NeoMarketing’s 75 Theses

Published April 17, 2025

My Writings

Some time ago, I came across “Ninety-five theses on AI” by Samuel Hammond—a powerful collection of concise statements designed to challenge conventional wisdom and provoke deeper thinking about artificial intelligence. This format, inspired by Martin Luther’s revolutionary 95 theses nailed to the church door in 1517, struck me as the perfect vehicle to distill my own thinking on marketing’s necessary transformation.

In the past five years, I have written over 180 essays exploring new ideas in marketing—examining everything from the attention recession and the AdWaste crisis to re-engineering retention and the transformative potential of AI-native martech. These writings have gradually coalesced into a cohesive vision I call “NeoMarketing.”

As Claude puts it: “A thesis, in this context, is not merely an observation but a declarative statement of principle—a stake in the ground that challenges established thinking. Each thesis should stand alone as a provocative insight while collectively forming a comprehensive framework for reimagining an entire discipline. The power of theses lies in their brevity and clarity—complex ideas distilled to their essence, without sacrificing their revolutionary potential.”

What follows are 75 NeoMarketing theses—each a single, potent point capturing a distinct aspect of marketing’s necessary transformation. Together, they constitute not merely a critique of the status quo but a blueprint for a fundamentally different approach to how brands build and maintain customer relationships in the digital age. This is my manifesto for NeoMarketing—a vision for eliminating the $500 billion AdWaste crisis while creating sustainable, profitable customer relationships that benefit both businesses and the people they serve.

Based on just the titles of my past essays, I asked Claude to summarise the key themes.

1. The AdWaste Crisis and Marketing Inefficiency: You’ve extensively explored how brands waste billions reacquiring customers they already know, creating what you call the “$200-500 Billion AdWaste Problem.” This theme is evident in essays like “Solving the $200 Billion AdWaste Problem” and “The Coming Age of Anti-Acquisition.”
2. AI-Native Marketing Transformation: A significant portion of your work examines how AI (particularly agentic AI) is fundamentally changing marketing—not just as an add-on tool but as a complete reimagining of operations. Essays like “Marketing’s AI Triad,” “AI Co-Marketer,” and “How Agentic AI will Transform Digital Marketing” showcase this focus.
3. NeoMails and Email Reinvention: Email transformation appears as perhaps your most consistent theme, with numerous essays on “Email 2.0,” “NeoMails,” “AMP technology,” and interactive elements. You’ve clearly positioned email as an underutilized channel with immense potential for reinvention.
4. AI Twins and Personalisation: The concept of AI Twins (both at segment and individual levels) features prominently, with essays like “AI Twins: The Future of Marketing Intelligence” and “MyTwin: The Agentic AI That Powers N=1 Personalisation,” exploring how digital replicas can transform customer understanding.
5. Attention Economics and Microns: You’ve deeply examined attention as a scarce resource, with essays on “Attention Messaging,” “Atomic Rewards,” and “Microns” that explore how to create brief, valuable engagements that respect customers’ time while building habits.
6. Progency and Performance-Based Marketing: The evolution of martech business models appears frequently, particularly your concept of “Progency” that combines platform capabilities with agency services and outcome-based economics, shown in essays like “Progency for Martech: The Missing Link.”
7. NEON and Authenticated Advertising: You’ve developed the concept of a new advertising ecosystem built on authenticated identity rather than cookies, with essays on “NeoAdtech,” “NEON,” and breaking free from “Big AdTech” appearing regularly in your recent work.
8. Profitability Focus and Metrics: A consistent thread explores shifting marketing from a cost center to a profit driver, with concepts like “Profipoly,” “ProfitXL,” and essays on becoming the “Chief Profitability Officer” demonstrating your focus on marketing economics.
9. The Only Once/OOO Philosophy: Your “Only Once” theory of marketing (acquiring customers just once) appears as a fundamental principle in essays like “Only Once: A Radical New Theory of Marketing” and “From AAA to OOO: The NeoMarketing Revolution.”
10. Velvet Rope Marketing (VRM): Special treatment for best customers features prominently, with several essays specifically on “Velvet Rope Marketing” exploring how to differentiate experiences based on customer value.
11. Martech Business Model Innovation: You’ve extensively explored how martech companies can evolve their business models, with essays on “Martech 2.0,” “New SaaS,” and various explorations of performance-based pricing and revenue sharing.
12. Retention Engineering: A significant theme is the systematic approach to customer retention, with essays like “The 10 Tenets for Re-engineering Retention” and “Retention Re-engineering” showing your focus on keeping customers rather than constantly acquiring new ones.

