Rajesh Jain

The Invitation

This essay has not described a product available for purchase today. It has described a direction — a vision of what marketing intelligence can become when accountability replaces activity as the organising principle.

The elements are falling into place. Context Graphs are deployable. BrandTwins are constructible at scale. Agents can act autonomously. Alpha pricing is commercially viable. The question is no longer “is this possible?” but “who will build it first, and who will adopt it early enough to capture the compounding advantage?”

The marketing technology category is about to split into two worlds.

The first world is utilities. Platforms priced on inputs. Capability commoditised over time. Feature parity and price pressure. Success depending entirely on perfect execution by the buyer. In this world, vendors compete on price because they cannot compete on outcomes. Margins compress. Differentiation disappears. The category becomes infrastructure — necessary, but undifferentiated.

The second world is outcomes engines. Intelligence priced on verified uplift. Built on proprietary models and compounding learning. Premium positioning justified by accountable delivery. Success depending on results, not activity. In this world, vendors who can guarantee outcomes command premium economics. Those who cannot become utilities.

Meridian is a bet on which world wins.

For CMOs:

Start demanding accountability from your vendors. Ask the uncomfortable question that most vendors hope you will not ask: “Will you take outcome pricing? Will you bet your revenue on our results?”

The vendors who refuse are communicating something. They are signalling their own confidence boundaries. They may have good products. They may have sophisticated features. But they are not willing to stake their economics on whether those products actually deliver what they promise.

The vendors who accept are making a different statement. They are expressing confidence born of capability. They are aligning their success with yours. They are signalling that they have something proprietary — something that justifies the exposure of outcome accountability.

When you find vendors willing to take that bet, you have found vendors worth serious consideration.

For CEOs and CFOs:

Marketing does not have to be a cost centre.

For decades, you have approved marketing budgets with limited visibility into what that spend actually produces. You have seen dashboards full of metrics that do not connect to the P&L. You have wondered whether all those martech subscriptions actually move the needle or merely create activity that looks like progress.

There is a different model. Customer retention is measurable. Profit improvement is attributable. Vendor economics can be aligned with your outcomes.

The question is not “what did we spend?” It is “what did we earn?” And with the right contract structure, that question becomes answerable.

The CFO who asks “what is the ROI of our martech stack?” typically receives vague answers about brand building and customer experience. The CFO who asks “what is the Alpha our retention system generated?” receives a number — verified uplift over control, measured in profit, defensible in any audit.

That is the difference between buying capability and buying outcomes.

For the industry:

The shift that is coming will not be comfortable for everyone.

Vendors whose products do not reliably deliver results will struggle with outcome pricing. They will resist the shift, arguing that attribution is impossible, that too many factors influence retention, that outcome-based models are impractical. These arguments reveal more about the vendor’s confidence than about the model’s feasibility.

Vendors whose products genuinely work will embrace outcome pricing because it differentiates them from competitors who cannot make the same offer. They will welcome the shift because it rewards capability over marketing, results over rhetoric.

The market will sort this out. Buyers who demand accountability will find vendors willing to provide it. Buyers who accept capability-without-accountability will continue to hope for results. Over time, the former will outperform the latter. The evidence will accumulate. The category will split.

The closing thought:

Meridian turns “Never Lose Customers” from a manifesto into a procurement category.

It is the answer to the CMO who is tired of tools that require perfect execution to deliver results. It is the answer to the CFO who is tired of marketing spend that disappears without accountability. It is the answer to the CEO who is tired of asking why customer acquisition costs keep rising while customer retention keeps stagnating.

The future of marketing is not better campaigns. It is not more sophisticated segmentation. It is not AI-generated content at scale.

The future of marketing is outcome accountability — the principle that vendors should share in the results they claim to produce, that intelligence should be measured by what it delivers rather than what it promises, that “Never Lose Customers” should be a contractual commitment rather than a conference keynote.

For those ready to stop buying tools and start buying outcomes, the architecture is emerging. The economics are proven.

Meridian is what that future looks like.

Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice. Never Pay Fixed.

