You: What about this stormy weather we’re having in search marketing?

Me: Turbulent winds of change buffeting us continuously.

You: Yeah, hard to find a sure footing these days.

Me: You’ve got to listen to the best conversation anyone has had in 2024. It will help you feel instantly smarter, I can almost guarantee. Seriously, it’s been viewed nearly 400,000 times and has almost 3,000 wildly enthusiastic comments since it was published a couple of weeks back.

The funny thing is, what I’m calling the best dialogue of the year for our industry is not a chat between two people inside the SEO world. The keen viewpoints I’m about to share stem from a 1.5-hour interview by YouTube influencer and music educator Rick Beato of former Silicon Valley consultant and world-famous jazz historian Ted Gioia.

After sitting through it once, nodding my head, I watched it again, taking nine pages of notes, which I want to distill down today with my own perspective from here in marketing land. What you learn could definitely influence not just your reading of the present but also your personal and business strategy over the next few years.

So you don’t feel like you’re eavesdropping on the talk of two total strangers, here are a couple of quick notes.

I’ve been watching Rick Beato’s videos for about a year since my older siblings began praising this YouTuber whose channel has 4.3m+ subscribers. When we were little kids, my brother taught me to count time signatures to Rush, and my sister taught me to dance to The Police. These are the kinds of bands Rick analyzes and interviews with passion and amazing skill drawn from his own background as a musician, music producer, music educator, and enormous music fan. I don’t know if it’s because he comes from a big family (like mine) or because his dad worked for the railroad (like mine did), but I find him an immensely relatable person. His frank talk on the weird weather in the music industry is fascinating and full of insight for professionals in multiple fields.

I had never heard of Ted Gioia before watching this interview, but he’s a Stanford-and-Oxford-educated author of 11 books who kept a piano in his office when he was predicting markets for Fortune 500 brands. His current home base is his Substack, The Honest Broker, where he’s writing outstanding pieces on music, society, and various timely topics. His conversational style immediately resonated with me when watching the interview. By the time he began comparing our century to the era of Romanticism in the 1800s, I felt I had found a kindred spirit. He simply has a great mind and a gift for socio-economic analysis. I’d say he’s probably a genius.

These are both genuine people who call it like they see it and are interesting to listen to. And, now, for what I learned from their remarkable conversation!

You cannot read an SEO blog without someone using the word “trust,” whether that’s trust signals, trusted sources, trust factors, or trusted content. But here’s the problem: the public has lost trust in most large institutions, including those in the tech sector. Ted Gioia highlighted three examples in the Rick Beato interview that depict a tell-tale lack of transparency in major online arenas.

1. Spotify — Why do songs that only have 100 plays on YouTube earn billions of streams on this music platform? Ted highlighted the case of Johan Röhr, whose name you’ve probably never heard because he allegedly goes by 654 different names on Spotify and is included in more playlists than Michael Jackson, ABBA, and Elton John. This has caused subscribers to speculate that there is an unseen special monetary relationship with the platform.

2. Netflix — Instead of embracing transparency, Netflix will no longer report on its number of subscribers, causing its shares to drop as shareholders doubtless feel uncertain and in the dark.

3. Sports Illustrated — Instead of cultivating columnists, Sports Illustrated created fake AI authors and filled its publication with inhuman content, which it then deleted after it was found out, resulting in public mistrust and ridicule. This example has now been joined by countless others, emphasizing a core question from Ted for our times: ‘If AI is so great, why are brands being secretive about it?’

Major platforms across multiple industries are failing to operate in a way that’s perceived as above board. In our own corner, we have the all-too-familiar and growing issue of people feeling manipulated by search and social platforms. No one but a few people at Google know what’s in their algorithms, and our desperation to understand the operations of this entity, which has come to rule so much of modern life, is seen in our massive reaction to the recent API leaks. Complaints that Google isn’t as good as it used to be are growing louder and louder and louder by the week, with all kinds of speculation as to why that might be. Meanwhile, if Meta flips a switch, you suddenly can’t do the things you want to on Facebook and Instagram anymore.

