Rajesh Jain

Changing Who Listens

CAC is the word every CMO knows, every board asks about, and every CFO scrutinises. It is the most shared, most visible, most emotionally loaded metric in modern marketing. Rising CAC is not a theoretical problem; it is a lived one — the question that hangs over every quarterly review.

That is why ZERO the CAC changes everything.

This framing does not ask marketers to learn a new concept. It uses their language to reframe their problem. It does not accuse them of waste. It redraws a boundary.

“ZERO the CAC” is not a claim that acquisition disappears. That would be fantasy, and CMOs would dismiss it instantly. It is a claim that paid CAC should not exist on owned channels. Any conversion from customers you already reach — customers in your inbox, in your database, in your known identity graph — should cost nothing. If you’re paying Google to reach someone already in your database, something is structurally broken.

This is where the reframing becomes powerful. Instead of asking acquisition teams to care about retention, it shows them how retention eliminates their biggest cost. Instead of asking CFOs to fund “engagement,” it shows them how to zero out an entire class of spend.

This isn’t aspiration. It’s channel arbitrage.

Channel	CPM	CAC
Adtech Platforms	$20-50	$50-200
NeoMails (own list)	$0	$0
NeoNet (partner brands)	Low	Fraction of adtech

The mechanics fall into place naturally with NEO (New Email Order):

Component	Role	CAC Impact
NeoMails	Owned channel engagement — interactive, habit-forming, transactional	Zero CAC
NeoNet	Cross-brand recovery — deterministic, authenticated, no auctions. Funded by ActionAds: other brands pay to reach your engaged audience.	Low CAC
NeoBoost (powered by APUs)	Attention maintenance — daily micro-habits via Attention Processing Units that prevent the silent drift from engaged to dormant	Zero CAC

The system follows an escalation logic:

1. NeoMails first: Reactivate Rest/Test customers through your owned channel. Zero cost.
2. NeoNet second: Those who don’t respond get reached through partner brands — still far cheaper than auction-based ad platforms.
3. NeoBoost upstream: Protect Best customers so they never drift into Rest/Test in the first place.

Exhaust free before spending cheap. Prevent before you need to recover.

What changes most is who listens. Acquisition teams lean in. Growth leaders engage. CFOs ask follow-up questions. The conversation moves from “Why should we invest in retention?” to “How do we zero out this portion of our CAC?”

Retention doesn’t disappear — it becomes the mechanism, not the pitch.

This is the shift from being a Retention prophet to becoming a Growth economist. From asking for a seat at the table to attacking the largest line item in the budget.

ZAP the REACQ diagnosed the problem. ZERO the CAC reframes the solution. NEO delivers it.

ZERO the CAC. NEO. Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice.

Fighting Invisible Enemies

You cannot fight what dashboards don’t name.

That realisation took time to sink in. Marketers don’t wake up thinking about “reacquisition.” Their platforms don’t show it. Their spreadsheets don’t track it. Their attribution models label every conversion the same way: new. If a customer converts through a paid ad today, the system does not ask whether that customer once opened an email, once installed an app, or once bought six months ago. History is flattened. Memory is erased.

Arguing against this worldview is extraordinarily hard, because it requires arguing against the marketer’s own data. And dashboards always win. Not because they’re right, but because they’re there — glowing on the screen in every weekly review, every board presentation, every budget negotiation.

“AdWaste” and “REACQ” were accurate, but they were revealed truths. They required explanation. They required education. Worse, they required marketers to accept a diagnosis that their own tools did not reflect. That’s a high bar to clear before attention is even earned.

There’s a difference between a revealed truth and a felt pain. A revealed truth is something you prove to people. A felt pain is something they already experience. Revealed truths require teaching. Felt pains require only naming.

Reacquisition is a revealed truth. Rising CAC is a felt pain.

Education-first narratives are seductive, especially for people who like ideas. But they invert the natural order of persuasion. They demand belief before attention. In a world saturated with messages, that order rarely works.

I realised I was asking marketers to accept my diagnosis before I had earned their attention.

There was also a more structural problem. The people who most viscerally understood the reacquisition argument were retention teams — CRM managers, lifecycle marketers, email specialists. They understood because they lived it. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: retention teams don’t control the big budgets. They operate on roughly 10% of marketing spend. The other 90% sits with Acquisition — performance marketers, growth leads, the people who spend real money on Google and Meta every day.

