@Mary Kathryn Johnson Great question, and you are spot on about the shift. My short answer is this, direct response did not break, distribution and trust did. So I adapted by moving upstream. I still use direct response fundamentals every day, clarity, positioning, mechanism, offer, proof. But instead of ads being the primary delivery vehicle, they are now just one expression of a much bigger system. For the generation you are describing, including your sons, interruption is dead. What still works is relevance earned through proximity and usefulness. Here is how I approach it in practice. First, I build inside communities instead of marketing at audiences. That means showing up where conversations already exist, Reddit, niche Slack groups, Discords, Skool, private Facebook groups, comment sections. I am not selling there. I am pattern spotting, answering intelligently, and becoming familiar. Trust forms before any call to action exists. Second, I flip the role from advertiser to interpreter. Most people can smell a campaign because it is trying to persuade. What they trust are people who help them make sense of complexity. That is where my background helps. I translate messy problems into clear frameworks, decision paths, and tradeoffs. That feels like help, not marketing. Third, proof now travels sideways, not top down. Ads used to create authority. Now authority is borrowed from peers. So I engineer systems where customers, users, or operators become the distribution layer. Screenshots, short Looms, casual posts, group replies. Nothing polished. Nothing brand heavy. Just real people validating outcomes. Fourth, AI lets me scale presence without faking intimacy. This is the big unlock most companies miss. I use AI to listen at scale, synthesize sentiment, and respond faster and more thoughtfully, not to generate hype. The tech is invisible. The usefulness is not. Lastly, when ads are used, they no longer try to convince. They simply signal, “people like you are already doing this.” The heavy lifting already happened in community, content, and conversation.

@Mitch Nachtigall one of mine too :)

@Christina Hooper dig this. I might add in one thing the difference between leading and lagging indicators or metrics. As an example, revenue is a logging metric where you mention sales conversations as a leading metric. It’s actually going to be the thing that directly leads to revenue numbers. Leading vs lagging was a big mental shift for me