It’s little wonder that people have a sense that they are being manipulated for unknown reasons when using much of the internet. While it’s understandable that trade secrets have to be kept quiet, if your community ends up feeling hoodwinked and bamboozled by your mode of operations, you can’t really lay claim to being a liked or trusted brand.

We’ve weathered a lot of extreme claims over the past few decades. Everyone’s life was supposed to be completely rewired by virtual reality and voice assistants, remember? It hasn’t happened, but, particularly as the search industry is being inundated with AI hype, Ted Gioia’s remark hits home:

“Companies are placing huge bets on this and they want to change the culture into something they can monetize.”

No one in the creator economy is against monetization, but when it’s done at major platform scale, it starts to feel less like business as usual and more like manipulative social engineering. There seems to be a growing reaction to the unpleasant feeling the public is having of being pushed and prodded instead of engaged and served.

Right now, across multiple fields, including music, film, and publishing, there is a unifying issue of decision-makers having little or no feeling for the arts because their main interests are in making money for themselves and their shareholders. In an echo of Ted Gioia’s explanation of what has happened to the music industry since streaming emerged, my sister, who is a screenwriter, and my brother-in-law, who is a cinematographer, tell me that the executives running Hollywood have little interest in film. Production has ground to a stunning halt, unemploying writers, actors, and crews across the board, with fewer films making it to the screen every year. People who devoted their youths to earning degrees in this field are being furloughed or fired because there is no work to do.

This question occurs to me: Are the major players in the tech world interested in the thriving of human society at all, or merely in profits and, perhaps, having their own way, with their own way sometimes apparently being a rather strange picture of life for the rest of us?

It’s in our job description to discover repeatable successes for our brands and clients. Our work has trained us to take it for granted that algorithms control nearly everything we consume. We dream of finding those sweet spots of create-once-market-forever. We believe strongly in formulas, even when we disagree with what they produce.

But here’s another problem: when big platforms become too tied to a formula, they run the risk of hitting that old law of diminishing returns at some point. Ted highlights these examples:

1. Starbucks getting huge with a sugary drink and then getting stuck in a groove to the point that enough of the public starts thinking of their coffee as a joke; despite selling an addictive substance, their stock is plunging.

2. Netflix’s formula running its course so that no room is left for growth, leaving them “playing games,” as Ted puts it, of hiding their figures and raising subscription prices.

3. Walt Disney tying itself to the hope that it could just repeat its Marvel formula ad infinitum and keep raking in the profits; then the public got oversaturated with the experience, calling the more recent films “dull,” “lacking heart,” and “not special anymore.” By May of 2024, Disney announced it would stop churning these films out at such a fast rate and try to focus on quality… confirming that they weren’t previously much concerned with quality so long as movie-goers kept buying tickets.

The strange thing about brands getting frozen in a formula is that the largest companies are almost always the most risk-averse. No one can blame a business for wanting to stay focused on whatever strategy delivered initial success, but this can result in overlooking the predictable pitfall of mistaking creative ventures for assembly-line productions. Offer too much of the same thing, and people will get bored. Stay too much the same and the business will stagnate.

Rick and Ted gave an excellent example of the music industry in the 1950s. Record labels had hit on how to produce formulaic pop hits, and, with some notable exceptions, the charts were full of some pretty bland stuff. It left the public hungry, and when the risky, avant-garde, hyper-creative Beatles came along, the world was ready for something fresh and new. Simultaneously, Hollywood slowly realized it couldn’t keep churning out formulaic westerns and musicals forever to an increasingly bored audience and had to take the risk of letting creatives produce less predictable films, like The Godfather.

I’ve learned that the big music labels are back in a similar rut today, thanks to what music streaming platforms have done to the industry. The labels no longer remember how to scout talent and cultivate stars as they used to; instead, they’ll only sign musicians who have already built up their own following on Instagram or TikTok. They don’t want to take any risks, and the music biz has become a backward-looking game of buying up the licenses of old songs instead of investing in new bands.