The Choice

Every CEO eventually asks the same question, even if they phrase it differently: “Why do we keep paying to reacquire customers we already had?”

The question usually surfaces after a board meeting where someone noticed that customer acquisition costs keep rising while retention rates stay flat. Or after a quarterly review where the marketing budget consumed its allocation with no visible impact on customer lifetime value. Or after a competitor’s move revealed how many “loyal” customers were actually just waiting for a better offer.

The question is simple. The answer has two parts.

Answer one: because you have been buying tools instead of outcomes.

The tools work. The platforms deliver messages. The journeys execute. The analytics report. But the accountability for whether any of it actually retains customers has remained with your internal team — a team constrained by bandwidth, turnover, campaign-mode operations, and cost-centre economics. The tools gave you capability. Capability is not the same as results.

Answer two: because there has not been an alternative.

The martech category was built to sell capability. No vendor offered outcome guarantees because the business model did not support them. Fixed SaaS fees do not create incentive alignment. Vendors who tried performance pricing could not make the economics work because their systems were not built to deliver reliable outcomes.

That is changing.

The choice is now real. Two paths exist.

The first path: buy platforms, deploy agents, train the team, execute brilliantly, build your own Alpha.

This is the right choice for organisations that want control over their marketing operations. They want internal capability that compounds over time. They want ownership of strategy, execution, and learning. They have the patience to build the expertise and the stability to retain it.

Agentic Marketing gives these organisations leverage. The tools are powerful. The AI amplification is substantial. Success is possible for those who can achieve sustained excellence in execution.

The second path: give a portion of your customer base, measure the delta, pay only on profit improvement, let Meridian and NEO deliver your Alpha.

This is the right choice for organisations that want outcomes without building internal capability. They want to convert marketing from cost centre to profit engine without undertaking multi-year transformation programmes. They want accountability transferred to someone willing to bet their revenue on results.

NeoMarketing gives these organisations certainty. Not hope. Not optimisation. Certainty that if results are not delivered, payment is not required.

Most organisations will use both paths.

Start with platforms and agents to build internal understanding. Learn what works. Develop marketing operations competence. Establish baselines.

Then graduate to NeoMarketing when you hit the ceiling of what internal teams can achieve — or when you simply want guaranteed outcomes rather than optimised effort. Use Meridian for Best customers when N=1 intelligence justifies the investment. Use NEO for Rest and Test customers where scalable recovery is the goal.

The paths are not mutually exclusive. They are complementary. The platform provides foundation. NeoMarketing provides guarantee. Together, they address the full spectrum of capability and accountability.

The unifying truth is that both paths serve the same mission: Never Lose Customers.

Agentic Marketing says: “We will give you the tools to pursue that mission.”

NeoMarketing says: “We will deliver that mission and prove it with measurement.”

The question is not which approach is correct. Both are correct for different situations. The question is: who do you want to be accountable?

If you want accountability to rest with your internal team, Agentic Marketing gives them the best possible tools and AI amplification.

If you want accountability to rest with a vendor who only gets paid on results, NeoMarketing provides that structure — and the intelligence to back it up.

Either way, the $500 billion AdWaste crisis is addressable. Either way, customer retention can become a profit engine rather than a cost line. Either way, the cycle of lose-and-reacquire can be broken.

The only question is who is on the hook for making it happen.

The Agentic Moment

Meridian is not a theoretical possibility for some distant future. It is becoming buildable now because of three forces that have converged simultaneously.

The first force is that agents can act.

For most of AI’s history, the technology was assistive. It could suggest, recommend, draft, and summarise. But action required a human in the loop — someone to approve the recommendation, send the message, make the decision. The human was the rate limiter. The AI was a productivity enhancer.

That boundary has shifted. AI agents can now execute workflows across systems. They can run experiments, adjust parameters, coordinate actions, and make decisions without requiring human approval at every step. The technology has moved from “chat” to “work.”

This matters because retention is not a one-time optimisation problem. It is a daily operating problem. Customers drift continuously. Attention decays continuously. The competitor’s offer arrives continuously. A system that requires human approval for every intervention cannot operate at the speed and scale that continuous drift demands.

