.

One doesn’t replace the other. They solve different parts of the same problem. Google’s latest changes don’t make what happens outside Google less important. I think they may do exactly the opposite.

The better Google becomes at automating the bottom of the journey, the more valuable differentiation becomes at the top and middle of it. If competitors increasingly use the same automated systems to capture demand, the advantage has to come from somewhere else.

It comes from what the consumer already knows, what they already trust, what they already remember and what influenced them before they ever opened Google and searched.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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The national organization creates awareness. It establishes the brand, develops the creative, and builds enough familiarity that consumers recognize the name. Then, when someone is ready to act, local marketing captures that demand through Google, paid search, Performance Max, maps, social platforms, directories, or other lower-funnel channels. It is a logical model but I also think it leaves a very important part of the customer journey almost completely unattended.

There is a layer between broad brand awareness and demand capture where consumers are recognizing needs, developing preferences, researching possibilities, encountering competitors, and gradually deciding which companies belong in their consideration set. We call this the Intent & Influence Layer. For franchise organizations, this may be where some of the biggest untapped opportunities exist.

Demand Gets More Similar as You Get Closer to the Transaction

Something interesting happens as consumers get closer to taking action: their behavior begins to converge. Someone ready to file their taxes may search for a tax preparer nearby, compare reviews, look at pricing, or search for help with a particular tax situation. Someone ready to join a gym may search for gyms nearby, compare memberships, read reviews, look at class schedules, or check hours and amenities. Someone who needs a home repair may search for a provider, check availability, compare ratings, and make a call. The industries are completely different, but the behavior at the bottom of the journey is remarkably similar.

That is precisely the environment where Google’s increasingly automated advertising systems are powerful. Performance Max and Google’s broader advertising ecosystem are designed to identify and capture people exhibiting behaviors associated with an eventual action.

At that point, the platform doesn’t necessarily need to understand everything that made a consumer different weeks or months earlier. It needs to recognize that the consumer is ready now. That is the Demand Capture Layer.

But move backward in the customer journey and something very different happens. People start looking in ways that are much more reflective of local environments, concerns, economics and even culture.

Influence Is Local

Consider tax preparation.

The final action may be nearly identical across the country: someone searches for tax help and schedules an appointment. But what happened before that search can vary enormously.

One market may have a large population of gig workers. Another may have more retirees. Another may have a concentration of military families, small-business owners, recent homebuyers, or people with complicated investment income.

Even economic conditions can change what matters. In one community, messaging around maximizing refunds may resonate. In another, consumers may be thinking about small-business filings, extensions, tax planning, or navigating a major financial change.

The final demand looks similar. The conditions that created it do not.

Health and fitness provides another example.

Someone at the bottom of the journey may simply search “gym near me.” But the person who eventually conducts that search could have arrived there through very different behavioral paths.

In one market, outdoor recreation may dominate people’s lifestyles. In another, extreme summer heat or winter weather may push activity indoors. A community with a younger population may behave differently from one with a large retiree population. One location may compete primarily against traditional gyms, while another competes against boutique fitness studios, Pilates, CrossFit, community recreation centers, or at-home fitness.

The search looks the same while the journey into the search is markedly different.

A Franchise Isn't One Market with Hundreds of Locations

This may be the more useful way to think about franchise marketing. A franchise with 200 locations isn’t necessarily one national market with 200 places to purchase something. It is potentially 200 local markets connected by one brand.

Those markets can have different competitors, demographics, economic conditions, cultural influences, media behaviors, seasonal patterns, and triggers that cause people to move from passive interest toward active consideration. Most franchise marketing frequently flattens those differences.

The national campaign defines the audience and message. Geography determines where the advertising runs. Local marketing becomes a smaller version of the national strategy. It is important to realize that shrinking the geography isn’t the same thing as localizing the strategy.

True localization means asking a different question:

What is happening in this market that could cause someone to become a customer?

That’s an Intent & Influence question.

The Differences Are Greatest Before Demand Fully Forms

This is the part I find particularly interesting. The farther we move backward from the transaction, the more market differences matter. A consumer ready to buy a product, schedule an appointment, join a gym, file their taxes, book a service, or visit a location has entered a relatively narrow behavioral state. They are expressing demand.

But six weeks earlier? They may look completely different.

The future tax customer could be reading about self-employment deductions, researching an IRS notice, starting a business, selling investments, preparing for retirement, or simply consuming content about the upcoming tax season.

The future fitness customer could be researching weight training, looking at nutrition content, preparing for a race, trying to improve mobility, following wellness creators, researching a new exercise program, or visiting competitors.

The future home services customer might be researching energy efficiency, noticing an unusual utility bill, looking at home improvement content, visiting a competitor’s website, or responding to a change in weather.

Brand Awareness Isn’t the Same as Influence

National brand building still matters enormously for franchises. It creates familiarity, credibility, consistency, and trust. Here is what we often miss: awareness and influence are different marketing jobs.

Brand awareness asks:

Do you know who we are?

Influence asks:

When your circumstances begin to change, are we present while you’re deciding what to do about it?

That second question requires a much deeper understanding of the consumer.

And because circumstances vary from market to market, influence is inherently more local. A national campaign can tell millions of people that a fitness franchise exists. A localized influence strategy can recognize the kinds of behaviors suggesting that people in a particular market are becoming more receptive to joining one. A national tax campaign can create brand recognition.

A localized influence strategy can recognize the behaviors and life circumstances that suggest different groups of consumers are beginning to think about taxes. That’s a fundamentally different use of advertising.

The Opportunity Is Before the Search

By the time someone types “tax preparation near me,” “gym near me,” “urgent care near me,” “oil change near me,” or “AC repair near me,” much of the behavioral complexity has disappeared. That consumer has declared what they want. That declaration is enormously valuable, which is why demand-capture platforms are so powerful. It is also why competition becomes so intense there. Everyone wants the person who has already raised their hand.

The Intent & Influence Layer asks a different question:

Can we recognize the person before the hand goes up?

It is not because they happen to fit a demographic profile. It is because their behavior suggests that something is changing. That is a very different marketing problem.

Don’t Compete with the Demand Capture Engine

Within our work at MarketStorm we don’t try to recreate what Google is becoming exceptionally good at doing. Neither should any other sophisticated marketer in this space, we should seek to complement it. Let demand-capture platforms compete for the final expression of intent.

Yes, this can make attribution more difficult, but the point of our work is not getting credit; it is driving revenue. To drive revenue, we have to be strategic enough to step away from seeking that last click. The larger strategic opportunity may be to own more of what happens before the consumer enters that environment.

That creates a very different franchise marketing architecture:

National Brand → Local Intent & Influence → Demand Capture

The national organization creates brand equity and provides consistency. The local Intent & Influence Layer recognizes the behavioral signals, market conditions, competitors, and consumer differences that make each location unique. Then Google and other lower-funnel platforms capture demand when the consumer is ready to act.

These aren’t competing systems. They are different systems, each doing different jobs.

Local at Scale

Historically, sophisticated localization has been difficult for large franchise organizations. Running hundreds of truly individualized marketing strategies could require hundreds of campaigns, hundreds of audience decisions, different competitive sets, different optimization strategies, and an enormous amount of management. This is why the industry compromised - because it was easier. We created sophisticated national strategies and distributed them locally. That worked until advances in technology created the opportunity to truly focus locally.

It is increasingly possible to bring national-level data science, audience intelligence, behavioral targeting, optimization, and measurement down to the individual franchise market—even when the individual location does not have a national-sized advertising budget.

That creates something franchise organizations haven’t always had local intelligence at national scale.

And I think that becomes increasingly important as demand capture becomes more automated. If every competitor eventually has access to similar bidding automation, similar AI optimization, and similar tools for capturing consumers who are already searching, competitive advantage has to move somewhere else.

It moves to earlier in the journey. Competitive advantage moves from capturing demand into understanding why demand is developing. It moves into recognizing the signals that precede demand. And it moves into influencing consumers before they arrive at the search box. By the time two consumers search for the same thing, they may look significantly similar to a demand-capture algorithm unless there has been an influence strategy employed before that search.

The people they were before they made that search may look nothing alike. This is where the opportunity lies. The most strategic thinkers understand those differences aren’t noise that needs to be eliminated in the name of national scale. This is where leaning into the Influence Layer delivers the payoff. Understanding the differences at first intent and knowing how to apply the right kind of influence to bear is how to move from random intent to actual demand.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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There is a technical answer. We build custom algorithms, analyze behavioral signals, identify audiences, and serve advertising programmatically across the open web. That’s all true. But if we’re being honest, that explanation misses what really matters. At its core, our work isn’t about technology. It’s about understanding people, specifically the moment something changes in a person’s life.

Think about a homeowner whose air conditioner suddenly stops working during a heat wave. Or someone discovering a water stain on the ceiling after a storm. Or a family beginning to research a medical treatment they never expected to need. In each case, something shifts. A person moves from being a potential customer to becoming someone actively trying to solve a problem. That moment changes behavior. People start researching, asking questions, comparing options, and paying attention to information they might have ignored just days earlier. They begin forming opinions about who they trust and which companies seem credible. Those moments are where we focus our attention.

Its purpose is to recognize when intent begins to emerge and help our clients become visible, familiar, and trusted while consumers are still forming decisions. Eventually, those same consumers may turn to Google, visit a website, read reviews, call a business, or even ask an AI assistant for recommendations. We think of those channels collectively as the Demand Capture Layer because they are where consumers act on decisions that have often been developing for days, weeks, or even months. Understanding the relationship between influence and demand capture is the key to understanding how marketing actually works.

The Moment Everything Changes

Traditional marketing often starts by describing people through demographics.

Homeowner.

Certain income level.

Particular ZIP code.

Family with children.

Those characteristics can help determine whether someone could become a customer, but they don’t tell us whether someone needs a service right now. An HVAC company may identify the perfect homeowner profile, but if that person’s air conditioner is running perfectly, they probably aren’t thinking about HVAC services. The moment the system fails on a 95-degree day, however, everything changes. The person’s demographics remain exactly the same, but their circumstances have changed dramatically. That shift creates urgency, attention, and intent.

The Ad Didn’t Change. The Person Did.

We’ve all experienced this personally. You can drive past dozens of roofing companies, attorneys, HVAC contractors, medical providers, and restaurants without consciously noticing any of them. Then suddenly you need one. Almost overnight, those businesses seem to appear everywhere. In reality, they were always there. What changed wasn’t the advertising. What changed was you.

Attention is contextual. Relevance isn’t simply a characteristic of an advertisement. It is created when a message intersects with a real need. The same advertisement shown to the same person can produce completely different results depending on what is happening in that person’s life at that moment. This is one of the most important principles behind the Intent and Influence Layer.

Where and When Most Decisions Are Made

This becomes especially important in the period Google famously described as the Messy Middle.

Once people recognize a problem, they rarely move directly from awareness to action.

They research.

They compare options.

They seek validation.

They eliminate alternatives.

They form preferences.

In many ways, this is the most important phase of the customer journey because consumers know they have a need, but they haven’t yet decided who deserves their trust. Most purchasing decisions are shaped during this period, long before a search turns into a click or a phone call.

Finding an audience is only the beginning. The real opportunity is becoming part of the consumer’s decision-making process while preferences are still being formed. By the time many consumers reach Google, their favorite AI chat or social platform, they may already have opinions, impressions, and preferences that were created somewhere else.

Familiarity Is More Powerful Than Most of Us Realize

Consumers don’t make decisions in one place. They move fluidly between streaming television, audio platforms, websites, social environments, search engines, AI tools, and countless other touchpoints. Building familiarity across those environments can have a powerful cumulative effect. Few customers are created by a single impression. Most are influenced by a sequence of interactions that gradually build recognition and trust over time.