By speaking primarily to retention, I was preaching to the converted. By using language unfamiliar to acquisition leaders, I was never really entering the room where decisions were made.

I was right about the disease. I was wrong about the door.

Naming the Problem

The $500 billion AdWaste crisis is real. Brands are spending vast sums every year not to acquire new customers, but to reacquire customers they already had — customers who once bought, once engaged, once trusted them, and then quietly drifted away. This is not a marginal inefficiency. It is a structural failure in how marketing works.

When I first began writing about this problem, the insight was stark: roughly 70% of what shows up as “acquisition” spend is, in reality, reacquisition. Performance marketing budgets are being spent on customers who already exist in a brand’s database — past buyers, subscribers, app installers, email recipients. Google and Meta are not just helping brands find new customers; they are helping brands win back their own customers at premium prices.

Think about the absurdity. A customer buys from you. You have their email, their purchase history, their preferences. Then you lose their attention through generic messaging and irrelevant campaigns. They don’t unsubscribe. They don’t complain. They just stop opening, stop clicking, stop showing up. Six months later, you’re bidding against competitors in a auction to reach that same person. You’re paying rent to sleep in your own bedroom.

This led to the framing of reacquisition as a hidden tax on growth. If a brand has already paid to acquire a customer once, why should it pay again — and often at a higher price — just to reach the same person? Why should adtech platforms profit from attention decay that martech systems were supposed to prevent?

“ZAP the REACQ” emerged as a rallying cry to name and fight this invisible enemy. It was a way of saying: this is not growth, this is leakage. This is not optimisation, this is waste. If martech did its job — if retention, engagement, and relationship-building actually worked — adtech would not be able to monetise reacquisition at this scale.

Internally, the reacquisition framing resonated. Teams working on CRM, lifecycle marketing, and owned channels immediately recognised the pattern. Retention-focused CMOs nodded. Product teams understood the systemic failure. At conferences, people would approach me afterward and say, “You’ve named something I’ve felt but couldn’t articulate.”

But outside the circle of the converted, something else was happening. The phrase didn’t travel. There was no backlash. No counter-argument. No debate. Just polite disengagement. The idea didn’t spread, not because it was wrong, but because it never quite entered the mental model of the people controlling the largest budgets.

That was the first signal I couldn’t ignore.

The diagnosis was right. The language wasn’t.

Published February 4, 2026

1

The Trinity

Marketing has a problem it doesn’t know how to name.

It isn’t churn. It isn’t rising CAC. It isn’t inefficient spend.

It’s something quieter, more structural — and far more expensive.

Most brands today are paying a hidden tax every quarter. They lose customers silently, then pay again to win them back. The dashboards call it “new acquisition.” The platforms celebrate it as performance. The P&L absorbs it without protest.

This tax has a name.

REACQ: The Hidden Tax

REACQ — pronounced “re-ack” — stands for the Reacquisition Tax.

It is the money brands spend to buy back customers they already acquired, lost quietly, and failed to retain.

REACQ is not churn. Churn is visible — it triggers alerts, reports, action. REACQ happens before churn is ever acknowledged, in the long silent drift from attention to indifference.

Across categories, 60-70% of customers counted as “new” are not new at all. They are returning customers who once bought, once engaged, then slipped away unnoticed. Months later, they reappear through paid ads — retargeted, re-won, re-celebrated.

Globally, this costs brands over $500 billion a year.

Why don’t marketers talk about it? Because REACQ is invisible by design. Platforms don’t report it because they profit from it. Martech doesn’t surface it because it measures campaigns, not continuity. Everyone optimises their piece — and no one owns the whole.

Once you see it, though, you can’t unsee it.

And once you see it, you have a choice.

ZAP: The Refusal

ZAP is not a product. It is not a feature. It is not a platform upgrade.

ZAP is a refusal.

ZAP stands for Zero AdWaste Pledge — not an aspiration, but a line in the sand. A commitment to stop accepting reacquisition as normal. To stop paying twice for the same customer relationship.

ZAP has three meanings, layered deliberately:

• Zero AdWaste — the outcome
• ZAP — the action (eliminate, not optimise)
• ZAP the REACQ — the rallying cry

At its core, ZAP is a moral frame with economic consequences:

Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice.

This is not about doing marketing better. It’s about refusing to participate in a system that profits from customer disappearance.

