Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

The zero-click crisis: How search AI Is changing digital marketing

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 38

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Is there anything better than sitting in the garden with a cool drink and the sun on your face? The only thing I can think of enjoying that while listening to the latest episode of your favourite marketing podcast! 

This time we're hearing from Rich Harper, Head of Digital Marketing, and Sophie Caswell, Head of Strategy and Innovation, as they reveal how AI search results are fundamentally altering the relationship between brands and their audiences.

The conversation challenges marketers to move beyond vanity metrics and rediscover marketing fundamentals. Rich shares how an obsession with performance has led many organisations to treat marketing departments as mere lead generation machines rather than strategic partners. Meanwhile, Sophie draws on her background creating communication strategies for major brands to explain why maintaining brand

Recorded ahead of their talk at the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2025, this episode emphasises the need to prioritise brand and creating a human connection—it's time we stop writing for bots! 

If you want to find more great marketing content (no brag) then head on over to our Resource Hub. There you'll find thought pieces, articles, templates and podcasts—including this one!

Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

See what we can do for you at brewdigital.com


Haydn Woods-Williams:

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Marketers of the Universe. We're here today with our Head of Digital Marketing, rich Harper, and our Head of Strategy and Innovation, sophie Caswell, ahead of a talk they are doing at the Marketing Society's Digital Day in May 2025. We are talking predominantly about search and AI and how it could potentially be stealing clicks from your brand and what you can do about it. But, as is always the case, we're very likely to go and have a wider conversation around AI, marketing, brand and everything there as well. I'm really excited to have this conversation and sadly can't be at the digital day, so really keen to understand what they will be presenting. But that is for you to find out. Let's get on with the podcast. Rich, sophie, firstly, just so everyone knows who you go far, could you just give a quick 20 second roundup of why you are qualified to talk about the new era of search and AI? Rich, we'll kick off with you, please.

Rich Harper:

Hi Hayden, I'm Rich Harper. For those of you that listen to the podcast regularly, I have been a regular guest. I am the head of digital marketing at Brew Digital. I've been in digital marketing now for over 15 years, so hopefully that experience gives me a platform to to have an opinion and share my expertise.

Sophie Caswell :

lovely, thank you, rich sophie well, I suppose I'm kind of in an interesting position when you talk about digital day and about this particular subject, because I am the person that heads up innovation and strategy at Brew Digital, and, although I've worked in tech now for 12 years, before I did that I was the comms planner for very large ad agencies at board level, and I did lots of comms planning for the advertising accounts for people like Mercedes, people like the Department of Transport, santander and American Express, amongst others, before I jumped ship and ran away to digital, and now I use the sort of communications planning capability bedrock that I had and user insight and psychology bedrock to understand how user interactions work within technology, specifically, not just digital marketing, but the structuring of websites and what drives people to the behaviors online that they display.

Sophie Caswell :

And so when Rich and I were discussing what we wanted to talk about at Digital Day, we were discussing the issues around AI and how that's affecting the way that people's search results come out, and we both came to very similar views in terms of some of the best strategies that people could actually use. And although I transitioned 12 years ago into the digital space and spent a lot of my time deep in the tech world rather than necessarily straight marketing and structuring websites. The observations of what I know from my background before I moved into this and how digital marketing is evolving is useful to impart?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

yeah, of course, thank you both for that. Let's let's jump straight into the nitty-gritty of AI. Has been a massive, massive thing in marketing or in everywhere, like all walks of life, over the last 12, 18 months. Can you kick things off by just giving a bit of context around what is actually happening, that people should be a little bit worried about the evolution?

Rich Harper:

of search, as well as the kind of introduction of AI into the mainstream in the last kind of 18 months, has meant that traditionally how we used to search and find information, which was a paid ad which would have appeared at the top of the search result page or an organic listing that would have appeared on the page somewhere, has changed and shifted somewhat. So whereas before we were optimizing to drive traffic to our site, the introduction of AI overviews has kind of changed that, because people no longer need to click through to find out the information because the AI overviews in Google are answering their queries there and then that has resulted in. I think in 2024, from the research, around 60% of searches now result in a zero click. So that's had obviously a heavy impact on websites traffic and has probably had a lot of brands scrambling around thinking about what they need to do about that.

