SA Channels
Build the system before you have the idea
Doug Bird spent five years measuring Red Bull's in-person marketing. His argument: events are as measurable as digital, and the idea should be the last thing you work on.
A new acronym arrives every few months, and an agency is always ready to invoice for it. Graeme Stiles of Algorithm Agency makes the case for building underneath the platforms instead, and then declines to sell the acronym.
Is Google on its way out?
Graeme Stiles has spent most of his career in SEO, which makes his answer more interesting than a yes or a no. It is both. Google is not disappearing, but in his view it drops from "95 plus percent market share" to one building block among several, used in and around the other tools people now reach for first.
The behaviour has already moved. Research starts inside an assistant as often as a search box, and Google has read the same signal: the AI overviews are the platform rebuilding itself, because "the search results, the 10 links that we grew up on, it's not going to survive."
What is striking is that he thinks this is good news, and says so as someone whose whole world was Google for years. More routes to an audience is not a threat to marketers. It is the end of a monopoly on attention that nobody chose.
The acronym arrives with an invoice attached
Which brings the commercial question. GEO and AEO are the newest line items on the market, and his agency sells exactly the discipline they sit next to. He will not package them.
"We're not going to try sell you GEO as a new service, because we can then add a line item to the invoice and charge you more. With working with you on your organic optimisation, that covers SEO, it covers GEO, it covers the whole system that we need to optimise for."
This is the most useful question a buyer can take into a supplier conversation: is this a new discipline, or a new line item? Staying on the cutting edge matters, he is clear about that, but it belongs "within the context of the offering and the system rather than going, hey, let's just do GEO for the sake of it."
Luke Marthinusen of MO Agency arrives at the same place from the technical side, as we covered in the piece on backlinks and corroboration. The work that makes a page readable to an assistant is largely the work good SEO always asked for, done properly.
Foundations outlive platforms
"If you optimise for a system and you are optimised for the foundational elements, it's going to tick the box of each of those platforms, but it's going to outlive the individual platform."
His evidence is the platform everyone built on. Five years ago nobody seriously planned for a world where Google was not the be-all and end-all, and the agencies that had done the unglamorous foundations (content that answers something, a site structured so a machine can follow it) carried that work straight across. The ones who optimised for Google's quirks did not.
So the instruction is to build around what the person at the other end actually wants from you, rather than around the platform currently delivering them. "Platforms will come and go, they'll rise in popularity, they'll drop off. But if you have that fundamental thread in your strategy around, let's just do this for actually the person who's going to be reading this."
The only question that survives the rollout
He ends somewhere no channel conversation usually goes. Vanity metrics are the real risk, and he includes performance marketing in that. It does not ultimately matter how the paid campaign performed, or how many hours the new chat agent saved. Those are process numbers.
The question is whether the business problem you went out to solve is solved. His observation is that teams get six and twelve months into a rollout, deep in the process and the hype, without once stopping to ask it. That applies to the newest acronym exactly as much as it applies to the oldest channel.
Try this week: take the newest line item on your supplier's invoice and ask whether it is a discipline or a repackaged retainer. Then pick one campaign or tool that has been running six months or more, write down the business problem it was bought to fix, and answer honestly whether it has.
Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.
First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.
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I'm Terence Mentor. These articles come from my conversations on the SA Digital Marketing Podcast. Through TM Digital, I look at what businesses spend on marketing and tell them plainly what's working.