1
The $500 Billion Lie
Martech is broken — and no one’s talking about it.
Here’s the number no martech vendor will ever put on a slide: 80% of engaged customers will silently disappear this quarter. Not churn. Not unsubscribe. Not complain. They simply vanish from owned channels — and then, months later, reappear as “new” acquisitions in paid campaigns.
This isn’t a rumour. This is the data — from 250+ brands across industries. It’s the biggest unspoken truth in marketing.
And the silence is deliberate.
Because the system is designed so vendors profit when brands lose customers, not when they keep them.
The Three Fatal Flaws of Martech
- The Impossible Problem
True N=1 personalisation is mathematically impossible for humans. Traditional marketing teams can build ten journeys, maybe fifty segments, but not millions of evolving customer micro-states. Martech tools help organise workflows — but they cannot think. They cannot adapt. They cannot deliver true individual relevance.
The result? Customers receive messages meant for segments, not for them. Relevance degrades. Attention fades. And the drift begins.
- The Invisible Problem
Martech does not track the thing that kills business: attention decay.
It doesn’t alert marketers when Best customers slip into Rest, or when Rest quietly drift into Test. There are no dashboards for “customers we’re about to lose.” No warnings before the silence becomes permanent. This invisible collapse funnels customers straight into the arms of Google and Meta — who happily rent them back at auction prices.
By the time a “win-back” campaign fires, brands are already bidding against competitors for people whose email addresses sit in their own database.
- The Alignment Problem
Martech vendors get paid regardless of whether customers stay or vanish. Fixed SaaS pricing has no connection to outcomes. Send a million ignored emails? That’s revenue. Customers churning? Still revenue. Growth stalls; their invoices don’t.
There is no incentive to solve retention — because the problem is profitable.
**
The result of these three flaws is a $500 billion global AdWaste crisis — money spent reacquiring customers brands once owned. Brands pay to acquire a customer, watch them fade through neglect, then pay again to ‘rediscover’ them in adtech auctions. The same customer, bought twice. Sometimes three times. Sometimes more.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: this isn’t a bug in martech. It’s the business model.
Martech loses customers. Adtech charges to win them back. Martech loses them again. The cycle repeats, and both industries thrive — while brands bleed.
The lie is that customer loss is inevitable. That churn is natural. That reacquisition is just the cost of doing business.
It’s not.
There is another way. A new system for marketing. A completely different philosophy — one where vendors only win when brands win, where attention is treated as capital, and where paying twice for the same customer becomes structurally impossible.
There’s a name for it: NeoMarketing.
2
Never Lose Customers
Agentic — AI that serves customers, not just brands
Every brand has the same dream: treat every customer individually. Marketing that adapts in real time, understands intent, and delivers the one experience that matters right now.
For 20 years, martech promised this. And for 20 years, martech failed.
Why? Because the N=1 dream is humanly impossible.
A marketer can design a segment. A marketer cannot design ten thousand individual journeys updated daily. The cognitive load alone would require thousands of people working around the clock. So martech settled for segments — and segments fail. They’re better than nothing, but they’re not good enough to prevent drift.
Enter Agentic: Marketing That Thinks
Agentic turns marketing from automation to autonomy. Not by making humans faster, but by deploying AI systems that operate with genuine intelligence — systems that can understand, predict, and respond to individual customer needs at scale.
This isn’t chatbots bolted onto legacy platforms. It’s a fundamental reimagining of how marketing operates.
Two breakthroughs make it possible:
- Marketing Agents
Specialised AI workers — segment agents, content agents, scheduling agents, insights agents — coordinated through multi-agent workflows. Instead of marketers telling the system what to do, the system figures out what needs to be done.
These agents analyse behaviour patterns across millions of customers simultaneously. They detect the early signals of disengagement — the subtle shift from Best to Rest — before it becomes visible in traditional metrics. They orchestrate interventions automatically, testing and optimising in real time. They learn continuously, improving with every interaction.
- BrandTwins
Here’s what makes Agentic truly different: it’s not just about serving the brand. It’s about serving the customer.
A BrandTwin is a customer-side AI advocate — a digital counterpart built in the Twin Factory that understands preferences, behaviours, sensitivities, and attention patterns. Think of it as a personal shopper, negotiator, and filter rolled into one.
Crucially: the BrandTwin works for the customer, not against them. It filters noise. It protects attention. It ensures relevance. It ensures customers never feel spammed or misunderstood again.