Sophie Caswell :

Yeah, I think when Rich and I were talking about this challenge that marketeers are finding and his views on the best things to help combat it, it was really interesting because I was trying to think of best examples of why it's super important to focus on what AI is doing and what the results are. Further down the page and I actually had that very evening, an example which really really resonated, which is I had a flat battery in my car, and so you go straight into Google and you're like why have I got this flat battery? Now, I had an inkling it's because it's an old battery. You know, scan as usual. Oh, look, there's the AI. Yeah, here are the reasons. Oh look, age. Yeah, hit the bullseye.

Sophie Caswell :

But actually what I was really looking for was to look at the sources for that. I had to push further down the page because I wanted to see more information from trusted brands that I know and I wanted to know about the services that they will help me with in order to sort that problem super quickly, because I needed my car back up and running for urgent things the next day. I was actually looking for a brand. In this case it was Halfords, because I know from their previous brand advertising that they offer same day inventory and fitting, and provided I could actually jump out and start my car again, I'd be able to get to my local branch and do that Now.

Sophie Caswell :

With AI coming up top, that's all very well, but actually the brand I'm really looking for is further down. But would I be looking for that brand if I didn't have a pretty rich knowledge of what it is they do from pretty robust brand advertising that's relatively recent, about what services they offer? No, I wouldn't be. You know, the argument here is there are lots of ways to combat this problem, but brand investment and making sure that people are actually understanding your product and still scanning for your brands super important.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That's kind of got me thinking a little bit Like actually you know, we as marketers over the last five ten years, thinking a little bit like, actually you know, we as marketers over the last five ten years really really push performance. When it comes to seo in particular, we've invested money into, you know, creating content and more content and content that answers all the possible questions that people search. Actually, if what you're saying there is is true, sophie, actually the brand is is way more important than that and the the kind of performance side of things isn't as important. Do you agree with that statement? Don't you think there's more?

Sophie Caswell :

it's a. It is a tricky balance. It's very, very important to sort of have a look at at the economic times in which we're in. We've got new technology like ai that everyone's like. Every single day something new comes out and we're kind of excited and also terrified and also trying to think how the best way to harness that is and everything that brings with it. But we're also I don't think anybody would dispute that we're in pretty challenging economic times. Okay, and In my previous life I must have written between 20, 25 different papers for clients trying to defend their budgets, marketeers trying to defend their brand budgets in difficult economic times, because the first thing people start to do is tell them they've got to slash their spend and brand always seems to be the thing that people think is the nice to have rather than must have.

Sophie Caswell :

Now I'm not saying that this environment is the same as that, because, hey, ai didn't exist back in the early noughties, early nineties, when I first started to write these papers, but it does rhyme like the Harvard Business School repository of information. Harvard Business Reviews some of the leading research establishments for marketing and business in general. You will find so much information on the importance of maintaining your brand investment to ensure that you land up with immediate sales and to ensure that when you come out of those tricky economic times, you are best positioned to have a decent market share. First survive and then thrive.

Sophie Caswell :

And some of the papers and the summaries of those papers are absolutely fascinating. So, to my mind, it's not massively massively invest in your brand. It's not outspend your competitors. It is a balance between making sure you continue to invest in your brand. It's not outspend your competitors. It is a balance between making sure you continue to invest in your brand, but you also are ensuring that you have the response mechanics to get the performance marketing operating as much as possible. And that is hard because people are pushing you to reduce the annual spend all the time or to combine those two spends, which is never a good idea.