Claude continued: “These themes collectively form a comprehensive vision for transforming marketing from an acquisition-obsessed, wasteful discipline into a precision-focused, AI-powered approach centred on building lasting customer relationships. Your work explores this transformation from multiple angles—technological innovation, business model evolution, customer psychology, and economic fundamentals—creating a holistic framework for what you’ve termed “NeoMarketing.” The evolution of your thinking is also apparent when viewing these essays chronologically, with earlier works focused on foundational concepts like microns and email reinvention, while more recent essays integrate these ideas into larger frameworks like NeoMarketing, AI-native systems, and the comprehensive AdWaste solution.”

Theses

Overview

1. AdWaste—the reacquisition of customers who already know a brand—is the single greatest destroyer of profits in modern business, creating an absurd cycle where companies pay rent to access relationships they already own.
2. A staggering 70% of digital marketing budgets—approximately $500 billion annually—is squandered on reacquiring existing or lapsed customers through expensive ad platforms, creating marketing’s great tragedy: paying platforms to reach people already in the database.
3. This $500 billion transfer from brands to Big Adtech represents perhaps the largest ongoing wealth extraction in business history, systematically draining resources that should be directed toward innovation, customer experience, and shareholder value.
4. Without addressing the AdWaste crisis at its root, sustainable profitable growth remains a mathematical impossibility—brands are simply funding their own obsolescence through platform dependency.
5. The solution to AdWaste cannot emerge from optimising adtech performance (ROAS)—this merely makes inefficiency more efficient; true transformation requires reimagining retention through revolutionary martech approaches.
6. AdWaste stems directly from the Attention Recession—when customers mentally unsubscribe from a brand’s communications, forcing companies to buy back attention through increasingly expensive ad platforms.
7. The Attention Recession itself arises from two fundamental marketing failures: the “Not for Me” problem (generic messaging that fails to resonate with individual preferences) and the “No Hotlines” problem (inconsistent or low-value engagement channels).
8. Two transformative technologies now converge to solve these core problems: Agentic AI enables true N=1 personalisation at scale, while AMP for Email transforms static messages into interactive, app-like experiences that command attention.
9. This technological foundation also enables two revolutionary business models—NeoN, which creates a direct brand-to-brand marketplace for attention exchange through authenticated identity, and Progency, which combines AI-powered platform capabilities with performance-based service delivery.
10. Together, these innovations form NeoMarketing—a complete reimagining of how brands build and maintain customer relationships, transforming marketing from a cost centre driven by acquisition to a profit engine powered by retention, fundamentally altering the economics of customer relationships.

Endstate

11. The focus for marketing should be to maximise Earned Growth—revenue generated organically from existing customers and referrals—transforming marketing from an expensive acquisition machine into a self-sustaining engine of profitable expansion.
12. As Fred Reichheld powerfully articulates: “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.”
13. This paradigm shift demands an OOO (Only Once/Ones) mindset to replace the wasteful AAA (Acquire, Acquire, Acquire) approach—acquiring each customer exactly once, then investing relentlessly in making them feel valued and understood.
14. True customer-centricity requires making each person feel individually recognised through N=1 omnichannel personalisation—delivering precisely the right message at the right time through the right channel to the right person, not as marketing rhetoric but as operational reality.
15. The twin north stars of marketing excellence thus become maximising customer Lifetime Value (LTV) while simultaneously minimising Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)—a formula that mathematically guarantees sustainable profitable growth when executed systematically.

Marketing Today

16. The current state of marketing is dominated by acquisition addiction via Big Adtech platforms (Google/Meta), with 80-90% of budgets funnelled into driving clicks and conversions—creating a dependency that undermines long-term business health.
17. While this approach may drive short-term revenue growth, it conceals two devastating flaws: Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) rise relentlessly year after year, while the absence of robust retention strategies results in 60-65% of customers making precisely one purchase before disappearing forever.
18. The dark, unspoken truth of digital marketing is that 7 out of 10 supposedly “new” customers are actually existing or former customers being expensively “reacquired”—a systemic inefficiency that remains largely unacknowledged in marketing boardrooms.
19. This AdWaste—the continuous cycle of paying to reacquire customers already in a brand’s database—represents the single greatest destroyer of business profitability, systematically transferring wealth from brands to adtech platforms while creating no genuine value.
20. CMOs have unwittingly transformed from growth champions into collection agents for Google and Meta—managing ever-larger budgets that primarily serve to enrich platforms rather than build sustainable, profitable customer relationships for their own businesses.

