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NeoMarketing
Continuing the tradition I began in 2020, this year-end series serves as a reflection on the past year and a look ahead to the future. [Previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.]
This past year has been rich in ideas—as every year is—but also revealing in its execution challenges. That is the gap I am determined to close going forward. The NeoMarketing vision must now move decisively from theory to reality, because the cost of delay is enormous. AdWaste continues to hobble brands, forcing them to pay recurring “revenue taxes” on every transaction—through rising CAC, marketplace commissions, excessive discounting, and increasingly, Agentic Commerce.
Sustainable, profitable growth demands a fundamental reset. Marketing must reclaim attention as a scarce, ownable asset, evolve intelligence from tools into agents, and rewire its economics to reward outcomes rather than activity. This is where Agentic Marketing—powered by marketing agents and AI Twins—meets email’s reinvention as an attention and engagement surface through NeoMails, Magnets, and Mu. Together, they enable deeper, enduring relationships with Best customers, while systematically recovering Rest and Test customers—without paying twice to reacquire them.
Equally important is fresh thinking on business models. Alpha, with its outcomes-aligned pricing, and ActionAds in Email point to a future where marketing spend becomes an investment, not a tax. These are the ideas I explored throughout the year—and the foundations on which NeoMarketing must now be executed.
Here are the 90 marketing essays I wrote in 2025 (in reverse chronological order):
NeoMarketing: The Infrastructure Layer That Completes the Stack
NeoMarketing: A New Architecture for Marketing
Marketing’s New Mission: Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice.
From Relationship Recession to Attention Renaissance: The Promise of NeoMails
Attention to Intention: Building Customer Agency with NeoMails and BrandTwins
NeoMails: Interactive, Incentivised, Individualised—Insta in the Inbox
NeoMarketing in 10 Numbers
The 80% Attention Churn Crisis—and How NeoMails Solves It
Marketing’s Two Magicians: Agentic and Neo
The NeoMarketing Map: Never Lose Customers, Never Pay Twice
Upstream and Downstream of the Martech Click: Why Attention Beats Interruption
World Models: An Overview and Marketing’s Future
The Brand Daily: Saving the 80% Marketing Ignores
The Segment Martech Forgot: Why Rest Customers Hold the Key to Profitable Growth
Mu Burn: Turning Attention into Value
Can Mu Make Email Invincible?
Circles: The Social Layer of Muniverse
Winning Email’s Next Era: Attention, Actions, Ads
Arc@de in the Inbox: From Digital Drudgery to Daily Delight
Muniverse and the Mailbox
From Profit Bleeding to Profit Recovery: The NeoMarketing Revolution
“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?”
Martech’s Post-SaaS, AI-First Trillion-Dollar Future
From Vibe Coding to Martech’s Reinvention
Customer Journey Algebra: Marketing’s Missing Math
BrandTwins and the Twin Factory Revolution
Solving Marketing’s Impossible Problems
Identifying Marketing’s Impossible Problems
Microdramas: The Next Wave of B2B Storytelling
Making Quizzing Cool Again: The QUEST Revolution
(T)Winning in Marketing’s Agentic Age
A New Email Inbox: From Digital Wasteland to Daily Destination
ZeroBase: A New Business Model for the Agentic Marketing Era
Marketing’s AI-Native Future: The Rise of Agentic Systems
Email’s Twelve: Architects of the Attention Revolution
QUEST: A Killer App for Attention—A Solution for AdWaste
Agentic Marketing Kernel: 10 Essential Engagements to Maximise LTV
Agentic Marketing: The Path to Superintelligence and Super Profits
Email Inbox Attention: Ideas and Innovations
Progency: Delivering Blue-Sky Growth for Marketing’s Mission Impossible
NeoMarketing: Profit Engineering for Rule of 40 and CMO Comeback
NeoMarketing: The ONLY Path to Systematic, Sustainable, Profitable Growth
Progency and the Long Tail of Customers
The Brand Daily: Moments of Magic
The Moat in Progency and NeoN
The Hidden Anatomy of eCommerce Profitability
News Media’s Renaissance: How NeoMails and NeoN Offer a Path to Revival
Progency: Marketing’s Hedge Fund Moment
Progency: Key Ideas Compilation
10 Innovations to Transform Emails into Profit Engines
Progency = McKinsey × Palantir: The Future of Marketing Execution
Progency: An Implementation Playbook
EAGLES: The Six Essential Metrics to Revolutionise eCommerce Profitability
NeoN: The Beta Efficiency Engine
Progency: The Growth Alpha Engine
NeoMarketing’s Mantra: Double the Best, Halve the Waste
Ending AdWaste: Progency for LTV, NeoN for CAC
From SaaS to Success: The Progency Proposition
From CMO to C-Suite MVP: How Progency Transforms the Marketing Leader’s Game
Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess
NeoMarketing’s Triad: NeoMartech, Progency, and MarCo
Progency: The AI-First Agency of the Future
NeoMarketing’s 75 Theses
Two Marketing Moonshots for Retention and Profits: NeoN and Progency
AI-Native Martech: A ‘Department of One’ for the ‘Segment of One’
The Attention Recession: Solving Marketing’s $500 Billion AdWaste Dilemma
Progency: Fusing Martech, AI Agents, and Experts to Eliminate $500 billion AdWaste
From Dark Ages to NeoMarketing: How AI Will Eliminate $500B in AdWaste
NeoMarketing: The Marketing Enlightenment for Brands
NEON: How Emails can Print and Save Money
The Emergence Revolution: How Agentic AI Will Reinvent Marketing Teams
TradMails to NeoMails: Ending AdWaste, Unlocking Marketing Prosperity
Neovism: From Vision to Reality – The Path to Marketing Prosperity
NeoVisM: A New Vision for Marketing, An Antidote to AdWaste
AI and Neo: The Twin Engines of Marketing’s Future
NeoSearch: Reimagining Product Discovery for the AI Age
From Trad to Neo to One: Rethinking B2C Martech with Free-to-Brand Consumer Utilities
AI Twins in Action: Daily Allies for Smarter Marketing and Meaningful Connections
Brain Rot to Brain Gain: Can Microns in NeoMails be the Answer?