Rich Harper:

We're all guilty of driving performance. I'm not sure if it's marketers' fault. I think there's the pressure from the CEOs, there's the pressure from CROs, there's the pressure from all different parts of the business to drive leads and to show that marketing is having a positive impact on the bottom line. I think it's always been difficult with attribution models and stuff like that to be able to always prove that. So we jumped to that point in time where we can say, hey, this is what we can show vanity metrics to justify our position, because it's just the way kind of things have progressed. But there's been so many studies and there's lots of research out at the moment that backs up that.

Rich Harper:

The brands that win on the performance side of things are the brands that invest in brand as well, and not just a small amount of brand investment. They heavily invest in their own brand and I think it's always kind of yeah, it's hard to measure the direct impact of of kind of brand campaigns in terms of that bottom line revenue. So you have to look at metrics away from just clicks, impressions, you know the vanity stuff that we're all so guilty of, of pushing in front of a ceo, and basically start talking the right marketing language in front of the board. And when I say the right marketing language, I mean let's step away from those, those types of metrics and start to insert ourselves in the fact that how do, how are we driving that bottom line venue? How are we aligned with sales? How are we aligned with other line value? How are we aligned with sales? How are we aligned with other departments, other areas of the business? Because the marketing team isn't just the lead generation function, is a strategic driver behind, really, for me, business growth.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

One of the things that you mentioned there around vanity metrics, kind of just bringing this back to the specifics of search and ai, I completely agree with a lot of what you said, but do you think that an obsession with these vanity metrics? You know, we look at followers on linkedin as an example. We look at potentially um traffic volume and clicks from organic search. If we're using those vanity metrics or if you're a company that's been using those vanity metrics and suddenly AI snippets are here, how do you as a marketer navigate that? Because that's a really challenging environment to be in.

Rich Harper:

Right Really challenging. I think it's about establishing the KPIs that matter for the business. Ai is both a hindrance and a opportunity, and I think the businesses that embrace the opportunity will start to win. But that opportunity is not a disguise or an excuse to then push out poor marketing. The fundamental aspect of marketing, if you think about the four Ps, have never changed and they should never change. Marketing strategy is as old as time. Those fundamentals still exist and as a marketing department, we need to move away from just being one of those Ps and embracing all four of them, because really we're being treated like just the promotion arm of a business.

Rich Harper:

Now is all the departments taking on the product development or service development and then giving it to the marketing team and saying can you send this out to market? But they've skipped a bunch of steps. We've had it with clients. You know they come to us and they say, hey, we've got this fabulous product, and then we go, okay, cool, who's it? Who's it for? It's for these people. Okay, is it really for those people though? Yeah, it's for those people. Is there any competition to it? No, there's no competition doing it. And then 10 minutes later, you do a bit of searching and a bit of market research, and you're like, hey guys, I've just found like 15 competitors that do exactly the same thing. What is your product or what is your offering? Why is it different? And then we start to unravel and it comes back and you're like okay, and this is when why? For me it's more, how do we, as marketers, stamp our authority again and start being marketers, rather than being pushed into a corner to just, hey, go and get us some leads for this?

Sophie Caswell :

I'd agree with those sentiments. I would absolutely say that there's an erosion of the basic capabilities in marketing. I think generally these days is there is a proliferation of companies exploding it has been over the last 20 years of startups and god knows what else. And then the technology that's available for people to google anything they don't understand or you know, rely on ai or the surfacing of information via the internet to get any information that they should really have known or looked at or had experience of or what have you to get them out of a tight spot.

Sophie Caswell :

I think there's generally a lack of appreciation of the thinking that needs to go on before you actually embark on any kind of marketing campaign. The idea of actually having a strategy is sometimes what is that? I don't really know what that is, you know, and that's just bizarre to me, very, very strange that there is no real thinking. That goes on a lot of the time behind why you're doing what you're doing. You're just going hell for leather, or you're going on hunches, or you're getting through by using buzzwords and that might work when things are buoyant and that's fantastic, great, well done you.

