How AI Changes Customer Acquisition
The New Playbooks for Search, Growth Marketing, and Influencer
Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.
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How AI Changes Customer Acquisition
Check out this video of me raving about Naked protein:
This seems like it could be standard marketing—maybe an influencer ad that would run on Instagram or YouTube. But the video is AI-generated.
You can sort of tell; my voice, in particular, is pretty robotic. But I made this synthetic ad in under five minutes. The quick steps:
I grabbed the closest product in my apartment—my protein powder, which arrived from Amazon this morning.
I filmed a 30-second clip of me talking into the camera on HeyGen. (I did have to shell out $29 for a monthly subscription.) That training clip created the “Rex” avatar by using my likeness—both video and voice.
I then wrote a script about why I love Naked protein powder, and generated a fresh ad to export. (By the way—the quality would be better if I fed it more than 30 seconds of video and audio to train on.)
This is clearly the future of influencer marketing: an influencer films herself talking about a product; she sells her likeness to a brand; the brand runs dozens of tests on different ad copy to see what performs best, then pours money behind the best-performing ads. Beyond influencer, this is the future of marketing in general. No more expensive production budgets or time-intensive editing.
In our 25 Predictions for 2025 last month, we wrote about Icon—“the AI Admaker.” My friend Kennan, Icon’s founder, formally unveiled Icon on Tuesday in a badass launch video.
Kennan’s video uses a similar reveal. First, he asks the audience which ad on the screen is AI-generated—an ad for Coca-Cola or an ad for Pepsi? The answer: both. Then he delivers the kicker: he too is AI-generated.
In my example above, you can see how easy AI ad generation has become: you could make your own AI-generated ad right now, in under five minutes. Icon productizes AI ad-making and supercharges it.
How it works:
Icon digests your video library and tags scenes—“close-up,” “unboxing,” and so on. Those scenes become reusable clips, Lego-like blocks to make ads.
You then prompt Icon’s AdGPT to generate scripts.
Icon matches clips to each script scene, generating an 80-99% complete ad.
You finalize edits with Icon’s CapCut-like video editor, then hit publish.
Today, a three-person creative team might make 30 ads a month. With Icon, they can make 300+. The product essentially gives creatives superpowers. Ad-making is tedious: scriptwriting, scene-matching, video editing, UGC creation, and so on. It was only a matter of time until elegant new workflows automated the rote tasks.
The average American is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 ads every day (!). In a matter of years, the majority of these will be synthetic.
Let’s take a step back: AI is changing customer acquisition. Across every playbook, the rules are evolving.
Most obvious is Search. Anecdotally, I find myself using Google’s AI Overviews more and more; it’s rarer that I’ll sift through a sea of blue links to find the right page.
Say I’m watching the Grammy’s and need a refresher on pop culture. Kendrick Lamar wins Record and Song of the Year for “Not Like Us,” and I’m wondering why the entire audience is singing “A minorrrr.” I type:
why do drake and kendrick hate each other
In the old world of search, I’m clicking through articles to find the best one; today, I just read Google’s AI Overview:
I get a clean summary of the feud’s origins, recent events, and the cultural impact. Not bad. The Drake-Kendrick query is a natural fit for chat: reading a quick summary is more efficient than finding the right link. In hindsight, it makes total sense that search should behave this way. My kids will be shocked to learn we used to sift through links to find information—shouldn’t technology just…answer the question we ask?
Outside of Google, of course, we see AI-native products like ChatGPT and Perplexity. From Perplexity:
Upstarts like Perplexity are still early: in December, Perplexity reported 20M queries a day. Google sees 8.5B (!) searches a day—a cool 425x multiple on Perplexity. But Google hasn’t faced competition in a long time and its ironclad grip on search seems to be loosening: Google recently slipped below 90% market share for the first time in years.
When it comes to what companies care about, it’s how and where they show up in search.
Say I’m looking for the best running shoes. Nike has always cared about SEO and SEM to appear in Google’s top results (side note: Search generates 74% of Google’s $240B in revenue). Today, if I’m Nike, I also care about whether AI recommends my shoe.
One of the most interesting startups out there—in my mind—is Profound, which helps brands optimize visibility in AI search. Less than half of the sources that AI answer engines cite are within the top 10 search engine results. With Profound, brands can figure out what factors are influencing content visibility, and make sure they’re still front and center.