NeoMarketing’s Crux: Creating AI-Powered Micro-Moments That Amaze
How Martech Companies Can Usher in the NeoMarketing Era
From AAA to OOO: The NeoMarketing Revolution
NEON: Breaking Free from Big AdTech with an Open Collaborative Network
The NeoAdtech Symphony: 12 Innovations Orchestrating Marketing’s Next Era
MyTwin: The Agentic AI That Powers N=1 Personalisation
Can NeoAdtech create India’s First Trillion Dollar Company?
The NeoAdtech Roadmap: 8 Questions That Will Transform Digital Marketing
NeoAdtech: Breaking Big Adtech with NeoMails and AI Twins
How NeoMails can create an Adtech (and AdWaste) Alternative
AI Predictions for 2025
Only Once in Action: NeoMails, SmartBlocks, and AI Twins
And here are my interviews and talks:
Clearing the BLUR Podcast
Interview with Afaqs
Interview with IMPACT
Interview with Campaign India
Interview with Social Samosa
Agentic Marketing Talk at ET Martech
ET Retail Summit
On NeoMarketing: How AI is Redefining Martech and Adtech
Progress rarely arrives fully formed; it accumulates through iteration, doubt, and return. What emerged over the year was not a single insight, but a coherence that could not have been forced earlier. With the framework now visible, 2026 becomes less about searching for answers and more about building what this journey has made possible.
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Reflections
Here are some interesting vignettes from 2025, in no particular order:
- This was one of the first years in a very long time (except during the pandemic) that I did not make a US trip. In fact my international trips were quite limited – Indonesia in March (customer meetings), Bangkok in April for Netcore’s sales kick-off, and Sri Lanka (Colombo and Bentota) in July and November for customer events. I do miss the thrill of visiting new countries and places – hopefully I will do some more of it in the coming year.
- Much of the travel was domestic this year: Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai – mostly for customer meetings and speaking at events, both of which I like. Preparing presentations every few months helps me refine my own thinking.
- The best part of the year for me was the time spent with Abhishek when he was here in summer. We spent a lot of time watching OTT together – Severance, Slow Horses, Andor, Criminal Justice, Stick, Friends and Neighbors, and our old favourites, Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister. Among these, Slow Horses was a very pleasant surprise. Perhaps I was put off by the name and didn’t really read the reviews, but it’s something we should have watched much earlier!
- One weekend pleasure is now the walk with Bhavana on the Coastal Road Promenade. I had never expected to see something like in my lifetime! The one thing about Mumbai: it’s constantly upgrading. Many infra projects are going on all across the city. As Manu Joseph wrote recently: “South Bombay is the only part of urban India where life has gotten better.”
- My writing with the constantly improving AIs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) has continued apace. I now use the AIs for helping me come up with new ideas and it does this quite well. AIs’ writing of course has improved dramatically – its almost poetic prose at times!
- Deep reading is something I have fallen behind on. While I read my favourite thriller and mystery writers, I need to expand to other genres. I think of this regularly but never get around to doing it!
- One thing I am happy about is that my gym training discipline (3 times a week) has continued well. I do think the muscles are getting stronger – at least from what I see in the weight training!
And here are a few things I am looking forward to in 2026:
- Bringing the NeoMarketing ideas to life. What matters in 2026 is translating frameworks into working systems, experiments into repeatable playbooks, and concepts into outcomes that brands can see, measure, and trust. The goal is to move NeoMarketing from thought leadership to lived practice.
- Scaling Netcore faster with Agentic Marketing and the new ideas. By embedding agents, AI Twins, and outcome-aligned models into Netcore’s core offerings, the focus shifts from incremental growth to compounding impact. 2026 should be about proving that this approach can accelerate growth while improving efficiency and margins.
- Doing something different personally. I had made a list a year ago (Part 3) but didn’t do much. The one thing I would add to that list: Teaching. I want to create space for sharing what I’ve learned more deliberately. Teaching—whether through structured sessions, mentoring, or writing—feels like a natural next step, a way to codify ideas and help others avoid mistakes I’ve made along the way. It is also a discipline that forces clarity, humility, and continuous learning.
Every year brings with it a sense of freshness and anticipation, but there is something uniquely energising about the shift from 31-12 to 1-1. It is a reminder that while ideas may take time to mature, action always begins with a decision to start. I look forward to carrying that intent into 2026—with curiosity, focus, and a bias towards building.
Wish you all a Very Happy 2026.