Sophie Caswell :

But for senior clients who are having to make very, very bold decisions about how they're going to handle the other people in the boardroom when it comes to defending their budgets. You need people who can think their way out of a tricky situation in terms of the challenges that marketeers face and defend those budgets, justify why you're doing what you're doing and not capitulate, and try and help that organization navigate difficult times and new challenging times in technology as best they can so that when they come out the other end, they're in best place and they are not playing catch up and they still exist. If you don't and you just have people that and you haven't done your due deal in terms of employing people or upskilling people who can think their way out of situations and help you, you're going to struggle.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

From a personal point of view, what do you say to a client when they're having those struggles?

Sophie Caswell :

Well, for me it's easy, because if I'm already talking to a client and they're having those struggles, they come to the right person, because usually they're talking about technology in relation in some way shape or form to their marketing. Usually, when it's me, it's about a website or something like that, and that's what I do every day. So I have absolutely no problem in picking the bones out of the internal landscape that clients got to navigate, but also what they've got to try and achieve, what their objective is, why it's their objective. Because the classic one is to come to people and tell them what it is they want and this is to Rich's point earlier on, which is product people or whoever services coming to a marketing team and saying do this right, why? Because what you think you need might not be what you need. Tell us what you're actually trying to achieve and do it honestly. Just tell us everything around it and then we will advise you on the best strategy, because nine times out of 10, what you would recommend is actually something different.

Sophie Caswell :

So what would I say to those people? Firstly, I would say invest in people who do have capability of critical thinking, and if you need to spot that, then by all means, people can DM me on LinkedIn and find out some hints on how to help them with that, but have a look for people who have worked on brands that are complex. Have a look at people who have stayed in organizations and evolved in those organizations and have the capability or have a background that actually points towards being able to understand consumer behavior in depth and then start upskilling and there's a wonderful organization called the Marketing Society who can help you with that. But yes, if people want advice, then by all meansm me, I'm very happy to give it for me it's.

Rich Harper:

It's when, when a client comes to me, it's about going back to basics and really, like, so said, it's understanding really what it is that they want to achieve. I'm going to talk about things like going back to basics. We're all guilty of it. You know we have a service or we have a product and it's doing well. How are we going to create another revenue stream? How are we going to create a service or a product that can help us achieve bigger growth, bigger revenue? You know I use Starbucks. Starbucks had everyone knows Starbucks Starbucks had got to a point where they were actually seeing a decline in sales and when they replaced their CEO, it basically came to light that their menu was too complicated Because they were trying to appease everybody.

Rich Harper:

They created such a complicated menu and actually these drinks were becoming more complicated to make, which meant the baristas were taking more time to make the drinks that they lost the original ethos of what they were. So people coming in to get a quick coffee and leave having to wait 10, 15 minutes to get a coffee. They don't understand the menu because they can't actually find their favourite drink. The baristas don't know how to make them because there's so many different drinks to make that they actually had that negative impact on sales and they started to decline because people were like this is not what I signed up for. And then they walk out the door and they don't come back.

Sophie Caswell :

They had an aggressive expansion strategy during a period where other people were floundering people like Coffee Republic etc. And they struggled in the end because they couldn't support that expansion.

Rich Harper:

Then you see the rise of the independent coffee shops because people, they can go in there, they can get, you know, that experience, like you know, they get the smells, they get the taste, they get that kind of feel good factor, rather than going into Starbucks and going I don't know, is it Christmas, Is it Easter? We've got all sorts of different syrups and all sorts of different things going on when all I want is just a flat white.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

We're talking a lot here about experiences that brands are having, our experience of working with clients. Now the title of your talk suggests that AI is stealing your clicks. It's not helping your brand. Can you explain that title to me please?

Rich Harper:

We could turn that question back to the audience. If google's not going to send you clicks anymore, how is your brand going to stay relevant? How is it going to stay indispensable? And by doing let's call it lazy marketing, that's, by doing the same stuff as your competition, by using ai to generate your content, which is inevitably going to spam the internet, how are you going to stand out from the crowd? Going back to our point earlier, we need to invest in people, we need to invest in strategic thinkers, we need to invest in creativity because, let's face it, we could type into a ai prompt make turn me into a plastic action figure and it will do it in seconds. That's not the creativity that we need, and the creativity we need is not going to come from ai.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

is going to come from humans we're in this world where people are jumping on trends so effectively, we're jumping on trends and creating the same content anyway, and there was a recent study from from densu I think it was the end of last year that said 71% of B2B marketers think their messaging is unique, but 68% of buyers say that all brands sound the same. So how do you, regardless of what's happening with AI, how do you become that brand that is not just thinking they're unique but actually being unique?