Attention Recession

21. AdWaste is the direct consequence of Attention Recession—a phenomenon where customers mentally unsubscribe from brand communications long before formally opting out, creating a silent exodus that eventually manifests as churn.
22. For marketers, push messages via email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, and app notifications serve as critical bridges to bring customers back to transactional properties (websites and apps)—yet when these bridges collapse, costly reacquisition becomes the only alternative.
23. The alarming reality is that 9 out of 10 push messages are ignored entirely, while only 3 of every 100 visitors to a brand’s property complete a transaction—a devastating funnel leakage that destroys marketing efficiency.
24. These dismal statistics illuminate marketing’s twin fundamental failures: the “Not for Me” problem (irrelevant, generic messaging that fails to resonate with individual needs) and the “No Hotlines” problem (the absence of consistent, valuable connection channels).
25. Unless these root causes are addressed—beginning with solving Attention Recession at its source—the AdWaste crisis will persist regardless of how much brands optimise their acquisition funnels or improve their ROAS metrics.

Breakthroughs

26. Five revolutionary ideas and innovations lay the foundation for solving Attention Recession and radically enhancing Engagement, Conversion, and Retention (EnCoRe)—beginning with the Best-Rest-Test-Next (BRTN) framework that reimagines segmentation based on actual engagement patterns: Best customers (retain), Rest customers (engage), Test customers (reactivate), and Next customers (convert).
27. Agentic AI represents perhaps the most transformative breakthrough—where Marketing Agents function as autonomous specialists handling complex tasks at scale while AI Twins create digital replicas of customers that enable unprecedented understanding and personalisation.
28. AMP in email transforms traditional one-way broadcast messages into interactive, two-way NeoMails—removing the “click-through penalty” that loses 80-90% of potential conversions by enabling complete transactions directly within the inbox.
29. NeoN, an alternative email ad network powered by authenticated identity, creates a direct brand-to-brand marketplace that slashes reacquisition costs while eliminating the platform “tax” currently claimed by Google and Meta.
30. Progency solves the persistent “Who Will Do It?” problem that plagues martech adoption—combining proprietary platform capabilities with specialist expertise and AI acceleration in a performance-based model that delivers outcomes, not just software.

BRTN Framework

31. The Best-Rest-Test-Next (BRTN) framework represents a radical departure from traditional demographic segmentation by categorising customers based on their actual engagement patterns and lifetime value (LTV) contribution—aligning marketing strategy with economic reality.
32. Best customers—the elite 10-20% who typically generate 60-80% of revenue and an astounding 200% of profits—demand Velvet Rope Marketing (VRM) that creates distinctly superior experiences, requiring marketing teams to deploy AI-native platforms that treat these individuals as unique entities rather than segment members.
33. Rest customers—the critical middle 30-50% showing declining engagement—represent marketing’s greatest untapped opportunity, yet receive insufficient attention from resource-constrained marketing teams; this neglected segment is precisely where Progency intervention delivers the highest ROI by rebuilding attention before dormancy sets in.
34. Test customers—the “One and Done” segment who have become inactive, dormant, or churned—constitute the primary source of AdWaste as brands repeatedly target them through expensive adtech platforms; NeoN provides a brand-to-brand co-operative alternative that cuts reacquisition costs while preserving authenticated relationships.
35. Next customers—genuinely new acquisitions—should ideally arrive through zero-cost referrals from delighted Best customers; for these newcomers, marketing teams must establish thoughtful welcome journeys, collect zero-party data, and facilitate rapid first and second transactions to establish the foundation for lasting, profitable relationships.

