Street Fight Live took place a few weeks ago in Los Angeles, and we’ve examined key sessions & talks here on Localogy Insider. From those sessions, there were several overarching themes and threads. However, there were three that stood out most to us. Here they are in no particular order.
1. New Rules of Engagement
Along with escalating consumer usage of AI engines as a front door to the web, the game has changed for getting found. This evokes the well-established but still growing topic of AI SEO or generative engine optimization (GEO). This isn’t a new finding or insight, but questions remain around the how.
Fortunately, some portion of AI SEO will inherit ranking factors from good-old SEO, given that similar authorities will be sourced. That’s good news for anyone who was already on top of their SEO game. But getting found amidst the new fragmented mix of AI, search, and social engenders a new playbook.
That playbook is nuanced and evolving, but a few quick tactics include reverse engineering AI prompts… just like SEO involves reverse engineering keywords. Because AI search is all about natural language (detailed) queries and prompts, deeper levels of detail are required in business listings and profiles.
Will AI Elevate or Eviscerate Search: The New Rules of Engagement
2. Operations, not Marketing
“Most local businesses don’t have a marketing problem,” said Scorpion CRO Jamie Adams, “They have an operational problem.”
Adams went on to explain that after all the money local businesses spend to make their phones ring… they don’t answer the phone. This missed-calls problem is a longstanding dirty-little secret in the world of SMB marketing, but there finally could be a solution. The rise of AI could cover this call gap.
In fact, when looking at all of the proposed ways that AI will elevate SMB operations and marketing, the under-exposed killer app could end up being this ability to make sure every incoming call is addressed. We’ve already seen players such as vcita and Vendasta beat this drum, and back it up with real products.
Meanwhile, macro trends factor in, such as recent rate hikes in advertising. This affordability issue may push more local advertisers — including multi-location brands and SMBs — away from advertising and towards better operations. In other words, utilizing smart systems, they can do more with fewer leads.
3. It’s Small Agencies’ Time to Pounce
Speaking of macro trends and escalating ad rates, this could have a transformative effect on the agency landscape. Michael Farmer, who has spent a career advising big agencies and closely examining their financials, sees a big transformation coming. And it could be good news for smaller disruptive agencies.
Backing up, aggregate revenues for top ad agencies and holding companies — think: the WPPs of the world — haven’t grown over the past decade. They’ve reconciled that flat growth by cutting costs and streamlining to preserve margins. The result is cost-cutting and other measures that degrade quality.
For example, the number of campaigns a given agent or exec will execute in a given year has ballooned, meaning less time and mindshare for each. At the same time, staff has been drastically reduced in the aggregate, and high-value work is increasingly done by cheaper and less experienced creative pros.
Now, there’s an even bigger squeeze on these agency giants from escalating ad prices, which drives demand down, and advertisers into the arms of increasingly-capable generative-AI alternatives. So for smaller agencies that can be adaptive, nimble, and AI-forward, the time is now to capture market share.
This also flips the script on another small-agency challenge. They’re getting boxed out of ad tech in a system that doesn’t set them up to win. So all of the factors above – including the rise of AI to empower smaller players – could seed an agency world reshuffling we haven’t seen since the Mad Men era.
