Why a snack company, a flag company, a furniture company, and a fitness rower shouldn’t share a marketing strategy, and the system we use to make sure they don’t. Steve Cozzolongo Jun 17, 2026 I’ve scaled DTC brands across every vertical you can name. $30-AOV supplements. $5,000 fitness rowers. 8-SKU beauty brands. 8,000-SKU furniture catalogs….
Phantom Progress: Why Your Marketing Looks Busy But Your Business Isn’t Growing
Your Amazon agency says attributed revenue is up 22%. Your Meta contractor says 34%. Your in house Google team says 11%. And your contribution margin dropped 5%. Everyone is winning. Except your business. This is what we call Phantom Progress. And nearly every company we work with is experiencing some version of it when they…
How to Fix Your Brand Reputation in 2 Hours with AEO
One Reddit post spent more than a year ruining Park Seed’s reputation. It wasn’t some viral rant or really even all that negative. No joke, it was literally a complaint about a $0.01 charge. But it consistently ranked among the top search results. When people searched the brand, that post tainted their first impression. When…
Google Ads in AI Search for E-commerce Explained
Google’s latest AI Mode update embeds ads, offers, and checkout inside AI-generated answers, and that change will break most of the assumptions brands still make about how Google Ads works. It’s just a matter of time before Gemini is fully integrated into Google Ads, and (probably) ChatGPT into Bing Ad, so the time to begin…
How We Ranked in AI Product Recommendations (and Drove 1,800% AI Traffic Growth)
TL;DR This case study outlines the exact structural and technical changes required to rank in AI product recommendations. How to Actually Show Up in AI Answers Peter Millar had strong brand recognition and healthy traditional SEO performance. But AI product recommendations rarely included them. They already had the authority they needed. We just had to…
Educational Content Hubs Explained (and Why AI Recommends Brands That Have Them)
TL;DR AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Grok don’t recommend products based on info from some master database. They take information from sources they understand to be experts in the space. The problem for most brands is that product pages alone don’t signal expertise. Content that educates customers on your product is still important, but…
How Do You Influence AI Results With Reddit?
You can influence what AI tools like ChatGPT say about your brand, and you can do it fast. For our client Park Seed, a single Reddit thread ranked on Google page one within hours and AI answers started citing that thread almost immediately. Reddit moves faster than traditional SEO. And that’s important because AI systems…
A CMO’s Guide to the 4 E-commerce Product Types
Teams debate Meta vs Google. They argue about creatives, bids, and attribution models. Meanwhile, the real variable shaping performance never gets named: What kind of products are we actually selling? One of the fastest ways we pressure-test a brand’s strategy is by classifying it by buying behavior. There are four core e-commerce product types. Each…
Get Your Shopify Store on ChatGPT ASAP
ChatGPT users can buy from Shopify stores right from their chat as of January 2026, in case you missed the announcement. That means a customer can ask ChatGPT for advice, get a specific product recommendation, and then complete the purchase without ever going to your store. No Google search, no Amazon links, and no ads…
How Internal Teams Can Market Like an Agency in E-Commenrce
The biggest difference between the marketing results professional agencies achieve and the performance an average internal team can pull off has little to do with the creative we output. It’s mostly structural: How decisions get made. What gets prioritized. And what doesn’t get worked on even when the CEO’s professional YouTuber nephew is sure that…