Agents make continuous operation possible. They can process signals, update models, select actions, and execute interventions around the clock without human bottlenecks. They can run hundreds of micro-experiments simultaneously, learning from each result and adjusting the next action. They can maintain a living system rather than a series of campaign bursts.

Industry analysts predict that 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents within the next few years. Marketing — with its high volume of repetitive decisions and clear feedback signals — is the ideal proving ground for this shift.

The second force is that attention systems generate better signals.

Traditional marketing systems generate sparse signals. A customer either opens an email or does not. Clicks or does not. Converts or does not. The signal is binary and infrequent. Learning is slow because feedback is limited.

Systems like NeoMails and NeoBoost create frequent, lightweight interactions that produce rich signals. Not just whether the customer opened but how long they engaged. Not just whether they clicked but what they chose among alternatives. Not just whether they converted but what path they took to get there.

This signal density changes what is learnable. With sparse signals, models can detect only gross patterns. With dense signals, models can detect subtle dynamics — the early warnings of drift, the specific triggers that re-engage, the individual preferences that distinguish one customer from another.

More signal improves the Context Graph. Better context improves Meridian’s decisions. Better decisions improve outcomes. Better outcomes generate more engagement. The flywheel turns.

The third force is that Context Graphs can hold state and reason.

The breakthrough is not merely storing more data. It is storing meaning.

Decision traces capture why actions were taken, not just what actions occurred. Precedents accumulate so the system can learn from its own history. Confidence scores quantify uncertainty so the system knows what it knows versus what it guesses. Learning transfers across customers so insights from one relationship inform predictions about similar relationships.

This is what turns marketing from repeatable campaigns into compounding relationships. Without state, every interaction starts fresh. With state, every interaction builds on what came before. Without reason, the system cannot learn from its decisions. With reason, the system becomes wiser over time.

The protocols now exist to make this work at scale. Standards for agent communication, context sharing, and cross-system coordination have matured enough that building Meridian is an engineering challenge rather than a research problem.

Together, these three forces create the agentic moment: the point at which outcome-guaranteed marketing intelligence becomes technically and economically feasible. The components exist. The integration is buildable. The question is no longer whether this is possible but who will build it first.

And there is a compounding advantage for early movers. A well-built Meridian system gets better with every action — within a brand because decision traces reduce repetition and increase learning transfer, and across brands because anonymised patterns reveal behaviour dynamics no single brand can observe alone.

The early adopters will not just have a head start. They will have an expanding lead.

Answering the Objections

Outcome-based marketing systems trigger predictable objections. They should. Healthy scepticism is part of sound executive decision-making. The objections deserve direct answers.

“Attribution will be disputed.”

This is the most common concern and the most easily resolved.

Meridian does not rely on last-touch attribution — the flawed model that credits the final click while ignoring everything that preceded it. Last-touch attribution creates endless disputes because it is fundamentally arbitrary. Why credit the last touch and not the first? Why credit any single touch when the customer journey involved dozens?

Meridian relies on uplift measurement. The methodology is straightforward: create two statistically identical populations. One receives Meridian-driven interventions. One receives business-as-usual treatment. Measure the difference in outcomes — retention, revenue, profit — between the two groups. That difference is the uplift. That uplift is what gets paid.

This is incrementality testing. It is the same methodology pharmaceutical companies use to measure drug efficacy. It does not require attribution modelling. It does not require arguing about which touchpoint deserves credit. It requires only measuring the delta between treatment and control.

The measurement can be rigorous. Random assignment ensures the groups are comparable. Statistical testing ensures the difference is real rather than noise. Holdouts can be maintained over time to verify that uplift persists rather than fading. The methodology is well-established. The disputes dissolve.

“You will need too much data. What about privacy?”

A credible system must be built with governance as a first principle, not an afterthought.

