Bye Now! The Button That Kills Your Business
Yup, I started this article with every marketers FAVORITE button, Bye Now. No, it's not a typo, here's why.
Yup, I started this article with every marketer's FAVORITE button, Bye Now. No, it's not a typo. Here's why.
Are you one of them? You know, the marketing types who think brand is a fluffy waste of budget and it's all about CPC, CAC, and BUY NOW. Like a junkie chasing the next fix, you're addicted to the quick hit of sales today. I've watched this play out for over 40 years and across nine Super Bowl campaigns, and I can tell you exactly how it ends: you sacrifice the one thing that actually makes a business bulletproof -- becoming the dominant, go-to name in your category -- for a short-term spike that dries up the second the algorithm shifts.
Brand-Building? Nah, Just Hit 'Em With Another Buy Now Button
The Clock Is Ticking…On Your Business
"That's the way the cookie crumbles."
It's an expression we've heard all our lives. Now you get to feel what happens when the cookie actually crumbles -- and I'm sorry, but only if you haven't been listening to me from the start.
If you've followed the Ad Zombies story (and my eternal soapbox preaching), you'd already know the importance of building a brand first. That's right. Building a brand. First. I've written well north of 100,000 ads for clients across every category you can name, and the ones still standing after a recession, a platform shakeup, or a category-wide price war are never the ones who leaned hardest on Buy Now. They're the ones people already trusted before they ever needed to buy.
Why brand first?
It's simple. When the economy tanks, when there's no budget to advertise (that's another article), when Google fiddles with cookies and tracking… your brand is the only asset that doesn't evaporate overnight.
Don't cry, here's a tissue.
Google's Cookie Games Should Scare You Straight
Now, about Google. For years, Google promised to kill third-party cookies in Chrome, then delayed it, then walked the whole plan back and let users opt out instead. That flip-flopping is almost worse than a clean cutoff -- it means the rules of tracking and retargeting can change under your feet with zero warning, whenever it suits a platform's bottom line.
What does this mean for marketers who haven't built a brand?
It means you're exposed. It means "too bad, so sad." Any day the tracking infrastructure you've built your entire funnel on can get pulled out from under you, and suddenly re-marketing and retargeting get a lot less reliable. Following people around the internet with cheap banner ads was already a weak strategy -- it just got weaker.
Now you're going to have to create contextual advertising that actually matters to your customer, cookies or no cookies. So how do you avoid the pain of a crumbling strategy?
Well, you can start today.
How to Not Get Screwed (Starting Today)
We started building our brand decades ago. But don't worry, you've got time to catch up. Start creating ads that entertain, engage, and connect with your audience. For us, it's always entertainment first -- and it starts before you ever write a word of body copy. Get the headline wrong and none of the rest of the ad matters, because nobody sticks around to read it.
If we can create a dopamine rush in the viewer and get them to smile, share, comment, and like our ads, we win. Because once they start doing that, we can retarget them without needing a third-party cookie to do it.
We can drive them into our pipeline, get them to download H5 -- our internal framework for writing headlines that actually earn the read -- get them to subscribe to our brain blast, or pull real feedback from them in Facebook groups.
There are countless ways to capture potential customers and turn them into paying clients, and no, this doesn't happen without real infrastructure -- the kind we talk about when we talk about what AI can and can't do for a workflow like this, because a research assistant can help you scale content, but it can't build the trust a brand needs on its own. With cookies getting shakier by the year, it's only going to get harder for businesses with no brand equity to fall back on. Especially if all you do is rely on sales-based advertising and chasing people around the internet with shitty banners.
Start building a brand before your cookie crumbles and your business gets swept away.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ken intentionally misspells it as 'Bye Now' to make a point—marketers obsessed with 'BUY NOW' buttons and immediate sales are actually saying goodbye to their business. They're sacrificing long-term brand building for short-term conversions, which will screw them when market conditions change.
Google announced they're removing third-party cookies from their platform as of 2022. This means those tracking crumbs you leave around the internet disappear overnight, making remarketing and retargeting nearly impossible for marketers who relied on following people around with banner ads.
Ad Zombies puts entertainment first—they create ads designed to trigger a dopamine rush and get people to smile, share, comment, and like. Once viewers engage that way, they can retarget them and drive them into their pipeline through tools like their H5 download, Brain Blast subscription, or Facebook groups.
H5 is described as 'the secret element of writing great ad headlines' that Ad Zombies offers as a downloadable resource. It's one of the ways they capture potential customers and move them into their sales pipeline after engaging with their brand content.
When the economy tanks, advertising budgets disappear, or platforms kill tracking tools like cookies, sales-obsessed marketers lose their crutch. Brands that already built audience connections through entertaining, engaging content don't rely solely on retargeting crumbs—they've got actual relationships with customers.