Nike, for instance, can work with Profound to ensure the running shoe query yields a result for the Nike Pegasus 40:
Here’s what Profound’s dashboard looks like—the example below is for Rho, a business banking company. Rho can see how its brand visibility has trended over time and how it stack ranks against competitors like Chase and AmEx:
Two years ago, we wrote a Digital Native piece titled AI’s Interface Revolution. From that piece:
We’re used to visiting Airbnb to find a place to stay on vacation. But what happens when we can just tell an AI companion, “Book me a home in Madrid for the week of May 12th.” The AI companion has no brand loyalty; Airbnb’s hard-earned name recognition—the result of millions of marketing dollars and a decade of word-of-mouth—now means nothing. As the user, I only care about finding a decent place to stay for a good price; I don’t care whether that’s through Airbnb, Booking.com, or a new AI-powered upstart.
Airbnb has put a lot of effort into building its brand, and it will be hesitant to disrupt itself and devalue its brand. That could make it vulnerable.
This is exactly what’s happening. AI is becoming the medium through which we interact with companies and discover brands. Today, that largely means chat; soon, agents. If you’re not staying ahead of the curve, you’re not getting in front of customers.
Ads were always going to be part of the AI playbook. Perplexity used to say they wouldn’t run ads; 2.5 years in, they’ve changed tack. Welp, saw that one coming. I like how my friend Kyle described the shift:
I don’t love the gaslighting that we’re getting from some of the execs at Perplexity. From the beginning of the company’s life it explicitly stated on its website that search should be “free from the influence of advertising-driven models.” Fast forward to April 2024 when the company first announced future plans to integrate ads into its platform. Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, went as far as to say, “advertising was always part of how we’re going to build a great business.” C’mon bruh.
This was inevitable. A good rule of thumb: the longer your tech company exists, the more your probability of serving ads approaches 100%. This is especially true when you reach a lot of eyeballs. Over 3 in 4 American adults use Amazon Prime:
Yet for years, Amazon eschewed advertising. In 2009, Jeff Bezos famously called advertising, “the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” Now, Amazon is a $40B+ advertising behemoth:
This is 2022 data, so it’s outdated, but Amazon ranks 3rd or 4th in the world for its ads business. (My guess is Bytedance has now passed Amazon into 3rd.)
When you have millions of eyeballs, you show those eyeballs ads. As another example: Uber is reportedly doing $1B+ in ad revenue. And showing ads to riders waiting for their ride had an added benefit: riders had something to watch while waiting, and were less likely to cancel the ride. Win-win.
Speaking of Uber—one of our Daybreak companies is Helium, whose co-founder Zach Witzel was a longtime Uber product lead. At Uber, Zach ran experimentation—optimizing the app to drive growth. But most apps don’t have these resources. Helium is essentially an AI growth marketer for apps, running A/B tests to see what will drive key metrics (starting with paywalls). This is another way AI is changing customer acquisition: better, data-driven experimentation and optimization.
A final area of change that interests me: influencer marketing. Again, follow the eyeballs; influencers are nothing if not eyeball-aggregators. We’re seeing AI change the playbook here too. Tools like AMT help supercharge influencer marketing teams, automating creator outreach, contracts, product shipments, payments, and so on. Anyone who has been part of an influencer deal knows the process is stuck 20 years in the past, stitching together Gmail + Excel + PayPal. In a $25B+ industry still growing 20% year-over-year, this is untenable.
Of course, the real Holy Grail in AI + influencer is likeness, as mentioned earlier. We’re not far away here. In order to create the synthetic ad for Naked protein above, HeyGen required me to consent to build a Rex avatar.
Here’s a screenshot of me looking very haggard and reading HeyGen’s script:
Soon, a standard influencer contract will incorporate something like this. Influencers will give brands the right to generate ads based on their likenesses and to test different scripts and angles and products to see what performs best. This will be a new form of passive income for them, helping influencers scale: you can be asleep while new ads are generated using your face and voice.
A lot is happening in customer acquisition—from AI automation for rote tasks, to synthetic ads, to “bidding for keywords” now being optimizing placement in AI search.
The internet reinvented acquisition. Mobile reinvented it again. (Remember, Facebook almost missed the boat with mobile.) AI is now bringing another sea change. A lot of companies—from ad-reliant Big Tech incumbents to brands big and small—will be caught flat-footed.
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