Imagine someone first encountering a brand while watching Connected TV. A few days later they hear that same brand while listening to streaming audio. Later they see a native article or display advertisement while researching a problem online.

None of those interactions may seem particularly important on their own. Together, however, they create familiarity. By the time the consumer is ready to act, that company is no longer a stranger. It has become recognizable. And familiarity often plays a far bigger role in decision-making than most marketers realize.

The Search Is Often the End of the Story

This is also why attribution can sometimes tell an incomplete story.

Imagine a homeowner discovers a problem on Monday. Over the next week, they research solutions, encounter a company’s advertising multiple times, become familiar with the brand, and gradually develop trust. On Friday, they search Google, click a listing, make a phone call, and become a customer. Most analytics systems will credit Google with the conversion, and from a technical perspective that is accurate. Google captured the action.

The question isn’t simply where the conversion happened. The more important question is what influenced the consumer before they got there. What created familiarity? What built trust? What shaped preference? Those influences often exist upstream from the final conversion point. Search captures demand exceptionally well, but it is not always responsible for creating all of the demand that ultimately arrives there.

Two Layers. One Customer Journey.

That is why we think about marketing as two interconnected engines working together.

One helps identify emerging intent, build familiarity, and influence decisions while they are still taking shape.

The other captures that demand when consumers are finally ready to act.

Both are important. Neither replaces the other. In fact, they work best when they operate together. Search, reviews, websites, Google Business Profiles, AI platforms, and phone calls are all incredibly valuable because they give consumers somewhere to go when they are ready to make a decision. Our role is to influence what happens before they arrive there.

The Intent and Influence Layer doesn’t replace Google’s Demand Capture Layer. It feeds it. The audiences we identify and influence eventually flow downstream into search, websites, reviews, business profiles, AI recommendations, and other environments where decisions turn into actions. We aren’t competing with those channels. We’re helping create the demand that ultimately reaches them.

Every Search Has a Story Behind It

The more we study consumer behavior, the more obvious it becomes that buying decisions rarely follow a neat and predictable funnel. People move back and forth between awareness, research, evaluation, comparison, and action. They gather information, reconsider options, seek reassurance, and often revisit earlier stages of the process before making a final choice. Behind every search is a story. Behind every conversion is a series of influences. And behind every behavioral signal is a person trying to solve a problem.

The technology helps us see those signals. Understanding human behavior helps us understand what they mean. That, more than anything else, is what we do at MarketStorm.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Before we begin, I’d like to dedicate this to two exceptional women on our executive team who will be celebrating birthdays around the time this post is published. Both have demonstrated what authentic leadership looks like: leading with confidence, integrity, empathy, and a willingness to be fully themselves. Their impact reaches far beyond titles or accomplishments. They make the people around them better. This piece is dedicated to them with gratitude and admiration.

Happy Birthday.

Somewhere along the way, many women begin to believe they are too much. We are told we are too opinionated, too ambitious, too emotional, too intense, too direct, too sensitive, too driven. We hear these messages often enough that they stop sounding like someone else’s opinion and begin sounding like our own.

• We start editing ourselves before we ever speak.

• We soften our opinions or apologize before asking a difficult question.

• We’ll smile when we’d rather disagree.

• We’ll celebrate quietly so we don’t seem too proud.

• We’ll dream privately because our own ambition seems like we are overstepping boundaries.

• We learn to occupy less space, not because anyone explicitly asked us to, but because we’ve practiced becoming smaller for so long that it feels natural.

The most difficult part is that this doesn’t only happen in marriages or romantic relationships. It happens in our friendships and in our families. It happens in workplaces even when we reach the boardrooms. If we are being truthful, sometimes it even happens between women. Any environment that values comfort over authenticity can slowly teach us that belonging requires becoming a smaller version of ourselves.

What we tell ourselves matters

As I have watched this myself, I have come to believe that the greatest loss isn’t when someone else tells us to shrink. The greatest loss is when we begin telling that to ourselves.

No one has to silence us because we have learned to silence ourselves. We become our own editor. Before anyone can question whether we are asking for too much, we quietly decide not to ask. Before anyone can call us difficult, we choose to remain silent. Before anyone can suggest we are intimidating, we diminish our own accomplishments. Over time, the external voice becomes an internal one.

I don’t believe this begins because women are weak. I think it begins because we are human. Every one of us wants to belong. Every one of us wants acceptance. We want to be loved, respected, included, and valued. There is nothing wrong with that desire. The problem comes when acceptance becomes more important than authenticity.

From a young age many girls are taught, sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally to measure themselves against the “-est.” The prettiest. The smartest. The funniest. The nicest. The most accomplished. The most selfless. The comparison changes as we grow older, but the habit remains. We spend our lives trying to determine whether we measure up to an invisible standard that is always moving. The tragedy of comparison is that it never allows us to become ourselves. It only allows us to measure whether we view ourselves as better or worse than someone else.

The truth is there will always be someone who is younger, wealthier, more accomplished, more charismatic, or more beautiful. If our worth depends upon winning those comparisons, then we have chosen a game we can never truly finish. Perhaps that is why so many women spend years trying to smooth away the very qualities that make them distinctive.

The woman who asks deeper questions begins apologizing for being “too intense.”

The woman who sees possibilities others miss starts believing she is unrealistic.

The woman who speaks honestly worries she is intimidating.

The woman who feels deeply wonders if she is too emotional.

For me, it looked a little different. I was always the one who thought around corners. The one who connected dots that other people didn’t see. The one who was told she was overthinking, overanalyzing, or simply out of touch with reality. For a long time, I wondered if they were right. Still, when small anomalies emerge around me, I can’t help myself; I have to know why.

This is who I am

I have become a data scientist and researcher, and as such, my work has never been about accepting what “everyone knows.” In fact, those are often the moments that make me most curious. If everyone knows something to be true, I want to understand why. I want to see the underlying evidence for myself. That often means spending hours or days reading research papers, patents, technical documentation, obscure publications, and executive interviews that most people never see. Sometimes the answers aren’t found in a single source. They emerge only after hundreds of seemingly unrelated pieces begin to form a pattern.

For example, several years ago, I started noticing subtle changes in Google’s products and public messaging. Individually, none of them seemed particularly significant. But taken together, they pointed toward something much larger. Between technical announcements, executive interviews, product releases, and shifts in user behavior, I began to see a company redefining its identity. I was seeing that Google was beginning to identify not as a search engine that sent people to websites, but as a platform increasingly designed to answer questions itself.

At the time, AI-generated answers were just beginning to appear. I remember telling people that what we were witnessing wasn’t simply another feature. It was the beginning of the end of search as we had known it. The click through to a company’s website would become less central because Google itself was becoming the destination.

Most people thought I had lost perspective. I heard things like “Google is and will always be a search engine”, “People will always click through that is why they search”, or “You’re reading too much into it.” There were moments when I questioned myself too. Maybe I was connecting dots that weren’t really there. Maybe I had spent too much time looking for patterns, but here we are. I don’t do this just with technology. I do this all the time whether I want to or not.

Yes, I know this example is specific to me. My guess is that there are things in yourself which are outliers when compared to others around you. These things can make you stand out, sometimes it can feel like in the most awkward way. These are the areas where we are the most judgmental of ourselves. We all want to fit in so much that we can see these differences as something to hide.

It is OK to lean into who you are

So, let me ask you this:

• What if those qualities we are so judgmental about in ourselves were never flaws?

• What if they were fingerprints?

• What if the very parts of ourselves we’ve spent years questioning are actually the clearest expression of the gifts we were given to contribute?

Every person possesses characteristics that make them unmistakably themselves. Those outlier qualities, the parts that don’t quite fit neatly into everyone else’s expectations, are often the very things that become our greatest strengths. They are the source of our creativity, our leadership, our compassion, our courage, our insight, and our resilience. Even so, those are often the first things we hide. We spend years shaving off our edges because we mistake uniqueness for deficiency. The question we rarely ask ourselves is “Why is that our goal?”

That realization changes the question entirely. Instead of asking, “How do I fit into this room?” Perhaps we should be asking, “How can I be in this room and allow myself to be fully myself?” Those are not the same question. One assumes that we must change to belong. The other asks whether belonging should require changing at all.

Becoming real with yourself

There is a quiet freedom in reaching the point where you no longer need to be the prettiest, the smartest, the funniest, or the most successful. You no longer need to win someone else’s competition because you finally realize it was never your competition to begin with. All you need is to be fully you, and that is enough. Not because you have become perfect, but because perfection was never the assignment.

Some people will still misunderstand you. Some will find your confidence uncomfortable. Others will mistake conviction for arrogance or passion for intensity. Those reactions belong to them. They are not reliable measures of your worth.

My mother-in-law could walk into any room and absolutely own it. She had a sense of self that inspires me to this day. She used to say “What other people think of you is none of your business. What you think of you, that is your business.” She had a freedom to be true to herself I have rarely seen in anyone else.

The real question is not whether other people think you are too much. The real question is whether you have been living as less than yourself in order to make other people comfortable. If the answer is yes, perhaps today is the day you let that go.

I am not talking about becoming louder for the sake of being heard. It is not about proving anything to anyone. It comes by quietly deciding that you will no longer negotiate away pieces of yourself in exchange for acceptance.

The truth is you were never too much. You were never meant to become smaller. The fullest version of you has been there all along, patiently waiting for the day you decide that fitting in is no longer worth the cost of disappearing.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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My answer is usually immediate.

“Let’s go after them.”

At MarketStorm we spend a great deal of time helping businesses conquest their competitors. We target the audiences visiting competitor websites, identify consumers actively researching competing brands, and build campaigns designed to introduce a better alternative before a buying decision has been made.

Not because I enjoy beating competitors for the sake of winning.... Ok, I think I just lied to you, I do love winning, but I also enjoy it because it forces us to think differently. Most businesses spend almost all of their energy looking inward on things like improving their website, adjusting pricing, and launching another promotion. Those things matter, but they ignore an important reality.

Every customer your competitor serves was once available to everyone. Google’s own research shows that nearly 70% of the time, even if they start with another brand in mind, you can change their minds if you show up at the right place at the right time and at the right frequency. MarketStorm can help with that, but there are things you can do too.

Do your own analysis

The best competitor analysis isn’t an annual exercise that gets filed away in a PowerPoint presentation. It becomes a continuous process of understanding how customers make decisions, where competitors create friction, and where opportunities exist to offer something better.

There are direct competitors selling the same services to the same customers. There are indirect competitors solving the same problem in a completely different way.

Industry publications, YouTube videos, Reddit discussions, local directories, review sites, and AI-generated answers increasingly compete for attention long before a prospect ever reaches your website. If you don’t understand all three groups, you’re competing with only part of the market.

Next, we evaluate how those competitors position themselves. What do they actually sell? How do they package it? Where do they price themselves? Are they competing on cost, convenience, expertise, luxury, or speed?

Sometimes the most valuable information doesn’t come from their marketing at all. It comes from their customers. Reviews are often more valuable than advertisements because customers tell you exactly what they expected—and exactly where the competitor failed to deliver. Every recurring complaint is a market opportunity waiting for someone willing to solve it.

Where does their demand come from?

The next step? Deconstructing how they generate demand.

What keywords are driving traffic? Which offers appear repeatedly? What messages do they continue investing advertising dollars behind? Which social platforms generate meaningful engagement instead of simply collecting followers?

Today, this analysis extends well beyond Google. Consumers discover businesses through AI assistants, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook groups, streaming television, podcasts, local search, and dozens of other touchpoints. Understanding where competitors appear often tells you more than understanding what they say.

