The Crime
Martech Is Marketing’s $500 Billion Problem
The marketing industry wastes an astonishing $500 billion every year reacquiring customers brands already own.
This is not a rounding error. It is not inefficiency at the margins. It is not the cost of growth. It is the dominant use of marketing budgets: nearly 70% of spend goes into reacquisition, retargeting, and “win-back” advertising — money spent trying to bring back customers who should never have been lost in the first place.
What makes this even more troubling is that the industry claims to have solved this problem. Over the past two decades, brands have invested heavily in martech — CRM systems, customer engagement platforms, retention solutions, CDPs, marketing automation, personalisation engines — all with a singular promise: build better customer relationships.
And yet, customers continue to disappear at an alarming scale.
Research across 250 brands reveals a stark truth: only 20% of engaged customers remain engaged quarter over quarter. Four out of five customers who clicked on an email or WhatsApp will vanish within ninety days. They do not complain. They do not unsubscribe. They simply stop opening, stop clicking, stop caring.
This is not a failure of tools. It is a failure of the system.
Marketing’s problem child
The uncomfortable truth is this: martech has become marketing’s problem child. Powerful, sophisticated, and expensive — yet incapable of growing up. It automates messages, orchestrates journeys, and generates dashboards. But it does not prevent churn. Worse, it has quietly normalised it.
When customers disengage, the response is almost always the same: spend more on ads. Retarget them. Reacquire them. Pay again.
And everyone in the system gets paid.
Martech vendors charge fixed fees based on usage — messages sent, records stored, events captured, journeys triggered — regardless of whether customers stay or leave. Adtech platforms profit handsomely from reacquisition spend. Agencies optimise campaigns to bring customers back into the funnel. The system hums along, even as relationships decay.
This is why the problem persists. AdWaste is not a bug in martech. It is a feature of its economics.
The misalignment at the core
Traditional martech is built on input-based pricing. It sells activity, not outcomes. Volume, not value. Usage, not retention. Vendors get paid when brands do more, not when customers stay longer. As a result, the system is structurally indifferent to churn.
In fact, churn is good for business.
When customers lapse, brands are forced back into the adtech ecosystem. Budgets flow to platforms that promise reach and targeting. Martech continues to bill for campaigns and journeys. Agencies continue to optimise spend. The cycle repeats — quarter after quarter.
From the outside, this looks like execution failure. On the inside, it is perfectly rational behaviour within a broken model.
The inconvenient truth
The industry rarely calls this out because doing so would require admitting something uncomfortable: the very technologies meant to build lasting relationships have helped create an economy where losing customers is acceptable, even profitable.
This is why the problem cannot be solved by better segmentation, more data, or smarter AI layered onto the same foundation. As long as the economics remain unchanged, the outcomes will not change. You cannot fix a system that profits from failure by adding more features to it.
Incremental improvement cannot solve structural misalignment.
What we are witnessing is not a tooling gap. It is a moral and economic failure hiding in plain sight.
The name for this
There is a name for this failure.
It is the money brands waste reacquiring customers they already acquired. It is the cost of normalised churn. It is the silent tax on marketing P&Ls that nobody talks about.
This is AdWaste.
And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
