The Defensive Play: Slow the Decay

Given the law, what do you do? The defensive strategy is constant renewal inside your existing channels: new creative, new messages, new publishers and placements, ongoing testing. This doesn't stop the decay, but it can stretch a channel's useful life from months into years.

Chen offers one genuine exception to the misery: when your marketing is itself useful information, clickthroughs hold up. Content people actually want (a genuinely helpful email, a tool, a well-targeted answer) doesn't get filtered like advertising, because it doesn't feel like advertising.

But treat the defensive game as what it is: managed decline. Squeezing another quarter out of a fading channel is real work worth doing, and it is not a growth strategy on its own.