The Profit You Already Own (2e) (Part 3)

Attention is the lead indicator — and the grid that shows it

Every transaction is downstream of attention. Nobody buys from a brand they have stopped noticing. That makes attention the lead indicator and revenue the lagging one, and the gap between them is exactly where brands lose customers without realising it. By the time a sales report dips, the attention left months earlier. The dashboard simply had no column for it.

Attention is not abstract, either. It is a set of things you already log: a WhatsApp message opened, an email clicked, a push notification acted on, a site visited, an app opened, a store walked into. Every one of those is a signal you own, sitting in a table somewhere, unused as a forward-looking measure. Track it and you can act before the loss instead of after it — re-engage a fading customer while there is still a relationship to save, rather than paying to reacquire them once they are gone.

Which leads to the map. RFM ranks customers by what they have already done. The Transaction–Attention Table adds the axis that predicts what they will do next. The rows are lifetime transactions since the first order; the columns are attention right now, split at thirty and ninety days. Ninety days of silence means the relationship is broken, whatever the purchase history says — and that holds even in a long-cadence category like insurance or furniture, because the cadence governs when they buy, not whether they are still listening.

The nine cells. Percentages are illustrative of a typical consumer base, not a benchmark — your own audit finds your real distribution.

A transaction here is whatever you sell: an order, a recharge, a deposit, a policy renewal, a subscription month. The grid is category-agnostic by construction, which is why it travels from D2C to banking to telco without translation.

The three columns hand you three jobs, and this is the part worth committing to memory. Strong attention is to be grown. Weakening attention is to be protected before it slips. Lost attention has to be recovered. Grow, Protect, Recover — and most of any brand’s base sits in the weaker rows and the righter columns, drifting in a direction RFM is blind to.

Look at what the illustrative distribution does to your intuitions. Roughly fourteen per cent of buyers sit in B — best and engaged — and they carry something like thirty-eight per cent of trailing revenue. Meanwhile thirty-nine per cent of buyers sit in R2: bought once, lapsed, gone quiet. They carry fourteen per cent of revenue and almost all of the unrealised value. Nearly two in five of your customers are in a cell nobody in your organisation has a plan for.

The rows hide the single most important number in consumer marketing. For most brands, sixty to sixty-five per cent of customers buy once and never return. The second transaction roughly triples lifetime value, and each purchase after it makes the next more likely. One purchase is a trial; the second is a customer. In banking it is the second product; in telco, the second recharge. Almost everything worth doing is in service of getting from one to two — and then never letting two go dark.

Which reframes the customer journey. It is not one acquisition funnel. It is a sequence — Unknown to Known to First to Second to Repeat — running against a second force that needs no budget and no campaign to operate.

The path you drive, and the path that happens anyway.

Attention decay is the default state of every commercial relationship. Nobody has to do anything for it to happen; it happens while you are busy running the calendar. Marketing’s job, stated as plainly as it can be, is to move customers along the top path faster than entropy pulls them along the bottom one. The TAT is simply a way of seeing both movements at the same time, which no list and no RFM score can do.

One purchase is a trial. The second is a customer — and it roughly triples their value.

Thinks 2067

FT: “AI groups are racing to make conversations with chatbots feel more natural, betting that talking will overtake typing as the dominant way people interact with AI agents despite the social awkwardness of speaking to machines. OpenAI and Google have recently updated their voice offerings to make AI sound less like a robot reading from a screen and more like a colleague who understands instructions and context. Their latest products come amid exploding demand from consumers and businesses and represent a significant break from earlier voice assistants, which converted speech into text, generated a text response and then read it back. Newer models can process and produce speech directly, helping to reduce delays, awkward tone and missed context that made earlier products feel mechanical.”

Reuters: “As shoppers increasingly turn to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for product ​recommendations, retailers are racing to appear in chatbot results while resisting efforts to cede customer data that underpin online sales. Growing online traffic ‌from AI platforms has pushed retailers including Walmart, Ulta Beauty and Wayfair to update their websites so their products rank highly in chatbot searches. Yet many want purchases to remain on their own websites, where they can collect data on browsing habits, basket sizes and past purchases that help drive future sales and customer loyalty.”

