Phil Ohren returned to Through Your Lens recently to talk about what this means for brands right now. The conversation cuts to the heart of why marketing feels harder, why your paid spend isn’t delivering what it used to, and what actually wins in 2026.
Interview Summary
Marketing has shifted. Not gradually. All at once.
For two decades, the game was predictable. People searched Google. We watched those searches. We responded to intent. We measured everything.
That’s over.
Today, people are having conversations with AI they would never have with Google. They are confessing, not searching. They are asking for help solving symptoms, not finding products. And we can’t see any of it.
The Problem: We Lost Visibility
Google made its money by letting us see what people wanted. You could watch search volume shift. You could respond to intent in real time. You could optimise.
AI platforms changed the equation. They moved the conversation into a private moment. A therapy session, not a search query.
The result: most brands are wasting 40% of their media budget right now and don’t know it.
When you do a paid media audit across the brands we work with, from skincare to ecommerce, the pattern is consistent. Forty percent of spend is ineffective at driving any outcome. Lower funnel. Mid funnel. Doesn’t matter. The money is gone.
The worst part: it’s going to get worse. Advantage Plus and Google AI Max are so good at capturing someone at the last minute that they claim credit for purchases that were already going to happen. Your brand awareness campaign is actually stealing your brand intent customer. The algorithm looks fantastic. The data is lying.
Why That Happened: You Forgot About the Product
Here is the hard truth: brands that need massive paid media investment have a problem that paid media can’t fix.
They have a product problem.
Imagine you need to spend 20 to 30 million dollars in paid media to reach a growth target of four million users at a five dollar cost per acquisition. Stop. That is not a media problem. That is a product problem.
Good products don’t need that much marketing. They need people to talk about them.
Look at Mark Henry and Solid Technics. He makes pans. One piece. Lasts forever. Does not break. By every modern metric, this is a terrible business model. You can’t sell the same pan twice.
Except people don’t stop talking about the pan. They buy one. They reference it. They recommend it. The founder shows up. The story is real. So real that you hear about the pan at your local cafe and you suddenly want three.
That is product-led marketing. Most brands are doing it. They just are not mindful while they are doing it.
The Shift Happening Now
Three things are changing:
One: Product visibility is moving from search to private conversation.
Before, if you made a pan and wanted people to find it, you optimised for search. You got found when someone typed the right keywords.
Now someone goes to Claude or GPT and asks: “What is the best durable pan I can buy that I will never throw out?” That question lives in a private conversation. No search volume data. No keyword metrics. No visibility for brands.
But the product still needs to exist in the conversation. It lives there through:
- The symptoms your product solves (better than you know yourself)
- The founder story and authenticity behind it
- Earned media and PR mentions
- Customer reviews and advocacy
If your product does something real, these signals matter more than keywords now.
Two: Paid media is attracting the wrong kind of return.
Brands are doubling down on paid because it is predictable. You spend money, you see results the next day.
The alternative (PR, SEO, content, referral programs) looks blurry. It goes into a black box of privacy and attribution and nobody wants to explain that to the board.
So everyone goes to paid. And everyone captures the same customer who was already going to buy anyway.
What winning brands do instead: they run a paid media audit, find the forty percent waste, redirect it to owned media and advocacy. A twenty or thirty thousand dollar audit saves a million in annual spend. It is the highest ROI activity you can run.
Three: Authenticity is the only competitive advantage left.
Fake video is getting scary. Deep fakes that pick up pictures and move convincingly around a room. Zoom calls with bots that take a deep breath before hanging up. The technology is here.
But here is what it cannot do: it cannot create a genuine story that stays with someone.
Two brothers in Perth wanted a motorbike. They had no money. So they started a fencing company at nineteen and twenty years old. They documented the whole thing. First client. First paycheck. Then they got the bike.
That went viral not because it was polished. It went viral because it was real. The hero’s journey. The struggle. The work. The win.
That lands. People remember that. They talk about those two brothers at the cafe.
Brands keep trying to replicate that with AI-generated authenticity. It does not work. Authenticity is harder because it requires you to show up as a person, not a product.
Most founders have five times more followers than their brand. That is not a follower problem. That is a focus problem. The brand is trying too hard. The founder is just being real.
What Winning Looks Like in 2026
For Intender, the shift has been clear. We moved from implementation to consulting in the last year because the answer to every media problem is now the same: go back to your product.
Brands that are winning right now are doing four things:
Understand what your product actually solves. Not what you think it solves. Not the tagline. The real symptoms it removes. The real jobs it does. A pan does more than cook. It lasts. It simplifies. It solves decision fatigue. It represents quality. None of that shows up in the product description.
Feed the algorithm, but tell a story. AI platforms like Advantage Plus want context. They want to know what your product does. But they also need signals. Customer reviews. Founder video. Real people saying real things. You are teaching the algorithm to find your customer by showing it what genuine looks like.
Stop measuring campaigns. Measure if the product is working. If your paid reach drops when you pause bad campaigns, that is not a bad thing. That is a signal that you are not saying the right thing or solving the right problem for the right audience. The learning is worth more than the reach.
Build referral and advocacy into your business model. A customer who refers three others is a better customer than one who buys once and leaves. This is not new. What is new is that it has become essential because you cannot see people’s intent anymore. Advocacy is the only visibility you have left.
The Question That Matters Most
Here is what Phil kept coming back to: just because you can does not mean you should.
You can build AI content. You can automate your ads. You can run full campaigns while you sleep.
But the question is not can you. The question is should you.
If you are good, show up as a person. If your product is real, let people talk about it. If your story is honest, it will travel further than any algorithm.
That is what has changed. The algorithm is still there. The paid platforms are still there. The tools are all still there.
But the winners are the ones who stopped trying to game the system and started focusing on something worth talking about.
Everything else is just noise.
