In Summary
We started by shining light on a problem that has been around for a hundred years: the 50% waste in advertising. Until now with its combination of digital customers providing data via their devices, it was a problem that had no solution. Now, it is possible to identify where the 50% waste is happening – reacquisition of churned customers and wrong acquisition where new customers exit rapidly. Solutions to this modern 50% problem have not been forthcoming because of the seductive allure of new acquisition, the availability of easy money from investors, and the CEOs’ priority of growth over profits. There is now trouble in paradise.
The cost of new customer acquisition is rising faster than ever before – just witness the 30-40% year-on-year growth rates of Google, Facebook (Meta) and Amazon. Easy money is going to slow down or disappear. This will force CEOs to focus on growth with profitability – and even going as far as to prioritise profitability over growth.
It is in this context that the ideas outlined in this series (and through my past writings) need to be seen. There are multiple innovations which when combined together can help create a new future for marketers and martech. It is a world in which they can have it all – drive exponential forever profitable growth. Here are the key takeaways:
- To solve the problem of rapidly rising customer acquisition costs, marketers need to address adtech’s 50% waste problem due to reacquisition and wrong acquisition
- The starting point for fixing this is not optimising adtech, but focusing on existing customers and martech
- Marketers need to make shifts in the 5 Rs of retention, repetition, referrals, reactivation, and replenishment
- Three innovations can help power the modern marketer’s transition: Atomic Rewards, Martech 2.0, and Progency
- The marketer’s new map is about Pipe, Partitioning, and Prospecting
- Done right, this is the path to profitable growth and creating a “profits monopoly”
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PS 1: There is a famous line in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. Gothmog says, “The Age of Men is over. The Time of the Orc has come.” Of course, the Orcs are the evil ones and eventually lose. But to borrow the phrasing, what I can say is: “The Age of Adtech is over. The Time of Martech has come.” And hopefully, this time it will be a happy ending for brands and customers!
PS 2: I have been trying to think of a new name to describe this new thinking which combines Martech 2.0 and Web3 (along with the idea of a Progency.) Atomic Marketing, as a signal to the importance of Atomic Rewards? Or maybe Exponential Marketing, to indicate how exponential growth can now be possible? Or Profitable Marketing – because marketing has always been seen as a cost centre? Perhaps, replace Marketing with Martech because that is what it is all about – marketing powered by tech. I don’t have an answer yet. It is a question for another day and a future series!