After gathering the evidence, organize it into something practical. Every competitor has strengths that deserve respect. Every competitor has weaknesses. Every market contains opportunities that no one is addressing. And every business faces threats that require a response.

Develop a game plan

But this is where many businesses stop. They complete the analysis. They discuss it. Then they put it in a folder.

The real value begins only when the analysis changes how you operate. If competitors consistently disappoint customers in one area, become exceptional there. If everyone competes on price, compete on trust.

If they all sound the same, develop a voice that customers actually remember. If competitors dominate search results, build better content. If they own the conversation today, start creating one customers would rather join tomorrow. And yes, if they have built valuable audiences, intelligently and ethically compete for those audiences.

That’s one of the reasons competitor conquest campaigns have become one of my favorite strategies. Someone who is researching your competitor has already demonstrated intent. They are already investing time trying to solve a problem. They have raised their hand.

The question is whether they ever learn that another option exists.

That is where MarketStorm becomes incredibly powerful. We can find them in milliseconds. Instead of waiting until someone searches specifically for your business, we can introduce your brand while they’re actively evaluating alternatives. You’re not interrupting an unrelated experience—you are becoming part of the decision-making process itself.

Ultimately, competitor analysis is not about obsessing over other companies. It is about understanding customers better than your competitors do. Businesses don’t win because they copy what everyone else is doing. They win because they discover what everyone else is missing.

That’s the game and it’s still my favorite one to play.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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One of the most common mistakes organizations make isn’t poor strategy or weak execution. It’s measuring the wrong things.

We create KPIs, build dashboards, and track performance with good intentions. Leaders want accountability. Investors want clarity. Clients want proof. Teams want to know whether they’re succeeding. So we build reporting systems designed to answer those questions.

The problem begins when we start confusing what is easy to measure with what actually creates value.

What seems like a subtle distinction can have enormous consequences because the metrics that are easiest to collect often become the metrics that drive decisions, budgets, and strategy, regardless of whether they truly reflect what is driving success.

Revenue is easy to measure. Trust is not. Website traffic is easy to measure. Influence is not. Ad clicks are easy to measure. Confidence, familiarity, and credibility are much harder. Yet those harder-to-measure factors are often the very things that determine whether someone ultimately chooses your company over a competitor. In many cases, we aren’t measuring what matters most. We’re measuring what is most convenient.

The Last-Click Illusion

Marketing provides one of the clearest examples of this challenge. For years, marketers have relied on what is known as last-click attribution. The idea is simple: whichever marketing channel generated the final click before a customer converted receives credit for the sale. The appeal is obvious. The data is easy to collect, the reports are easy to create, and the dashboards provide clean, straightforward answers. Clients appreciate simple explanations. Marketers appreciate clear ROI calculations. Entire platforms have been built around making last-click reporting as easy as possible to consume and understand.

It tells us where the customer journey ended, but it tells us very little about why the customer chose us in the first place. That distinction matters more today than ever before because the way people make buying decisions has fundamentally changed.

The Cost of Oversimplification

When businesses attribute success only to the final click, they often shift budgets toward the channels that are easiest to measure rather than the activities that actually influenced the buying decision. The programs that build awareness, familiarity, and trust frequently appear less valuable because their impact isn’t as easy to quantify. Meanwhile, the channels that simply capture demand at the end of the buying journey receive more and more investment because they appear to be producing all the results.

Over time, this creates a dangerous cycle. Companies spend more money on tactics that are easy to report on and less money on the tactics that are actually shaping customer preferences. Marketing teams optimize for what is measurable instead of what is meaningful. Advertising budgets slowly drift away from the activities that create demand and toward the activities that merely harvest it.

What starts as a reporting shortcut becomes a resource-allocation problem, and resource-allocation problems eventually become revenue problems. Businesses can find themselves spending more money on the wrong channels, underinvesting in the activities that genuinely influence customer behavior, and ultimately losing revenue as a result.

When Good Marketing Looks Ineffective

One of the most damaging side effects of this simplified approach to measurement is that it can make effective marketing appear ineffective.

If you’re investing in advertising, brand building, thought leadership, streaming television, podcasts, sponsorships, or other trust-building activities, much of their influence may never appear in traditional attribution reports. The customer sees them. The report often doesn’t.

As a result, organizations sometimes conclude that their marketing isn’t working when, in reality, their measurement framework simply isn’t capturing how customers actually make decisions.

This is often when businesses unintentionally make things worse. They cut the very programs that are creating familiarity and trust because those programs don’t seem to produce direct conversions. Budgets shift toward channels that are easier to track, reporting becomes cleaner, and leadership feels more confident. Yet performance frequently declines because the activities responsible for generating demand are no longer being funded.

Trust Happens Before the Click

Today’s customers rarely make decisions based on a single interaction. Long before someone searches for your company, they have often encountered your brand multiple times. They may have seen your advertisements while streaming television, read an article mentioning your company, heard you discussed on a podcast, seen recommendations through AI assistants, or encountered your message across social media and industry websites.

Each interaction contributes something valuable. Not a sale. Not a click. Familiarity.

Behavioral science has shown for decades that familiarity reduces uncertainty. Brands we recognize tend to feel safer than brands we’ve never encountered. Repeated exposure, especially in trusted environments, quietly builds credibility long before customers consciously realize it. By the time someone finally searches for your company, much of the decision has already been made.

The Messy Reality of Decision-Making

Google’s research into what it calls the Messy Middle challenged one of the oldest assumptions in digital marketing.

Rather than moving neatly from awareness to purchase, consumers cycle through exploration, comparison, validation, evaluation, and uncertainty before finally making a decision.

The click comes at the end of that process, not the beginning. Yet much of the marketing industry continues to focus on the final interaction because it is the easiest part of the journey to measure. The challenge isn’t that the final click doesn’t matter. It does. The challenge is believing it tells the whole story.

The Danger of Convenient Data

Most organizations build reporting around the platforms they already use.

Google Analytics measures what Google can see.

Meta measures what Meta can see.

Amazon measures what happens within Amazon.

CRM systems track activity once someone becomes a lead.

Each platform provides useful information, but none of them can observe the complete customer journey. Customers move fluidly between connected televisions, podcasts, AI assistants, publisher websites, search engines, social media platforms, email, and real-world experiences. No single platform possesses the entire story, yet we often treat these partial views as objective truth because they arrive in polished dashboards filled with precise numbers.

We naturally assume that because a metric is precise, it must also be important. That assumption can be costly. The more we simplify reporting to fit neat dashboards, the greater the risk that we optimize toward what is measurable rather than what is actually driving business outcomes.

We Naturally Gravitate Toward Easy

This tendency extends far beyond marketing. Schools measure test scores more easily than curiosity. Businesses measure activity more easily than innovation. Organizations measure attendance more easily than engagement. Governments measure spending more easily than outcomes. We are naturally drawn to metrics that create the appearance of certainty, even when the most important drivers of success are difficult to quantify. This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a human problem. We prefer simple answers packaged in neat reports. The challenge is that reality is rarely that simple.

Measuring Influence Instead of Activity

The organizations that consistently outperform their competitors are often the ones willing to ask harder questions. Instead of asking which channel generated the last click, they ask what caused someone to trust them before they ever clicked. Instead of focusing exclusively on transactions, they seek to understand behavior. Instead of optimizing for what is visible, they work to understand what is influential.

Those questions require better data, more sophisticated models, and a willingness to become comfortable with probabilities rather than absolutes.

The Future Belongs to Those Who Measure What Matters

As AI continues to reshape how consumers discover information, these distinctions will become even more important. People increasingly find answers through AI assistants rather than lists of websites. Information is encountered across a growing ecosystem of channels, devices, and experiences. Trust is being built in places that many traditional measurement systems cannot fully observe, yet many organizations continue to evaluate performance using models designed for a much simpler internet.

If your marketing feels like it isn’t working, the first place to look may not be the campaign itself. It may be the measurement framework you’re using to judge it. When we mistake incomplete data for complete truth, we risk optimizing away the very activities that create trust, influence decisions, and ultimately drive growth.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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That world no longer exists.

The rise of AI-driven search, cross-device behavior, streaming media, and increasingly fragmented consumer attention has fundamentally changed how decisions are made. Consumers don’t experience our marketing channels separately. They experience them as a continuous flow of information, influence, validation, and decision-making. As marketers, we need to stop thinking in terms of isolated channel funnels and start thinking about how the entire ecosystem works together.

The Influence and Intent Layer contains everything that shapes awareness, consideration, trust, and preference before a consumer actively signals demand. This includes programmatic display, connected TV, streaming audio, native advertising, social media, digital out-of-home, and other forms of targeted media designed to influence behavior.

The Decision Capture Layer is where consumers act on that influence and convert. In most cases, that means Google in some form, but it can be other search engines and social platforms.

It is not about what we want to see, it is about human behavior

Whether we like it or not, consumer behavior has made search the dominant validation and decision environment. When people become interested in a solution, they don’t typically convert on the first ad they see. They research, compare options, read reviews, validate their assumptions, then decide in the environment where they are most comfortable making that decision. That means every investment we make in the Influence Layer must ultimately be judged by its ability to feed the Decision Capture Layer.

The Real Job of Upper and Mid-Funnel Marketing is now Influence

Many organizations still evaluate upper-funnel media through the lens of direct attribution. They ask whether a CTV impression led directly to a conversion or whether a display campaign generated enough last-click leads. Those questions miss the point. We have to let go of the long held belief that the role of upper and mid-funnel marketing is not necessarily to capture demand. We need to replace it with the understanding that its primary role is to create the conditions that make future demand more likely.

What happens when channels work together?

Research consistently shows that when programmatic display and connected TV are layered with intent and influence as the strategy, we typically see incremental audience reach gains between 30% and 50%, largely because programmatic channels unlock inventory and audiences that Google alone cannot reach.

These channels expose brands to consumers during moments when they are not actively searching. More importantly, they help establish familiarity and preference before search activity ever occurs.

When consumers eventually enter Google’s ecosystem, they don’t arrive as blank slates. They arrive carrying impressions, perceptions, and trust that were formed elsewhere. This is where the traditional funnel begins to break down.

A connected TV impression might influence someone today. A display ad reinforces the message next week. Social interaction provides validation a few days later. Eventually, the consumer searches Google and converts. Which channel deserves credit? The answer is all of them.

The most effective marketing systems don’t treat channels as competitors. They treat them as collaborators.

This is particularly important because today’s media landscape is increasingly fragmented. Consumers split their attention across streaming services, websites, social platforms, mobile apps, podcasts, and search engines. No single channel owns the customer journey. Programmatic advertising helps solve this challenge by extending reach far beyond Google’s owned inventory.

Data cited by Comscore and Google indicates that programmatic capabilities can expand a marketer’s reach to 76% of US Connected TV households and 89% of ad-supported households by accessing premium streaming inventory outside of YouTube.

This matters because reach is not simply about impressions. Reach is about influence.

The more relevant touchpoints a brand creates across the journey, the more likely that brand is to become part of the consumer’s consideration set when a need arises. The result is not just more awareness. It is stronger behavioral momentum moving toward the point of decision. Omnichannel marketing creates continuity between influence opportunities that occur across dozens of environments. Instead of hoping consumers discover a brand when they search, we can actively shape the journey that eventually leads consumers to search for your brand.

Feeding the Decision Engine

One of the most important realities facing us as marketers is that Google’s role has evolved. Google is no longer just a search engine. It is effectively the world’s largest demand capture system. When consumers are close to making a decision, they overwhelmingly turn to Google to validate information, compare providers, and take action. That behavior has remained remarkably consistent despite rapid changes in media consumption.

