Dennis Mink

🦅 Hawk Talk- published via Forbes Business Development Council 📈 The digital economy is shifting faster than most growth teams can adapt. Platform control, rising customer acquisition cost (CAC), shrinking attribution windows, and 30% app-store fees didn’t just suddenly appear, but the Epic vs. Apple ruling made something unavoidable clear: the old app-first growth model is structurally broken. The most important economic lever in digital growth today isn’t the app. 🚀 It’s the web funnel. 📰 Not just a landing page. A decisioning system that sits between the click and the install and then determines everything that follows. Users don’t decide inside app stores, They decide before the install, when narrative, relevance, pricing, and emotional fit align. 💡 We have seen teams change nothing but their web decision flow and increase ROAS by 80%+. Same budget. Same channels. Same creative! This isn’t just optimization. It’s about economic restructuring. That’s the infrastructure today’s most resilient digital companies are thinking about and building towards.. ✔️ Click to read the full article below >>>>>> Hawk Digital cc Ella Berylo Paris Noel #NRF #CES

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CTR. ToFu. CPV. UGC. If these acronyms make your head spin, you're not alone. Video marketing has a lot of metrics to track, but not all of them matter. In our latest episode of The Drip, we break down exactly how to measure video marketing success...and which numbers you should actually care about. Check out this episode and more on our YouTube channel👇

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Many teams treat email like a megaphone. They broadcast promotions and announcements without thinking how each message fits into the customer’s journey. That approach creates noise and confusion. Optimization isn’t about more messages. It’s about better alignment with audience behavior, goals, and data. It means crafting emails that reflect what someone did, learned, or showed interest in next. Guiding customers boosts engagement. When you build campaigns around context, measurement, and iteration instead of guesswork, your results improve over time. To read the full article, click the link in the comments. #EmailMarketingStrategy #EmailOptimization #CustomerGuidance

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DTC brands - How often are you auditing your website for UX? We just had a great conversation about this on our team. We are driving reach and awareness. Then engagement. Then web traffic. But what happens when it's crickets after that?? Even if it's not "our fault"... it doesn't really matter. We ALL want conversions for the brands we work on. That, at the end of the day, is the ultimate indicator of success. And UX plays a MASSIVE part in it. One of my team members (who came from another agency who used to do UX/CRO) told us a story yesterday about how they once changed the COLOR of a button... and it increased conversions by 30%. WOW. So it got us thinking (and talking) about how often brands should be doing this. (And who should be but that's another question.) Are you doing it consistently? Treating it like a project? Do tell.

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Roofers will say: “Google Ads don’t work in my area.” Then I look inside the account. They’re targeting Chicago… But their Google Business Profile authority is in Naperville. Their reviews? Mostly from Aurora. Their landing page? Generic “Serving Illinois.” And we’re surprised the calls feel off? You can’t tell Google one thing and show it another. It’s like putting a yard sign in one neighborhood and answering the phone in a different one. Location targeting isn’t just a radius setting. It’s alignment between: • Campaign geography • Landing pages • Google Business Profile footprint • Where your reviews are actually coming from When those don’t match, click quality drops. Then everyone blames the ads. Before raising your budget, check your footprint.

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HubSpot is really leaning into the "no press is bad press" strategy lately. -First they quietly updated their T&Cs around customer data...then quickly reverse it with a bad apology. -Then they throw a massive conference around the future of AI with celebrity speakers, lavish parties, etc. -Aaaaand then lay off 660 people and call it an AI transformation. I understand businesses need to evovle. I understand shareholder value matters. But there is something deeply antithetical about preaching customer success and trust while making customers and employees feel like disposable widgets in some AI strategy. Your brand is what people experience, not what you tell people it is.