ZAP defines the what and the why.

Which leaves the hardest question unanswered. How?

NEO: The Operating System

The answer is NEO.

NEO stands for New Email Operating System — not email as a channel, but email as an attention and relationship OS.

The distinction matters.

Traditional martech optimises campaigns. NEO operates relationships.

ESPs send messages. NEO manages attention over time.

Martech asks: Did this campaign perform? NEO asks: Is this customer still paying attention?

NEO is built around an Attention Stack designed to eliminate REACQ at the root:

• NeoBoost — keeps attention alive through cadence, presence, and relevance (works with any ESP)
• NeoMails — earns daily engagement for Rest and Test customers, before drift becomes loss
• NeoNet — enables recovery without rent, through cooperative brand-to-brand reach
• APUs (Attention Processing Units) — make attention measurable and monetised via Magnets, Mu, ActionAds, and Ledger

Together, they replace rented reach with earned presence.

**

REACQ is the enemy. ZAP is the refusal. NEO is the operating system that makes refusal possible.

Three words. One architecture. Zero AdWaste.

2

The Playbook

ZAP is not a switch you flip.

It is a tax you stop paying — step by step.

This is not a transformation programme. It is a progressive replacement. The path follows my 4B framework: Basics, BAU Better, Boosters, Breakthrough.

Each B unlocks the next. Each maps to a segment, a product, and a goal. Together, they eliminate REACQ structurally.

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Basics — Build the Identity & Attention Layer

Everything starts with one asset: the email address.

If you don’t have a customer’s email, you don’t own the relationship. You rent it — from Google, from Meta, from whoever intercepts them first.

Basics means capturing email — and mobile for redundancy — from every customer, at every touchpoint. Transaction. Browse. App install. Store visit. No email, no owned channel. No owned channel, no escape from REACQ.

Then establish BRTN segmentation — the lens that makes the rest of the playbook work.

BRTN segments customers by engagement:

Segment	Definition	Size	Challenge
Best	Engaged in past 30 days	~20%	Keep them engaged
Rest	Engaged 30-90 days ago	~30-40%	Stop the drift
Test	No engagement for 90+ days	~30-40%	Reclaim before they’re gone forever
Next	Genuine new acquisitions	Variable	Convert to Best

Most brands only serve Best and Next. They celebrate acquisition and reward loyalty. The middle — Rest and Test — is ignored. That’s where 60-70% of customers sit. That’s where the REACQ tax lives.

Traditional segmentation asks: How valuable is this customer? BRTN asks: Is this customer still paying attention?

The shift matters. Value-based segmentation optimises extraction. Engagement-based segmentation enables intervention. You can’t stop drift if you’re not watching for it.

Basics is not just about knowing who the customer is. It’s about being able to see when attention begins to fade — and having the infrastructure to act before silence becomes departure.

Without Basics, the other Bs don’t work.

Goal: Foundation.

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BAU Better — Retain the Best

Your Best customers — the top 20% — are already engaged. The job isn’t to acquire them. It’s to keep them.

This is where NeoBoost works.

Every brand sends transactional emails — order confirmations, shipping updates, account notifications, password resets. These are your highest-open-rate emails. And most brands waste them on static receipts: confirming a transaction but building nothing beyond compliance.

NeoBoost embeds APUs into these emails, turning every transactional touchpoint into a relationship moment.

It works with any ESP. No migration. No platform fee. Just upgraded attention infrastructure on emails you’re already sending.

Segment: Best.
Goal: Retention.

**

Boosters — Recover the Rest

Rest and Test customers have drifted. They haven’t churned formally — they’ve just stopped paying attention. Traditional win-back campaigns shout at them with discounts. It rarely works.

This is where NeoMails come in.

NeoMails are not campaigns you run. They are a stream you maintain — lightweight, interactive, habit-forming. Sixty seconds of value. Fun, Useful, or Rewarding. Not promotional blasts. Presence.

NeoMails target the Rest and Test — the 60-70% of customers between engaged and lost. They rebuild relationships through a regular rhythm of engagement. Their goal is to lower the cost of recovery.

Segment: Rest and Test.
Goal: Reactivation.

**

Breakthrough — Reclaim the Lost

Some customers won’t respond to owned channels. They’ve tuned out completely. Traditionally, this is where brands surrender them to Google and Meta — paying full price to reacquire someone they already owned.

This is where NeoNet works.