Context Graphs are designed for structured intelligence and restraint. The architecture enforces data minimisation: only the signals necessary for decisions, nothing extraneous. Every action is traceable through the Decision Trace Graph — what data was used, for what purpose, with what outcome. The system can explain why any intervention was made.

“Restraint is intelligence” is a design principle, not a marketing slogan. Meridian knows when not to act. It recognises when another message would erode trust rather than build it. It understands that attention is finite and abuse is cumulative. This restraint is only possible with governance infrastructure that tracks attention budgets and respects boundaries.

The mature intelligence system is not the one that maximises messages. It is the one that maximises relationship value while minimising intrusion.

“Outcome pricing sounds like agency performance fees. We have been burned.”

Many organisations have been burned by performance promises that delivered excuses instead of results. Agencies committed to outcomes and then explained why external factors prevented delivery. The creative was not approved in time. The budget was cut mid-campaign. The market shifted unexpectedly. The competitor launched a promotion.

Meridian is different in kind, not just degree.

It is a productised model, not a services engagement. The intelligence is systematic, operating continuously through autonomous agents rather than depending on which account manager happens to be assigned this quarter. Outcomes are tied to customer profit metrics — retention, repeat purchase, contribution margin — not vanity ROAS that can be gamed through channel shifting or measurement manipulation.

The model improves daily through continuous learning. Agencies improve annually through staff changes and strategy reviews, if they improve at all. The feedback loops are not comparable.

And critically, the accountability is real. If Meridian does not deliver uplift, it does not get paid. The excuses do not matter because the measurement is objective. Either the treatment group outperformed the control group or it did not. The results speak for themselves.

“What if the model fails?”

This objection contains its own answer.

If Meridian fails, the vendor does not get paid. The brand has risked nothing except the time spent on integration and the opportunity cost of the pilot period. The financial exposure sits entirely with the vendor.

This is precisely the point of Alpha pricing. It transfers risk from the brand to the provider. Traditional enterprise software puts the risk on the buyer: pay upfront, hope for results, absorb the loss if results do not materialise. Alpha pricing inverts this: the vendor invests first, delivers results, and gets paid only when value is created.

The willingness to offer Alpha pricing is itself a signal of confidence. Vendors who refuse outcome-based structures are implicitly admitting uncertainty about whether their products actually work. Vendors who accept are making a statement: we believe in this enough to bet on it.

“Why can only you build this? Will everyone else not copy it?”

Anyone can copy a feature. Very few can copy a signal moat.

Meridian’s edge comes from unifying three signal streams that most systems treat separately:

• Engagement signals from owned channels — what customers open, ignore, click, dwell on, abandon, return to. These signals reveal attention patterns and preference dynamics that no other source can provide.
• Channel signals from messaging infrastructure — responses to emails, behaviour on WhatsApp, interactions with push notifications, timing patterns across communication modes. These signals reveal channel preferences and responsiveness that engagement data alone cannot capture.
• Discovery signals from on-site search and browse — queries entered, refinements made, products viewed, paths abandoned, recommendations clicked or ignored. These signals reveal intent and consideration that messaging data alone cannot see.

When these three signal streams feed the same Context Graph, learning compounds across the entire customer experience. The insight from a search query informs the email timing. The email response refines the product recommendations. The recommendation click updates the BrandTwin’s preference model. The cycle continues, each signal enriching the others.

This integration is the moat. Competitors who have only engagement data see part of the picture. Competitors who have only discovery data see a different part. The complete view requires all three — and building that integration from scratch takes years of infrastructure investment and data accumulation.

Every brand that joins the system makes the system smarter. Anonymised patterns across hundreds of brands create consumer intelligence that no single-brand solution can match. The model learns that customers who behave like this tend to drift for these reasons and respond to these interventions — not from one brand’s limited data but from the collective experience of an ecosystem.

This is precisely how adtech built its moat. Google and Meta aggregated signals across millions of advertisers to enable precision targeting that no single brand could achieve alone. The more advertisers participated, the smarter the system became. That network effect is why they dominate acquisition.

Meridian applies the same principle to retention. Every brand on the system makes the system smarter. Anonymised patterns across hundreds of brands create consumer intelligence that no single-brand solution can match.

