Don’t Fire Your Best Marketing Channel
What happened:
An Ashley Furniture employee (@stefisthechef) recently went viral with his raps about couches and mattresses. His videos racked up millions of views. They weren’t videos written, produced, or approved by their marketing team. They were just organic and natural videos created by a guy (a sales guy). That’s top-of-funnel marketing at its purest. Users who’ve never engaged with a brand all the sudden become aware and are curious about a brand. And it was all free!
Ashley Furniture was handed free and positive scroll-stopping content that grabbed the attention of millions, and how did they respond? They fired the employee because he refused to take down his “unauthorized videos”. He grabbed the attention of millions who otherwise may not ever have engaged with Ashley Furniture (for zero advertising dollars) and instead of capitalizing by adding these people to their sales funnel (those reading this post understand this is what really matters when it comes to top-of-funnel marketing), etc…. they fired the guy.
In a matter of hours, the positive viral momentum @stefisthechef created for Ashley Furniture became a PR nightmare. And in a move that surprised no one, a competing brand (Couch+Co.) stepped in and capitalized on Ashley’s fumble at the 1-yard-line. Couch+Co hired Stef shortly after he was let go and immediately went to work by featuring him in promotional videos for the company.
The lesson for direct marketers:
The tools have changed. The channels have changed. AI, LLMs, and algorithmic content discovery mean that moments like Stef’s can easily outperform any paid campaign your marketing department is currently running.
Embrace the chaos. Brands that do feed off this kind of organic momentum, rather than shut it down, and it’s those brands that pull ahead of its competitors.
Brands unable or unwilling to embrace nuance (especially in an industry like ours that is constantly in motion) are quickly being left behind. If that means eliminating stale and archaic corporate policies that might prevent a brand from capitalizing on an opportunity like this when one arises… so be it. Get it done now so that when it happens to your brand you can respond accordingly rather than shutting it down, tying your compliance department up with emails to employees about protecting the brand, etc. Capitalize by identifying, supporting, responding/connecting and building off the momentum of engaging content… even when it hasn’t come from your marketing department.
Will your brand have a similar moment? Who knows… but best to be ready when/if it does. And when it does, do your best to be the Couch+Co of your story. And most definitely don’t get in the way of it.
Drop us a line to let us know what you would have done and/or if you want to have a conversation with us. We at Beyond Direct help brands understand where their audience actually lives and how to meet them there… and we’d love an opportunity to partner with your brand.
By: Christian Vergara | Vice President
Articles like these are my nemesis: Email Displacement: The Channel Most Vulnerable To AI Job Loss 08/06/2026
Not because I have my head buried in the sand, lamenting, “Oh no, AI is going to replace all that I do, and all that the people I love do, and then once we reach Singularity - which is coming any day now - the AIs will be sentient, won’t need us, and we’ll all be looking for John Connor to save us from the Terminator machines.”
Every part of the sales funnel is important, but at the very top of it is where it all starts… with your top-of-funnel marketing. It’s your first handshake, you first opportunity to introduce your brand… what it represents, what it offers, the value it provides, etc. to prospects. It’s generally the largest part of the marketing/sales funnel and is designed to get in front of eyeballs, educate potential customers, brand awareness (for those who may not even have any awareness about your brand at all), and ultimately generate leads.
My Best Round of the Year Came After My Worst Moment
I pushed my golf cart into a creek a couple of weeks ago. Not in a metaphorical "I had a rough start" sense. I literally let go of the handle on a slope with the full expectation that it would gently roll down the hill and be waiting for me at the bottom. Instead, I watched in slow-motion horror as it took a rogue left turn and I was left standing powerless as it careened wheels over handle into the muddy waters while my playing partners (barely) tried to stifle their laughter. Everything ended up taking a dip in the creek including my clubs, car keys, and phone.
The Trade Desk’s stock is down about 75% from its 52-week high. NewsCase and Sharper Trades cite reasons such as disappointing earnings reports, removal from the Nasdaq-100, increased competition, and internal challenges.
When a company gets big enough, problems migrate to the macro. There’s usually a top-down analysis of financial problems that explains the stock price decrease. But if you simply look at TTD’s core offering, maybe this decline was predictable.
Advertising on the open web is like advertising in the wild west. Your ad can basically end up anywhere, and as long as the live dashboard shows attributed clicks, no one bats an eye. According to an ANA report, about 36 cents of every dollar spent on programmatic web ads actually reaches the consumer.
What happened:
An Ashley Furniture employee (@stefisthechef) recently went viral with his raps about couches and mattresses. His videos racked up millions of views. They weren’t videos written, produced, or approved by their marketing team. They were just organic and natural videos created by a guy (a sales guy). That’s top-of-funnel marketing at its purest. Users who’ve never engaged with a brand all the sudden become aware and are curious about a brand. And it was all free!
Your emails might say “delivered.” That doesn’t mean they’re being seen.
According to Unspam's 2025 Email Deliverability Report, deliverability is the single biggest factor separating elite performers from everyone else. Gmass research shows strong campaigns achieve up to 5% response rates, while campaigns with poor deliverability struggle to hit 1%.
