Marketing has stopped speaking to people: Mordy Oberstein explains why it’s time for some self-criticism
Welcome back to SEO Confidential: today we tackle a question that affects everyone: when did marketing stop speaking to people and start chasing the trends of the moment?
And how do you rebuild trust at a time when AI hype risks overshadowing what truly moves markets?
The guest of this conversation is Mordy Oberstein, one of the most influential minds in the search and brand strategy landscape.
Founder of Unify Brand Marketing, consultant for Semrush, former Head of Communications and later Head of SEO Brand at Wix, Mordy has redefined the perception of the brands he represents.
His philosophy is as simple as it is ruthless: either the brand promise survives the test of real life, or it’s just background noise.
In this exclusive interview, Mordy dismantles the illusion of an omniscient marketing built on metrics and linear funnels, and shows how the industry trapped itself in a parallel reality for twenty years, forgetting the psychology of the very people it was supposed to understand.
We’ll talk about identity, consistency, and accountability.
Ours will be a direct, unfiltered conversation between marketing’s narrative and the truth of the market. An invitation to question the models, realign the teams, and rediscover the substance behind the strategy.
Get ready to look at brands with fresh eyes.
And to ask yourself, once and for all, whether what you’re building truly speaks to people.
Right below you’ll find the video of our interview with Mordy. Enjoy!
If you’d rather read the full transcript of the interview, you’ll find it below. Happy reading!
Brand identity is back at the center: in a more mature landscape, it becomes the key to building solid, recognizable connections
Mordy, in a recent interview you said that the real problem for marketing teams isn’t the arrival of LLMs, but the fact that for over twenty years the industry has lived in a sort of “parallel reality”, ignoring human nature.
How did this disconnection take root over time, and what were the key steps that allowed this model to last so long, up to the moment when consumers started to become aware of it?
Essentially, what happened is that the Internet turned into a kind of artificial reality, almost like a big TV show. For years marketers behaved as if everything were perfectly measurable: you saw the user arrive from one point, move to another, then another, and finally buy. Everything seemed trackable, everything under control. And this illusion of direct attribution led the industry to believe it could predict and even steer human behavior with mathematical precision.
This happened at the very moment the web was maturing, and with it people’s expectations. But those expectations no longer had anything to do with reality. Nobody, in real life, would accept a stranger showing up at their door shouting “Buy our ultimate all-in-one tool!”. And yet online it worked. Users had grown accustomed to intrusive content, aggressive promotions, hyper-targeted advertising. It was simply “the normality of the web”. Until it became too much.
At some point, the balance broke. Users began looking for more authentic, more conversational experiences. It happened with platforms like TikTok, where content felt more direct and spontaneous, and even with Google, which started introducing more interactive and personalized results. That’s when people said: “Enough. I want something real”.
This new awareness was born from a generation that grew up entirely inside the Internet, that knows how it works and no longer lets itself be fooled. Users have become more mature, more critical, more attentive. It’s a natural consequence of any collective evolution: when a platform or a system becomes an integral part of everyday life, sooner or later the moment comes when the audience wakes up. And that’s when everything changes.
You argue that in order to truly adapt, companies must first “come to terms with the past”, acknowledging mistakes and admitting their responsibilities.
I’ve noticed that many brands prefer to reset their strategy without going through this phase of self-criticism. Do you believe this reckoning can help build genuine trust with the audience in a landscape dominated by LLMs?
Yes. Companies tend to ignore their own past. They pretend the mistakes they made don’t exist and that changing direction is enough to turn the page. They say: “Okay, now we do X, Y and Z. New strategy”. But changing strategy doesn’t erase what happened before. If yesterday a brand was aggressive, manipulative or overly commercial, it has to acknowledge it openly. Until it admits it acted that way, it can’t really change. You don’t become a different brand overnight just by declaring it: it takes an act of accountability.
When I worked at Wix (an online website-building platform, among the most widely used in the world, Ed.), I saw how important it was to re-establish the connection with the audience. The starting point is telling the truth: acknowledging where you were, showing with concrete facts that you’ve chosen a new approach, and doing it authentically. It’s a long process, not a cosmetic operation. But most brands don’t want to wait. They want immediate results, KPIs to show in the next quarter.
The problem is that human memory doesn’t work that way. People remember how they were treated. And until a company proves over time that it has truly changed, trust cannot be rebuilt. Saying “we’ve learned” isn’t enough: you have to prove it, day after day. Only then can you go back to building an authentic relationship with the people on the other side of the screen.
