The Retail Barbell Effect: Why the Middle is Dying

Why brands must win at AI-driven discovery and real-world experience or get crushed in the middle

We’re moving toward a barbell strategy in marketing: extremely digital on one side and extremely analog on the other.

The middle is dying.

Huge S/O to Coach, Uniqlo, joining Ralph Lauren and Capital One and others in this cafe execution. This is very obvious why this is happening, my friends. Real life. The real world. I’m looking at it right now: tons of people walking around. Real life, not on your device, not digital. This is exploding in value as digital explodes.

This is not, “We’re going to stop doing digital” and do real world stuff. This is BOTH. You don’t want to be in the middle. You want to be at the extremes of AI and social and live shopping and all that, and then you want to be on the other extreme, the analog world, sitting down and having a coffee; hiking; going to concerts; sporting events. Experiential, experiential, experiential. This is the barbell effect, the evolution of the technology boom and consumer behavior.

The Retail Barbell Effect

This is another example of this emerging “retail barbell effect” that I’m focused on, with the rise of GEO and AEO and live shopping. The digital transformation is going to impact brands and retailers more than ever meanwhile, as a counter to this explosion of technology, you have this effect of real life, physical, tangible analog executions like cafés and pop-up sampling events, pop-up shops, activations at concerts and sporting events experiential marketing.

So the explosion of trends that are hitting people that are selling things — a.k.a. the things I just mentioned — will lead to a whole New World by 2030 and most retailers and brands are not ready for the extremities on both the digital and the analog side of things.

The Unplugging of Gen Alpha

This one is so fun for me. I am completely convinced that Gen Z, Gen Alpha (that’s coming next), and very honestly, maybe even Young Millennials are all understanding that the phone 📱 is great, but it’s not the end-all, be-all… and we don’t want to live on it 24/7, 365.

(By the way, I know you all want to demonize it, but this 📲 is great… it has changed your life. I know we’re all shitting on it, but how do you order food? How do you get a date? How do you do a million things? So, yes, this is great, AND we can try something else.)

So the unplugging is just a pendulum swing. In 2006, smartphones and social platforms didn’t exist as they do today and didn’t have any of the market share. Now, the pendulum has swung the other way and phones have gotten so much market share that we’re starting to unplug.

I think within the next decade, starting in 2026, we’ll see more businesses around the concept of unplugging. I recently talked about a business concept where you get paid to walk with people — like, literally walk with them. I think experiential businesses will be huge: music festivals, going to outdoor events, just going out and putting the phone away.

The Fragmented Attention Economy

I don’t think the concept works the way it did when Kellogg’s and Coke were running. Owning a category is so hard now because we don’t live in television anymore. Back then we had radio, print, and outdoor media, and whoever was best at those won. Later, Procter & Gamble won television. You should look into that. They were the biggest spender and they dominated with brands like Tide because they won TV.

Today, even the winners — Liquid Death, Poppi — you can’t really “win” a category because everything is fragmented. We live in a fragmented attention economy. The reason my model is a lot of content is this: look at the four of us on this call. If you’re Coke and you want all four of us to drink Coke — let’s just say bottled water — all of us would drink water, but all of us would need different messages to get us to buy it.

When it was print, radio, and TV, you could only make one message because distribution was expensive. So we’re in a very different world. There is no owning a category.

The LLMs are not Coke and Kellogg’s in the 1900s. They’re the battles on Google search in the early 2000s. This is about showing up organically. Now there’s paid product, too, such as ChatGPT’s featuring branded banners at the bottom of AI responses. This is SEO and SEM all over again.

In 2000, I tried to get Wine Library to show up first when you typed in “wine.” That was SEO. In 2003, I wanted to be better at ads than anybody. That was SEM.

The LLM game right now is identical to the early 2000s. Make relevant, good content at scale. Substack, X articles, podcasts — all of this is going to get sucked in to answer results. YouTube and YouTube Shorts are very important because Gemini is going to be a big winner. They’re a closed garden, and they’re going to use YouTube to feed Gemini results. Reddit has already declined because there’s a lot of garbage there.

Social continues to grow. There’s garbage, but there’s also a lot of authenticity.