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Meta’s Agentic Commerce signals a bigger shift than shopping features. eComm brand owners take note. There was an interesting moment in Meta’s latest earnings call that didn’t get a lot of mainstream attention. Zuckerberg and CFO Chad Heaton discussed “agentic shopping tools”. AI agents that help people find very specific products, remember preferences over time, and eventually make decisions on a user’s behalf. They described these agents as sitting between shoppers and merchants, blending subscriptions, advertising, and commerce into one experience. On the surface, it sounds like another product roadmap update. But if you’ve spent time in eCommerce, it’s hard not to read this as something more structural. Most online shopping today still relies on the same basic behaviour: people browse, compare, get influenced, and then decide. Agentic shopping flips that sequence. Instead of someone scrolling through options, they tell an AI what they want and the AI does the filtering. Not just by keywords, but by memory. Past purchases. Returns. Preferences they’ve never formally written down but have shown through behaviour. Think less “recommendations” and more delegation. “Find me something like the jacket I bought last winter, but lighter, under $250, and not from a brand that took three weeks to ship.” That’s not search. That’s outsourcing the decision. Meta’s interest here makes sense when you zoom out. If an AI agent becomes the place where people decide what to buy, then Meta isn’t just hosting ads anymore. It’s shaping the decision environment itself. Ads, subscriptions, product discovery, and checkout start to blur together. The platform isn’t trying to send traffic somewhere else, it’s trying to mediate the entire journey. In that setup, the value isn’t attention. It’s trust and relevance at the exact moment a decision is being made. This is where things change for eCommerce brands. When the “buyer” is an AI agent, a lot of the tactics we’ve relied on for years start to matter less. Hooks don’t impress an algorithm. Brand storytelling doesn’t override poor fulfilment. A polished funnel doesn’t fix inconsistent sizing or high return rates. Agents evaluate patterns. They learn which brands deliver on time, which ones cause friction, which products get kept. Over time, that becomes the filter through which brands are surfaced. What’s interesting is that this rewards the unglamorous stuff. It rewards brands that are clear on who they’re for, realistic with pricing, operationally sound, and consistent over time. In a world where people stop browsing and start delegating, it’s no longer: “How do we get more people to click?” It becomes: “Would an AI confidently recommend us without needing persuasion?” That’s a harder question. But it’s also a more honest one. And it suggests that the next phase of eCommerce growth will come from being genuinely easy to choose.

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🛒 Google just launched Universal Cart - and the affiliate marketer in me immediately thought: this could get interesting. 👀 https://lnkd.in/gJ7YEff2 Google's new Universal Cart lets U.S. shoppers save products from multiple retailers into one cart across Search and Gemini - then helps them: ● COMPARE & ORGANIZE products across merchants ● TRACK PRICE DROPS and back-in-stock alerts ● FIND PROMO CODES automatically ● IDENTIFY CARD PERKS & REWARDS through Google Wallet ● CHECK OUT through Google Pay or transfer the cart directly to the merchant Sound familiar? 😉 These are functions that have historically created value for several major segments of the affiliate ecosystem - shopping comparison, coupon, cashback/loyalty, shopping assistants and browser extensions. So I don't think the question is whether this affects affiliate marketing. The interesting question is HOW. Could Google increasingly own the journey from discovery → comparison → savings → cart → checkout, while affiliates compete for fewer touchpoints along the way? Or does this create an entirely new affiliate opportunity as commerce becomes more agentic? One detail I find especially interesting: Google's Universal Commerce Protocol already supports structured attribution information such as campaign IDs, click identifiers, and source/medium markers. That makes me wonder whether the future isn't necessarily Google vs. affiliates, but rather a new model where publishers, creators, loyalty platforms, and other partners need to become much more deeply integrated into the AI-driven commerce journey. Either way, I think one thing is becoming clear: Affiliate innovation can no longer stop at the click. The next battleground may be who influences, and gets credited for, the purchase decisions being made inside AI-powered shopping experiences. Curious what others in the affiliate space think. Threat, opportunity… or both? #AffiliateMarketing #PartnershipMarketing #Ecommerce #AgenticCommerce #AICommerce #PerformanceMarketing

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