A Question
For years, I’ve fought against the $500 billion AdWaste plague—the staggering burn of budgets reacquiring customers brands already knew. In presentation after presentation, I’ve shown how 70% of marketing budgets are wasted on reacquisition—much of it becoming ‘revenue taxes’ paid to Google and Meta for the privilege of finding lost customers. This crusade against AdWaste has become my calling card, the foundation of my thinking about modern marketing’s fundamental dysfunction.
But recently, that foundation was shaken.
I was reading Laura Ries’s provocative new book, The Strategic Enemy, when her central thesis stopped me cold. Ries argues that breakthrough companies don’t succeed by being better—they succeed by defining and defeating a strategic enemy. Uber didn’t just offer better taxis—it declared war on the taxi industry. Tesla didn’t just make electric cars—it declared war on combustion engines. The enemy crystallises the mission, rallies the troops, and clarifies the value proposition.
This made me confront an uncomfortable question: What does Netcore truly stand against?
The obvious answer seemed clear—we fight the Adtechs, those profit-devouring giants who’ve turned customer reacquisition into a trillion-dollar tax on business growth. For years, I’ve positioned them as marketing’s great villain, the strategic enemy that must be defeated.
Then a colleague asked me a question that changed everything.
“What if you’ve got it backwards?”
He continued with surgical precision: “What if Adtechs aren’t the disease but merely the symptom? What if the real story is that Martech platforms—companies like ours—created the very problem we claim to solve? Think about it: brands only pay the Google tax because their marketing technology failed to keep customers engaged. They only need reacquisition because retention didn’t work.”
The implications were staggering. If Martech had delivered on its promise—if it had truly enabled brands to build lasting customer relationships—would the AdWaste problem even exist? When brands ask, “Who lost my customers, moved my profits, and killed my future?” perhaps they shouldn’t point at Mountain View or Menlo Park. Perhaps they should look at their marketing clouds, their customer engagement platforms, their entire Martech stack that promised retention but delivered abandonment.
Every failed retention campaign, every ignored customer, every broken journey creates another profitable transaction for Google and Meta.
Martech hasn’t been fighting Adtech; it’s been feeding it.
This revelation transforms everything. It means the enemy isn’t external—it’s internal. The call isn’t coming from Silicon Valley; it’s coming from inside the house. We haven’t been David fighting Goliath; we’ve been Goliath’s arms dealer.
If this hypothesis is correct—and I believe it is—then NeoMarketing isn’t just the antidote to Adtech. It’s the cure for Martech’s disease. And that single shift changes everything—how we build, how we position, and how we deliver the future of marketing.
