All the Bad Boys are Standing in the Shadows said Mike Ryan

Welcome to the Struggle Bus of the eSpot Show, the home of the e-com early news. I'm your host Vinny O Brien, or as my friends like to call me, hey you in the bushes. As an aged journeyman on e-com, I wanted to create the Struggle Bus to create a space for us long-suffering career veterans who've seen it all and then, quote, go quietly back to our desk to get the work done. With me today is one of the biggest brains in our industry. Mike Ryan is the head of eCommerce Insights at Smarter eCommerce, a US man who found love and moved to Austria. The only thing sharper than his insights is his quick wit. Mike, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for the very kind intro, Vinny.

Mike, you have an incredible output when it comes to LinkedIn content and content in general, from your podcast through to Twitter and everything else in between. I'm not entirely sure how you find time to do all of this, but I want to take you back and we'll jump into a little bit about your career along the way. But I kind of start this podcast always with one kind of opening statement, and then we build on everything else from there. And I want to take you back to 2 years ago. You wrote a post on the Smarter Ecommerce LinkedIn page., and it was all to do with the emergence of Google Marketing Live being conversational and allowing people to create campaigns. Do you remember that post?

I mean, I remember that Google Marketing Live. I'm not sure what I wrote about it back then.

Look, nothing too controversial, but it was interesting at the time. You said a few things. You posed, who is this going to be for? Because there's this new conversational flow allowing you to create campaigns, writing or Conversational campaigns in Google Ads. You said who's it for? You said everybody, probably. I'm summarizing all of this for you now. Then it was, how do we need to think about this technology? And you said the decisions to be made here will be about who can versus who should. And you've asked some really interesting questions in there. And then just getting on towards the end of it, you said it's not magic, it's math. Which kind of speaks to your brain and I think the way that you think about the world. But you end up and you say this comment, which I thought was kind of telling and maybe an interesting point to start the conversation today. I hope we'll all linger and dwell at this point in the technology. It feels to me, probably I'm guilty of it too as well, but it feels to me like the industry has not spent enough time in the technology at this point yet. We have formed opinions and strategies and way forwards. Ways forward. You probably, as you said, you probably can't remember writing the post, but if you cast yourself back and then bring yourself forward, where does that leave us?

Yeah, I mean, well, when I think back on, on that feature, conversational campaign creation that Google announced back then, um, I, I wonder if anyone is using that feature. And, and maybe this brings us back forward to the, to the statement at the end there about like, about dwelling, because I think that we are not that reflective about this technology, or there's just this insane need for tempo and momentum and a race to find use cases. And it's all just like, go, go, go, next model, next model, next model. And yeah, so I, I think that is a little old school, but a lot of good things happen by moving slowly.

So I mentioned in our pre-call conversation, short as it was, I said there's a few topics I was looking into as being my guiding lights for next year, and one of them is productivity does not equal progress. And it kind of touches on what you have said there. And I wonder, are we being forced into this kind of productivity gain because we've had this year of efficiency, um, kind of carving out in terms of our businesses and taking costs out. Now we need to get back to growth. How, how, how do you advise your customers or, or people you think, or people you talk to within your own business about moving slowly? Like, how do you develop a mindset around taking things slower?

Um, well, I mean, I, I think like for, for me personally, just to— before we get in that, like the— my limiter is not on— is not so much on the tools that I work with or stuff like this. Um, ultimately I'm limited by the amount of ideas that I can produce. And, um, yeah, I mean, also just my— I don't know, that I, I, I could— it's great that you can vibe code something in 5 minutes or whatever, just kind of, you know, just as an example, and, but, um, doesn't really matter if your ideas are not good, otherwise it's just output. So, um, I— something that I've been talking about with businesses because it has been quite challenging for some of our customers. Um, we have some customers that, well, we've lost, or rather that, you know, their businesses, um, have shut doors, and there have been some very sad stories. Um, But yeah, I mean, again, it's just this idea that, like you said, product and— excuse me, productivity and progress are not necessarily directly related with each other. More is not necessarily more. I think that we really need to take stock and make sure that we've got our best offers that we have, that we're focusing on actually being differentiated. Somehow, um, I see like the role of AI and e-commerce ahead is potentially being this kind of like a blender, um, where it's just, it's just consuming information at this vast scale, putting it through a blender, and you know, if, if your brand is able to emerge on the other side of that, um, 'Cause I'm afraid the only thing that emerges on the other side of that are just price tags and commoditization and that there isn't a lot left for e-com to hold onto in terms of finding relationships with customers and not just being ChatGPT's warehouse. This is a concern for me. So I really emphasize brilliant basics, doing the things that we've been doing, doing them well, doing them better, doing the things we ought to have been doing, um, and because we did— we don't know exactly what's ahead. But I don't know if that's getting toward an answer to your question.