This is the philosophical shift that matters. Traditional martech treats customers as targets — objects to be segmented, messaged, and converted. Agentic marketing treats customers as principals — individuals with their own interests, served by AI advocates that align brand success with customer satisfaction.
The Outcome
For the first time, Best customers don’t slip. They don’t fade. They don’t disappear.
The drift from Best to Rest — that silent 90-day collapse that feeds the reacquisition machine — gets caught early and reversed. Customers feel understood, not targeted. Engagement deepens rather than decays.
Best customers stay Best. Forever.
Never lose customers. That’s not a slogan. With Agentic, it’s an operating principle.
Next: If Agentic keeps the Best, how do brands recover the Rest? Enter AdZero.
3
Never Pay Twice
AdZero — Stop funding the reacquisition machine
Marketing has an addiction it refuses to acknowledge: reacquisition.
Every month, brands quietly lose the Rest and Test segments — customers who once clicked, browsed, and bought but have fallen into inactivity. These customers are lapsing and lost. They could be Best customers becoming unengaged. They could be registered users who never made a purchase. They could be the ‘one and dones’.
But because martech doesn’t measure attention decay, brands discover the problem too late — when the customer resurfaces in a Google or Meta campaign wearing the mask of a “new” prospect.
This is the Invisible Problem in action. And it drains marketing budgets dry.
The Absurdity of Modern Marketing Economics
Imagine paying $50 to acquire a customer. Then paying the same $50 again six months later to reacquire them. Then again next year. This is exactly what brands unknowingly do — every quarter, at massive scale.
The platforms profit. The martech tools remain blind. The CMO pays twice (or thrice). The CFO wonders why margins never improve.
And here’s what makes it absurd: brands are paying rent to reach customers whose email addresses already sit in their own database. Names, purchase histories, preferences — all known. Yet the only path back is bidding against competitors in adtech auctions for people who’ve already bought.
This isn’t customer acquisition. It’s a ransom payment.
Enter AdZero: Zero Reacquisition Spend
AdZero is the system designed to kill the reacquisition machine. It turns attention into a renewable resource rather than a consumable one.
The logic is simple: if a brand already knows a customer, it shouldn’t have to pay a platform to reach them. The execution requires two components working together.
- NeoMails
Traditional email has become noise — promotional broadcasts that customers ignore, delete, or filter into oblivion. Open rates collapse. The channel dies. And with it dies the owned relationship.
NeoMails are different. They’re daily attention rituals — brief, valuable, interactive micro-experiences that customers actually want to open. Not promotional blasts. Not newsletter dumps. Sixty-second moments of genuine utility that build habits and maintain connection.
Think of the difference between a friend who only calls when they want something versus one who checks in regularly with something interesting to share. NeoMails transform the brand-customer relationship from transactional to relational. They recover the Missing Middle — those Rest and Test customers who haven’t left yet but are fading fast.
- NeoNet
For customers already dormant, NeoNet solves the recovery problem without paying the adtech tax. It’s a cooperative brand network with 1:1 matching for reactivation and inbox-native retargeting.
A customer dormant for Brand A might be active for Brand B. Through NeoNet, Brand A can reach that customer through Brand B’s active relationship — at a fraction of auction prices. ActionAds power the economics: one brand helps another recover a lapsed customer, and both benefit.
Cooperative recovery instead of competitive bidding. The economics flip completely.
The Outcome
Together, NeoMails and NeoNet produce the AdZero outcome: attention owned, not rented. Customers recovered, not rebought. The leak plugged at the source.
Never pay twice for the same customer. Own the attention. Kill the leak.
Next: If Agentic keeps customers and AdZero recovers them, what makes the business model finally work? Enter Alpha.
4
Never Pay Fixed
Alpha — The new deal between brands and martech
The final flaw in martech isn’t technology. It’s pricing. And it’s not just outdated — it’s a betrayal.
Think about it: a martech vendor charges the same fee whether engagement grows or collapses. Whether retention improves or craters. Whether customers stay or vanish. The vendor’s revenue is guaranteed. The brand’s is not.
This is misalignment at the core of the industry. And it explains why retention has never been solved.
The Dirty Secret
Martech vendors have no economic stake in whether retention actually works. Fixed SaaS fees decouple their success from brand success. Send a million ignored emails? Revenue. Customers churning? Revenue. Platform underperforming? Still revenue.
A cynical observer might note that customer churn actually benefits the ecosystem — it creates demand for more tools, more campaigns, more features to address the problem that never gets solved. The worse retention gets, the more martech solutions brands need.