NeoNet is a cooperative identity network. Instead of bidding on anonymous impressions, brands reach lapsed customers through other brands’ emails — authenticated, consensual, at a fraction of adtech cost.

Your lapsed customer is another brand’s engaged subscriber. NeoNet connects these dots without platform intermediaries. Recovery without rent.

When owned channels fail, NeoNet is the last line of defence before paid reacquisition. It keeps recovery in the ecosystem, not the platforms.

Segment: Test.
Goal: Recovery without REACQ.

**

The Progression

B	Action	Segment	Goal
Basics	Identity + Attention	All	Foundation
BAU Better	NeoBoost	Best	Retention
Boosters	NeoMails	Rest/Test	Reactivation
Breakthrough	NeoNet	Lapsed	Recovery without REACQ

Each B compounds the next. By Breakthrough, you’re no longer optimising a broken system. You’ve replaced it.

The revolving door closes. The REACQ tax drops. Marketing shifts from cost centre to profit engine. Not because marketing spent more — but because it stopped paying the same bill twice.

3

The Movement

Great products don’t change industries. Movements do.

Adtech didn’t win because it was virtuous. It won because it aligned incentives at scale — making growth easy and waste invisible. It taught brands how to buy demand efficiently, while quietly normalising the cost of losing it.

ZAP is the counter-movement.

Every mature industry eventually turns inward. First comes expansion. Then optimisation. Then the realisation that the biggest gains no longer come from doing more — but from stopping what should never have been normalised in the first place. ZAP is marketing’s inward turn. Not anti-growth, but anti-leakage.

Why Movements Beat Features

Category creators don’t sell features. They sell enemies.

Salesforce didn’t sell CRM — it declared “No Software.” HubSpot didn’t sell tools — it named Outbound as the villain and created Inbound. ZAP doesn’t sell email — it sells the end of REACQ.

NeoMarketing doesn’t win through ideology. It wins through economic alignment. When brands stop paying twice, profits rise. When attention is earned rather than rented, growth becomes durable. When continuity replaces campaigns as the organising principle, marketing stops leaking value.

The enemy is precise.

The Reacquisition Tax is measurable — every brand can calculate its number. It is undeniable — the maths doesn’t lie. And it is un-co-optable — platforms and legacy martech cannot lead this movement because their business models depend on REACQ continuing.

This is why ZAP cannot be a feature, a tactic, or a vendor claim. It has to be a movement.

The ZAP Campaign

For ZAP to scale, it must be bigger than any one company — including Netcore.

The mechanics are simple, deliberate, and cumulative:

• The REACQ Calculator: Every brand calculates its number. This is the moment of seeing — the realisation that 60–70% of “growth” is a revolving door.
• The Zero AdWaste Pledge: CMOs commit publicly: “I will never lose customers. I will never pay twice.”
• The Scoreboard: Aggregate REACQ savings tracked over time — anonymised and indexed at first, with public recognition as legitimacy builds.
• ZAP Certification: Brands that reduce reacquisition below 30% earn the badge — not for effort, but for outcome.

Netcore’s role is not to own the movement, but to enable it — providing the operating system that makes the pledge achievable in practice, not just in principle.

The Profit Unlock

This is not a marketing transformation. It is a P&L transformation.

If even 10% of global AdWaste is recovered, $50 billion flows back to brand margins. CFOs stop questioning marketing spend and start funding it. The Rule of 40 stops being a stretch goal and becomes a by-product of stopping the REACQ tax.

In a post-cookie world, owned identity beats rented reach. Brands that ZAP early gain an advantage others cannot buy their way into — because it is built on relationships, not auctions.

Adtech taught brands how to buy customers. ZAP teaches them how to keep them.

Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice.

That is not a slogan. It is the refusal that changes everything.

Published February 3, 2026

1

Why AdWaste Is Structural, Not Accidental

I have discussed NeoMarketing in numerous essays in recent times. Each essay builds on earlier ones and incrementally improves the framework.

Maya’s Dashboard

Maya is the CMO of a mid-sized D2C brand. Her dashboard looks busy — and on the surface, healthy. Campaigns are launching on schedule. The CDP is stitched together. Journeys are flowing. AI is optimising subject lines, send times, and offers in real time.

Yet three numbers refuse to cooperate.

Customer acquisition cost is up 40% over two years. Reacquisition now accounts for 65% of performance spend. Retention is flat, despite more than $2 million invested in martech.