Experiential Retail and Brand-Owned Spaces

Anything that’s successful in retail can be an option for any brand.

For John Deere, the barbell effect might be opening $1 pizza slice place. For Gucci, maybe it’s a spa, a nail salon, or a hair salon.

If you’re an energy drink, maybe you stand up a convenience store — a 7-Eleven clone.

If you’re Philadelphia Cream Cheese, should you open a bagel shop and use it as a content studio? Let me save you time: yes.

Experiential as a Content Engine

Experiential matters because everything is a production day now. A physical location is a production day. That bagel shop for Philadelphia Cream Cheese? That is an opportunity to film. Literally everything in the store is filmed for content. There’s a waiver on the door for patrons so they know it’s a production day.

Another thing I’m obsessed with is showing up at festivals and sampling product, but also filming it. You’re a coconut water brand at Coachella. Instead of just handing out samples, you film everything. “Oh my God, this is the best coconut water I’ve ever had.” That could be three million views on TikTok.

Or you get a permit and hand it out at a farmers market in San Francisco. Film it all.

People are yearning for experiential because we live in a digital world: brain rot, scrolling in bed. As a result, we’re going to more concerts, more sporting events, and we want more.

In the article, I also want to tip my hat to Ari Emanuel. He just started a new experiential company. He sees the next wave, just like he did with UFC, bull riding, and WWE.

LLMs Will Be Bigger Than Google Search

AEO and LLMs are grounded in the fact that this is 2000 all over again.

Google SEO began around 1996-1997 with the launch of Backrub (later Google) by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which focused on ranking websites based on backlinks. The term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) itself was coined around 1997, coinciding with the rise of early search engines like Altavista and Yahoo.

Google Ads (originally known as Google AdWords) officially launched on October 23, 2000. It initially operated on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions model, rather than the pay-per-click system it is known for today. (The platform was rebranded from AdWords to Google Ads in July 2018.)

So it’s always been evolving.

But now, this battle will be more intense than search. With Google, there was still human choice. You could scroll, click, compare. With LLMs, the relationship is more absolute, and that’s before we even factor in AI agents that automatically do things for you.

Years ago I said, “Alexa, order me a pizza.” If you don’t say Domino’s, you’re dead. Agents will order for you if you don’t care.

Google Search was a molehill. LLMs are the mountain.

The Danger of the Middle

The “middle” that you want to stay out of isn’t mid-tier malls. The middle is middle marketing: television commercials. Billboards. Print ads. That’s yesterday’s marketing. That middle layer is becoming less relevant.

The biggest warning sign that you’re in the middle? It’s when your internal marketing metrics say things are going well, but your business isn’t healthy. Brand lift studies. Impressions. Media efficiency. That stuff is the bane of my existence.

The Barbell Strategy

Soon, you’ll see brands investing heavily in two extremes: AI, social, and digital content at massive scale on one side, and real-world experiences and analog interactions on the other.

Experiential events. Community activations. Things happening in the real world. Because as AI floods the internet with content, real life will become rare. And when something is rare, it becomes valuable.

So imagine something like this. What if Nike started sponsoring running clubs everywhere?

You wake up tomorrow and see ads on social media inviting people to join the Nike running club in your city. You show up. There are trainers. Cameras. Community. Free gear. Five hundred cities. Every event is filmed and turned into content.

The real-world experience becomes the fuel for social media content. That’s the future.

Experiential events become production studios because in a world where most content is AI-generated, real life content will sit on a pedestal. That’s the barbell. AI on one side. Analog on the other.

Another example: a brand sends handwritten notes to its customers. Imagine hiring people whose job is to write handwritten thank-you notes to customers — three sentences, four sentences. Real human effort.

In a world dominated by automation, that kind of human touch becomes powerful. That’s the kind of math brands should be doing.

Instead of asking, “What campaign should we run?” they should ask: What real-world experiences can we create that become content? What analog interactions can we scale?

Because I believe we’re entering what I call the Thank You Economy again. People will value attention, effort, and human interaction more than ever.

Which brings me back to the strategy: Please stay out of the middle. Commit to the extremes. Go all-in on digital scale and AI-driven content, and go all-in on real-world experiences, community, and analog connection.

That’s the barbell. The middle is where brands slowly die.