This is why every omnichannel strategy should be designed with a clear understanding of how it supports the decision environment. Connected TV should build familiarity that improves branded search behavior. Display should reinforce messaging that increases engagement once prospects begin researching. Social campaigns should provide validation and credibility when consumers compare alternatives. Every touchpoint should be engineered to make the eventual decision easier.

In other words, the purpose of the Influence Layer is not just to generate impressions. Its purpose is to prepare consumers for the moment they enter the Decision Capture Layer. The best marketing strategies recognize that these two layers are inseparable.

The Future Belongs to Integrated Systems

The next generation of marketing leaders will not win by mastering a single channel. They will win by orchestrating systems. Success increasingly depends on understanding how influence accumulates across touchpoints and how that influence ultimately manifests in search behavior, website engagement, and conversion activity. The marketers who continue to optimize channels independently will struggle to explain the growing gap between reported performance and actual business outcomes.

Those who embrace an integrated mindset will see something different. They will begin to understand that every impression, every engagement, every view, and every interaction is not an isolated event. It is a contribution to a larger behavioral journey.

What once looked like a collection of disconnected marketing funnels has become a unified system. At the top sits an Influence and Intent Layer, designed to shape consumer behavior before demand exists. At the bottom sits a Decision Capture Layer, where consumers validate, compare, and ultimately choose.

Our job in marketing is no longer optimizing channels in isolation. Our job is to ensure that every investment made in Influence creates momentum toward Decision. Through that lens, we see omnichannel marketing not as a media strategy, but as the architecture of consumer decision-making.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Here is what just happened, what is coming next month, and—most importantly—why MarketStorm’s custom audience data is now your secret weapon for surviving these changes.

1. Google Paid Search & AI Max Migrations

Google is forcing advertisers away from traditional keyword targeting and moving them into a fully automated AI model.

• The AI Max Forced Transition Timeline: Google is aggressively phasing out manual search features. On August 3, 2026, Google permanently blocked new campaign-level Broad Match and legacy Automatically Created Assets (ACA).

• The September Automated Upgrade: Coming up in September 2026, Google will automatically upgrade existing legacy search campaigns to its full AI Max framework. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) will follow with a forced migration in February 2027.

• Removal of Language Controls: Effective late September, Google is completely removing campaign-level language targeting settings. Google’s AI will guess the user’s language based solely on landing pages and ad copy.

2. The Google Display Network (GDN) is Disappearing

The traditional, manual Google Display Network is being retired.

• The Shift to Demand Gen: Google is actively forcing standalone GDN campaigns to migrate into Demand Gen campaigns.

• Loss of Placement Control: Instead of picking specific websites where your banner ads appear, Google’s Demand Gen broadens your reach, automatically blending your ads across YouTube Shorts, Google Discover, Gmail, and partner sites using their own broad internal algorithms.

3. Local Services Ads (LSA) Moving into the Main Dashboard

For service-based businesses, the way you win local leads just changed.

• Dashboard Consolidation: As of August 1, 2026, Google began moving Local Services Ads into the core Google Ads dashboard, running them on Performance Max infrastructure. While it remains a pay-per-lead system, manual routing and direct budget parameters are being swallowed by Google’s centralized AI.

The Big Picture: How MarketStorm Feeds Google’s New AI

Google’s message to advertisers is clear: “Give us your budget, trust our AI, and we will find the audience.”

The problem? When everyone relies on Google’s generic, internal data to find customers, ad costs skyrocket, and the traffic becomes less targeted. This is exactly where MarketStorm secures your competitive advantage.

Google’s new AI Max and Demand Gen engines are completely dependent on signals. If you feed Google’s AI generic traffic, it optimizes for generic results.

• We Fuel the Fire: MarketStorm acts as the precise intent and influence engine operating in the “Messy Middle”. While users are actively browsing the web, reading news, or streaming audio, our AI captures their real-time behavioral data.

• We Build the Demand: By the time a customer goes to Google to search for your service, MarketStorm has already influenced their decision.

• Better Signals = Cheaper Conversions: The high-intent clicks and leads MarketStorm drives to your website feed Google’s new AI Max algorithm with premium conversion data. This teaches Google’s AI exactly what a high-value customer looks like, lowering your Google cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Google is exceptionally good at capturing demand when consumers are actively looking for a solution. MarketStorm is designed to influence, shape, and create that demand long before a prospect ever enters a search query. Rather than competing with Google, MarketStorm helps fuel Google’s AI by creating the conditions that ultimately lead to searches, website visits, and conversions.

Understanding the Two Layers of Marketing

Where once there was the marketing funnel, then the “Messy Middle”, what we are seeing now is that the marketing ecosystem has evolved into two interconnected layers: the Influence Layer and the Demand Capture Layer.

The Influence Layer is where the first behavioral and intent signals are generated. Here customers discover problems, explore possibilities, consume content, and begin forming preferences. This is where demand is created and nurtured.

The Demand Capture Layer is where customers have shifted from influenceable intent to highly focused intent. They evaluate their options, validate their choices, and ultimately convert.

MarketStorm operates primarily within the Influence Layer. Through behavioral intelligence, custom audience development, native advertising, display advertising, Connected TV (CTV), streaming audio, digital out-of-home (DOOH), and other programmatic channels, we help brands influence consumers before they formally shift behaviors from investigating to buying.

Google operates primarily within the Demand Capture Layer. Search, Shopping, and Performance Max are designed to recognize demand that already exists and convert consumers when they are ready to take action.

Intent Begins Before the Search

Consumers rarely wake up one morning and immediately search for a product or service. Before they reach that point, they have often spent days, weeks, or even months gathering information, consuming content, talking to colleagues, watching videos, reading articles, and exploring options. These behaviors create signals that reveal future intent long before traditional search activity occurs.

This is where MarketStorm creates value.

By analyzing behavioral patterns and identifying audiences exhibiting early-stage intent signals, we help brands engage potential buyers before they become active shoppers. Rather than waiting for demand to appear, we help create it through carefully timed touches influencing the decision. process.

A simple analogy is to think of Google Search as the cashier at the front of a retail store. The cashier is incredibly important because the transaction cannot happen without them. But the cashier did not convince the customer to visit the store. The billboard on the freeway, the article they read, the podcast they listened to, the display ad they saw, and the recommendation from a trusted source all influenced that decision before they ever walked through the door.

MarketStorm Reaches Consumers Where Google Cannot

Another critical distinction is where consumers actually spend their time.

While Google owns some of the world’s most powerful advertising properties, consumer attention is distributed across an enormous digital ecosystem. Research consistently shows that people spend only a fraction of their online time, only about 13%, within Google’s owned environments. The vast majority of their attention, the remaining 87%, occurring across websites, streaming platforms, mobile applications, audio services, and other media channels.

MarketStorm reaches consumers throughout the broader digital landscape through channels including native advertising, display advertising, Connected TV (CTV), streaming audio, digital out-of-home (DOOH), and premium publisher environments. These touchpoints exist largely outside of Google’s ecosystem but play an enormous role in shaping future purchase decisions.

Consumers may first encounter a brand while watching streaming television. They may later see a display ad while researching a related topic. They may hear an audio ad during a podcast or notice messaging on a digital billboard during their commute. Each interaction contributes to awareness, familiarity, and trust.

Most purchasing decisions are not made during a single search. Instead, they are influenced by dozens of interactions occurring across multiple channels over time. By maintaining a presence throughout these moments, MarketStorm helps brands stay visible during the stages when consumers are forming opinions and building preferences.

Feeding Google’s AI Engine

Google Performance Max is one of the most sophisticated conversion engines available today. However, like any engine, its performance depends on the quality of the fuel it receives.

Performance Max relies on audience signals, conversion data, search behavior, and machine learning to identify and convert ideal customers. When those signals are weak or incomplete, Google’s algorithm must spend time and budget trying to determine who the right audience is. MarketStorm helps solve this problem.

By identifying prospective buyers before they begin actively searching, we generate engagement signals that help create stronger audience intelligence. As consumers interact with content, visit websites, engage with brand messaging, and move closer to purchase, Google’s AI receives clearer signals regarding what an ideal customer looks like.

The result is often faster optimization, improved efficiency, and stronger overall performance.

This is why we often describe MarketStorm as the Influence Engine and Google as the Demand Capture Engine. MarketStorm creates the conditions that generate demand. Google captures that demand when consumers are ready to act.

Measuring Success Beyond Last-Click Attribution

One of the biggest challenges in marketing measurement is that the last platform before a conversion often receives all the credit.

Because Google is frequently the final destination before a purchase, many reporting systems make it appear as though Google alone drove the outcome. While Google may have received the final click, the decision itself was often influenced by numerous interactions that occurred much earlier. This creates what is commonly referred to as the “last-click attribution trap.” A better approach is to measure how the entire ecosystem performs together.

That is why one of the most important indicators of success is often search lift. When consumers who previously had no awareness of a brand begin searching for that brand by name, it is evidence that influence has successfully become intent.

The Risk of a Google-Only Strategy

Many organizations seek to simplify reporting and consolidate spending into a single platform. While understandable, this approach can create significant blind spots.

A Google-only strategy limits growth because it focuses almost exclusively on consumers who are already expressing demand. While those audiences are valuable, they represent only a portion of the market. The much larger opportunity often exists among consumers who have not yet begun actively searching.

Demand comes from influencing individual thinking and behavior. Without demand generation, marketers may find themselves competing for the same high-intent audiences as their competitors while acquisition costs continue to rise.

There is also the risk of relying too heavily on a platform’s own reporting. Automated systems can sometimes appear highly successful because they capture consumers who were already inclined to purchase. If marketers only evaluate what happens at the point of conversion, they may overlook the influence that created that demand in the first place.

This can lead organizations to over-simplify reporting, underinvest in demand generation, and inadvertently starve the very programs that are creating future growth.

In some cases, this results in a dangerous cycle where marketing appears efficient on paper while actual business growth slows. Brands can end up misallocating spend toward channels that capture existing demand rather than the activities that create new opportunities. The result may be rising acquisition costs, stagnant growth, and lost revenue despite seemingly positive performance reports.

The Bigger Picture

The most successful marketing strategies are not built around a single platform. They are built around understanding how customer decisions are formed and ensuring a brand remains visible throughout that journey.

Google then serves as the Demand Capture and conversion layer. When consumers are ready to evaluate options, compare providers, and make a purchase, Google captures that intent and helps convert it into action.

Google may receive the final click, but the decision itself is often influenced by a much larger sequence of interactions that occurred beforehand.

That is why we do not view MarketStorm and Google as competing solutions.

One is the Influence Engine.

The other is the Demand Capture Engine.

Together, they create a complete single marketing strategy that influences prospects, generates demand, validates decisions through conversion, and drives sustainable business growth.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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When Google announced Split View for Chrome, most of the discussion focused on productivity. The feature allows users to keep Google Search results visible on one side of the browser while opening a webpage on the other. Researchers can compare multiple sources without losing their place. Marketers can analyze competitors more efficiently. Students can reference information while taking notes. Developers can view documentation alongside their code. There is no question that it is a useful addition.

But wait, there is more

One of the lessons I have learned after spending more than twenty years studying the evolution of the internet is that the biggest changes rarely announce themselves as revolutions. They arrive disguised as conveniences. A new feature saves a few clicks, a new interface feels slightly more intuitive, or a process becomes just a little easier. Individually, these changes seem insignificant. Collectively they alter human behavior, and eventually they reshape entire industries. Chrome’s Split View feels like one of those moments.

For most of the history of the web, Google Search served as a doorway. You searched for information, selected a result, and left Google behind. The destination website became your world for the next few minutes.

That company controlled the experience. It controlled the narrative. It controlled what you saw, what you read, and how you interacted with its brand.

