Going direct is the future of marketing

Is inbound marketing dead?

YouTube insists I should watch many more clips of Sam Altment or Jensen Huang dishing out business advice.

Got me thinking…

These people aren't just CEOs anymore, they're celebrities and influencers. (I mean… Jensen even got a signature black leather jacket — like Steve Job's turtlenecks, but in leather)

And of course, Sam and Jensen aren't alone. You'll see this everywhere you look, with tech leading the charge:

• Mark Zuckerberg
  Lived outside of the limelight for a decade, but now posts shorts where he directly critiques Apple Vision against Meta alternatives. He fights people in cages. Both he and Yan LeCun (Meta AI) regularly appear on podcasts.

• OpenAI
  Practically all the key people at OpenAI (or previously OpenAI) appear regularly on podcasts and in the news. Most of OpenAI marketing consists of Twitter drama and podcast appearances.

• Elon Musk
  The modern kingpin of this strategy, who of course not only has a massive personal brand, but now also even owns his own platform.

• Bryan Johnson
  Tech entrepreneur turned longevity researcher. If I had to just pick one name, I'd say he's probably the most interesting marketer in the world right now. Turned his whole life into the perfect PR story, grew a Youtube following from practically zero to >1M subs in under 2 years, and is leading a cult of people who want to live forever (no joke!).

• Vitalik Buterin
  How unlikely! Literally the last person you would expect to become a celeb, but he can't travel without bodyguards and literally has a Time Person of the Year title on his name. Not bad!

It's a completely new way for entrepreneurs and CEOs to speak directly to their audience.

The history (the trend)

Once upon a time, you'd have companies build a product and spend on advertising on television or radio to get the word out. Outbound was the name of the game.

Then in the early internet era, we made a massive transition: companies like Hubspot and Buffer led the way to inbound marketing, where companies would publish on their own blog and build a following. The 3rd-party advertising platforms were disintermediated, in favour of a direct relationship between the company and the target audience.

Today, we're effectively cutting out the marketing department, to arrive at the purest form: a direct relationship between founder and consumer.

Elon Musk in many ways started the trend, but now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.

The future

I wonder what this will mean for the future.

It seems to imply that any company that doesn't have a charismatic and enigmatic leader, has a distinct marketing disadvantage against those that do — they literally don't have a face, and a less distinct identity.

It seems that VC investors should probably more heavily skew towards investing in founders that they believe can be the next generation of charismatic leaders. It gives more leverage to whoever will be the face of the company.

It creates even more opportunities for the reverse pattern, too: people with a primary focus on building an audience… who then create businesses (think Kardashians, Oprah, Jay-Z, Rihanna… but also MrBeast, Alex Hormozi, Pieter Levels, etc), as well as the complementary pattern of VC investors becoming more celebrity-like (A16z, Chamath & David Sacks, etc).

It means that the quality of content will continue to rise: your average marketing team will have a hard time competing with a charismatic CEO for producing thought-provoking editorial pieces or snappy TikTok content. Educational how-to content is out, and opinionated world-building content is shattering all records.

Conclusion:

The future of marketing is a direct 1:1 relationship between the founder and the consumer

Inbound marketing is dead.

We want raw, unfiltered root access to the founder's vision (and founders want a direct path to speak to customers, too!)

Cheers,

— Pieter