No, it, it is. It, it's just, it's an interesting crossroads that we find ourselves at. And, and I just wonder, with someone like yourself— I pay a lot of attention to your content— I think you've self-identified as an introvert and intuitive you think and you kind of prospect. So I love the way that you put forward how you think about data. You think over a longer time period than most people I know. And I think that's a huge advantage that you're able to demonstrate. When you think about now, LLMs and their impact on our daily lives, what kind of timeframe are you looking at over? And you mentioned as well, none of us know where this is going. How far, if at all, can you project forward?

Um, just to like, about this data thing for a second, by the way, I mean, um, you know, people talk about being data-driven and stuff like this, and, um, people talk about insights, and now there's this potential for automated insights as well, but this is all so much harder than it sounds because There are many reactions to data and information that might be derived from data. And usually it's just like, oh, or huh, and um, or uh-oh. And what you really want, I mean, the oh's can be important, but everyone wants to find the ahas. And me personally, I'm like a dog with a bone when it comes to data. And that's what distinguishes me. It's not that I'm like the best data scientist out there or, that I, like, AI has made me so productive or something like this. It's about persistence and wading through all the ohs and huhhs and all that stuff till you find the ahas. And hold on, now I kind of forgot about the second part of your question.

You're thinking in terms of '80s bands rather than questions now, but I just gonna—

ABBA's, I forgot the ABBA's.

The ABBA's, yeah.

When you're digging through data, you find your ABBA's.

The A, B, C, O's and the AHA's. Um, yeah, yeah, look, it was more about the time frame over which—

oh yeah, I mean, well, let— I don't, I don't want to leave that on the table because that's— yeah, I think that's the question that a lot of people are asking. And, um, I think it is hard to predict what's going on. Like, we are arguably or probably in this moment of exponential acceleration with this technology, and these things Like, you know, if you look at an exponential curve from the side, you know, it's this very steep, steep thing. But like, we're in the first-person view. We are in the, we're like on the line looking at it. It's effectively a wall that we can't see past. We can't see the top of, and we don't know what's on the other side. And the last time we had a disruption like this, it was probably smartphones. And there were a lot of kind of second-order consequences of smartphones that were non-obvious, like, I mean, social media was already around, Facebook was all around, but the combination of smartphones and social media was maybe non-obvious and has changed so many things. And when we talk about like what's happening now with e-commerce, I think it is like, it's about this magnitude of change. Like we don't know how large the change is going to be and we don't know how, kind of constricted or how relaxed that the time range that it plays out over will be. Um, if you have something that is really vertical, it's like a brick wall that you smash into. Other things are more like a slope that we can kind of work our way up. Um, but you know, that's— I think of that when I think of Agentic Commerce or even just AI shopping assistance, this kind of spectrum of AI-powered shopping outcomes that are either opportunities or disruptors for the businesses. And it's like, the shorter answer is I don't think we can know. It will— what I can guarantee is that when we look back at it afterwards, we'll rationalize it. It'll seem like it was self-evident. Hindsight's 20/20, blah blah. But the honest answer right now is we don't know.

It, it poses some interesting questions, particularly for Google, which is a platform that you spend quite a lot of time, a lot of time in, and People have said they haven't really put out a response to this, or a credible one, to like the emergence of ChatGPT and others. But also, Google have survived other infiltrations of their ecosystem before. Many people have tried to muscle in on their turf, to use a term. I saw a Grease clip of the movie a little while ago, so muscling on someone's turf is what came to my head. But Google have had a really successful history in defending their territory by not doing too much. What's your read on what they're doing now? Are you seeing something that we're not?