The ironic part of this is that the most lucrative thing happening in music these days is the old-school live performances of an artist called Taylor Swift (you may have heard of her), but the industry isn’t taking much note of how music fans are craving authentic experiences with musicians and is, instead, trying to figure out how to use AI to feed more of the sameness to all of the listeners. They won’t change until they are forced to do so, and for now, both Rick and Ted (who listen to music for a living) agree that the best music can’t be found on major labels. You have to go to independent artists or to people recording themselves in their bedrooms to hear something fresh and new.

I’m with you if search engine platforms come to your mind when reading these examples of how the majors are making all the wrong moves in music and film. As Google and all the tech giants tie themselves to AI in hopes of socially engineering humanity so that they can enjoy the rewards of formulas, the public has headed to Reddit, Discord, Substack, YouTube, and a ton of other sites hoping to make authentic connections with other interesting people… not with robots.

I think I shouted something gleeful when this interview pivoted to Ted mentioning he’s spent the last couple of years researching historical parallels to our present moment of fixation on formulas. I’ll sum this up as succinctly as I can:

• The 1700s in Europe were dominated by what is known as the Age of Enlightenment — a period in which people championed rationalism over humanism and believed that everything could be categorized, explained, and controlled with the right formula. Author Nancy Marie Brown has described this as an era in which both Europeans and North Americans “disenchanted” themselves, replacing the humble state of being mystified by all the strange and wondrous things about our world with the narcissistic notion that smart people could possess and manage everything.

• In this environment, creatives held lowly roles. For example, the outstanding composer Joseph Haydn was forced to wear servant’s clothes in the presence of his wealthy patrons.

• The core product of the Enlightenment was the Industrial Revolution, with its factories, sweatshops, and harnessing of fossil fuels for the purposes of mass production. This is basically the beginning of the climate change we’re all struggling with today.

• Then, the backlash began. Clearly, the public sensed that society had become too cold and formulaic and began championing the creatives. The Romantic era made heroes out of poets like Blake and Keats, who were penning curses on smokestacks and odes to vanishing nature in the 1800s. Unlike poor Haydn, Beethoven became a huge celebrity whose fame outpaced that of the rich industrialists.

• Humanism clapped back at rationalism in this period, and some of the core results of the Romantic movement were the abolition of slavery in Europe and the US and legislation against child labor.

Ted Gioia sees parallels between the 20th-century obsession with “progress” and the Age of Enlightenment, with an eye to whether the 21st-century backlash has already begun in a new Romantic movement. If you asked modern people to guess where Americans are spending the bulk of their screen time, they’d probably say it's binging the increasingly formulaic content of Netflix. But, actually, Netflix has been outpaced by YouTube — the wild and chaotic home of the creatives and a major seat of the creator economy.

Netflix admitted in 2023 that they focused on quantity over quality and the public has gotten fed up with the result. I can see it in my own screen consumption habits. Why would I invest time in a so-so show that will be canceled after the first season when I could instead dig into a vibrant, original vlog or podcast, join the host’s Discord server, and connect with really creative and cool humans?

The phenomenon we’re seeing is what Ted Gioia describes as macroculture vs. microculture. To put it in our own industry’s wheelhouse, macroculture is Google thinking that you want an AI Overview to answer your search; microculture is you ignoring that source and heading to Reddit to find real people having a lively discussion about your question. Similarly, macroculture is Spotify spoonfeeding you a playlist of music by people whose names you’ll never know; microculture is your sister telling you that you’ve got to watch Willow’s mesmeric Tiny Desk performance of a song called “Symptom of Life.” And then following up your viewing by noticing that Rick Beato just devoted an episode of his show to this very song. Macroculture is large and slow; microculture is responsive, adaptive, and so much harder to control.

I don’t know whether Ted is right that we’re on the doorstep of enjoying a massive new Romantic-era-style backlash. I hope he’s right, though. I’ve personally written about this topic in the past in my own way because, like those skeptics in the Age of Enlightenment, I’d much rather have my mind expanded by original experiences than lulled by mass-produced filler.