Whether you stayed for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, your attention belonged almost entirely to the website you had chosen. At least in Chrome, that doorway has disappeared.

Split View quietly changes that relationship

Now, when you click on a result, Google doesn’t disappear; it stays with you. While that may seem like a subtle distinction, behavioral psychology has taught us that context matters just as much as content. Human beings rarely make decisions in isolation. We make decisions within environments, and those environments shape how we interpret the information in front of us.

When a website fills your screen, it becomes the environment. Every design choice, every image, every headline, and every piece of content works together to create an experience. The company has a brief opportunity to establish trust on its own terms. When that same website occupies only half of the screen while Google’s search results remain visible beside it, something fundamental changes. The website is no longer the environment; it becomes one option within Google’s environment. That may prove to be far more important than the feature itself.

For years, clicking on a search result required a small but meaningful decision. You left the search results behind. If you wanted to compare another company, you had to hit the back button, wait for the page to reload, and begin evaluating again. It wasn’t difficult, but it created just enough friction that many people immersed themselves in the page they had chosen before deciding whether to return.

Split View removes that friction because you haven’t really left Google. You’re glancing at another page while keeping your original search in view. You are exploring through Google’s frame not your own.

Your website is now competing with Google for attention

Behavioral economists have long understood that when the cost to switch decreases, comparison increases. People become more willing to sample alternatives because there is almost no cost to doing so. Websites become easier to abandon because users never fully leave the environment that presented the alternatives in the first place.

Every marketer understands that a great landing page is designed to focus a visitor’s attention. Headlines, imagery, testimonials, and calls to action are carefully arranged to guide someone through a single experience. But Split View introduces a second experience running alongside the first.

While someone reads your website, they are also seeing Google’s rankings. They are seeing competing headlines. They are seeing alternative brands. Depending on the search, they may also be seeing sponsored listings, AI-generated summaries, maps, reviews, shopping comparisons, or other search features.

Your website is no longer competing only against your competitors. It is competing against Google’s interface itself. That observation led me to a larger realization. Over the past several years, Google has steadily reduced the number of moments when users completely leave Google’s environment.

Featured Snippets answered questions before users clicked. The Knowledge Panels summarized organizations without requiring a visit. Google Business Profiles allowed customers to call businesses without opening their websites. The AI Overviews answered increasingly complex questions directly on the search results page. AI Mode continues to move search away from lists of links and toward conversations.

Now Split View allows Google to remain visually present even after someone chooses to visit another website. Viewed individually, each of these features solves a legitimate user problem. Viewed together, they reveal something much larger. Google is becoming less of a gateway to the internet and more of the environment in which the internet is experienced.

Why it matters

That distinction matters for several reasons. For years I have argued that Google’s real product is not search, it is trust. Search has been the mechanism through which trust was delivered.

Every ranking, review, recommendation, map result, Local Services badge, and AI-generated summary helps users feel more confident in making a decision. Google’s value has never been limited to finding information. Its value lies in helping people decide which information deserves their confidence. Split View appears to extend that philosophy. Instead of helping users discover websites, Google now remains present while those websites are evaluated.

I don’t believe that means Google created Split View solely to keep people inside its ecosystem. The productivity benefits are genuine, and good product design should solve real problems. But product features often produce behavioral consequences beyond their stated purpose. Whether intentional or not, Split View reinforces Google’s role as the context in which decisions are made. That should cause every one of us to pause.

Whenever the frame changes, human behavior follows

For decades, we believed our website was the primary place where our brand came to life. Increasingly, that assumption is becoming outdated. If Google remains present while customers evaluate our websites, then our websites are no longer the sole stage on which trust is built.

How will people make decisions differently tomorrow than they do today? That has always been the more important question. I suspect Chrome’s Split View is one more clue pointing toward the answer.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Carole joins host Jacob Sanders for a conversation about the shift from a traffic economy to a trust economy, navigating the messy middle with 35 touches over 45 days, and why marketers should be measuring influence, not just the last click.

Watch the full conversation below.

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The internet hasn’t become smaller, less important, or less central to our lives. In many ways, it has become the opposite. It has become so deeply integrated into our daily routines that we rarely think about where information originates. Instead of traveling across the internet in search of answers, we increasingly expect answers to find us wherever we already are.

A traveler planning a vacation may never visit a travel website. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI assistant to create an itinerary. Someone looking for dinner inspiration scrolls TikTok or YouTube. A software buyer starts on Reddit because they trust the candid experiences of other users more than carefully crafted marketing copy. A shopper compares products on Amazon long before they visit the manufacturer’s website.

Even local service businesses are experiencing this shift. A homeowner looking for a plumber, HVAC contractor, or electrician may discover a company through a Google Business Profile, online reviews, an AI-generated overview, or recommendations from a neighborhood Facebook group without ever seeing the company’s homepage.

Podcasts have become part of this transformation as well. Instead of reading ten articles on a subject, many people simply listen to experts discuss it during their commute. None of these experiences feel like the traditional vision of “surfing the web” that defined the early internet. Yet every one of them is part of the internet. The web is no longer something people navigate. It is something that surrounds them.

The Center of Gravity Has Shifted

For decades, businesses treated their website as the center of their digital universe, and everything pointed back to it. Advertising drove traffic to the website. Search drove traffic to the website. Email campaigns drove traffic to the website. Social media existed largely as a mechanism to send people back to the website. The website was the destination. Today, it is often just one touchpoint among many.

Customers may encounter your business through an AI-generated answer, a YouTube demonstration, an online review, a Reddit discussion, a podcast mention, a Google Business Profile, an influencer recommendation, or even a connected television advertisement before they ever consider visiting your site. In some cases, they may never visit it at all.

That doesn’t mean websites are becoming irrelevant. Far from it. Websites remain an important source of information, trust, and conversion. What has changed is their role. Your website is no longer the sole repository of your brand. It is one of many places where customers encounter and evaluate your business. The brand now extends far beyond the boundaries of a domain name. Your business effectively lives wherever information about it appears.

Information No Longer Waits to Be Found

Perhaps the most important behavioral shift of the last decade is that information increasingly comes to us instead of waiting for us to seek it out. For thirty years, the dominant model was active search. People had a question, and they went looking for an answer. Now, recommendation systems anticipate that question before it is fully formed.

Streaming platforms suggest what we should watch next. Spotify recommends music before we know we want to hear it. Amazon predicts products we may need. TikTok decides what content is most likely to capture our attention. AI assistants summarize thousands of pages into a simple, conversational response.

The internet is gradually becoming less like a library and more like an ongoing conversation. Rather than asking, “Which website should I visit?” People increasingly ask, “Can someone simply tell me the answer?” That distinction may seem subtle, but it changes everything about how information is discovered, consumed, and trusted.

The Rise of the Presence Economy

Many organizations still evaluate digital success using a familiar metric: website traffic. Traffic certainly remains valuable. It can indicate awareness, engagement, and intent, but it is no longer a sufficient way to explain how customers make decisions.

Consider a simple question: if an AI assistant recommends your business without generating a website visit, did your marketing fail? What if someone watches your YouTube videos, reads dozens of positive reviews, calls directly from your Google Business Profile, and becomes a customer without ever visiting your homepage? Most marketers would agree that this outcome represents success. Yet traditional measurement frameworks often struggle to recognize it. The problem is not customer behavior. The problem is that our metrics were built for a different internet.

We are gradually moving from a traffic economy to a presence economy.

The winners in this new environment will not necessarily be the businesses generating the most clicks. They will be the businesses that consistently appear wherever customers gather information, build confidence, and make decisions. That requires a fundamentally different mindset. Instead of asking, “How do we get people to our website?” Organizations must begin asking, “Where do people establish trust before they ever decide to contact us?” Those are not the same question, and they do not produce the same strategy.

This Shift Didn’t Start With AI

It is tempting to view artificial intelligence as the cause of this transformation. In reality, AI is simply accelerating a trend that has been unfolding for years. The evolution began long before generative AI entered the mainstream.

Google replaced web directories with search. Social media reduced the importance of bookmarks. Mobile applications displaced websites for countless daily activities. Streaming platforms replaced television schedules. Online marketplaces became more influential than brand catalogs. Voice assistants allowed people to bypass traditional search altogether. The technologies changed, but the underlying pattern remained remarkably consistent.

People adopt whatever makes acquiring information easier. AI is simply the next step along that path. What feels disruptive today is actually part of a much larger behavioral evolution that has been underway for decades.

Marketing’s Next Inflection Point

Throughout my career, I’ve observed that organizations rarely gain a lasting advantage simply because they adopted a new technology first. The companies that consistently outperform are the ones that recognize behavioral shifts before everyone else. This is one of those moments.

The internet is no longer best understood as a collection of websites connected by hyperlinks. It is increasingly becoming a distributed intelligence layer that delivers information wherever people happen to be. Websites still matter. They remain essential components of the digital ecosystem. But they are no longer the center of the experience. The center of gravity has moved.

For marketers, business leaders, and brands, that realization changes the questions we should be asking. The future is not about optimizing every tactic to drive another click. It is about ensuring your business is discoverable, credible, and trusted everywhere your customers choose to seek information.

The future of the internet isn’t about getting people to visit your website. It’s about being present wherever they decide to look.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Every generation of the internet has had a defining moment when the underlying assumptions about how the web works begin to change. At first, those moments are easy to dismiss. They look like new features, new products, or interesting experiments. Only years later do we recognize that they represented something much larger.

I believe Google’s recent patent for AI-generated webpages may be one of those moments.

What is Google Thinking?

The patent itself may never be implemented exactly as written. Technology companies file thousands of patents that never become commercial products. That is not what interests me. What interests me is that patents reveal how engineers and researchers are thinking about the future. They capture ideas companies believe are worth protecting because they represent possible directions for technology.

In this case, the direction is far more significant than most of the discussion surrounding it.

What are we missing?

Most commentary has focused on whether Google intends to replace websites with AI-generated versions of those pages. While that possibility has understandably generated concern among publishers, retailers, and marketers, I believe it misses the larger story. The real significance of this patent is that it challenges one of the most fundamental assumptions of the modern internet—that a website is the final destination of an online journey.

How it works now

For more than thirty years, the internet has operated on a remarkably consistent model. Businesses create websites. Search engines help users discover those websites. Visitors arrive, browse information, make purchasing decisions, and complete transactions. Entire industries have been built around improving every step of that process. Search engine optimization, landing page design, conversion rate optimization, user experience research, digital advertising, and web analytics all assume that success depends upon bringing people to a website.

Google’s patent suggests a future where that assumption may no longer hold true.

Where does Google want to take us?

The patent describes a system capable of evaluating the quality of a webpage before the user ever sees it. Rather than simply directing a visitor to the publisher’s original page, Google’s AI could analyze performance characteristics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, content quality, page design, and other engagement signals. If the page does not meet Google’s desired experience threshold, the system could generate an entirely new version of the page using artificial intelligence, drawing upon information from the original website while tailoring the presentation to the individual user’s search history, interests, and intent.

Whether or not Google ultimately deploys this capability is almost beside the point. The patent demonstrates something much more profound. Google is envisioning an internet where the experience presented to the user becomes more important than the website itself.

That represents a fundamental shift in how we should think about the web.

Is it an evolution or a revolution?

For years I have argued that the internet should not be viewed primarily as a collection of technologies. It is better understood as a reflection of changing human behavior. Every major transition in the history of the internet has followed that pattern.

Yahoo did not lose its leadership because Google built a technically superior search engine. Yahoo lost because it misunderstood what people wanted. Yahoo believed users wanted a portal where they could browse the web. Google recognized that users increasingly wanted immediate answers. The technology mattered, but the behavioral shift mattered far more.