BrightEdge data shows that, despite its rapid growth, AI search generates less than 1% of referrals, while organic remains the real engine of traffic and conversions.
In your view, why do marketers keep chasing new AI channels with such urgency, despite the obvious disproportion between hype and concrete results?
This trend confirms exactly the gap between the dominant narrative and the reality of human behavior. Marketers today enthusiastically chase AI-related channels because they perceive them as “the next big shift”. It’s a new paradigm, and nobody really knows what it will become. But since it looks popular and promising, many rush to adopt it. The problem is that the mindset they bring to it is still the old one.
Nothing that’s happening now is genuinely new. The user journey has always been a complex weave: you search for a product on Google, watch a review on YouTube, compare prices on Amazon, go back to Google Shopping to check the deals. Today LLMs enter this process too, but the mistake is to keep reasoning in terms of direct attribution, as if the ecosystem were still linear and predictable. In reality, it no longer is.
An emblematic example is NerdWallet. It’s a huge brand, with a business model based on affiliation, which however no longer works the way it used to. They’ve invested significant sums in branding and TV campaigns, but the communication between teams — the one managing advertising and the one handling online content — isn’t coordinated. The strategies don’t talk to each other. And this despite it being an experienced, well-structured company.
It’s a widespread problem: organizations are still trapped in silos, with separate departments working toward different goals. But in a context where organic traffic is declining, where you need to build new channels and direct relationships with your audience, this fragmentation can no longer work.
Today, more than ever, what’s needed is consistency. Companies must learn to align their teams, integrate strategies and messages, and create a single ecosystem in which every part supports the other. It’s the only way to stay relevant in a world where technology changes, but people’s psychology stays the same.
In your opinion, is the real problem for a brand choosing the right channel, or understanding how to create an authentic, lasting bond with its audience?
Everything starts with connection: managing to resonate with people. But you can’t resonate if you haven’t first understood who you are. It’s surprising how often brands skip this phase. You have to ask yourself: who are we? what do we do? why do we do it? what value do we generate for those who follow us or choose us?
Let’s take NerdWallet again: their real strength is the ability to translate complex financial language into something clear, transparent and understandable. That’s what sets them apart. But if a brand like that goes and sponsors exclusive Wall Street events, the message doesn’t work: it doesn’t speak to its real audience, ordinary people who want to better understand how to manage their money.
The problem is that many brands don’t do this work of introspection. They don’t truly define their identity, and so they end up chasing whatever channel looks promising: today TikTok, tomorrow Google, the day after that another platform. Without a clear direction, every investment becomes scattered.
In NerdWallet’s case, the lack of consistency between brand, TV spots and digital strategy shows up in the numbers: according to Semrush data, their organic visibility has dropped and, to compensate, they’re spending far more on paid advertising. The result is that every conversion costs more and more, and margins shrink. What used to come “for free” now costs ten dollars, and the real profit shrinks to a single dollar.
When a company doesn’t have a clear identity, every channel becomes more expensive and less effective. But when there’s an authentic connection with the audience, everything changes: performance improves, costs go down, and results multiply. It’s a real economic lever, not just a communication one.
The problem is that many brands don’t realize it. They see the million dollars they earn, but not the two or three million they could earn if their identity were consistent and recognizable. True resonance is born from identity. And its value is measured not only in engagement or visibility, but in concrete results: money saved, trust earned, sustainable growth.
We’ve seen that the distinction between content designed to convert and content built to establish authority belongs to the “old web”.
What are, in your view, the most frequent mistakes marketers make in keeping them separate, and what concrete practices can turn content into a fluid path capable of uniting connection and conversion?
In my opinion, one of the most common mistakes is precisely separating the two. In reality, authority and conversion are part of the same process. When you build authority, you’re preparing the ground for the sale.
If someone is reading, listening to or watching a piece of my content and at that moment I offer my brand marketing services, I’m not interrupting them with a sudden sales pitch. I’ve already given them value, I’ve already demonstrated competence. At that point they’re more willing to listen to me. They’re more open to the idea that I might offer them something useful.
Authority and conversion, therefore, are not distinct phases: they feed each other. They work like any dynamic of trust. It’s the same mechanism that leads a person, faced with two boxes of cereal, to choose the familiar brand over the new one. Not because the product is necessarily better, but because that brand has already built a bond, a familiarity, a credibility.
