- Marketing in a Box
- Posts
- What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking - July 4th, 2025
What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking - July 4th, 2025
Practical marketing insights from the trenches: summarized, questioned, and ready for action.
Adam Lasky
July 04, 2025
Happy Fourth of July! 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.
Was this email forwarded to you?
🔥 This Week's Saves
TL;DR: Search is being rewritten by AI, just like search was rewritten by ads. Blue links aren't as valuable for informational queries as they used to be. Informational content now has to earn a spot in AI summaries, sidebars, and voice answers. The winners are the one who create structured, brand-led, semantically clear content read by machines first, humans second.
Why It's Worth Your Time: If content is part of your growth strategy (and it should be) then you need to stop thinking only in terms of keyword ranking and start thinking in terms of retrievability and summarizability. This AI shift in SERP real estate is similar to the ad shift when a lot of the real estate became devoted to ads, and then local packs, and then PAA.
One Quote to Chew On:
"Information is no longer enough. Search has become less about query fulfillment and more about cultural participation. People aren't just searching on platforms, they're searching through culture."
How I'm Thinking About This: SEO content needs to answer a few questions:
Is it LLM-legible?
Is it formatted for chunkable citations?
Is it unique (i.e. not AI-written)?
If the answer is "no" then your content is most likely not future-proof. We need to write to be read, parsed, and reused by machines. That means structured, skimmable, original content with built-in citations and semantic clarity.
TL;DR: Meta Ads targeting in 2025 is less about choosing the perfect audience and more about letting the algorithm find it…if you give it strong creative and clear signal. I think the time of thinking "we know our data better than Meta" is over. Broad beats granular. And I can't remember the last time I ran Lookalike audiences. Your job is to train the algorithm.
Why It's Worth Your Time: This guide reframes targeting from an input to an outcome. If you're still obsessing over audiences instead of feedback loops and creative testing, you're playing the wrong game. Jon Loomer shows how to align with Meta's machine-learning engine.
One Quote to Chew On:
"It doesn't matter whether you believe in algorithmic targeting. It cannot be avoided in most cases, particularly when optimizing for conversions. Many of your attempted restrictions are pointless and counterproductive.”
How I'm Thinking About This: I'm treating targeting like scaffolding. Our focus is shifting to signal clarity (conversion events, funnel quality, attribution modeling) and creative variability. The targeting layer is now just a permission slip to run good ads. This is even more so the case with Meta's new "incrementality" attribution option.
TL;DR: Tom Greenwood makes a compelling case for less, but better. Instead of designing for obsolescence and feeding the cycle of linear consumption and disposal we should design for circle business models and better solutions (i.e. reassess the purpose of products and services and the companies behind them). Ultimately, less acts as a catalyst for innovation, a "thinking inside the box" mentality using constraints as a tool to think differently.
Why It's Worth Your Time: Doing fewer things (but doing them better) is one of the keys to high-impact work. Cal Newport called this "deep work" that creates sustained, high-quality output without the busyness.
One Quote to Chew On:
"Does all work even serve a purpose nowadays? Or is there such a thing as bullshit jobs, as David Graeber calls them - roles that bring little value to society - that, if eliminated, could free up talent for better work or even allow us to engage in more creative or fulfilling activities?"
How I'm Thinking About This: Everything, everywhere, all at once is not a growth strategy, even though it feels like that's what founders and startups should be doing. Geoffrey More wrote in "Crossing the Chasm" about a D-Day analogy: you don't land on all beaches. You pick one, focus an overabundance of support on that niche, and win it outright. That's the wedge (and how you cross the chasm).
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,
P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit. We're all in this together.