The Companies That See Tomorrow First
By Carole Lawson, Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm
I’ve spent much of my career studying one thing: how the internet changes human behavior. The companies that win are rarely the ones with the biggest market share or the deepest pockets. They are the ones that recognize what tomorrow looks like by seeing the behavioral shifts before everyone else. The companies that lose usually make an all too common mistake: they assume tomorrow will look like yesterday.
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