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- What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking - July 18th, 2025
What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking - July 18th, 2025
Practical marketing insights from the trenches: summarized, questioned, and ready for action.
Adam Lasky
July 18, 2025
Happy Friday! Every week, I save dozens of posts, articles, and newsletters that challenge my thinking. Here's what stood out this week and why I think it's worth your time too.
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🔥 This Week's Saves
TL;DR: ChatGPT is not intelligent. It's something way more interesting. It's a map of human culture. These AI machines are mapping the patterns that shape how we think and write. They compress meaning and generate new combinations from old thought patterns.
Why It's Worth Your Time: The AI sycophants think we're digitizing our brains. The AI critics think we're building SkyNet. Seth Godin thinks both are missing the point. What we're actually building are tools that can process and reconstruct patterns of human expression.
One Quote to Chew On:
"Here's what's actually happening inside these machines: They're mapping the statistical relationships between every word and every other word in human culture. They're building a heat map of how language actually works."
How I'm Thinking About This: ChatGPT is an aggregating pattern-matching machine. It doesn't create new content. It assembles old content in new ways and acts as a brain lubricant. Godin is right: I don't think machines are replacing human creativity. But when we say "creativity" we don't mean it in the iRobot sense of "can you paint a masterpiece?" When ChatGPT “paints" a masterpiece it's mostly a job-to-be-done. The creativity piece is the origin of the idea.
TL;DR: AI will keep getter better, so what does this really mean?
Lower cost, more digital stuff
Everything will be "personalized," localized, or contextualized
Lots of automation of white collar work
Lots of direct oversight of service/blue collar work
Why It's Worth Your Time: Some of the second and third order effects are more interesting: a lower trust society, bifurcating and carving out the middle market companies, higher median incomes and more inequality to name a few. What particularly stood out was the erosion of the switching cost moat, one of the 7 brand powers companies have.
One Quote to Chew On:
"Custom software, instantaneous contextualization, personalized advertising, on-demand books, etc. This stuff will be relatively easy to produce (and maybe even produce well) and people will love it."
How I'm Thinking About This: I don't think personalization is the be-all-end-all that everyone makes it out to be. Yes, I want tailored results based on my previous behavior or likes. But followed to the nth degree, we create echo chambers of ourselves. What happened to discovery and browsing and window shopping and "giving it a go"?
TL;DR: Google hides an increasing number of paid search terms in pMax and search campaigns, making it impossible for advertisers to see what queries triggered their ads. Google is skimming off the top for their own benefit (we kinda knew this…but not the extent), and Collin Slattery estimates that for every $1 you spend on Google Ads, they skim $0.85 in forced inefficiency. This results not only in a lower "blended" ROAS but elevated CPCs as well.
"For all data in our dataset, visible search terms perform over two times better than hidden search terms. This means that 28% of spend on our sample is performing half as well as the other 72%."
Why It's Worth Your Time: Advertisers are essentially flying blind, unable to see which queries are driving (or wasting) spend. That makes it harder to cut irrelevant traffic, fine-tune intent targeting, or improve ROAS. 27% of search spend and 34% of shopping spend queries are now hidden, significantly cutting into CTRs, CPCs, and ROAS. It's a structural shift in Google's ad platform toward opacity, diminishing marketer control while protecting Google's margins.
One Quote to Chew On:
"The trend on all this data is clear: Google is hiding lower quality search terms that advertisers would be less likely to bid on if they were visible."
How I'm Thinking About This: Google's move to hide queries under the guise of automation or privacy strips advertisers of agency and accountability. The bidding on irrelevant terms, the low-intent traffic, the queries you'll never see…Google was always a rent-seeking machine. We're paying a premium to not know what we're buying. We will need to rebuild signal elsewhere via first-party data, server-side tagging, and closed-loop attribution.
This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your marketing journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.
Until next week,
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