Yeah, I still, I'm of two minds about it because, you know, it's hard to have this counterfactual where Google fired the first shot of the AI war rather than OpenAI. Um, and, you know, ultimately it was these kind of gestures by, by Microsoft with the new Bing. If you're— if anyone remembers the new Bing, I mean, it never materialized really. Um, but this made— this made a world of difference to shareholders at the moment. Google just declared like code yellow or whatever they called it. And, and, you know, they ultimately— they blinked. Like, the threat from Microsoft was not particularly real. Um, and ChatGPT is evolving into something, that's for sure, but, um, only a subset of the activity on ChatGPT is comparable to Google-like information-seeking behavior. Yeah. Um, so I, I don't know. I mean, I think they've made actually some— I think they've made some big responses, some big answers with, um, AI Overviews not being one of those. I am not— I think AI Overviews is a dumb feature that doesn't need to be there and just provokes publishers because it's taking people's traffic. Um, I think AI Mode, which is much more their, their more complete answer to ChatGPT, is what I should be on. And, and as you said, Google has a history of defending, and they're in a very fortified position because, um, they just already have that market share, and they can do crazy things like put AI Mode right on the Google page, on the Google homepage, and, um, generate massive amounts of awareness about it really fast. Um, so yeah, I mean, and I also think that OpenAI has everything to lose, or they have in some ways slim chances of success just because, um, of the raw economics of that. They're losing so much money. I'm— I would be— I, I think Sam Altman is one day going to get a knock on his door. If he hasn't turned the ads on yet, he'll get a knock on his door at midnight saying turn on the ads. He's gonna say, okay, but I won't personalize them. And they'll say, personalize them.

It seems inevitable. It's what way he can try and do ads differently. And there's no easy answer to that question, I don't think. We haven't got the patience for another platform full of ads, I don't feel.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that You know, and when I look at the experience on Amazon, the word "enshitified" has been coined to describe what's happening on Amazon. And I feel that it's appropriate because I think that experience has gone way downhill and ads are part of that. I find that ads on Google, people might disagree with me here, but I think they're not that bad. I think they're usually relevant. I think that it's predictable where on the page they're gonna appear, what they're gonna look like. What drives me nuts about Amazon is it can be sometimes really hard to figure out what— if what you're seeing is sponsored and where it is. It's variable. There's so many different— yeah, I, I'm not satisfied with that. OpenAI, um, you know, they have this kind of allergic stance toward ads, and this will, I think, cause them to produce ads that are as non-intrusive as, as possible. That's certainly their goal, but we'll see. I mean, they're taking their first step into e-commerce and they're building product feeds, and, you know, they're integrating with the shop systems. And, you know, like, in some ways that's just another platform. It's, it's, um, it's different, but it's, it's also so similar to what we already have. Like, um, I don't know, it's a, it's a bit like there's all this talk about Agentic reshaping everything, and yet they have a dependency on shop system integrations and product feeds, which is the existing paradigm. Things didn't change maybe as much as we imagined.

Yeah, it requires a human behavioral change that we saw happen during COVID but was quickly eroded because we realized it wasn't what we necessarily wanted to do or how we wanted to behave. And I'm not seeing the evidence yet to suggest that agentic is an appropriate path forward. I certainly don't want it, but the areas that I've seen, and I'm piecing together the research on it, I'll certainly share it, but governments are now investing in strategies that are enabling a more agentic society. For example, the Irish government signed off a piece of legislation that came into effect in early September, which was about creating an environment in the preschool education of children that makes them agentic citizens. And it was really striking because one, it's not a word governments ever use, and two, they give some loose definitions around it that talk about taking agency on learning and teachers being able to provide agency. But it's an unusual stance for a particularly conservative government.

Yeah, I mean, let me, let me just go on record that I've, I've despised the word agentic from the first time that I heard it. And I don't know the details of what you're discussing here, but it's a bit weird to talk about agentic citizens because we're actually real citizens. We have real agency. We are human beings with free will and with rights. And so I don't know. It feels very buzzwordy to me.

But that's what was striking about it, the fact that it's a technology phrase embedded in an educational policy that's now in place. And as I said, in a country that's got a historical conservatism when it comes to protection of that policy. That's where I think there's movements happening that may shape this in ways that we're not in control of. And that's where I sit very uncomfortably around all of this. But kind of moving it forward, what's it changing on a day-to-day basis for you? Or how's it changing how Smarter eCommerce are having to behave on behalf of your clients?

I mean, right now we're just kind of helping people understand the, the kind of roadmap that Google is laying out, what's coming next. Um, we're also looking at, you know, helping people evaluate OpenAI. Is this something they need to pay attention to or not? And if so, when? Um, I think it will. Yeah, well, it might not take off as fast as some people expect, um, but Also, there, as I said, like, you know, I talked about OpenAI building e-commerce based on feeds and Google has these new AI advertising placements, like in AI Overviews and AI Mode. And they're just built right now out of standard ad inventory because that's what they have. And so it's partly just, it's managing expectations that there is this level of uncertainty, there is change coming. But also, you know, what of this is, is a distraction? And what are the things that we've been doing that we can't forget about because that's still how things are built right now? So it's really just, it's an intermediate phase, and it's the early part of that intermediate phase. So I think there's actually more reassuring going on right now than there is like a radical change in tactic. Because for the most part, a radical change in tactic for e-commerce, for paid advertising, is not that necessary right now. It's of course different if you're a publisher who depends on, you know, very information-based, and you depend on organic traffic. That's, that's a totally different situation that those people are facing. And we kind of benefit. It's like that saying that the future is here, it's not evenly distributed. The future is very much here for these organic publishers, or publishers with a dependency on organic, and it's less so here for e-commerce right now as I see it.

