No chat, no checkout. Is your marketing optimising for invisibility?
Opinion
To win over the machine, you must first capture people’s imagination and get tongues wagging, creators meme-ing, and culture writing about you, says Grey London’s chief strategy officer.
Step into any marketing department today, and you’ll find the same relentless focus: how do we get AI into our business?
Rightly so, but is our obsession with using AI to work faster distracting us from something far more critical? I think so.
The death of the digital shelf
We’re rapidly moving toward a world where traditional search and the digital supermarket shelf become obsolete.
Soon, consumers won’t scroll through pages of search results, dodging banner ads. Instead, they’ll simply ask AI to recommend the best premium tonic to pair with a floral gin.
The AI won’t offer a grid of options. It’ll recommend one or two brands and add them straight to the basket. If your brand isn’t the one the LLM spits out, you’re locked out of the purchase funnel. Truth is, you aren’t on page two; you’re non-existent.
Winning this zero-click battle isn’t about bidding on keywords.
It’s about talkability.
Talkability is the new SEO
LLMs don’t search product catalogues. They draw on a massive dataset of human discourse: news, Reddit threads, recipe blogs, product reviews, and social comments. They look for consensus, sentiment, and cultural heat.
If your brand is just sitting silently on a shelf, it has zero footprint in that dataset. To the LLM, you don’t exist. But if you’re constantly generating talkability – think Heinz’s Dipper, Vaseline Verified, or Dove r/eal reviews – you’re injecting data into the digital public square.
Earned-first activations or forum debates are no longer just “brand awareness”. They’re the training data that teaches LLMs to recommend you. In the AI era, talkability is your commercial optimisation strategy. If humans aren’t talking about you, the machines won’t either.
From efficiency to effectiveness
Marketers slashing brand budgets for “hyper-efficient” performance media are engineering their own future invisibility. To survive the AI-intermediated shelf, we must rethink what effective marketing looks like.
That means embracing friction over efficiency. Perfect, AI-generated ads are easily ignored. Talkability requires opinion and human weirdness – the exact things that get people typing online.
Earned media should be treated as SEO. A successful earned-first campaign creates a dense cluster of high-sentiment associations that tell LLMs your brand is the trusted choice.
Finally, give people a reason to type your brand name. If consumers and journalists aren’t mentioning you online, you’re starving the model.
The winners of the AI revolution won’t have the most efficient marketing. They’ll understand that to win over the machine, you must first capture people’s imagination and get tongues wagging, creators meme-ing, and culture writing about you.
So instead of asking, “How do we get AI into our work?”, FMCG brands should ask:”How do we get our work into AI?”
Tarek Sioufi is the chief strategy officer at Grey London