Attention, Agents, Alpha, Ads
As martech companies navigate the AI transformation, four foundations will determine who thrives and who becomes obsolete:
- Agents: The New Operating System
The age of dashboards and manual workflows is ending. AI agents are becoming marketing’s operating system, multiplying human capabilities rather than just assisting them:
- Agents Collective: Internal co-marketers autonomously handling segmentation, campaign orchestration, and optimisation at superhuman scale
- Twin Factory: Manufacturing BrandTwins (customer AI representatives) powered by TwinLedgers, delivering true N=1 personalisation and profitability management where every customer has their own P&L
- Agent Marketplace: Creating an ecosystem where specialised agents (content creators, campaign optimisers, audience analysers) can be deployed, combined, and orchestrated like apps on a platform—turning martech from monolithic software into a composable agent economy
- Attention: Engineering the Upstream Currency
Attention is upstream of every outcome—without it, no channel or campaign succeeds. Yet traditional channels (email, SMS, push, RCS, WhatsApp) face saturation, regulation, and declining engagement. The future lies in owning attention:
- Attention Magnets: Daily touchpoints like The Brand Daily (daily brand touchpoints) or Muniverse (gamified brand experiences) where customers return voluntarily rather than avoid
- Attention Currency: Mu powers a loyalty program which converts passive audiences into active participants, creating a sustainable attention flywheel where engagement is rewarded and measured
- The next battle isn’t about messaging more—it’s about engineering enduring attention
- Alpha: Hedge Fund Economics for Marketing
The SaaS subscription model is giving way to outcome-driven economics. Borrowing from hedge funds’ distinction between alpha (excess returns), beta (market returns), and carry (value share):
- ZeroBase Economics: Brands pay only for incremental uplift in revenue, LTV, or retention above baseline
- Progency Partnerships: Vendor and brand co-create growth and share in the upside
- By focusing on alpha—the excess return delivered—martech transforms from cost centre to profit engine
- Ads: The Second Revenue Revolution
Adtech built a $700B industry in two decades—with $500B being pure AdWaste spent on reacquisition. Martech, trapped in narrow SaaS thinking, remains a fraction of this. AI opens a different play:
- PII-Powered Cooperative Networks (NeoN): Brands pool first-party data for surgical reactivation, reacquisition, and lookalike acquisition, bypassing the Google/Meta duopoly
- ActionAds: Intent-rich, in-place ads that drive engagement without clicks or wasted impressions
- Twin promise: Save brands billions by cutting AdWaste while unlocking new revenue pools for brands and martech providers
The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
Adtech scaled by capturing attention, monetising through ads, and tolerating massive waste. Martech must now scale differently—combining Agents, Attention, Alpha, and Ads into a new architecture of growth. This is the essence of post-SaaS marketing: AI-native, outcome-driven, and retention-first.
The prize isn’t incremental SaaS revenue. It’s building a trillion-dollar martech industry that finally delivers on marketing’s impossible promises: precise engagement at scale, enduring customer relationships, and profitable growth where every dollar spent generates measurable returns.
The companies that master these four foundations won’t just survive the AI disruption—they’ll lead marketing’s evolution from cost centre to profit amplifier, from message blaster to intelligence orchestrator, from vendor to growth partner. The impossible becomes inevitable, making martech companies invincible in this new future. Martech must stop thinking like SaaS and start architecting the future of customer value creation.