Building effective content today means merging these two levels: offering real value and, at the same time, guiding the audience toward an action. When a brand manages to unite connection and conversion, every message becomes more natural, more human and more convincing.
Mordy, you’ve pointed to the moment when brands started treating algorithms as their real audience, forgetting people, as the breaking point.
Even today many large companies produce surface-level content, convinced they have a brand strategy when in reality they’re only doing product marketing. What concrete signals can a company look for to understand whether it has fallen into this illusion?
It’s fairly simple to tell. If the various teams in a company still work toward separate goals, it means there’s no truly unified strategy. It’s one of the clearest signals. When departments operate in watertight compartments, perhaps even competing with one another, it means a shared vision of the brand is missing.
Another obvious signal is when leadership doesn’t take responsibility for coordinating the overall narrative. If whoever leads the strategy doesn’t work side by side with all the teams to maintain a consistent voice, then you’re not building a brand: you’re just producing disjointed content.
An authentic brand is born when every department — from SEO to social, from marketing to product — works toward the same goal and, if necessary, is willing to sacrifice an immediate KPI for a broader, longer-lasting result. If that doesn’t happen, the company is probably trapped in a short-term vision.
Let’s take NerdWallet once more: the SEO team doesn’t want to publish content that’s too “SEO-oriented”, while the brand team bets everything on “image” campaigns on social media and in TV spots. Everyone looks only at their own numbers: views, likes, shares, traffic. But these are surface-level indicators.
When a company measures success only in terms of clicks or engagement, without asking whether that content is truly strengthening the relationship with the audience, it means it has fallen into the illusion of speaking to algorithms instead of people. That’s where the brand stops evolving and simply starts producing noise.
In one of your LinkedIn posts you wrote that you’re not that interested in the percentage of traffic coming from LLMs, but rather in understanding what happens before the user lands on Google and converts, because maybe they saw the brand in the LLM and then searched for it.
Why, in your opinion, do SEOs fixate on these numbers instead of understanding where purchase intent really originates?
You have to understand the funnel. Users may use an LLM as part of their journey, but they don’t stop there. The data clearly shows that, after consulting an LLM, many keep using Google. The problem is that a wrong conversation has taken hold, as if it were a choice between one or the other: either the LLM or the search engine. But it doesn’t work that way.
The funnel has always been chaotic. It has never been linear, and yet today we act as if it were, as if LLMs had upended the rules of the game. In reality they haven’t changed them: they’ve simply added another layer of complexity. They’ve made the journey more holistic, but people’s underlying behavior is the same.
A user can look at a product on Amazon, then search for it on Google, read opinions on Reddit, and maybe go back to compare prices. They never stop at a single point. This has always been the reality, and all LLMs do is bring it into sharper focus.
A marketer’s job is to understand what happens before and after. It’s not enough to say “people just want to chat with ChatGPT”: that’s not the whole story. Those who work in marketing must strive to reconstruct the entire story, to understand every step of the user’s journey, not just one part of it.
Marketing starts again from identity (not from trends)
Recognizing yourself before communicating: that’s where it all begins, according to Mordy.
Branding, for him, is not an exercise in style nor a race for visibility, but a process of awareness.
Every brand has its own authentic identity, a voice that often remains buried under years of strategies, metrics and campaigns. Doing branding means bringing it back to the surface, remembering why the company exists and what makes it truly unique in people’s eyes.
When a brand loses this link with its own story, it reacts like someone who has lost their memory: it tries to reinvent itself in a hurry, changing tone, image, language. But what is born from impulse, not from reflection, only generates dissonance.
The audience senses it immediately.
No advertising, no editorial plan can hide it.
Yes, because connection is the only value that lasts over time.
Superficial emotions run out; authentic experiences don’t.
A consistent message, grounded in a solid identity, creates resonance. That’s where the brand stops being a logo and becomes a recognizable presence, a voice that inspires trust.
In this vision, marketing is no longer a game of algorithms or trends, but an act of truth.
It means choosing consistency over the race for numbers, relationships over performance, depth over speed.
This is where the future runs through: brands that know who they are, that don’t pretend, that don’t chase. The ones that speak to people, not to platforms.
This is the direction we need to rediscover.
And the one from which, perhaps, search marketing can truly begin again.
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