Do you love the industry as much now, or love operating in it, um, as much as you did, say, when you were here, you know, 6, 7, 8 years ago? And do you get as enthused by these types of challenges as you did when you were younger? It's not an age— it's not an aging. I'm just wondering where your head's at in terms of excitement versus fear when it comes to these sorts of changes.

Um, no, I, I view it with the— I view it with more excitement and, um, also a bit of, you know, we've been through the, the crypto hype cycle, we've been through the, through the metaverse and stuff like that. Yes, yeah, that's why I'm so relaxed. I'm a billionaire. So, um, but I just— yeah, I'm, I'm a very curious person. I, I consider myself— it's like kind of a cringy phrase— but a lifelong learner. Like, learning is very important to me, and I'm privileged to be in a position where I can spend a lot of time learning. Um, but I just, I just see this all as, if anything, it's just a bit overwhelming the, the volume of information, um, the pace, the seeming pace of the change. Um, like, as I said earlier, it's a, it's, it's a bit of a brick wall. And, um, but it's more like sifting right now. There's so much stuff because I can't— sometimes I can't decide what of this information is crap and what of it is kind of the real deal. Um, and that's more the thing, like, you have to pay attention to everything, but then you have to decide what you're going to keep paying attention to.

Yeah, I keep coming back to a book I mentioned before, Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable, and he calls this phase filtering. And it's about how we've got to assimilate all of it and then determine what it is going to be useful. Some of it might not be useful enough today and then something into the future. I'm conscious of the time and I said to you, I try to keep this to 18 to 25 minutes every time we do it. I'm getting to the question that everyone wants to hear and it requires a lot of thought. But if It's a bit of a step change as well, so bear with me, but if your career was a song right now, what would it be? We mentioned A-ha, we mentioned ABBA, there's a pattern forming. You're in Europe.

Oh, okay, should I go with something European?

I don't know, whatever you're feeling.

Yeah, I know, I was gonna ask if Free Falling has been taken already or not, but it hasn't.

There you go, Tom Petty.

Let's go for it.

Amazing. Uh, that'll be added to the Spotify list soon. And, and the, the final My question after that, and then, is about holding a mirror up to where we're at right now. And you've done a huge job on that. So I feel I don't necessarily need to do that. But one, one thing that did strike me in all of this, and you went to Austria for love, do you think you'd think differently if you were living back home in the US? And has that European base given you a different perspective? Or has it just reinforced things you already instinctively feel?

Um, yeah, I have to think how to keep this answer concise. Uh, I think that it has given me a different perspective, um, and it's given me a level of, of detachment, um, too. Like, it's weird because when I, when I visit the US and, and I'm sitting, I don't know, in, um, sitting in a hotel lobby or sitting anywhere and like the, the news is playing on the TV there, um, it feels totally different than when I'm engaging with the news over here. And I don't know how, like, why or how to really explain that, but I think this level of detachment, um, helps me out a bit as well. Yeah, and I try to really stay middle of the road on things where I can, um, and that's sometimes even a controversial position nowadays, but I think it's an important one. I think We need to— there's so many ways in which just trying to stay calm and stay middle of the road is very helpful.

Yeah, it, it, it's a salient point maybe to finish up on. I, I love that idea. It comes through in everything that you do. Well, not everything you do. I think you've got very strong opinions on areas that count from a work perspective.

I fly off the handle once in a while.

Everyone does a Twitter rant every now and again as a lad, every 6 months or so, I reckon.

I never hurt anyone.

Never hurt anyone indeed. Mike, look, thank you so much for taking time out. Thanks for joining me on the struggle bus, and I hope you'll join us again at some point in the future.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Vinny O Brien. It was good to catch up again.

Yeah, likewise, Mike. Take it easy. There you go. I got you out within the 25 minutes.

Wow, spot on. Yeah, I think so. It was like 25:01 when I looked, when I just