Agentic AI

36. While martech platforms have deployed predictive AI and more recently generative AI (particularly for content creation), the true transformation will come from Agentic AI—autonomous systems where marketing agents interact with customer agents to overcome human limitations in campaign orchestration, segmentation granularity, journey complexity, and content personalisation.
37. Tomorrow’s marketing departments will harness functional agents to streamline operations and create distinctive experiences for every customer; in the near-term, an AI Co-Marketer will coordinate these specialised agents, while the long-term vision embraces self-organising “emergents” forming a “Department of One” capable of managing millions of individual relationships simultaneously.
38. Customers will be represented by AI Twins—initially as Madtech (martech and adtech) Segment Twins reflecting cohort behaviours, then evolving to Singular (1:1) Twins as zero-party data accumulates; these digital replicas enable marketers to simulate conversations for insights on product preferences, offer receptivity, and optimal campaign approaches.
39. The truly revolutionary aspect emerges when customers themselves interact with their own Twins, setting preferences that govern all brand interactions, discovering products aligned with their actual needs, and effectively delegating routine purchasing decisions to trusted agents that understand their unique preferences.
40. Agentic AI’s ultimate goal is nothing less than the transition from crude N=Many segmentation to genuine N=1 personalisation—treating each customer as a unique individual with distinct preferences, behaviours, and needs—thereby maximising lifetime value through relationships that feel personally crafted rather than mass-produced.

NeoMails

41. Email—the highest ROI marketing channel—is undergoing a revolutionary transformation through AMP technology, evolving from static one-way messages into interactive two-way NeoMails that create genuine dialogue rather than broadcast monologues.
42. NeoMails solve email’s fundamental engagement crisis by incorporating three breakthrough innovations: Atomic Rewards (Mu) that gamify opens through micro-incentives, Microns that deliver 15-60 second “brain gain” experiences, and SmartBlocks that enable frictionless zero-party data collection.
43. The most transformative aspect of NeoMails is the elimination of the “click-through penalty” where 80-90% of potential conversions are lost—enabling customers to browse products, complete forms, and make purchases directly within their inbox without ever visiting external websites.
44. By transforming email from a mere communication channel into an engagement and transaction platform, NeoMails deliver conversion rates 4-10x higher than traditional emails—not through better copywriting or design, but by fundamentally eliminating the friction that kills traditional email effectiveness.
45. NeoMails create reliable daily “hotlines” between brands and customers—solving the “No Hotline” problem at the root of Attention Recession by delivering genuine value that customers actively seek out rather than promotional noise they increasingly ignore.

NeoN

46. NeoN (New Engaged and Open Network) reimagines advertising by creating a direct brand-to-brand marketplace that connects authenticated customers through trusted email channels, eliminating the expensive intermediaries that drive AdWaste.
47. Unlike cookie-based targeting that relies on probabilistic matching, NeoN leverages authenticated identity (PII) with deterministic, precise targeting—ensuring every impression reaches exactly the right person with zero waste.
48. ActionAds embedded in NeoMails enable complete transactions directly within the email—eliminating the “click-through penalty” while creating frictionless conversion experiences that deliver higher performance rates than traditional digital ads.
49. NeoN transforms the economics of reacquisition by enabling brands to simultaneously “print money” (monetising their Best customers’ attention) and “save money” (efficiently reactivating their Test customers at a lower cost than adtech platforms).
50. By creating a cooperative ecosystem where brands both contribute and benefit from attention exchange, NeoN develops powerful network effects—each new participant adds both supply (emails to their Best customers) and demand (reacquisition needs for their Test customers).

Progency

51. Progency—a fusion of platform, expert talent, AI agents, and continuous improvement (P-E-A-K)—addresses the “Who Will Do It?” problem that prevents brands from fully leveraging martech capabilities despite their significant investments.
52. Unlike traditional agencies using third-party tools or martech vendors providing just software, Progency combines deep platform expertise with specialist talent and AI acceleration in a performance-based model focused on outcomes rather than inputs.
53. By shifting from consumption-based pricing (CPM or MAU) to revenue-share models tied directly to measurable results, Progency aligns incentives perfectly: if the brand doesn’t benefit financially, neither does the Progency.
54. Progency specialises in maximising value from Rest customers—the often-neglected middle segment showing declining engagement—enabling marketing teams to focus their limited resources on Best customer retention and Next customer conversion.
55. Through AI agent orchestration in a parallel marketing department, Progency delivers the operational scale of enterprise software with the strategic expertise of specialist agencies—creating a transformative approach that turns martech from a cost centre into a measurable profit engine.

