This category doesn't have a name yet

I don't have a word for what we sell.

On calls I say "social advertising," and the brand hears Facebook ads. I say "sponsorships" and they think podcasts and race cars. I say "working with people who have audiences" and I've used eleven words to describe something that should take one. Everyone eventually understands it, but only after I've spent the first ten minutes of the call on definitions instead of on whether it works.

That's a real tax. Every sale costs more than it should, and a meaningful number of them die in the confusion before we ever get to the interesting part.

The tax is also the moat#

Here's the thing I keep reminding myself when a call goes badly.

If this had a name, it would have a budget line. If it had a budget line, it would have vendors, benchmarks, an agency practice, and a conference. It would also have four funded competitors who all figured it out at the same time, because a named category is a visible one.

Nobody is funding this right now. The reason nobody is funding it is the same reason I have to spend ten minutes explaining it. Those are not two separate facts.

So the explanation cost is what I'm paying for the head start. I'd rather pay it than not have the head start. I just want to be honest that it's a cost and not pretend it's charming.

What it's like being early#

Nobody has a budget for you, so you're always taking someone else's. Every deal we do comes out of a line item that was allocated for something else — usually display, sometimes events, occasionally a discretionary pot that a marketing director controls personally. Which means every sale is also an internal argument I'm not in the room for, and I lose a lot of them without ever finding out.

There are no benchmarks, so you can't be judged fairly. A brand asks what a good result looks like. I don't know. Nobody knows. So they benchmark it against the thing they do know, which is a direct response channel with clean attribution, and this loses that comparison on the metrics they can see even when it's working.

Best practices don't exist, so everyone invents their own. Half the brands who try this write the post themselves and hand it to the creator as a script. It reads like an ad because it is one, it performs like an ad, and then they conclude the channel doesn't work. The thing they bought was the audience's trust and the first thing they did was spend it on ad copy.

The good creators are already busy. Not with this. With everything else. The people worth working with have other income and no particular need for you, which inverts the usual marketplace dynamic where supply is desperate.

What I actually think happens#

I think this gets a name within a few years, and I think the name will be worse than the thing.

Once it's named it gets systematized, and the systematization will optimize for the part that's measurable — reach, cost per thousand, deliverables in a contract — because that's what happens to every channel that grows up. The part that made it work in the first place is that a specific person told their specific audience something in their own words. That doesn't survive being turned into a media buy, and it's going to get turned into a media buy, because media buys are what large budgets know how to purchase.

So the window is now, and the window is not primarily about being first to market. It's that right now the only way to do this is the way that works.