Rich Harper:

Creativity isn't it Creativity? But talk to your bloody audience, talk to your customers. I think that, again, is we're so guilty of just making presumptions that we know best without doing that market research, without knowing what the audience thinks, how they buy. Talk to people. Talk to your audience without doing that market research, without knowing what the audience thinks, how they buy. Talk to people. Talk to your audience. Understand how that messaging is resonating with them. Understand how that product is resonating in the marketplace.

Sophie Caswell :

I'd say the central requirement of understanding your users remains, and when it gets mentioned, people tend to go oh, yeah, yeah, we've, um, yeah, yeah, we, we all support a user-centric marketing, marketing strategy. Great, show us your research. Okay, you've talked to three people. One of them is yourself. That's not enough. What else have you done? You know, let's have a look, let's see what. What do we understand? What's our insight? What's the yeah, what's the pain points? There's your buzzword. What's your pain points? What's the difficulty? What's going to innovate for these people? What's going to make life best for these people? That doesn't mean easier. It might mean creative, it might mean zany. That resonates with some people because that's what they're looking for. They're looking for a bit of fun in their lives, but actually they're looking for maybe something that just makes their life a bit easier sometimes, or both. But central tenet of what is the user insight remains the same.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Do you think that that user research is enough to understand and create a unique message?

Sophie Caswell :

No, you need to understand the market potential, because it's all very well you seeing a gap in the market from a user's perspective, but where's theization of it? What's the pricing strategy? Is it realistic, is it feasible? What have you done? What forecasting have you done?

Sophie Caswell :

Even if you don't have a lot of resource to help you with this, this is a. This is a way to actually use the technology in a positive way. Go out and look at the methodology. It doesn't take much effort to go and have a look and see what there is on the internet that actually can help you find that out, even if you don't have a massive research team or an innovation team. Then you take that work and you ask people's opinion about it. That matter Whether or not you're in a large corporation or you're in a startup, or you're in a scale-up, whatever you're doing. Go and find out the facts, or you're in a scale up, whatever you're doing. Go and find out the facts, then get the qualitative and then put those two together and evaluate, based on those things, what is the best route forward?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Yeah, I liked what you said about opinion there. I guess if we look at AI, the one thing that does separate us still is AI can't really have an opinion.

Rich Harper:

The scary thing is, there will be people out there that just believe what it tells them.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I do that. I read it and I'm like oh yeah, that's it. And then I go, oh shit, no, this is the ai. I need to.

Rich Harper:

I need to source check yeah, um, and do you know what as well? It's not even just ai, because the the internet is full of content. That's not accurate, um, which is why taking it back to kind of google and stuff like that there is such a focus. You know, the march um core update that's not accurate, which is why taking it back to kind of Google and stuff like that there is such a focus. You know, the March core update that was just released is really focusing on taking stronger action on spammy, ai generated content. It's really emphasizing people putting out content that provides high value to the user, is well-researched and is authoritative. If we can start to push more content out in the world, the AI will catch up and it will start to give us those answers. But we're the ones. We can't blame ai for giving us the the wrong answers when we flooded the world with this crap in the first place nor can you, nor can you blame it when you take it as read that it's right.

Sophie Caswell :

Again back to this point about engage brain. Make sure you have people that can think about these things and evaluate and decide whether or not they're true I'm gonna go back to the title to kind of tie things up.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Before I get there, I just want to mention you know, we've spoken about google and meta and we're in this world now where the infrastructure of the web is and data ownership is really around google and meta and when we talk about seo we really think about google and everything else is a a second opinion. How how do we go against that and understand this new ai driven world? How do you navigate that?