Mahesh Vyas: “India’s rapid growth does not produce adequate job…India has failed to capitalise on the demographic dividend available to it. It has failed to ensure good-quality jobs for young graduates.” More: “CMIE data shows that while India’s overall unemployment rate was 6.9 per cent in the last fiscal year, the unemployment rate for graduates was 14.5 per cent, while for those aged 20-24, it was 36 per cent.”

WSJ: “Sodium-ion batteries have almost none of the problems that lithium-ion ones do, and could be cheap enough to make fossil-fuel dependence a thing of the past.”

The Profit You Already Own (2e) (Part 2)

The most expensive line in marketing is still the one nobody reports

Your marketing dashboard reports opens, clicks, revenue and return on ad spend. Every one of those measures activity — how busy the engine was. None of them reports the thing quietly thinning your margin: how much of your growth you are paying for twice. A performance dashboard is built to show motion, not waste, which is why the most expensive problem a brand has is the one its own reporting is structurally unable to surface.

It helps to restate the job. A marketing team has one real task — to produce the next profitable transaction — and there are only two ways to add profit to it. Win that transaction in less time, by moving customers up the ladder on a channel you own. Or pay less tax to make it happen, by not renting back customers you already have. Profit is margin minus marketing cost; push the margin up and push the cost down, and everything else is detail.

The largest avoidable cost on most brands’ marketing line is the same everywhere: paying Google and Meta to re-buy customers already sitting in the database. That is AdWaste — and it is invisible precisely because the dashboard counts the re-purchase as a win rather than as a customer you owned, lost, and bought back at full price.

Consider what else is available to you. Cost of goods barely moves. People cost barely moves. Stores, warehouses, logistics — all of them have been squeezed for a decade by people who are very good at squeezing them. Marketing is the last line with real slack in it, and inside marketing the reacquisition tax is the largest single pocket of that slack. It is also the only line growing without anyone deciding it should: the adtech bill inflates twenty to twenty-five per cent a year on its own, through auction pressure alone, whether or not you buy a single additional customer.

So the diagnosis has not changed since June, and it did not need to. What was missing was everything downstream of it — why a problem this expensive and this well understood has gone unfixed for a decade, and what specifically has changed that makes fixing it possible now. That is what follows.

Profit = margin − marketing cost. Push the margin up, push the cost down. Everything else is detail.

Thinks 2066

Carmine: “Find something others are not looking at, then build a structure that lets you be wrong about it for three years without getting taken off the board.”

Peggy Noonan: “As religion recedes, politics takes its place. As confidence fades, political movements grow radical.”

NYTimes: “Unlike executive assistants, the chief of staff is often a senior level role, according to data from Indeed, because they serve as a second brain for the busy boss. An executive assistant “figures out what time something goes on the calendar, but a chief of staff figures out whether it should go on the calendar at all,” said Clara Ma.”

WSJ: “For the last four years, Jan Laenen, a senior director of engineering at Kellanova, has had a lofty ambition: to ensure that every crisp, salty chip coming off the production line is, in essence, the perfect Pringle…In that time, Laenen’s team has been working with Siemens to build a real-time “digital twin” of the Pringle dough as it moves through the production line of the company’s factory in Poland. New sensors and live machine data were integrated to create live digital versions of the dough, capturing minute variances in raw materials—like the particle size of the flour. That data now feeds into an AI model that can pre-emptively suggest how to tweak the machines to account for those variances, ensuring every chip is consistent, and flawless.”

[Via Tyler Cowen]: “As weapon systems increase in effectiveness, they will generally target one another rather than humans. Lower loss of life will ease conflict entry and hinder exit. Warfare will veer further from industrial competition into techno-industrial; the current appearance of parity between low tech and advanced actors reflects near zero deployment of advanced systems. As these deploy, their martial advantages will present clearly. The need for advanced ecosystems will lead to blocs able to combine human capital, techno-industrial capacity, and inputs. Logistics may be contested at elevated levels, changing the incentives around geographic size and increasing the value of inputs. Blocs may well engage in near constant warfare of various intensity levels. Bloc composition will be necessity driven, perhaps with increased fluidity.”