There is no incentive to fix what’s profitable to perpetuate.
Alpha: A Business Model Built on Outcomes
Alpha changes the equation. Named after the investment term for returns above baseline, it introduces outcome-based economics to martech — borrowing from how the best partnerships work, where both parties share risk and reward.
The model has three components:
Beta is the base — a reduced fixed fee that covers operational costs. Lower than traditional SaaS pricing because it’s not the whole story.
Alpha is the upside — the measurable value created above baseline expectations. When retention improves, when engagement increases, when revenue grows beyond targets, that’s alpha.
Carry is the payout — the vendor’s share of the alpha generated. Create value, share value. No value, no bonus.
In short: Beta = cost cover; Alpha = performance; Carry = shared upside.
This structure transforms the vendor-brand relationship from transaction to partnership. Martech companies become growth engineers — operators with skin in the game, incentivised to actually solve problems rather than just provide tools.
ActionAds: The Second Revenue Stream
Alpha also unlocks a new economic engine: ActionAds.
When NeoNet enables cooperative brand recovery, advertising flows through owned channels rather than adtech platforms. This creates revenue — revenue that can be shared between brands and the martech partners who enable it.
Brands earn from their attention assets. Vendors earn from the value they help create. Nobody pays for messages — only for outcomes.
Two revenue streams. Both reward results. Both align with brand success. Unlimited upside for everyone who delivers.
The Full Vision
For brands, the benefit is clear: reduced risk, aligned incentives, and vendors genuinely motivated to deliver results. No more paying full price for platforms that underperform. No more funding the perpetuation of problems.
For martech vendors willing to embrace this model, the opportunity is uncapped. When they genuinely improve customer retention, they share in the value created. The better they perform, the more they earn.
Never pay fixed. Not because fixed fees are inherently wrong, but because they create misaligned incentives. In the Alpha model, everyone wins when brands win.
**
The Complete Picture
NeoMarketing isn’t a product. It’s a complete reimagining of how marketing should work.
Three systems. Three promises. One architecture that finally solves marketing’s three fatal flaws.
Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice. Never Pay Fixed.
The $500 billion lie — that customer loss is inevitable and reacquisition is unavoidable — finally has an answer.
This is NeoMarketing. Welcome to the next era of marketing.
5
The NeoMarketing Architecture
A One-Page Reference
The Problem
Traditional martech has three fatal flaws:
| Flaw | Description | Consequence |
| The Impossible Problem | N=1 personalisation is humanly impossible | Customers receive irrelevant messages; attention drifts |
| The Invisible Problem | Martech doesn’t track attention decay | Customers vanish silently; brands pay to reacquire them |
| The Alignment Problem | Fixed SaaS pricing ignores outcomes | Vendors profit whether brands grow or shrink |
The result: $500 billion in annual AdWaste — money spent reacquiring customers brands already owned.
The Architecture
| System | Segment | Promise | Components |
| Agentic | Best | Never Lose Customers | Marketing Agents, BrandTwins |
| AdZero | Rest/Test | Never Pay Twice | NeoMails, NeoNet |
| Alpha | All (horizontal) | Never Pay Fixed | Carry, ActionAds |
How It Works
- Agentic solves the Impossible Problem. Marketing Agents orchestrate multi-agent workflows at scale. BrandTwins serve as customer-side AI advocates, delivering deep relevance at N=1. Best customers stay Best.
- AdZero solves the Invisible Problem. NeoMails build daily attention rituals that recover the Missing Middle. NeoNet enables cooperative brand recovery through 1:1 matching — without paying the adtech tax.
- Alpha solves the Alignment Problem. Outcome-based pricing (beta + alpha + carry) means vendors profit only when brands profit. ActionAds add a second revenue stream from owned attention.
The Value Exchange
| Stakeholder | Benefit |
| Brands | Customers retained. Attention owned. Economics aligned. Reduced risk. |
| Vendors | Unlimited upside through Carry + ActionAds. Partnership, not transaction. |
The Promise
- Never Lose Customers. Agentic keeps Best customers Best — forever.
- Never Pay Twice. AdZero recovers Rest and Test without funding Adtech.
- Never Pay Fixed. Alpha aligns incentives so everyone wins when brands win.
The One-Liner
Agentic keeps customers. AdZero eliminates reacquisition. Alpha aligns incentives. This is NeoMarketing.
