Modern Marketing’s Reality
Over the past few years, my essays have explored the interconnected crises of Acquisition, Reacquisition, and AdWaste in modern marketing. These challenges have created an unprecedented transfer of wealth from brands to Big Adtech platforms, fundamentally undermining business profitability. Here are the key themes that emerge:
- The Self-Inflicted Wound of Reacquisition: An astonishing 70% of marketing budgets are squandered on reacquiring existing customers through expensive adtech platforms. While some waste in new customer acquisition might be forgiven—given the inherent uncertainties in reaching completely new audiences—paying repeatedly to reach customers already in one’s database is marketing’s cardinal sin. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s a systematic failure to leverage one of a brand’s most valuable assets: its existing customer relationships.
- The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Trap: Brands have become ensnared in an expensive cycle of dependency on Big Adtech platforms. The auction-based advertising systems of Google and Meta create artificial scarcity and force brands into bidding wars – where they frequently end up paying premium prices just to reach their own customers through these platforms rather than using their owned channels. This vicious cycle depletes resources that could be invested in retention and relationship building. Marketing departments have essentially become collection agents for tech giants, managing ever-increasing budgets while losing the art of genuine customer engagement. The platforms’ “black box” algorithms promise optimisation but deliver mainly opacity and dependency.
- The Half-Trillion Dollar Wealth Transfer: The scale of this inefficiency is staggering: approximately $500 billion annually flows from brands to Big Adtech platforms through unnecessary reacquisition spending. This represents perhaps the largest ongoing transfer of business wealth in history. Imagine if even a fraction of these resources were redirected toward customer experience improvements, product innovations, or building sustainable competitive advantages. Instead, this capital enriches platform intermediaries while leaving brands increasingly dependent on paid advertising for survival.
- The Profitless Prosperity Paradox: The current system creates an illusion of growth while undermining long-term profitability. Brands can always buy more clicks to hit revenue targets, but this “growth at all costs” mentality leads to what I call “profitless prosperity”—expanding revenues that never translate into sustainable profits. The easy availability of paid traffic has seduced marketers away from the harder but more valuable work of building lasting customer relationships.
As Fred Reichheld powerfully states in Winning on Purpose: “There is only one way to grow a business profitably. You make sure your customers are treated so well that they come back for more and bring their friends.” This simple truth points toward the solution: marketing needs a fundamental reimagining focused on retention (and referrals) rather than endless acquisition.
Just as Classical Liberalism provided an intellectual framework for creating prosperity, marketing needs a new vision—one that breaks the addiction to paid acquisition and redirects resources toward building genuine customer relationships. The path forward requires more than optimisation at the margins; it demands transformation of mindsets. Welcome to NeoVisM (or Neovism, for easy reading) – a new philosophy that promises to do for marketing what Classical Liberalism did for economics.