And here’s the funny thing about this dynamic: isn’t this what the most thoughtful SEOs and marketers have been trying to say for years now? Haven’t we all been taught that our skilled analysis of keywords and links is just an essential stepping stone to the greater good of connecting with audiences? Isn’t all our messaging about building real relationships with communities, being authentic, and being trustworthy coming from an intuition that nearly every customer, every human person, craves connection? I think it’s time to look again at what we define as progress in our industry.

Tools are great. In SEO, we love them! In fact, I’m fine with AI being used as a subservient tool for some rote tasks — I just don’t want it to be mistaken for human progress. Ted Gioia puts it perfectly:

“The problem with progress is that people think progress is the new technology…but true progress is human beings flourishing.”

Any product that’s touted for its ability to remove the need for humans to think or work creatively doesn’t deserve our cheerleading, our reverence, our worship. The big platforms need to pause and rethink the actual risks of cultivating formulas (which always play out) instead of people (who will never stop being creative). I’m thinking of a CEO I knew who read poetry at all-hands meetings to help staff through rough times. I’m thinking of an overseas manager who spent time explaining the politics of his country to me in addition to discussing work projects. I’m thinking of any team leader who gets that the time employees are given for absorbing stimulating cultural, social, and artistic inputs is going to directly impact the quality of their outputs.

I am sensing on all sides that searchers feel Google is stagnating in 2024. The macroculture response would be to double down on the same path. The microculture approach would be to take risks. The kind of risks a musician takes when they put themselves out there on YouTube to see if anyone responds. The type of risk J.R.R. Tolkien took in launching modern fantasy while feeling like he’d exposed his “heart to be shot at.” The kind of risks employers take when they empower staff to riff from a place of creative kindness in serving the public.

Think about it… what if Google replaced their 20-year-old open-sourced and understaffed local search model with a human-led information desk in which actual local people were paid to help neighbors find a doctor, a hotel, a restaurant? What if instead of weighting big brand content farms so heavily in their organic results, Google went wacky and started surfacing the smallest and highest-quality publishers they could find? What if Google announced, “Look, forget about this AI thing; it’s probably not worth all this hullabaloo and carbon.” What would happen? I don’t know, but it would certainly shake things up! It would not be stagnant.

So, what will you do at your agency, your local business, or your major enterprise? I know you won’t stop looking for repeat success — it’s our job to do that. But is it time to rethink the shelf-life of formulas? How can we be more fluid in our strategies and more whimsical in the risks we’re willing to take to reverse this awful trend of businesses becoming faceless, remote, inaccessible entities? Every business is staffed by original, individual people. How much permission are they given to shine and connect with others? What can we do to re-embrace humanism and re-earn one another’s trust? What can we do so that we’re all working on projects that result in people flourishing?

I’m convinced you have ideas thudding quietly in your heart, sparkling like bits of lightning in your brain, but perhaps never spoken aloud in the workplace. Rationalism has its uses but also its limits. Rationalism gives us the technology to connect with almost anyone anywhere in the world, one-on-one. How we use it is up to us. To automate, to mimic, to lampoon? Or to be more human with more people? Goals and missions matter, and I think there is a little-explored creative road open right now to any organization that’s willing to rethink where we’re currently being led by would-be social engineers in the tech world. Where do we want SEO to go? What do we want it to be? A facilitator of disconnection or a better bridge between you and me?

What do you think? Please make time this week to watch the video and @ me directly on Twitter with your take!

For over a decade, it's been my honor to write this column for you, and the vibrancy of your response and your generous sharing of my work at your agencies, in your newsletters, and across social media has been a continuous source of encouragement and joy for me. Thank you for all of this, and if what you've learned has helped the local businesses you market or educate thrive, I'd be very grateful to hear about it via a LinkedIn recommendation. I'll be moving on to my next adventure after such brilliant fun and fellowship at Moz, so please, look for me soon in all the usual places, where I'll still be advocating for the local businesses I love. And if you have a local SEO opportunity at your company, I'd be excited to hear about it! Sending all good wishes to you, your companies, and your families.

Kind Regards,

Miriam