The Analog Market
We're not going back offline. We never left. We're just rediscovering what analog is for.
AI is doing to information what electricity did to darkness. Access to information (also known as “knowing”) stops being a problem. Search, research, comparison, scheduling, communication, task management… the entire cognitive overhead of navigating daily life is being absorbed into ambient intelligence. You ask, you have it. You need it done, it gets done. The interface is everywhere.
And as it spreads everywhere, something clarifies. Actually, two things.
One, we are starting to understand the difference between knowing and understanding. Despite the opportunity of knowing everything, some of us use this chance to do stupid f—ing shit. But that’s OK, we are humans. In the early 2000s, we also thought social media would bring free speech everywhere.
Two, we will rediscover the offline world. In this weekend edition, we won’t be judging everyone on how they use the available digital tools at their fingertips. But we will discuss what happens if digital simply takes care of itself, so we can go back to doing our own things. Like, I don’t know, gardening.
So let’s talk analog and the new trend of offline marketing.
We never left. But we have arrived.
We had offline. Then we built online, and for more than three decades, online ate everything. Attention, commerce, identity, relationships, and entertainment. The digital layer expanded until it felt like the whole world.
But it was never the whole world. It was an interface. And interfaces, when they mature, disappear. Every interface on this planet that is used globally has one single faith: they disappear and become infrastructure. And normally, you don’t care about infrastructure. You care only if there is a problem with it.
What we are entering is not a return to offline. That word carries the wrong implication, that digital is the default, and we are retreating from it. The opposite is true. Digital is becoming infrastructure.
Like electricity, like plumbing, like roads, it will run everything, invisibly, underneath. Governance, commerce, finance, logistics, communication, all of it will live on the digital layer, mostly handled by AI, seamlessly, without requiring your conscious attention.
No more candlemakers. No more oil lamp manufacturers. Just a couple of people running reactors producing electricity, quietly humming in the background so you can flip your switch in the bedroom.
No more information packagers, excel-junkies, PowerPoint deck builders, online traders, code writers, and oh, thanks God, no more personal brand experts for social media content. Just a couple of people running AI agents, producing results, and quietly humming in the background so you can radically decrease your screen time.
What remains above that layer is analog. Not as a consolation. As a destination. This is the Analog Market. And it is where most of your customers are going.
Looking back, it was obvious.
The signals were visible in 2025. They were being systematically underread by marketing teams too deep in their digital funnels to notice.
Forrester predicted that a third of consumers would choose offline over online brand experiences. Harris Poll found 77% of Gen Z and Millennials had planned travel or outings specifically around visiting a physical store, not out of necessity, but out of desire. 73% said shopping at a pop-up felt like being part of a cultural moment. Edelman’s Trust Barometer found only 42% of people trusted social media as an information source. Europol forecast 90% of online content will be AI-generated by 2026.
When the entire digital layer becomes indistinguishable and authorless, the physical object becomes the only thing with a clear origin. The only thing clearly made, by someone, for someone.
Two philosophers had mapped the intellectual territory before the data caught up. Byung-Chul Han argued in 2022 that the digital world had become a world of non-things, content with no weight, no origin, no soul.
Physical objects accumulate history. They carry an aura. When the infosphere tips toward content so generated that it has no author, the physical object becomes the exception. Which makes it precious.
Moeller and D’Ambrosio, in You and Your Profile, identified the trap built into digital identity, what they called profilicity: identity constructed through how we are observed by others, endlessly calibrated for a general audience. It worked as long as there was a signal in the profile. But when AI generates infinite, perfect digital profiles, differentiation collapses.
The only thing that cannot be faked or optimized is physical experience. Where you go. What you touch. What you show up for. Analog becomes the last unfalsifiable signal for humans, consumers, and brands.
Two markets. Two games.
Here is what most marketing frameworks are not yet accounting for: digital and analog are not just two channels. They are two distinct markets, with different buyers, different decision-making mechanisms, and, soon, fundamentally different marketing logic.
The digital market is becoming the infrastructure market. Commodities, utilities, information products, subscriptions, logistics. Everything where price, speed, and convenience are the decision criteria.
This market will increasingly be marketed to, purchased by, and optimized by AI. Your customer is not browsing your digital ad. Their AI agent is evaluating your product against seventeen alternatives and making a recommendation. The human may not be involved in the transaction at all.
Marketing here becomes machine-legible: structured data, clear value propositions, competitive pricing, frictionless purchase flows. You are not persuading a person. You are satisfying a query.
The analog market is something else entirely. This is where premium, luxury, and upscale lifestyle brands live, and increasingly, exclusively. It is the market for things with weight, craft, history, and soul.
Things that require a human to encounter, consider, and decide. Things where the experience of acquiring is part of the value of owning. This market cannot be marketed to by AI because the purchase is not a transaction. It is a moment. It is human-marketed, for humans only. And it commands the margins that the digital infrastructure market will never see again.
We all know this: diamond prices are not high because there are few diamonds. They are high because traders keep them locked up to inflate the prices. A luxury watch is expensive, not because it cannot be made on an assembly line. But because only a few are made by hand for each model.
When access to information is universal and free, you have to manufacture scarcity. When digital is endless and abundant, analog must be the ultimate scarcity.
The bifurcation is already happening. Mass consumer goods are racing toward AI-optimized digital purchase flows. Meanwhile, the brands that built meaning in physical space, through stores worth visiting, events worth attending, and objects worth keeping, are pulling away on brand equity, customer loyalty, and price premium.
Not because they rejected digital. Because they understood that their customer, at the moment of decision, is analog. Their customer is not just making a transaction. It’s creating and living an experience.
Analog market = analog marketing
If the analog layer is where human experience lives, then the marketing discipline that defines this decade is experience design. The craft of building encounters that are worth having, and worth remembering.
Print. Not nostalgia. Scarcity. In a world of frictionless AI-generated content, a beautifully produced physical catalog is remarkable precisely because it required intention, cost, and craft. It sits on a table. It gets kept. In 2026, 79% of Millennials said they looked forward to receiving brand catalogs. 64% of Gen Z used them as room decor. Harvard Business Review data showed print catalogs generating an average of $850 in annual purchases per consumer. Print is not dying. It is becoming premium.
Events and conferences. When digital presence is automated and ambient, showing up is a statement. The conference, the meetup, and the branded gathering are not logistics events. They are the primary arenas where trust is built, and decisions are made. The CMO investing in a room of real people will outcompete the one optimizing a funnel nobody is looking at.