The same pattern repeated with social media. Company websites did not disappear when Facebook emerged, but millions of people changed where they spent their time and how they discovered information. Businesses eventually followed those behavioral changes because attention had moved.

Amazon changed shopping in much the same way. It did not merely offer another online store. It became the place where people began their purchasing journey. Consumer behavior shifted first. Retail strategy adapted afterward. Artificial intelligence appears to be creating another one of these behavioral inflection points.

Today, users increasingly ask questions instead of typing keywords. They expect summaries instead of lists of links. They seek recommendations instead of directories. They interact with AI assistants that synthesize information rather than requiring them to visit multiple websites. The internet is becoming less about navigating pages and more about interacting with intelligence.

Seen through that lens, Google’s patent no longer appears to be an isolated technical innovation. It looks like another step in a much larger evolution that has been unfolding for years.

Our websites aren’t what they used to be

What I find especially interesting is that websites themselves are gradually changing roles. For decades, a website has been treated as the product. Increasingly, however, websites are becoming raw material from which intelligent systems generate experiences. Large language models already read websites to answer questions. AI search engines summarize web pages before users ever click. Shopping assistants compare products across thousands of retailers without requiring shoppers to browse each individual catalog. This patent simply extends that trajectory by allowing artificial intelligence to assemble a page specifically for the individual rather than presenting the publisher’s original design. If that future emerges, the implications for businesses are profound.

For years, organizations have invested heavily in optimizing websites because websites represented the primary point of interaction with customers. If AI becomes the intermediary between businesses and consumers, competitive advantage shifts away from creating the perfect webpage and toward creating information, products, services, and reputations that artificial intelligence can confidently represent. That is a very different strategic challenge.

Looking through the lens of human behavior

At the same time, I believe there is another behavioral force that deserves equal attention, and it is one that many technology companies continue to underestimate. Consumers appreciate personalization—but only to a point.

Behavioral economics has demonstrated repeatedly that people value convenience, relevance, and reduced effort. Those principles have driven many of the internet’s greatest successes. Yet human beings also have an equally powerful desire to feel that they remain in control of their own decisions. We want guidance without manipulation. We appreciate recommendations without feeling watched. We enjoy personalization until it begins to feel like someone else has already decided what we should see, think, or buy. That tension may become one of the defining questions of the AI era.

Ironically, the more sophisticated personalization becomes, the greater the possibility that consumers begin seeking experiences that restore a sense of independence and personal agency. We are already seeing increased interest in privacy-focused browsers, growing awareness of data collection practices, and broader conversations about the influence algorithms have over everyday decisions. These reactions suggest that technological capability alone does not determine adoption. Human comfort ultimately decides which innovations become permanent.

That is why I believe this patent represents something much larger than another Google announcement. It is not really about artificial intelligence. It is about the continuing evolution of the internet itself.

How will real people respond?

To find that answer, we have to understand that the patent isn’t really about replacing websites. It’s about changing Google’s role. Historically, Google has been an index that points users to information. This patent suggests a future where Google increasingly becomes the creator and curator of the experience itself, standing between businesses and consumers rather than simply connecting them.

For most of my career, my work has centered on studying how the internet changes as human behavior changes. Time and again, the organizations that succeed are not necessarily the ones with the most advanced technology. They are the ones that recognize behavioral shifts before those shifts become obvious to everyone else.

Whether this specific patent becomes a commercial product is almost irrelevant. It reveals the direction one of the world’s most influential technology companies believes the internet may be heading. More importantly, it invites every business to ask a far more important question. How does this impact consumer behavior?

That question, not the patent itself, may determine who thrives during the next chapter of the internet.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Yahoo Didn’t Lose to Google

This one is fascinating because I was there to watch it unfold. I was working for Governor Schwarzenegger at the time, and was the chair of his Innovation Council where the leaders of the emerging technologies of the time, Yahoo and Google among them, debated what the future of this new platform called The Internet might be. The Yahoo team was very focused on what it was at the time, the Google team was focused on what it could be. These were big crazy sounding dreams, most of which have become realities.

It was the early 2000s and Yahoo appeared untouchable. It was the front door to the internet. Millions of people started every online session there. Yahoo had the audience, the advertising revenue, the engineering talent, and the brand recognition. If anyone was positioned to become the dominant search company, it was Yahoo.

Instead, Yahoo misunderstood what users actually wanted. Yahoo believed people wanted to browse the internet. Google understood people wanted to find answers. That seems obvious today, but at the time it represented one of the largest behavioral shifts in internet history. Yahoo was so confident in its position that it outsourced search to a young company named Google.

The rest is history. Google wasn’t a better search engine. Google understood that the internet was becoming an answer engine rather than a directory.

QVC Didn’t Lose Because of Streaming Video

Years later, another behavioral shift appeared. QVC practically invented video commerce. They demonstrated products on camera decades before anyone had heard of influencers or livestream shopping. When short-form video exploded, they should have been perfectly positioned. Instead, they viewed themselves as a television retailer. TikTok viewed itself as a discovery engine.

Consumers were no longer sitting down at a scheduled time to watch shopping channels. They were discovering products continuously while scrolling through personalized content created by people they trusted. The technology wasn’t the disruption; the change in consumer behavior was.

AI Is Creating the Same Moment

Today I believe we’re watching another shift of similar magnitude. Many marketing agencies continue to organize their businesses around SEO rankings and Google Ads. Those disciplines are not disappearing overnight. But they are becoming less central to how people discover businesses.

Consumers increasingly begin with AI assistants instead of search engines. They ask questions instead of typing keywords. They expect recommendations instead of lists of links. They trust synthesized answers more than ten blue links.

We are in a whole different world now. For over twenty years, marketers optimized for algorithms that ranked webpages. Tomorrow they will need to optimize for systems that understand intent. That is an entirely different problem.

The Real Product Was Never SEO

The agencies that survive won’t be the ones with the best SEO checklist. They’ll be the ones that understand how AI is reshaping decision-making. The objective has never been to rank. The objective has always been to influence human behavior.

Search, social media, television, and AI are different mechanisms through which that influence occurs. If your strategy is tied to one platform, you’re vulnerable every time consumer behavior changes. If your strategy is tied to understanding people, you’ll adapt as the platforms evolve.

Reading the Digital Room

Yahoo had every opportunity to become Google. QVC had every opportunity to become a TikTok shopping experience. Both organizations believed they owned the category. What they actually owned was yesterday’s version of it.

Today’s agencies face the same choice. AI is not just introducing new tools. It is changing how people search, evaluate, trust, and ultimately buy. The winners won’t necessarily have the biggest media budgets or the most AI software. They will be the ones paying attention to the behavioral changes happening underneath the technology.

History doesn’t reward the companies that own today’s market. It rewards the companies that recognize tomorrow’s customer before everyone else.

The agencies that thrive over the next decade won’t be the ones that adopt programmatic AI. They’ll be the ones that understand what AI is changing about human behavior and how to target that. That’s a very different challenge.

At MarketStorm, we’ve spent years studying how the internet evolves—not just the technologies that appear, but the behavioral shifts they create. From search to social media, from streaming to AI, the pattern has remained remarkably consistent.

Technology changes which changes human behavior then the human interpretation of that technology redefines the technology itself. The organizations that recognize those changes early become tomorrow’s leaders. The ones that don’t become tomorrow’s case studies.

If your agency isn’t asking what AI means to your clients, your services, or your long-term strategy, that’s a conversation worth having.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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As a data scientist, I’ve learned that technology is actually the easier part to predict. Human behavior is far more complicated. Every major technological breakthrough creates dozens of possible futures, but only one actually emerges. Which future we get depends almost entirely on the decisions people make after the technology arrives.

That’s why, over the past year, one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned about artificial intelligence hasn’t come from a research paper, a benchmark, or even an AI model. It has come from watching our CEO lead.

Like every company, we’ve had countless conversations about AI. We use it every day. We build products around it. We continually look for ways it can help us work faster and make better decisions. What I’ve found fascinating is that our conversations rarely begin with a question about reducing headcount.

They begin with a question about increasing human capability.

• How can AI remove repetitive work?

• How can it give our team more time to think?

• How can it make our employees even better at what they already do well?

Those questions may sound subtle, but I believe they represent one of the most important behavioral inflection points business leaders will face over the next decade. I’ve also been paying attention to what other companies are doing.

Costco has long argued that investing in employees creates loyalty, and that loyalty creates better business performance. Rather than treating people as an expense to minimize, they treat them as a competitive advantage. Costco is employing AI in its operations, but not at the expense of its people.

IKEA invested heavily in artificial intelligence while retraining employees for new roles instead of simply replacing them. The company recognized that AI could increase the value of its workforce rather than reduce it.

On the other side, we’ve watched companies announce large workforce reductions in anticipation of AI efficiencies, only to discover months later that many of those positions contained something they hadn’t accounted for: institutional knowledge, judgment, customer relationships, and experience that proved difficult to replace.

As someone who spends every day analyzing data, I don’t see these as isolated business stories. I see a pattern emerging. There are really two competing theories about AI. The first sees AI primarily as a cost-reduction tool. The second sees AI as a capability multiplier. Both may improve efficiency in the short term. Only one strengthens the organization over time.

History suggests this isn’t a new phenomenon.

When computers entered the workplace, the companies that benefited most weren’t those that eliminated the most people. They were the ones that enabled people to accomplish more. When the internet became mainstream, customer service didn’t disappear. Customer expectations changed, and companies adapted.

Every transformational technology eventually raises the value of uniquely human capabilities. Here are some examples:

• Judgment.

• Empathy.

• Creativity.

• Trust.

Those qualities become more valuable, not less.

Watching our CEO navigate AI has reinforced something I’ve believed for years. Technology doesn’t determine the future. Leadership does.

The decisions leaders make during moments of technological change become the behavioral blueprint for their organizations. Employees observe what leadership rewards, what leadership fears, and what leadership believes is worth investing in. Culture forms around those decisions, and culture ultimately determines whether technology becomes a force for innovation and growth or simply another round of blind cost cutting.

As a researcher, I’m convinced we’ll spend the next several years measuring AI’s impact on productivity. I’m not sure we’ll spend enough time measuring something even more important, that is how leaders chose to introduce it.

Years from now, I suspect we’ll discover that AI didn’t create great companies. It simply revealed which companies already understood that their greatest asset wasn’t the technology they purchased. It was the people who knew how to use it.

That’s the roadmap I’m watching today at MarketStorm.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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That statement may sound strange coming from the stage of one of the largest technology conferences in the world, but it became the central theme of my presentation. Before we can talk about innovation, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, or enterprise architecture, we first have to answer a much more fundamental question: What business are we actually in? The answer to that question determines whether an organization adapts to change or ultimately becomes a victim of it.

Who does your customer think you are?

To illustrate the point, I told the story of the Railway Express Agency. For decades, it was one of the most successful package delivery companies in the United States. Its business model was remarkably intelligent. Passenger railroads traveled the country on predictable schedules, and Railway Express used the available cargo space on those trains to transport packages quickly and efficiently. Customers loved the service, and the company flourished.

Then commercial aviation emerged and transformed transportation. As airlines became the preferred method for moving people across the country, passenger rail traffic began to decline. Fewer passengers meant fewer trains, and over time the infrastructure that Railway Express depended upon slowly disappeared. Eventually, the company failed.

Most people look at that story and conclude that airplanes put Railway Express out of business. I don’t believe that’s what happened.

I believe Railway Express failed because it misunderstood its own identity. The company thought it was in the railroad delivery business when, in reality, it was in the package delivery business. Had leadership understood that distinction, the rise of commercial aviation would not have been viewed as a threat. It would have been seen as a better vehicle for achieving the same objective. The company’s purpose never changed. People still needed packages delivered. Only the technology available to accomplish that mission changed.

