Naming the Problem
The $500 billion AdWaste crisis is real. Brands are spending vast sums every year not to acquire new customers, but to reacquire customers they already had — customers who once bought, once engaged, once trusted them, and then quietly drifted away. This is not a marginal inefficiency. It is a structural failure in how marketing works.
When I first began writing about this problem, the insight was stark: roughly 70% of what shows up as “acquisition” spend is, in reality, reacquisition. Performance marketing budgets are being spent on customers who already exist in a brand’s database — past buyers, subscribers, app installers, email recipients. Google and Meta are not just helping brands find new customers; they are helping brands win back their own customers at premium prices.
Think about the absurdity. A customer buys from you. You have their email, their purchase history, their preferences. Then you lose their attention through generic messaging and irrelevant campaigns. They don’t unsubscribe. They don’t complain. They just stop opening, stop clicking, stop showing up. Six months later, you’re bidding against competitors in a auction to reach that same person. You’re paying rent to sleep in your own bedroom.
This led to the framing of reacquisition as a hidden tax on growth. If a brand has already paid to acquire a customer once, why should it pay again — and often at a higher price — just to reach the same person? Why should adtech platforms profit from attention decay that martech systems were supposed to prevent?
“ZAP the REACQ” emerged as a rallying cry to name and fight this invisible enemy. It was a way of saying: this is not growth, this is leakage. This is not optimisation, this is waste. If martech did its job — if retention, engagement, and relationship-building actually worked — adtech would not be able to monetise reacquisition at this scale.
Internally, the reacquisition framing resonated. Teams working on CRM, lifecycle marketing, and owned channels immediately recognised the pattern. Retention-focused CMOs nodded. Product teams understood the systemic failure. At conferences, people would approach me afterward and say, “You’ve named something I’ve felt but couldn’t articulate.”
But outside the circle of the converted, something else was happening. The phrase didn’t travel. There was no backlash. No counter-argument. No debate. Just polite disengagement. The idea didn’t spread, not because it was wrong, but because it never quite entered the mental model of the people controlling the largest budgets.
That was the first signal I couldn’t ignore.
The diagnosis was right. The language wasn’t.
