performance marketing

Oct 17

Ruggable Abandons Meta-First Strategy for Creator Commerce

Ruggable's pivot from performance marketing to ShopMy creator partnerships reflects weakening unit economics in paid social at scale. Rather than compete on rising CPMs, the brand is outsourcing customer acquisition to influencers with engaged audiences—trading predictable but expensive performance marketing for lower-margin, higher-touch sales. Mid-market DTC brands are shifting validation of growth away from "spray and pray" ad spend toward micro-influencer dependencies that demand ongoing relationship management and deeper creator profit-sharing.

theme-brand marketing strategy performance marketing ai impact on channels

Sep 30

Performance Marketers Face Existential Threat From Zero-Click AI Searches

Source: Beet

AI-powered search engines like OpenAI's SearchGPT and Google's AI overviews are answering user questions directly without requiring clicks to destination websites. This dismantles the 25-year-old performance marketing model built on click-through conversion funnels. Brands optimized entirely around paid search and affiliate networks face simultaneous erosion of their traffic acquisition channels and attribution models. MNTN and other performance platforms must either integrate directly into AI outputs or pivot toward brand-building metrics that survive in a zero-click world. This is a fundamental business model problem, not just a channel adjustment.