Maya has done everything the playbooks prescribe. She has modern tools, a capable team, and more data than ever before. But customers keep fading, budgets keep rising, and contribution margins keep shrinking.

She’s not alone. Across industries, CMOs face the same pattern. More sophistication, same decay. More spend, same leakage. More tools, same outcome.

This isn’t a failure of effort. Or intelligence. Or tooling.

Maya doesn’t have an execution problem. She has an architecture problem.

**

The AdWaste Loop

The problem shows up as a loop most marketers recognise instinctively, even if they’ve never named it:

Acquire → Ignore → Drift → Reacquire → Repeat.

A customer is acquired at high cost. They engage briefly. Then nothing sustains the relationship. They drift quietly out of view. Months later, the brand pays Google or Meta to “acquire” them again — often without realising they already had them.

This is not growth. It is buying back your own customers at auction.

Across industries, 60–70% of so-called acquisition spend is actually reacquisition. That money doesn’t build new relationships; it compensates for ones that were allowed to decay.

That is AdWaste — and it behaves less like inefficiency and more like a recurring tax. A revenue tax paid to Google, Meta, and marketplaces — funded by marketing’s failure to keep customers in the first place.

And the tax keeps rising. Because the underlying architecture guarantees decay.

**

The Three Structural Failures

AdWaste persists not because marketers are careless, but because marketing systems were built on assumptions that no longer hold. Three structural failures sit beneath the loop.

Failure	What Broke	Symptom
Intelligence Gap	Humans can’t do N=1	Segments decay, Best customers fade undetected
Incentive Gap	Vendors paid for activity	No accountability for retention outcomes
Attention Gap	Push without memory	Inbox forgets, reacquisition becomes inevitable

The Intelligence Gap. Humans cannot manage continuous N=1 relationships at scale. Segments decay. Campaigns lag reality. Best customers fade because no system is watching them closely enough, often enough.

The Incentive Gap. Most vendors are paid for activity, not outcomes. Emails sent, messages delivered, journeys launched — revenue accrues regardless of whether customers stay or leave. Retention is optional; volume is not.

The Attention Gap. Marketing remains push-driven in a world that rewards pull. Channels forget. Engagement doesn’t compound. Customers fade silently until they reappear — expensively — in an ad auction.

These failures reinforce one another. Together, they make AdWaste inevitable, regardless of how advanced the tooling becomes.

**

Why Martech Can’t Fix This

The instinct is to solve these problems with better martech. Better AI. Better personalisation. Better targeting.

But martech optimises inside the broken structure. It does not replace it.

Backend memory is not experiential memory. Campaigns are not continuity. Channels are not relationships.

Martech didn’t fail at retention. It was never designed for it.

Fixing AdWaste does not require better marketing. It requires a new operating system.

2

Three A’s as the New Operating System

If AdWaste is structural, then the solution must be architectural.

NeoMarketing is not an upgrade to martech. It is a replacement for the assumptions martech was built on — a system designed so AdWaste becomes structurally impossible.

**

The Framework

AGENTIC → Never Lose Customers
ALPHA → Never Pay Fixed
ATTENTION → Never Pay Twice

Each pillar eliminates one structural failure. Together, they replace acquisition-first marketing with continuity-first growth.

**

AGENTIC — Never Lose Customers

Structural failure solved: the Intelligence Gap.

The maths of modern marketing is unforgiving. Ten thousand customers, multiple channels, daily decisions, real-time context — no human team can continuously optimise at N=1. Segmentation is a compromise, not a solution.

NeoMarketing replaces campaign-centric execution with Agentic systems.

M-Agents are autonomous AI agents for marketing ops that monitor intent, detect early disengagement, and orchestrate personalised actions continuously — not in batches, not in campaigns, but as a living system.

BrandTwins, created via the TwinFactory, act as persistent customer-side advocates. They learn preferences, protect attention, and ensure relevance before customers drift.

The result is not better campaigns. It is the end of campaigns as the primary unit of marketing.

Best customers stay Best. Fade is detected before it becomes churn.

Agentic doesn’t automate campaigns. It eliminates the need for them.

**

ALPHA — Never Pay Fixed

Structural failure solved: the Incentive Gap.

Traditional martech pricing is input-based. Send more, pay more. Use more features, pay more. Success or failure is irrelevant to the vendor’s revenue.

