A brand called Bolesa had 700,000 followers on Instagram. One morning the account was gone, and they could not get it back. For most of us that is a horror story. For Kathryn Byberg’s clients, it is a Tuesday.
Kathryn runs Little Leaf, the world’s only specialist PR agency for sexual wellness. On the Exit Ready podcast she described an industry where the normal marketing channels are simply closed, and in doing so she described where the rest of us are heading.
A category where the playbook does not work
Kathryn’s whole world is one most marketers never have to think about. The usual levers are gone.
“Take your marketing playbook and just rip it up, because nothing that works for any other brand is going to work within sexual wellness.”
No paid social. Google Ads that can be shut off without warning. Instagram accounts shadow banned or deleted overnight. Billboards refused. When a client builds their revenue on a channel they do not own, one policy change can take the whole thing away.
“We’ve worked with clients who relied heavily on Google as a high revenue stream, and you lose that channel overnight, and all of a sudden you’ve got big problems.”
You are building on rented land too
It is tempting to file this under “interesting, but not my problem”. That would be a mistake, because the gap between Kathryn’s world and yours is closing fast.
AI summaries now sit at the top of the search results, and they answer the question without sending a click. Platforms change their rules and their reach whenever they like. An algorithm tweak can halve your traffic, and an account suspension can erase an audience you spent years building. Every agency that has parked a client’s growth on one rented channel is exposed to exactly the risk Kathryn has managed for a decade. The difference is she planned for it and most have not.
What she does instead: diversify and earn
Because no single channel is safe, Little Leaf builds across many, and leans on the channels you earn rather than the ones you rent.
“We work with clients to really diversify the channels they’re working on.”
PR is the engine, because earned coverage and genuine stories cannot be switched off by a platform. Guerrilla and grassroots tactics have come back. The principle is the one I learned in the early Kaizen days of flyering and postering: own your message, know exactly who you are talking to, and do not be wholly dependent on a system you do not control. Earned and owned channels are slower to build than a paid campaign, and that is the point. They are also far harder to take away.
The funnel is now a web
The sharpest part of the conversation was about where attention has actually gone. Kathryn put it better than I have heard anyone put it.
“This marketing funnel that used to exist isn’t a funnel anymore, it’s a web.”
People research on Reddit, on Substack, on YouTube, and increasingly inside an LLM that hands them an answer with no link to click. So Little Leaf works to be present and cited everywhere those answers are assembled.
“LLMs are pulling directly from blogs and websites. Clients should have an article saying ‘this is why we’re the best’. Our job is ensuring we increase the share of voice across all of these platforms.”
This is the same shift I am watching across every sector. Ranking on Google matters less each month. Being the source an AI quotes, and showing up in the Reddit threads and the owned content the models read, matters more. The agencies that learn to win share of voice across this web, rather than chasing one ranking, are the ones who will still be found in two years.
What to take from this
You do not need to work in a restricted category to act on this. The risk is already in your clients’ accounts, and in your own.
Audit channel concentration. If a client gets most of their growth from one platform you do not own, that is a single point of failure, and naming it is the first job. Build the earned and owned channels that nobody can switch off: PR, a real content presence, an email list. And start treating LLM citation as seriously as search ranking, because the click is quietly disappearing and the answer is taking its place. Kathryn has thrived for years on rented land by refusing to depend on it. That is fast becoming the only safe way to build.
Go deeper: Hear the full conversation with Kathryn on Exit Ready episode 008, then read how to build an agency sales pipeline and the agency operations stack.