The Profit You Already Own (2e) (Part 1)

Introduction

Marketing’s most expensive problem is still the one your dashboard cannot show you: how much you pay to re-buy the customers you already have. The first edition argued the economics. This second edition (2e) adds the mechanism — the arithmetic that kept it undone, the agents that lift it, and the one asset that compounds only on ground you own. It is based on this NeoMarketing presentation.

Two months ago I wrote an essay called “The Profit You Already Own”. Its argument was simple: the biggest untapped pool of profit for most consumer businesses is not another acquisition campaign. It is the money leaking out of customers the company has already paid, once, to acquire.

Those customers are everywhere in every database I have seen. They bought once and never came back. They were good customers who quietly drifted. They abandoned a renewal, a recharge, an application or a cart. Months later some of them return through Google, Meta, a marketplace or an aggregator — and the business celebrates the transaction, having now paid to acquire the same person twice. I called that AdWaste.

The first edition laid out the economics, a map called the Transaction–Attention Table, six customer plays, a recovery model, and a way to prove any of it with holdouts. That diagnosis still stands. Nothing in the last two months has weakened it.

But there were two questions it did not answer well enough, and they are the two a CMO asks within about thirty seconds of hearing the argument.

  • If all of these plays are so obvious, why are marketing teams not already running them?
  • Why does it matter whether a customer comes back through a channel the brand owns or one it rents, beyond the immediate cost?

Over the past two months my answers to both have become much clearer, and neither turned out to need another framework. What was missing was the mechanism.

The work was never too difficult. There was simply too much of it for humans to do. Artificial intelligence changes that arithmetic — but agents by themselves are not an advantage, because everyone will have them. The advantage is the context those agents operate on: the accumulated memory of each customer and of every decision made around them. And that context compounds fastest on surfaces the brand controls. Which leads back to a channel most marketers have spent a decade quietly underestimating.

So this edition is about something larger than recovery. It is about how agents, accountability and owned attention together turn marketing from a machine for spending money into a machine for compounding profit.

Thinks 2065

The Verge: “In decades past, humans have used charisma destructively for control an profit, forming cults that turn abusive and financially exploitative. Now, AI systems could be used to do the same thing at a larger and more personalized scale. “It’s a cult-making machine, even if the cult is just you and it,” Stein said.”

FT: “Scientists in the US have for the first time used artificial intelligence to create viruses unknown in nature, a milestone in synthetic biology that promises advances in healthcare but also raises important biosafety and biosecurity concerns. Stanford University researchers developed a generative AI programme called Evo 2 that writes new genomes — the genetic instructions for life encoded in DNA. They used it to design and make 16 synthetic phages, small viruses that infect bacteria. Phages are sometimes used instead of antibiotic drugs to kill bacteria causing disease.”

WSJ: “Although GPS satellites are U.S.-owned military hardware, the reference frame relies on an international patchwork of aging radio-telescopes staring at quasars, laser-ranging stations and physical ground markers anchored to shifting tectonic plates. If that network were designated critical infrastructure, it would mean funding and protecting those ground nodes and data pipelines—many of which survive on academic grants. “When” and “where” weren’t given to us by nature. To keep from getting lost, humans must engineer and maintain both frames of reference.”

Arjun Vaidya: “How many Indian platforms are sitting on a customer relationship they can monetise another way? Everyone is chasing new users. The bigger unlock might be the second business you already have permission to sell.”

Thinks 2064

World Bank’s 2026 Report on AI. “Developing countries do not need to build trillion-dollar, all-purpose models to benefit from AI. But importing AI tools is also not enough. Countries must adapt AI to local languages, institutions, data, and development needs; ensure that national systems can work seamlessly with multiple platforms and providers; and steadily build the skills and infrastructure needed to do more. Low-cost tools—“small AI”—can put scarce expertise within reach of millions, through text messages, voice calls, basic phones, and other technologies that work even where electricity, computing power, and internet access are limited. The gains are already visible. AI is helping to accelerate medical screening, assisting farmers with more accurate weather forecasts, and aiding teachers in creating better lessons for students.”