NeoMarketing introduces Alpha economics.

Pricing shifts to an outcome-based model:

• Beta: a modest fixed baseline
• Alpha: performance-linked upside
• Carry: long-term profit participation

This is paired with Progency — an operating model that combines product, agents, and agency-like strategic services (via Martech Growth Engineers), paid for results rather than effort.

When vendors are paid for retention and profit, behaviour changes. Accountability becomes unavoidable.

Alpha doesn’t just change pricing. It changes who is responsible for results.

**

ATTENTION — Never Pay Twice

Structural failure solved: the Attention Gap.

Email and owned channels lost their magnet. Each interaction resets. Engagement never compounds. Customers fade quietly — and then get reacquired at full price.

NeoMarketing fixes this at the channel level.

At its core is the Attention Processing Unit (APU) — the primitive that gives the inbox memory.

• Mu in the subject line signals accumulated value
• Magnets create repeatable engagement
• ActionAds monetise attention without disruption
• Mu Ledger makes progress visible and redeemable

APU is deployed in two ways:

• NeoBoost, embedded into existing emails on any ESP, prevents fade among Best customers
• NeoMails, APU-native daily emails, recover Rest/Test customers

NeoNet is the ad network that enables cooperative, deterministic recovery without auction taxes.

The outcome is owned attention that compounds. Reacquisition becomes unnecessary.

Attention doesn’t fix individual emails. It fixes the channel.

**

The Flywheel

These pillars are not independent.

Agentic prevents loss. Attention compounds engagement. Alpha enforces discipline.

Remove any one, and AdWaste returns.

Together, they form a closed system where customers are acquired once, retained continuously, and monetised without leakage.

This is not better martech. This is what replaces it.

3

Platform, Not Products

NeoMarketing is not a product bundle. It is a platform built on primitives — and primitives compound.

**

Products, Primitives, Infrastructure

Layer	Examples	Role
Products	NeoBoost, NeoMails, Progency	Entry points
Primitives	APU, BrandTwins, Alpha	Structural logic
Infrastructure	M-Agents, NeoNet, Mu Ledger	Invisible power

Products can be copied. Primitives cannot be shortcut. Infrastructure creates moats.

This is why adding “AI personalisation” or “better journeys” does not replicate NeoMarketing. The value is not in features; it is in how the system is wired.

The question is not “which product should I buy?” It is “which layer do I need to build on?”

**

New Metrics for a New System

A new architecture demands new measures.

Open rates measure moments. CAC measures spending. Campaign ROAS measures tactics.

NeoMarketing tracks continuity and economics:

Old Metric	Measures	NeoMarketing Metric	Measures
Open Rate	Moments	Attention Retention Rate	Engagement that compounds
CAC	Spending	Reacquisition Ratio	Waste made visible
Campaign ROAS	Tactics	N=1 Live Ledger	Relationship profitability

ARR doesn’t create memory. Memory creates ARR.

**

What Zero AdWaste Actually Means

Zero AdWaste is not lower CAC or better ROAS.

It is:

• Customers acquired once, retained continuously
• Attention earned, not rented
• Owned channels that compound
• Marketing as a profit engine, not a cost centre

Zero AdWaste is not a metric. It is an architectural state.

**

Maya’s New Dashboard

Six months later, Maya’s dashboard tells a different story.

Reacquisition spend is down 35%. ARR is measured — and rising. Customer P&L is visible for the first time. Marketing contribution margin is positive.

She didn’t work harder. She didn’t optimise faster.

She changed the architecture.

Maya stopped fighting AdWaste. She made it structurally impossible.

**

Summary

The next decade of marketing will not be about better ads.

It will be about not needing them.

Traditional Martech: Lose customers. Pay twice. Repeat.

NeoMarketing: Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Fixed. Never Pay Twice.

**

NeoMarketing — The Zero AdWaste Platform

AGENTIC → Never Lose Customers
ALPHA → Never Pay Fixed
ATTENTION → Never Pay Twice

Pay Once. Profit Forever.

4

A Transformation and A Startup

Who builds NeoMarketing? If it is the answer to AdWaste, and if it cannot be replicated by adding features, then how does the industry actually get there?

The answer is uncomfortable but unavoidable: NeoMarketing requires two parallel efforts, not one. A transformation and a startup. Moving at different speeds, with different economics, toward the same destination.