Start with the problems you solve

That lesson has stayed with me because I continue to see organizations making the same mistake today. Companies often define themselves by the technologies they use rather than the problems they solve. They describe themselves as SEO agencies, social media firms, Google Ads specialists, website developers, programmatic advertising companies, or increasingly, AI agencies. But those aren’t businesses. They are tactics. They are delivery mechanisms. They are today’s version of the railroad.

The danger of defining yourself by a technology is that technologies inevitably evolve. Search changed how information was discovered. Social media changed how consumers engaged with brands. Smartphones transformed customer expectations. Today, artificial intelligence is reshaping how people search for information, evaluate companies, and make purchasing decisions. Tomorrow it will be something else. If your identity is tied to a specific platform, channel, or technology, every shift becomes an existential threat. If your identity is tied to solving a customer problem, every shift becomes an opportunity.

The organizations that successfully navigate disruption ask a different question than those that struggle. They don’t ask, “How do we protect what we do today?” Instead, they ask, “How do we continue helping our customers accomplish their goals?” That difference may sound subtle, but it changes everything. When your focus remains centered on the outcome rather than the tool, innovation becomes easier to embrace. New technologies are no longer threats to be feared—they become assets that help you serve customers more effectively.

Defining your purpose

This challenge is particularly visible in the marketing industry. Many agencies have built their entire identity around the services they currently sell. Some believe they are in the SEO business. Others think of themselves as Google Ads agencies, website companies, social media firms, or programmatic advertising specialists. Those labels may describe a service offering, but they should never define a company’s purpose.

The reality is that clients don’t wake up in the morning wanting SEO. They don’t wake up wanting programmatic advertising. They don’t wake up wanting artificial intelligence. Those are simply the terms our industry has trained them to use. What clients actually want is growth. They want more customers, more revenue, stronger brands, and a clearer path to achieving their business goals. Every marketing tactic, platform, or technology is simply one possible means of delivering those outcomes.

We are in the client outcomes business

That belief has shaped MarketStorm from the very beginning. We’ve never viewed ourselves as being in the website business, the Google business, the programmatic advertising business, or now the AI business. Those are simply tools, and tools will continue to evolve. Instead, we see ourselves as being in the business growth business. We are in the client outcomes business in most cases than means new customer acquisition. Our responsibility is not to defend yesterday’s tactics. Our responsibility is to identify tomorrow’s opportunities and use whatever technologies best help our clients grow.

That perspective has allowed us to evolve alongside the internet rather than constantly chasing it from behind. Over the years, technologies have changed, platforms have risen and fallen, and consumer behavior has continued to evolve. Through all of those shifts, our focus has remained the same: helping clients understand and adapt to how people discover, evaluate, trust, and ultimately choose businesses.

It is about people not technology

After more than two decades studying the evolution of the internet, I’ve come to believe that technology doesn’t change the world by itself. People do. Every major advancement—from search engines and social media to smartphones and artificial intelligence—has succeeded because it changed human behavior. Technology is merely the catalyst. The real story is how people think, act, and make decisions differently because of it.

The organizations that recognize behavioral shifts early are often the ones that redefine industries. The organizations that focus exclusively on the technology itself frequently find themselves trying to defend a business model that is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today we are seeing this dynamic unfold yet again as artificial intelligence reshapes search, discovery, trust, and buying behavior. The companies that thrive won’t necessarily be the ones with the newest AI tools. They will be the ones that best understand how customer behavior is changing and adapt accordingly.

Looking back, I have come to believe that the most important question a business can ask itself has very little to do with technology. In fact, it’s the same question I posed to that audience at Oracle OpenWorld years ago, and it may be even more important today than it was then.

What business are you really in?

If your answer is tied to a platform, technology, or channel, the next wave of disruption may feel threatening. If your answer is rooted in the customer problem you solve, disruption becomes an opportunity to serve customers in new and better ways.

Companies that define themselves by today’s technology eventually become prisoners of it. Companies that define themselves by customer outcomes gain the freedom to evolve.

Technology will continue to change. Human behavior will continue to evolve. The organizations that succeed won’t be the ones chasing the latest trend. They’ll be the ones that understand why behavior is changing and adapt before everyone else.

That’s the business we’re in. And in the end, it’s the business every enduring company is really in as well.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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For most of the internet’s history, marketers have operated under a simple assumption: attention is valuable. The businesses that captured the most clicks, generated the most traffic, and accumulated the largest audiences tended to win. That made sense. Attention was scarce, traffic was the currency, and websites sat at the center of nearly every digital experience. But economies change.

Every economic era has its own rules. Agricultural economies valued land and labor. Industrial economies valued manufacturing capacity. Financial economies value capital. The internet has always been no different. The value of any economy is determined by its currency, its scarcity, and its abundance. I believe we’re witnessing one of the most significant shifts in the history of the internet: the transition from a traffic economy to a trust economy, and that shift changes almost everything about how businesses should think about marketing.

Every Economy Has a Currency

In the early internet, traffic was the currency.

SEO existed to drive traffic. Advertising existed to drive traffic. Content existed to drive traffic. Success was measured by the number of visitors arriving at your website because every additional click represented another chance to persuade someone to become a customer. Your website was the destination, and every marketing effort pointed toward it. For years, that model worked remarkably well.

The problem is that the conditions that created that economy no longer exist.

What Became Scarce?

The defining characteristic of any economy is scarcity. Whatever becomes scarce becomes valuable.

Twenty years ago, information was scarce. If someone wanted to compare companies, learn about products, or answer a question, they needed to visit multiple websites and conduct their own research. Today, information is effectively unlimited. AI can summarize it. Google can surface it. YouTube can explain it. Reddit can debate it. Consumers have access to more information than any generation before them.

Information is no longer scarce. Even attention isn’t as scarce as it once was. Consumers encounter thousands of messages every day. Most are ignored almost instantly.

What has become scarce is something far more valuable: Confidence & Trust.

The New Currency Is Confidence

Behavioral economics has taught us an important lesson: as choices increase, people don’t become more rational. They become more selective. The human brain looks for shortcuts that reduce uncertainty and simplify decisions.

Reviews become shortcuts. Recommendations become shortcuts. Google Business Profiles become shortcuts. AI-generated summaries become shortcuts. Friends, colleagues, and online communities become shortcuts. Consumers are no longer simply looking for information. They are looking for reasons to feel confident in a decision. That confidence has become the modern internet’s most valuable currency.

Businesses aren’t just competing to be discovered anymore. They’re competing to be believed.

Why the Messy Middle Keeps Expanding

Several years ago, Google and Boston Consulting Group introduced marketers to the concept of the Messy Middle, the period of exploration and evaluation that happens before a purchase decision. Many marketers interpreted that research as evidence that they simply needed more advertising. I think the insight goes much deeper.

The Messy Middle exists because trust takes time to build. Every video someone watches. Every review they read. Every recommendation they receive. Every conversation they have with AI. Every social interaction. Every display impression. Each interaction reduces uncertainty just a little more. Most of those touchpoints never generate a click. Most never appear in an attribution report. Yet they create enormous value because they increase confidence.

In our own work, we’ve observed organizations investing an increasing share of their marketing budgets into influencing this trust-building stage, meaning that messy middle we talk about. That is where many buying decisions are effectively won or lost long before a prospect takes action.

Why Website Traffic Appears to Be Falling

This shift explains one of the biggest misunderstandings in marketing today. Many businesses see declining website traffic and conclude that marketing performance must be weakening. Often, the opposite is happening.

Consumers still follow the same basic decision journey. They search for information and answers. AI answers questions. Google summarizes information. YouTube demonstrates products. Reddit provides social proof. Review platforms establish credibility. By the time someone finally arrives on your website, a significant portion of the decision has already been made.

The conversion click hasn’t disappeared. The conversion click has moved.

Why Paid Search Keeps Getting More Expensive

The same economic shift helps explain another trend marketers often struggle to understand: the rising cost of paid search.

Years ago, many searches were exploratory. Consumers used search engines to learn and investigate. Today, many of those exploratory searches never produce a click because Google or AI can answer the question directly. What’s left are increasingly transactional searches: ‘Emergency plumber near me.’ ‘Schedule AC repair.’ ‘Call electrician.’

These searches occur after much of the trust-building process has already happened elsewhere. The remaining clicks carry higher commercial intent, making them more valuable and therefore more competitive.

Search isn’t becoming more expensive by accident. It’s becoming more expensive because those clicks now represent a customer who is much closer to taking action.

The Website Has a New Job

None of this means websites are becoming irrelevant. Far from it. What is changing is their role. In the traffic economy, websites existed primarily to persuade. In the trust economy, they exist primarily to validate.

When a prospect visits your website today, they’re often looking for answers to a different set of questions: Who are you? Can I trust you? Do you understand my problem? Have you solved it before?

Once those questions are answered, many users move directly to action. They call from a Google Business Profile. They schedule through Google. They tap a phone number in Maps. Increasingly, websites establish trust while platforms facilitate action. Those are very different functions in a very different economy.

Looking Through the Right Lens

One of the biggest mistakes businesses can make is continuing to optimize for the economics of yesterday’s internet. If you believe the internet is still a traffic economy, you’ll focus almost exclusively on website sessions, page views, and clicks. But if you recognize that we’re operating in a trust economy, the questions become very different.

• How do we create confidence before the click?

• How do we reduce uncertainty throughout the buying journey?

• How do we become the company people believe before we become the company they contact?

Those may be the defining marketing questions of the next decade.

The Next Competitive Advantage

Technology didn’t create this shift. Human behavior did. Technology merely accelerated it. People have always sought confidence before making decisions. The difference today is that they have more ways than ever to build that confidence before interacting directly with a brand.

The organizations that understand this change won’t simply generate more traffic. They’ll earn more trust. And in the next era of the internet, trust may prove to be the most valuable currency of all.

The companies that thrive won’t necessarily be the ones that attract the most attention. They’ll be the ones that reduce uncertainty, build confidence, and become the safest choice in a world overflowing with information.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Each new innovation arrives accompanied by bold predictions. Some claim it will eliminate jobs. Others argue it will transform society. Many believe it will permanently alter the way people live and work. Sometimes those predictions are right. More often, however, the most profound effects are the ones nobody saw coming.

After spending decades working in and studying the evolution of technology and its impact on business, I’ve come to believe that we consistently make the same mistake. We focus on what the technology does instead of asking how people will behave differently because it exists. That distinction matters because technology rarely changes the world directly. Human behavior does.

The Question We Keep Getting Wrong

When a new technology emerges, businesses immediately begin evaluating capabilities. What tasks can it automate? How much faster is it? How much money can it save?

Those are useful questions, but they are rarely the most important ones.

A better question is: How will people change because this technology exists?

Technology influences how people communicate, make decisions, gather information, and form expectations. Over time, those behavioral shifts reshape industries. The technology itself is often just the catalyst. The real disruption occurs when millions of people begin using that technology in ways nobody originally anticipated.

History shows us this repeatedly. The companies that redefine industries are often not the first to adopt a new technology. They are the first to recognize how customer behavior is changing and build their strategies around those emerging expectations.

The Spreadsheet Didn’t Replace Accountants

One of the clearest examples came from the rise of the electronic spreadsheet. When spreadsheets became widely adopted in the 1980s, many experts predicted they would dramatically reduce the need for accountants. The logic sounded reasonable. If software could perform calculations instantly and accurately, why would organizations continue employing large numbers of financial professionals? The prediction failed because it misunderstood the role of accountants. Arithmetic was never the profession. It was simply one task within the profession.