This is the network effect that becomes defensible. Early adopters benefit from the intelligence that later adopters contribute. The gap compounds over time.

The Alpha Contract

The real innovation in Meridian and NEO is not only the technology. It is the commercial structure.

The fundamental misalignment in marketing technology is that vendors get paid regardless of results. The contract specifies access to capabilities. The invoice arrives whether customers stay or leave. The brand bears the outcome risk. The vendor bears only the operational risk of keeping the platform running.

This structure made sense when software was genuinely a tool — a productivity enhancer whose value depended on how the buyer used it. Word processors do not guarantee good writing. Spreadsheets do not guarantee accurate analysis. The tool provides capability. The user provides skill. Outcomes depend on the combination.

But marketing technology is sold as something more than a tool. It is sold as a system for producing business results. Vendors promise transformation, competitive advantage, customer intimacy, personalisation at scale. The sales pitch is about outcomes. The contract is about inputs. The gap between promise and structure is the space where accountability disappears.

Alpha pricing closes that gap.

The model has three components:

• Beta is the baseline — the revenues and retention the brand would have generated anyway through normal operations. Think of it like market returns in investing. This is the benchmark against which performance is measured.
• Alpha is the incremental uplift above that baseline — the additional retention, revenue, and profit that NeoMarketing delivers beyond what would have happened without it. This is what gets measured. This is what gets paid.
• Carry is the long-term component — participation in sustained improvement over time. Like private equity carry, it rewards durable value creation rather than short-term spikes.

The brand’s fixed cost is zero. All infrastructure, compute, and operational costs are absorbed by the NeoMarketing vendor. The brand pays only a share of the Alpha — the verified uplift above baseline. No uplift, no payment.

The philosophy is simple: we invest first, we deliver results, we get paid only when you earn more than you would have without us. We win only when you win. If there is no Alpha, there is no Carry. The vendor’s economics depend on delivering what was promised.

This structure transforms the conversation.

The traditional martech sales process involves feature comparisons, integration requirements, pricing negotiations, and implementation timelines. The buyer evaluates capability. The seller promises transformation. Everyone hopes for the best.

Alpha pricing changes the questions. The buyer asks: “What uplift are you committing to? How will it be measured? What happens if you miss?” The seller asks: “What does your current retention look like? What is the baseline we are improving against? What access do we need to deliver results?”

The conversation shifts from “what can this do?” to “what will this deliver?” Capability becomes a means rather than an end. Outcomes become the subject of negotiation rather than the object of hope.

The pitch to CEOs and CFOs becomes clean: “Give us ten percent of your customers for ninety days. We will run Meridian and NEO-driven interventions across your owned channels. You pay only on incremental profit uplift versus a matched control group. Stop anytime — but pay through the average purchase cycle so measurement captures delayed conversions.”

This structure does four things immediately:

1. It removes risk. The brand cannot lose money on the pilot. If there is no uplift, there is no payment. The worst case is that the brand learns something about its customer base and loses nothing but time.
2. It signals confidence. Offering Alpha pricing is a statement. It says: we believe in our model enough to bet our revenue on it. Vendors who refuse outcome-based structures are implicitly communicating something about their own confidence in their products.
3. It fits executive mental models. This is not marketing-speak about engagement scores and brand awareness indices. It is profit uplift — measurable, attributable, defensible in a board meeting, explicable to investors.
4. It creates natural expansion. Success with ten percent leads to twenty-five percent, leads to fifty percent, leads to full deployment. The pilot is the proof. The proof is the sale. No one needs to be convinced by presentations when results speak for themselves.

A useful parallel exists in finance. The best quantitative funds did not win by explaining their models. They won by compounding results. Renaissance Technologies delivered 39% annual returns (after fees) for decades without ever publishing their methodology. Investors did not need to understand the model. They needed to measure the returns.

Meridian brings similar discipline to marketing: proprietary intelligence, outcome accountability, measurement over explanation. The model is complex. The contract is simple. Pay for what you get.