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Why Incremental Change Fails

When NeoMarketing is first described, a predictable objection arises: Can’t existing martech platforms just add these capabilities?

The answer is no — not because martech companies lack talent or technology, but because NeoMarketing breaks too many foundational assumptions to be layered on top.

You cannot simply “add” Agentic systems to an organisation designed around campaigns and quarterly planning. You cannot “pilot” outcome-based pricing inside a revenue model built on fixed SaaS fees and volume incentives. And you cannot “experiment” with inbox-level attention inside roadmap cycles optimised for enterprise feature delivery.

The Three A’s — Agentic, Alpha, Attention — are not features. They are architectural shifts. Each one changes who does the work, who bears the risk, and who is accountable for outcomes.

NeoMarketing cannot be built by doing martech better. It requires doing something different.

**

Martech 2.0 — The Transformation Engine

This does not mean traditional martech companies are obsolete. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to build part of the NeoMarketing OS.

They already have critical assets: customer relationships, data infrastructure, AI foundations, delivery expertise, and trust earned over years. But these assets must be rewired around retention and outcomes — not activity.

This is the transition from Martech 1.0 to Martech 2.0.

Martech 1.0	Martech 2.0
Campaign-centric	Customer-centric
N=Many Segments	N=Few and N=1 via Agents
Fixed SaaS fees	Alpha-based economics
Tools vendor	Growth partner

The shift is not cosmetic.

In Martech 2.0, AI is no longer used to optimise campaigns, but to power M-Agents and BrandTwins that continuously sense intent, detect early fade, and act on behalf of both brand and customer.

Just as importantly, Martech 2.0 abandons the safety of fixed pricing. Alpha economics demand a cultural shift — from selling software to sharing accountability. Revenue becomes tied to retention, growth, and profit — not emails sent or journeys launched.

This is where the Progency model emerges: product, agents, and strategic services combined — paid for results, not effort.

This is hard. It requires cultural change, not just technical change. But it is possible — for companies willing to transform rather than merely upgrade.

Martech 2.0 doesn’t sell tools. It shares responsibility.

**

Neo — Why Attention Must Be Built as a Startup

If Agentic and Alpha can be built through transformation, Attention cannot.

Attention is fundamentally different. It cannot be “evolved into.” It must be born new.

The Attention stack operates under a different physics:

• It depends on network effects — Mu, ActionAds, and cooperative inventory grow in value only as participation increases.
• It involves three actors simultaneously: consumers, brands, and advertisers.
• It runs on habit formation, not procurement cycles.
• It must be ESP-agnostic, working across existing platforms rather than reinforcing one. That positioning is impossible for a traditional martech company protecting its core business.
• And it demands speed, experimentation, and tolerance for failure that transformation-led organisations struggle to sustain.

The Attention Processing Unit (APU) is a primitive that does not exist in today’s martech stack. NeoBoost and NeoMails are carriers for that primitive. NeoNet is not an adtech clone, but a cooperative alternative to auctions — deterministic, identity-based, and aligned with retention.

This is not a roadmap extension. It is a platform creation problem.

This is why Attention must be built as a separate entity. New team. New economics. New ambition. Startup energy applied to a problem that incumbents cannot solve from within.

Attention cannot be retrofitted into martech. It must be built as a platform — with startup energy and network economics.

**

One Vision, Two Engines

Put together, the picture becomes clear.

Engine	Builds	Solves
Martech 2.0	Agentic + Alpha	Intelligence + Incentives
Neo	Attention	Memory + Magnetism

Neither engine works alone.

Agentic without Attention still leaks customers into stateless channels. Attention without Agentic lacks the intelligence to prevent fade. Alpha without both collapses back into fixed-fee SaaS.

Together, they form a closed system. One transforms what must be trusted. The other invents what must scale. They move at different speeds, but they are architecturally integrated.

NeoMarketing is not one company’s product. It is an operating system built by two engines moving at different speeds.

**

This is not one vendor’s roadmap. It is a category reset.

The martech industry does not need more tools, more dashboards, or more AI features layered onto old assumptions. It needs a new architecture — and the courage to build it in two ways at once.

Transform what must be trusted. Start fresh where new models and networks are required.

That is how NeoMarketing moves from framework to infrastructure.

5

Graphical View

Here is a ChatGPT graphic which captures the NeoMarketing vision.

And this is Claude’s take.