NeoMarketing

56. NeoMarketing represents the third distinct era of marketing evolution, following Traditional Marketing (1950s-1990s) and Modern Marketing (2000s-2020s)—a fundamental reimagining of how brands build and maintain customer relationships in the digital age.
57. Traditional Marketing operated through mass media to build brand awareness and recall—with marketers functioning as storytellers and market-makers who shaped consumer perceptions through creative campaigns, often accepting waste as an inevitable byproduct of reach.
58. Modern Marketing pivoted to performance metrics and digital platforms—obsessing over clicks, CPC, CPA, ROAS, and last-click attribution—yet this apparent precision had a devastating side-effect: transforming marketers into collection agents for Google and Meta while normalising AdWaste as standard practice.
59. NeoMarketing stands on three foundational principles that invert established orthodoxy: Retention before Reacquisition (prioritising relationship depth over constant acquisition), Trust before Transactions (building value-driven engagement before extracting revenue), and Individuals before Segments (recognising each customer’s uniqueness beyond crude groupings).
60. This new marketing paradigm delivers three transformative outcomes: an Antidote to AdWaste by solving the Attention Recession at its source, a Recipe for Re-engineering Retention through AI-powered personalisation and engagement, and a Flywheel for Profitable Growth that turns marketing from a cost centre into the primary engine of sustainable business success.

House of NeoMarketing

61. The House of NeoMarketing creates a comprehensive framework for marketing transformation with the ultimate goal of “Rule of 40” Profitable Growth (Maximise LTV, Minimise CAC)—a structured approach with each layer building upon the previous one to create a self-reinforcing system for sustainable business success.
62. The Foundation layer establishes the bedrock through Large Customer Models, Unistack integration, and Earned Growth metrics—ensuring that data, technology, and organisational alignment support retention-first marketing.
63. The Intelligence layer leverages AI Co-Marketer, autonomous “Emergents,” and AI Twins to enable true N=1 personalisation—transforming raw customer data into actionable insights that drive individualised experiences at scale.
64. The Engagement layer creates reliable daily hotlines through Channels 2.0, NeoMails, and Zero-Party Data collection—solving the “No Hotline” problem by establishing consistent, value-driven connections that combat Attention Recession.
65. The Monetisation layer converts engagement into revenue through Shoppable Channels, Omnichannel Recommendations, the NeoN network, and Progency—turning marketing from a cost centre into a profit engine that simultaneously maximises LTV and minimises CAC.

Martech Like Adtech

66. Martech must evolve from optional toolkit to mission-critical business infrastructure—just as adtech transformed from experimental channel to essential revenue driver, NeoMarketing demands that retention technology becomes as fundamental to business success as acquisition platforms.
67. The future of martech hinges on performance-based, outcomes-driven pricing that aligns vendor success directly with customer results—mirroring adtech’s revolutionary shift from media buying to guaranteed performance that transformed how brands allocate marketing investments.
68. Martech’s perceived budget constraints will dissolve when it creates measurable revenue impact—transforming from discretionary expenditure to Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), with virtually infinite budgets available for solutions that demonstrably drive profitable growth.
69. Just as lean marketing teams can manage millions in adtech spend through algorithmic scaling, NeoMarketing enables small teams to orchestrate sophisticated, personalised engagement at global scale through AI agents and autonomous systems that eliminate operational bottlenecks.
70. The companies that successfully transform martech from cost centre to profit engine will create unprecedented market value—establishing platform dominance in customer retention similar to how Google and Meta captured acquisition, potentially creating the next trillion-dollar marketing technology behemoths.

NeoMartech’s Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

71. Google and Meta built monopoly-like platforms around search and social networks—transforming how brands acquire customers while generating hundreds of billions in annual revenue and creating multi-trillion dollar market capitalisation, yet this value extraction has come at brands’ expense.
72. The next frontier of marketing value creation lies not in better acquisition but in eliminating AdWaste entirely—NeoMartech companies that engineer retention, growth, and profit flywheels for brands will capture a market opportunity of comparable magnitude to what adtech platforms seized in the previous era.
73. These emerging NeoMartech leaders will build their dominance on four revolutionary pillars: Agentic AI that enables true N=1 personalisation at scale, AMP in Email that transforms static messages into interactive hotlines, NeoN that creates an alternative to expensive reacquisition, and Progency that delivers guaranteed outcomes rather than merely software.
74. NeoMarketing represents marketing’s return to its fundamental purpose—building deep, lasting, and profitable relationships with existing customers that maximise retention, revenues, and referrals while continuously reducing customer acquisition costs through Earned Growth.
75. As adtech dominated the Internet and Mobile eras by solving acquisition, a trillion-dollar opportunity now awaits the visionaries who solve retention in the AI era—redirecting the massive wealth currently wasted on reacquisition toward creating genuine customer value and sustainable business growth.