Don't Market More. Matter More.

Jay Acunzo on what it actually takes to make people care.

Here’s a thought experiment: You’re at a conference. A speaker walks off stage after a talk that genuinely rearranged something in your brain. What do you do?

Most likely, you look them up online to learn a little more about them. It’s why my friend Jay Acunzo said to me in this week’s episode: public speaking is the ultimate form of zero click marketing.

And the more I sat with it, the more I realized it’s a stress test for everything we make.

Jay has been giving keynotes professionally since 2016. And in a talk, a “click” is quite literally physically impossible. A speech forces you to do the one thing most marketing tries to avoid: deliver discrete, undeniable value right now, in the room. You can include a QR code in your deck, and yes, attendees might use it in real time, but that isn’t really the goal for anybody. It’s not any attendees’ goal to transact in that moment, and when people speak publicly, they don’t always have something to sell. (Er… except for people like me who are trying to sell their book. But that’s sort of an exception.)

“Your ideas — and therefore, the value and originality of your thinking — should compel people to take an action. You shouldn’t need an overt call to action.” —Jay Acunzo

That’s zero click marketing in its purest form. Not “never have a CTA,” but: be so good that the seeking-out happens on its own.

He even has a (made-up, and frankly perfect) metric for it: unsolicited response rate, or URR. The rate at which people come to you without being asked. Because when the response is unsolicited, it’s more qualified. The catch, of course, is that you can’t fake URR. You actually have to be good.

The bar for “good” isn’t reach. It’s resonance.

This is where Jay said: “Don’t market more. Matter more.”

And related to that:

“Reach is how many see it. Resonance is how much they care.”

“Don’t be the best — be their favorite.”

I added one amendment, which I told him on the show: the more you obsess over resonance, the further your reach eventually goes anyway. Resonance isn’t the opposite of reach. It’s the on-ramp to it.

But mattering is harder than marketing. It takes creativity, risk-taking, and often, just sitting with the problem a lot longer than your competitors are willing to. Jay’s diagnosis for why so much content underperforms is brutal and correct: you’re at letter Z. You’ve lived with your idea so long that you’re standing at the very end of understanding it. Your audience is back at letter A. And most of us, because we’re so close to it, skip straight to “here’s how to do it” — the solution — over and over again.

“You have not gotten them ready to care or to act. Maybe that’s why it’s hard.”

Good communicators do the slow part. They meet people at A. They name what the audience wants, agitate the real problem, surface the deeper problem underneath it, and only then offer a premise. By the time they say “here’s how,” the audience is already leaning in, asking for it.

(This is, not coincidentally, the exact conversation that nudged me to stop treating “clicks are disappearing” as obvious and actually build the argument from the ground up. It’s a big reason the book Rand and I wrote exists.)

If you take one thing from this episode, make it this. Jay asks:

“Would they talk about you when you’re not in the room?”

For a lot of marketing — especially the churn-and-burn, brute-force, dig-the-hole-before-it-caves-in kind — the honest answer is no. Which is the actual reason a traffic decline feels existential. If you’re not saying anything that compels people to seek you out, you were always going to be exposed the moment the pipes changed.

And the pipes are always changing. Jay’s reminder that distribution channels aren’t neutral systems of pipes — they’re ad networks with opinions about what should spread — is something I think about weekly. Instagram rewards what makes it more ad inventory. LinkedIn wants you teaching 101-level stuff to the widest possible room. None of that necessarily maps to the audience you actually want, or to the work that’s actually best for them.

A keynote, though? Forty-five minutes, no algorithm in between. As Jay put it: “I’d much rather say one thing one time that my audience thinks about 10 times a day than get in front of the audience 10 times a week.”

Influence and impact. Not followers and traffic.

If you’ve ever put someone you admire on a pedestal for how effortless they make all this look, Jay would like you to know:

“The pedestal is made of crap.”

It’s built from bad drafts, dead-end soundbites, and rants that went nowhere. Creativity is trial and error — try the idea on like a shirt off the rack, decide it doesn’t fit, add a little seasoning, try another one. The people who look like they have a superpower mostly just refused to skip that part.

Listen to the Zero Click Marketing podcast wherever you get your pods, or watch it on YouTube.

As for Jay, everything he teaches lives at jayacunzo.com — his essays, his newsletter, and his relaunched podcast, Why They Resonate, where he breaks down what makes great speakers actually land. If you want to get better as a speaker, thought leader, or storyteller, start there.

Watch me get gently roasted. In a couple of weeks I’m going on Why They Resonate so Jay can pick apart a talk I’ve been giving this past year. I get to learn; he gets to roast.

🍪 Petits Fours

Four delicious considerations because this newsletter is, after all, called the “Menu.”

Another reason to stop treating “more traffic” as the goal: The people who still click are often the ones with harder, more specific questions that AI couldn’t fully answer. That means generic “what is X” content is less useful, while original research, real experience, proprietary data, and sharper analysis become more valuable. More by Jon Kelly in Hacker Noon.

Voice of reason Anil Dash on the “inevitability” of AI: “…it’s possible for creators working in their own communities to now make AI tools that serve their specific needs, without causing all the harms that make people object to Big AI. This feels like the true alternative to the narrative of “inevitability” that so much of the hyper-funded AI industry is trying to push, while also not forcing people into a quiet life of AI guilt if they still find some utility in some aspects of these tools.”

Nintendo Switch 2 price increasing on September 1: I like cozy games but I don’t play often, so I was unsure about getting the Switch 2. Buuuut… since the price is going up in a few months, my husband surprised me with the console plus Pokemon Pokopia. The game is absolutely delightful. Highly recommend.

Is it weird to listen to your friends’ podcasts to keep in touch in a lazy way? Yes? Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, my latest favorite listen is my friend Asia Orangio’s In Demand podcast. Asia’s one of the most brilliant people I know, and an original thinker. Check it out if you wanna get smarter about B2B growth.