Marketers love to boast about our golden era of innovation. Fancy tech stacks. AI insights. “The right message, to the right person, at the right time.”
Newsflash: that’s fantasy.
Sure, digital tools have their perks—real-time results, affordable testing, monetized media—but they’ve also unleashed a flood of ad fraud, privacy breaches, and thumb-scrolling zombies lost in TikTok loops.
But this isn’t a rant. It’s a call to rediscover love in two unexpected places.
Today’s marketing world is obsessed with ROAS, CPC, and CPS. We use them to validate performance, justify budgets, and defend every dollar spent.
But almost no one talks about a metric that sits before all of those:
“COBS” - the Cost of Being Seen.
In a digital environment where attention is fragmented and competition is louder than ever, visibility has become just as valuable as conversion. Understanding what you’re paying simply to get in front of a consumer’s eyes is critical, especially for companies in their growth stage.
“It’s because the other teams can’t stop looking at those damn pinstripes”. That’s Frank’s theory on the Yankees’ historic dominance quoted from the movie Catch Me If You Can. If the marketing landscape is baseball, then SEO is the pinstripes. While that metaphor might be a bit of a stretch, there does seem to be an overt proclivity for advertisers to focus on how search engine advertising is changing without looking at other very important cogs in the machine.
The battle between online publishers and AI search engines has been widely discussed. The dip in ad revenue is no joke and there’s a legitimate claim that AI summaries are more or less theft. This dynamic has begun to consume the metrics, strategies, and narrative for marketers. Let’s take a few steps back. Do CPG/retail companies even need a webpage?
In the modern digital marketing era, Search Engine Optimization has been the workhorse tactic favored by advertisers of all sizes; a reliable way to place one’s company directly in front of a customer and funnel organic traffic to their website. However, the crutch that many companies leaned on is wobbling many businesses are starting to realize that search engines are slowly seeing a shift in the way people are using them. With A.I. reshaping search, social media becoming the go-to discovery tool, and Google itself keeping more users on its own platform through zero-click results, the traditional SEO game is no longer what it used to be. The question marketers face now isn’t how to optimize for search engines, but how to adapt in a landscape where SEO’s influence is steadily declining.
Let’s just call it what it is: it’s borderline malpractice that mobile messaging (SMS/MMS)—the most effective channel in direct marketing today—remains sidelined in most customer acquisition strategies.
While brands continue to invest millions in lower-response tactics like digital programmatic display—less personal, wrought with fraud, and actively ignored by consumers—the one channel that achieves over 90% open rates within minutes of delivery is left waiting in the wings. Why? Because it’s opt-in only.
Marketing to seniors has always relied heavily upon THE Alpha channel: Direct Mail. While still a vibrant conduit to reach that cohort today (and one in which we invest heavily for our clients), as Mr. Bob Dylan suggested, "The Times They Are a-Changin'."
Over the last two decades, we have effectively helped advertisers in the Medicare, medical device, financial, and pharma spaces, all of which define seniors as a primary target market. Mail continues to be a workhorse for those offers, but don't blink; there's a new game in town.
The biggest challenge for modern marketing managers is simply getting messaging noticed. And by "noticed," I mean actual human beings viewing ads. LinkedIn is chock-full of stories of programmatic ad fraud, where real people only see a fraction of the ads supposedly served (thank you, Dr. Augustine Fou + cohorts!). Hucksters, fraudsters, 'made for advertising' websites (MFAs), and AdTech vendors who claim to serve ads but never do, steal money from legitimate advertisers in broad daylight ... all driven by the pressure to achieve impossible campaign results.
The LIV Golf Tour has been in the news lately, announcing a merger with the PGA Tour. They held a recent tournament stop in Washington DC a few weeks ago. The lead up and marketing of the event was outstanding - I purchased a couple of tickets for my wife and me. For the non-golfers, the LIV tour is a disrupter, competing against the PGA tour by luring some of golf’s biggest names with guaranteed money. Whereas on the PGA tour, prize money is only awarded to those who win. (Well, to those who make the cut at each tournament, but let’s not go into the weeds).
I’m a panic shopper. Christmas comes the same day in the same month, every year. This should afford me the ability to purchase gifts throughout the year; stocking up on stuff I know my wife would really love. She’s great at this. By the time the holidays roll around she's already bought for everyone, having started as early as summer. Stress-free and simple.
I was recently asked a simple question, by someone relatively new to adtech -- "if there's so much fraud, who's making all that money?" My answer surprised him. My answer was "everyone." He was expecting me to tell him about crime syndicates, nation states, and master hackers like the ones aggrandized in TV shows and movies. But the proceeds of ad fraud are far more mundane and widespread than that. Any fraud investigator will tell you that the most reliable way to find fraud is to "follow the money." So let's do just that.
We live in the most generous time in human history…even though the 24 hour news machine would have us believe that we live in a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. But it’s true. By any statistical measure, we give more today to those in need than any time in history, adjusted for inflation.