Bots now outnumber humans online—so Jess Graham says marketers should stop trying to outsmart the algorithms and start building channels they actually own.
Bots now outnumber humans online, and account for more than half of web page requests. Jess Graham thinks that ratio should change what the website is for, what marketers measure, and where budget goes next.
As CEO and founder of Banquet, and someone who helped establish the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, Jess has spent enough time with AI safety researchers to doubt that marketers can reliably game LLMs for growth. She makes the case for trading SEO, AEO, and GEO for positioning, messaging, and owned channels like email, apps, loyalty programs, and direct mail.
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3 Takeaways:
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:08) Back to Marketing Basics
(02:52) Is the Internet Dying?
(03:53) Rethinking Metrics & Owned Channels
(05:06) The Case for Bringing Back Direct Mail
(06:56) The Pay-to-Play Platform Future
(07:17) Curiosity as a Core Marketing Skill
(08:31) The GS1 Sunrise 2027 Opportunity
(09:39) Lightning Round & Hot Takes
About the Guest:
Jess Graham is the founder of Banquet, a commercial advisory for consumer brands. Technology is changing how people find brands, buy from them, and build relationships with them, and Jess advises companies on new paths to brand and revenue growth as those behaviors shift.
Her career spans two systems that shaped modern buying: nine years at Visa, studying how people actually pay and buy, from paper checks to Apple Pay, and Meta, where she led product marketing for Instagram and launched Reels helping build the plumbing for the attention economy.
Jess writes The Feast, an essay series on discovery, brands, and taste in the age of algorithms. She lives in the US and UK.
Connect:
Jess Graham: https://www.linkedin.com/in/discoveryinagenticcommerce/
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Sara: [00:00:00] I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
Jess: Google is sending one human set of eyeballs for every five bots that it's sending. I think we start asking more fundamental questions about the role of the website, who the website is for, who it services, what it needs to be doing in the modern era, what it needs to be doing five minutes from now and five months from now and five years from now, which is very much not what it did before.
Sara: That's Jess Graham, CEO and founder at Banquet. Let's get started.
So Jess, I had the pleasure of meeting you at the MarTech World Forum in London, where you had not one but two hot takes that stopped me and everybody else in our tracks. So I would love to start with those. I want to start with the first one, where we were talking about what to keep, [00:01:00] kill, add, or reinvent in a digital experience of 2030, and you said you would kill SEO, AEO, and GEO.
With that being such a hot topic right now, I would love [Jess: Yeah.] for you to share with the audience why you would kill that.
Jess: I had the privilege of spending some time in the last couple of years with a lot of AI safety researchers. I helped establish an organization called the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI. In my time with that group of people, I learned a lot about how LLMs work and a lot about what we understand about how LLMs work. To me, believing that we as marketers can manipulate them effectively for commercial growth regularly without sort of having this chasing the dragon kind of experience that we've had with other algorithmic changes seemed a little, frankly, just sort of silly to me, the idea that we would think as marketers that we could [00:02:00] manipulate something for commercial purposes that I think that even the smartest people in the world are having trouble figuring out how things work.
Sara: I love the analogy of chasing the dragon because I do feel like a lot of people feel like they're doing that. And one of the things you and I talked about was it's focusing less on this mysterious mythical thing and really focusing on what makes marketing great.
Jess: The basics, the blocking and the tackling, the positioning, the messaging, the value proposition.
All of that stuff gets lost in our desire to outthink the bots and outthink the algorithms. And sadly, that becomes the discourse of boards and C-suites, and really, I think we'd be better off sort of minding the store and going back to basics.
Sara: Yeah, I love that. Well, but going back to basics, one of your other hot takes was that you believe the internet is dying and/or will be dead by 2030.
[00:03:00] So what do you mean by that? And if you're thinking about basics, where so many people have felt like, "Hey, my website is just core to my strategy and plan," what does that mean for the future for that?
Jess: I think that the reality that we're living in now, however, is that Google is sending one human set of eyeballs for every five bots that it's sending.
And so if we think about how that actually changes what that surface becomes, I think we start asking more fundamental questions about the role of the website, who the website is for, who it services, what it needs to be doing in the modern era, not what it needed to be doing even five minutes ago, but what it needs to be doing five minutes from now and five months from now and five years from now, which is very much not what it did before.
Sara: What does that mean you should be thinking about today to prepare for that, even when you don't know what that future looks like?
Jess: Well, I [00:04:00] think the first thing that I advise clients to do is to look at their dashboards and think about what they're measuring, and think about whether or not they're measuring for the future or they're measuring for the past.
It's like, if you can't measure it, you can't action it. Well, the same thing is the reverse, right? If you measure it, then you're gonna feel some momentum to actually action it. But if you're looking at unique website visitors, is that even really relevant anymore, right? And so what are you measuring? So that's where I usually start.