Tyler Cowen: “In the late 19th century, various railroads went bankrupt—but that didn’t stop rail from knitting together much of the world. In the early part of the 20th century, there were over 100 auto companies in the U.S. By the end of the 1930s, Ford, General Motors (GM), and Chrysler controlled 80 percent of the market. Bankruptcy, it turns out, doesn’t stop progress. A similar logic holds for all the companies that built the AI infrastructure, whether we are talking about data centers, cloud computing, chips, energy, or other inputs into production. There is plenty of capital to step in and support any part of the AI supply chain that might be experiencing economic trouble.” [via Arnold Kling]

Semi Analysis: “A day in AI now feels like a year in any other industry. Model releases, software breakthroughs, and hardware improvements are compressing multi-year cycles for any other industry into weeks. Over just the past few months, agentic AI has crossed a real inflection point, driving a step-change in the value of tokens while software and hardware improvements have sharply reduced the cost of generating them.”

Janan Ganesh: “We don’t in fact live in interesting times. Only historical ignorance gulls us into mistaking this for an era of unusual chaos. The inflation rate in 2022 was about half what it was at the turn of the 1980s. The wars of today are localised and inconclusive. Technocrats have become deft at mitigating what should be all-consuming disasters, whether financial or biomedical, with a bailout here and a furlough there. A visitor to 2026 from a couple of generations ago would notice the low levels of violent crime, the general material comfort and the racial peace before noticing the joker in the White House or even the talk of war. Welles was right. Upheaval is a creative spur. There is just less of it than people are able to perceive. That the 38th film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a cultural event is embarrassing, and in a sense our highest achievement.”

ET Brand Equity Interview

Here. By Varun Markande.

“In the agentic era of marketing, MarTech partners must have skin in the game: Rajesh Jain, Netcore.ai”

Netcore Cloud has rebranded as Netcore.ai, signaling a shift to an agentic marketing platform. The company now focuses on selling marketing outcomes instead of input metrics. AI agents will handle complex tasks, enabling greater personalization and scale for marketers. This approach aims to reduce customer reacquisition costs and improve lifetime value. Netcore.ai is moving towards outcome-based pricing and partnership with its clients.

 

Thinks 2063

NYTimes: “A method nicknamed “Japanese walking” on social media — also known as interval walking training, or I.W.T. — seems to offer greater advantages than a simple stroll, or even than walking at a moderate pace for 8,000 or more steps a day…As the name suggests, interval walking is a form of interval training, which involves alternating between bursts of intense activity and more gentle movement or rest. In this case, it’s basically just alternating between fast and slow walking. But compared with more classic forms of high-intensity interval training, interval walking is more approachable for many people, especially those who haven’t exercised in a while or who are recovering from injuries that make high-impact activities like running difficult, said Dr. Carlin Senter, the chief of primary-care sports medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.”

WSJ: “Jonathan Roberts spent years studying dark matter and the origins of the universe. Now, he’s tackling another intractable problem: How to keep artificial-intelligence tools from cannibalizing the publishing industry. Publishers have faced declining traffic for years, but AI-powered search engines and chatbots are accelerating the demise of a business long reliant on clicks and ad revenue. As chief innovation officer at Barry Diller’s magazine publishing company People Inc., Roberts is charged with reimagining the media business for an AI era.”

FT: “[Philip K Dick’s] 1960s science-fiction visions are a guide to our age of erratic billionaires, wild space fantasies and glitchy, invasive technology.”

Arnold Kling: “Relative to the Web, AI is sterile. Those of us who do not work in the major labs are users, not contributors. AI progress consists of what takes place in the labs. To use another analogy from my 1990s era, imagine how little progress we would have made if, rather than the Internet, we would have been limited to America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Until now, human progress has come from our collective brain. Individually, nobody knows how to make a pencil. But when we can cooperate, whether in small groups, large organizations, markets, or computer networks, we can expand knowledge in all sorts of directions.”