Social Media Marketing Podcast Zero-Click Challenge: Why Marketers Must Go Back to Fundamentals
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Sep 25, 2025 
Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro and co-founder of Moz, dives into the evolving landscape of marketing in a world dominated by zero-click interactions. He discusses how platforms prioritize keeping users on-site, shifting the focus from traditional clicks to influence. Rand advocates for returning to foundational marketing principles, highlighting the importance of creating compelling products and targeting broader audiences to enhance brand recall. He also addresses AI's role, emphasizing it as a productivity tool rather than a job threat, while offering actionable strategies for marketers.
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Platforms Prioritize In-Place Engagement
- Platforms increasingly keep users inside their ecosystems, reducing referral clicks to external sites.
- Rand calls this trend “zero click everything” and argues it breaks traditional traffic-driven marketing.
Attribution Distorts Marketing Decisions
- Digital marketing's attribution promise warped spending toward platforms that could overclaim credit for conversions.
- Rand explains platforms used pixels and data to appear responsible for sales that would have occurred anyway.
Startups Buying San Francisco Billboards
- Rand describes San Francisco billboards by tiny startups targeting local influencers and VCs despite broad waste.
- He uses this to show targeted offline media can be a smarter spend than measurable digital ads.