The thing that I love about websites is that brands own them, and there are very few channels that brands own these days. And so where I think that brands should be focused, more than chasing the SEO, AEO dragon, is in building more owned channels. Maybe it's not the website. Maybe it's investing more in an app or another surface or your unboxing experience, your install experience, your newsletter, your email, your loyalty program.
I could go [00:05:00] on all day, and all of these things are at the heart of what martech does.
Sara: Are there any that you would bring back from, not even a pre-AI era, but even a pre-website era? What from the '90s playbook would you bring back that you think you would sink your teeth into?
Jess: Okay, so this is biased 'cause I spent a lot of time in financial services, and I got very good at direct marketing, which at that time was direct mail, and I got very good at those algorithms, and even have a patent for a segmentation. Like, this was back in the days when marketers used to be in the room helping create the segmentation, right?
I think things that are experiential, even direct mail, have more of a punch than they ever have before because we're all craving — whether it's post-COVID or post-AI or post-social media — we are all craving tangible, real experiences for ourselves, but [00:06:00] also with brands. And I think there's a woman, Charlotte Pierce, I think her company is called Inked, and she is just doing some phenomenal stuff in direct mail.
Super creative, super innovative. I mean, go use your data and build something beautiful and cool that people wanna open.
Sara: It's such an interesting dichotomy between what AI is doing in digitizing things and making our digital experience, as an example, morphing that and evolving that in so many different ways.
But it's also bringing back that need for that human connection and human interaction, and that's when you think about the brand. When you say offsite brand, like not on your website, but your offsite brand is that it's direct mail. It's the human contact.
Jess: Brands need that too. Brands need relationship too, and it's so disintermediated now by platforms that you really have to think about how to create that relationship in a way that's meaningful.
I mean, the reality is we're gonna be paying for it all soon enough [00:07:00] anyway, right? Like, they're gonna get their advertising platforms built sooner rather than later, and it's all just gonna be pay to play, and it's gonna be a painful budgeting season, but it's coming. So not to worry.
Not to worry. You can pay for it soon, you know?
Sara: What do you think is the skill or skill set that marketers should have? What's the most important one today to prepare for what is coming next, while they're in the hot seat trying to juggle all of this?
Jess: I think curiosity is the thing that has driven me.
So I have a lot of bias for curiosity as being something that is productive and that is empowering and that is sort of good for me, right? And so I think for me, if you're not thinking about, with curiosity, what you could build today by yourself in your apartment or in your home or in your boat that you couldn't [00:08:00] have even conceived of six months ago, then you're probably letting the best of what this technology is gonna reap pass you by, while probably suffering some of the negatives of it.
Like, even I get excited about the stuff that I can be more curious about, the things that I can build today that I could never have even imagined. I would have had to get alignment from 50 people in an organization to build the website that I built for myself over a weekend.
It's amazing.
Sara: Before we let you go, tell us about what you are calling the biggest brand opportunity of this generation.
Jess: Oh, this is my rallying cry. I think this is brands' last best opportunity to reframe the power imbalance that's been happening with platforms and brand and advertising for years, and that is an opportunity to embrace GS1 Sunrise [00:09:00] 2027, which is essentially replacing the UPC barcode on every single thing that's scanned at any register, and replacing it with a 2D code that gets scanned where it gets purchased and can also be scanned by consumers.
And imagine that as a channel for a marketer, for somebody who wants to talk about provenance, about safety, about allergens, about features, about benefits, about anything. And gather data, and create real consumer ownership where for years they've been beholden to retailers and ad platforms for any spare bit of information.
Sara: So we typically end with a hot take, but since we started with a hot take, I thought maybe we could give it a shot and do a lightning round with you, if you're comfortable doing that. Overrated or underrated: personalization?
Jess: I'd like to see it happen before I overrate or underrate it.
You know what I mean? I'd love to see a really good example of it, but I think underrated at this [00:10:00] point. Underrated.
Sara: This or that: being on an agent's shortlist, or having 10,000 customers who would never let an agent shop for them?
Jess: Without a doubt it's the second, 'cause you have a business if you have the second.
You have an idea if you have the first.
Sara: Okay, so finish this sentence: The first marketing job title agents make obsolete is...
Jess: I think all of them are up for grabs.
Sara: Which platform charges brands the steepest tax: Amazon, Google, or Meta?
Jess: I think in combination they are so extractive and so bad. I think when you start talking about giving any platform 60 cents on your revenue dollar, you stop having a lot of money to do R&D to create experiences that consumers will think are worth having.
You miss a lot of paying really smart and amazing people to do creative work for you. You miss investing in technology and systems that are gonna grow your business and your [00:11:00] own margin. They have created a really, really challenged ecosystem for marketers, and I think that that is why I'm so interested in people creating assets that will actually compound for them and will actually build value for them over time, which is at the heart of what martech could and should be doing, I think.
Sara: That is awesome. Well, Jess, just like your hot takes in London stopped me in my tracks, your lightning round did not disappoint. So thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation today. Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.