Once spreadsheets eliminated the burden of manual calculations, organizations suddenly had access to more financial information than ever before. Rather than reducing demand for expertise, businesses needed more people capable of interpreting data, identifying trends, evaluating risk, and advising leadership. Routine bookkeeping positions may have declined, but analysts, auditors, financial strategists, and advisors became increasingly valuable. The spreadsheet did not eliminate accountants. It elevated them.

Why Efficiency Often Creates More Demand

Economists have a name for this phenomenon: Jevons Paradox. The paradox suggests that when technology makes something dramatically more efficient, consumption often increases rather than decreases. At first glance, that seems counterintuitive.

If a resource becomes easier to use, we assume we will need less of it. In reality, lower cost and greater accessibility often encourage greater usage. Spreadsheets made analysis easier, which encouraged businesses to perform more analysis. More analysis produced more questions. More questions required more expertise. Efficiency did not reduce demand. It expanded it.

Email Didn’t Destroy Human Connection

The same misunderstanding appeared when email entered mainstream life. Critics argued that electronic communication would weaken relationships. They envisioned a future in which technology replaced meaningful human interaction with cold digital messages. The assumption behind those concerns was that communication itself was the purpose of relationships. It wasn’t. Connection was the purpose.

People did not stop wanting connection simply because a new communication channel appeared. Instead, they adapted the technology to support an existing human need. Families communicated more frequently across long distances. Friends remained connected through life transitions. Businesses collaborated across geographies in ways that had previously been impossible. Email changed the medium. It did not change our desire to connect. The behavior remained. The tool evolved.

The Insight That Helped Google Beat Yahoo

Perhaps my favorite example of behavioral change occurred during the rise of Google. The fascinating part for me is I was able to watch this play out in real time. I was working for Governor Schwarzenegger at the time and responsible for the State of California’s entire web presence. I chaired his innovation council which brought together leaders from the emerging technologies of the time, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and several others.

It was the early 2000s and Yahoo seemed nearly unbeatable. It had an enormous market share, a well-known brand, talented engineers, and millions of loyal users. Most observers believed the future of the internet involved building ever-better directories that helped people browse the growing web.

Google recognized something more fundamental. People didn’t actually want better directories. They wanted answers. That insight wasn’t primarily technological. It was behavioral.

The internet was evolving from a place where people explored into a place where people used to solve problems. Users were moving away from browsing and toward asking questions. Yahoo focused on improving the experience people already had. Google focused on the experience people were about to want. That difference changed everything.

AI Is Presenting the Same Opportunity

Today, artificial intelligence is creating another wave of bold predictions. Some believe AI will replace millions of workers. Others believe it will unleash unprecedented productivity and economic growth. Both perspectives may contain elements of truth, but history suggests neither is asking the most important question. Rather than focusing exclusively on what AI can do, we should be asking what people will do because AI exists.

• Will consumers continue searching the way they do today?

• Will they increasingly expect conversational answers instead of pages of links?

• Will trust shift toward intelligent assistants that synthesize information from hundreds of sources?

• Will expertise become more valuable because routine knowledge becomes universally accessible?

These are not technology questions. They are human behavior questions.

The Real Competitive Advantage

Most organizations will eventually have access to similar AI technologies. That means the technology itself is unlikely to be the source of sustained competitive advantage. The advantage will come from understanding how customer expectations are changing.

The organizations that thrive during the AI era will be the ones that recognize shifts in trust, decision-making, information consumption, and buying behavior before their competitors do. They won’t necessarily possess the most advanced artificial intelligence. They will possess the deepest understanding of human intelligence.

Technology Creates Possibility. People Create Change.

History offers countless examples. Text messaging began as a minor mobile phone feature before becoming one of the world’s dominant communication channels. Social media started as a way for friends to stay connected before evolving into one of the largest advertising ecosystems in history. Streaming services didn’t simply change television. They transformed when, where, and how people expected to consume entertainment.

None of those outcomes were inevitable. They emerged because millions of people collectively discovered new behaviors that nobody fully predicted. That is why I believe businesses should stop asking how AI will change their organization and start asking how AI is changing their customers. Because that’s where strategy lives.

The future will not be determined by what artificial intelligence can do. It will be determined by what people choose to do with it. It doesn’t matter what the developers think. The technology they develop may create all kinds of new possibilities. Human beings decide which possibilities matter.

That has been true for spreadsheets, email, search engines, smartphones, and social media. There is little reason to believe AI will be any different. The companies that thrive in the next decade may not be the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They may be the ones that understand the oldest truth in business:

Technology changes behavior. Behavior changes everything.

What behavioral shifts are you seeing in your customers today that didn’t exist two years ago? That’s probably where the future is hiding.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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Sometimes it feels like it would have been simpler to look the other way. There were clients to serve, deadlines to meet, and countless other decisions demanding my attention. Like most leaders, I’ve learned that confronting behavior is almost always harder than ignoring it.

When you first notice something isn’t right, it’s easy to rationalize it away. You tell yourself it’s an isolated incident. Maybe they’re having a difficult week. Maybe you’re overreacting. Maybe you’ll deal with it after this project is finished. You roll your eyes, shake your head, and think, “Are you kidding me?” Then you move on to the next thing. It is only after it is over that the absurdity of the behavior comes into full view.

We are each responsible for our own microenvironment

Leadership is busy, and defending culture rarely feels as urgent or as attractive as the work sitting in your inbox. Over the years I’ve come to believe that this is exactly how organizations begin to lose themselves. It’s not all at once, it’s little by little. One tolerated behavior at a time.

I’ve spent much of the last twenty years studying how technology changes human behavior. That may sound like an odd place to begin an essay about leadership, but I’ve discovered something surprising. The same principles that explain why new technologies reshape markets also explain why some organizations flourish while others slowly lose their way.

Behavior follows the environment. Change the environment, and behavior eventually changes with it. Organizations are no different.

Every leader creates a microenvironment within the broader organization. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we teach people what matters through our daily actions. We communicate what excellence looks like, what behaviors are celebrated, what standards are expected, and perhaps most importantly, what behaviors we are willing to overlook.

Long before I encountered the research, I had seen this principle play out in real life.

The Rosenthal Effect

In the 1960s, psychologist Robert Rosenthal conducted a fascinating experiment. Teachers were told that certain students in their classrooms were likely to experience extraordinary intellectual growth during the coming year. The remarkable part was that those students had been chosen at random.

Yet many of them did, in fact, outperform their classmates.

The teachers weren’t consciously giving them better grades or easier assignments. Instead, their expectations subtly changed the way they interacted with those students. They became a little more patient. They offered a little more encouragement. They provided more opportunities to grow. Over time, thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions accumulated until the students began performing at a higher level. The expectation became the reality.

Most people think of the Rosenthal Effect as an educational concept. I think it’s one of the most profound leadership lessons ever discovered. It changed the way I think about my own role as a leader.

For decades, leadership has often been defined by command and control. Set goals. Measure performance. Correct mistakes. Hold people accountable. Those things certainly matter, but I’ve come to believe they aren’t the heart of leadership.

The real responsibility of leadership is creating an environment where people can become more than they believed they were capable of becoming. That is a very different way of thinking.

Protect and project what you value

At MarketStorm, our first company value isn’t innovation. It isn’t performance, it isn’t profitability. It’s kindness. Not being polite, not avoiding difficult conversations because you might hurt someone’s feelings, genuine kindness.

To be clear, I am not talking about kindness because it makes people feel good, but because we’ve come to believe it is a competitive advantage. When most people hear the word kindness, they imagine avoiding conflict or lowering standards. That isn’t what I mean. Real kindness assumes the best in people while expecting the best from them.

True kindness celebrates growth. It offers encouragement without becoming dishonest. It gives people the confidence to take risks while holding them accountable for learning from them. It also removes people from bad situations or more importantly in a leadership role, removes the bad situation from your team. There is nothing more unkind than letting people suffer through a bad situation because dealing with it makes you feel uncomfortable.

We all have our own extraordinary

Every day we celebrate accomplishments. We openly cheer one another on. We intentionally recognize progress, sometimes in very small ways. We talk constantly about playing to one another’s strengths while protecting one another’s weaknesses. Rather than trying to make everyone good at everything, we help people become exceptional where they naturally excel while surrounding them with teammates whose strengths complement their own.

One phrase we use often is, “Find your own voice.”

What we mean is simple; we don’t expect anyone to become a copy of someone else. We want each individual to discover the part of their work that genuinely resonates with who they are.

Some people discover they love solving technical problems. Others become remarkable communicators. Some find joy in helping clients navigate difficult decisions. Others discover talents they didn’t know they possessed because someone finally believed they were capable of more. Someone finally saw what is uniquely extraordinary about them.

I’ve never believed that people come to work wanting to do a poor job; most people want to contribute. People want to grow, they want to be seen, they want to matter. Leadership isn’t about extracting more effort from people. It’s about removing the barriers that keep them from becoming who they’re capable of becoming.

Inputs become outputs

One of the unexpected outcomes of this philosophy has been the work ethic it produces. We often hear business leaders grousing about younger employees simply don’t want to work anymore. Our experience has been almost the exact opposite.

In fact, we sometimes have to remind people to go home, to take vacations, and to spend time with their families. They aren’t driven by fear or unrealistic expectations. They work hard because they genuinely enjoy contributing to something meaningful and because they know their teammates are counting on them.

I don’t believe that’s a generational phenomenon. I think it’s a human one. When people feel trusted, respected, challenged, and supported, most of them naturally want to contribute. The question isn’t whether people want to do meaningful work. The question is whether we’ve created an environment that allows them to.

Protecting what you build

But building a healthy culture is only half the responsibility. Protecting it is where leadership becomes difficult.

Every leader eventually encounters behavior that doesn’t align with the environment they’re trying to create. Rarely is it one dramatic event. More often, it’s a pattern. A dismissive comment. A lack of ownership. An unwillingness to support a teammate. A quiet erosion of trust.

Those moments almost never arrive when it’s convenient. There is always another deadline, another client call, another meeting, another reason to postpone the difficult conversation.

Every leader knows the temptation to convince themselves that it will get better on its own. Sometimes it does, more often than not it doesn’t. It is easy to hope that the team will take care of it. They won’t because they can’t. It is up to you.

What I’ve learned is that every time a leader ignores behavior that contradicts the values they publicly celebrate, they teach the organization something. The strongest organizational lessons are not through speeches; they come through silence.

People don’t ultimately believe what leaders say; they believe in what leaders do. Not what you do once but what you consistently do. Culture is not built by what leaders celebrate once a quarter. It is built by what they reinforce every day and what they refuse to tolerate. Eventually, if the gap between words and actions becomes too large, people stop believing the values altogether. They begin to assume those values exist for recruiting brochures or company websites rather than for real life.

In that moment, trust quietly disappears. Sometimes protecting a culture means making one of the hardest decisions a leader will ever make. No one enjoys telling someone they are no longer part of the team. I certainly don’t.

But I have come to believe that protecting a healthy culture is often one of the greatest acts of kindness you can show the people who remain. Every person who consistently lives your values deserves to know those values are real. They are not platitudes, they are not optional.

It is up to you

Certainly, Leadership is about setting goals and driving toward outcomes. The work has to get done, we all have to deliver. As leaders, we have to understand it is also about having the courage to protect the environment that allows everyone to grow.

The Rosenthal Effect teaches us that people often rise or fall to the expectations placed upon them. Leadership is choosing those expectations carefully. Culture is reinforcing them every day. Character is having the courage to protect them when it would be easier not to.

It is not just companywide. Every leader has an individual responsibility to drive and protect what we say we care about. In the end, every leader builds a microculture within their own team. The real question for each of us is whether we build it intentionally or is it built by what we choose to tolerate.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

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