Sophie Caswell :

well, one of the things that rich has talked about quite a lot and we are going to talk about a digital day is that one of the things we have to advocate for is search everything, optimization right, because the fact of the matter is that people aren't just searching Google now.

Sophie Caswell :

They're searching Jack GPT, they're searching TikTok, they're searching YouTube everything you can imagine. So what happens to the content of your site if you are just going to be optimizing it to try and overcome the issues that you've got going on with AI and search before that, which is generally optimized for bots? So I think our view on this and it isn't necessarily a new view of ours, but our view on this is generate content for humans that is useful to humans, because you're not going to go far wrong, because whatever might come along that's going to try and scrape your site and optimize the content for consumption by humans. You might not like it, you might need to to change it further down the line, depending on what comes out from a technology perspective and what becomes preeminent, but right now, ensure that you are producing content that humans are going to find useful and interesting, and that is probably one of the most important bits of advice to give right now.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

It's probably going to be the thing that has the most longevity sounds so simple when you say it, but it's turning that into action, I guess. But I want to kind of keep us on this little bit of focus and actually, when you said that, it did make me realize. You know, we've been really worried about these, particularly on Google AI overviews. You know, taking clicks away from websites, but actually what you just said there TikTok, YouTube, linkedin, all of these places people are searching they're not necessarily going back to your website for that information, so maybe you need to start thinking about that with Google as well. But I believe that is where your conversation at Digital Day with the Marketing Society is going to be. So for me to try and get a sneak peek at the answer and for anyone who maybe wasn't there, why AI is stealing your clicks and not helping your brand and what to do about it. What do we do about it?

Sophie Caswell :

The summary of things is pretty clear. Firstly, do not just assume that you need to crank up investment in paid. That is not necessarily going to result in a good situation for your brand, because that money's got to come from somewhere. We know, as I said earlier, from studies that have happened in difficult economic times or challenging times from a messaging perspective, that those people that suddenly go cut everything that never works, people that go aggressively after other people that doesn't work either. Go for a pragmatic approach, balance. Ensure that you're investing in your brand still, but you're being very, very careful with regard to how you're spending overall. It doesn't mean to say that you don't cut some things, it's just. Don't just decide that it doesn't really matter that you're not out there talking from a broadcast perspective about the kinds of things that you can actually do as a brand or a service. Those are the things that are going to keep people coming back to you. Okay, so that's the first thing.

Sophie Caswell :

Second thing is invest in people who can actually think, or have the capability to think, from a strategic perspective, and not just Google, and not just rely on AI and not just rely on buzzwords. There's been an awful lot of people that are able to get away with a lot of marketing snake oil, I think and it's back to basics understanding the market truly, understanding the user, getting some creative ideas and using those insights to think through problems and helping clients, as a client, understand truly what is the reason why you're being asked to do what you're doing. Challenge it a little bit Better insight, better able to deliver a better result. And the third thing is write content for humans, because if you believe that people are searching in lots of different places to get the information they need in order to answer the question they want, be it one with help, one of purchase, one of understanding, writing for bots is not going to cut it. It's got to be writing for humans.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Nice. I like when we finish on a kind of three-point roundup. We were chatting today with Rich and Sophie ahead of their session at the marketing side to Digital Day 2025. That is sold out. It's happening on the 7th of May, which is probably in the past at this point, but that is all we have time for today.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Thank you so much for listening. We hope you found some useful snippets from the session and they were able to go and put them into your own marketing strategy. We love that you've made it this far for your listen. We love making this content and would love it if you could recommend the show to a friend or colleague. Thank you to rich harper and sophie caswell for all the research that went into this and their content at digital day. Do feel free to reach out to either of them on LinkedIn. I'm sure they'll be very happy to chat with you if you've got an interest. For now, though, make sure to check out our past episodes. Subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to podcasts, and we will see you in the next one. I've been Hayden and these are the marketers of the universe. Thank you.

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