Fighting Invisible Enemies
You cannot fight what dashboards don’t name.
That realisation took time to sink in. Marketers don’t wake up thinking about “reacquisition.” Their platforms don’t show it. Their spreadsheets don’t track it. Their attribution models label every conversion the same way: new. If a customer converts through a paid ad today, the system does not ask whether that customer once opened an email, once installed an app, or once bought six months ago. History is flattened. Memory is erased.
Arguing against this worldview is extraordinarily hard, because it requires arguing against the marketer’s own data. And dashboards always win. Not because they’re right, but because they’re there — glowing on the screen in every weekly review, every board presentation, every budget negotiation.
“AdWaste” and “REACQ” were accurate, but they were revealed truths. They required explanation. They required education. Worse, they required marketers to accept a diagnosis that their own tools did not reflect. That’s a high bar to clear before attention is even earned.
There’s a difference between a revealed truth and a felt pain. A revealed truth is something you prove to people. A felt pain is something they already experience. Revealed truths require teaching. Felt pains require only naming.
Reacquisition is a revealed truth. Rising CAC is a felt pain.
Education-first narratives are seductive, especially for people who like ideas. But they invert the natural order of persuasion. They demand belief before attention. In a world saturated with messages, that order rarely works.
I realised I was asking marketers to accept my diagnosis before I had earned their attention.
There was also a more structural problem. The people who most viscerally understood the reacquisition argument were retention teams — CRM managers, lifecycle marketers, email specialists. They understood because they lived it. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: retention teams don’t control the big budgets. They operate on roughly 10% of marketing spend. The other 90% sits with Acquisition — performance marketers, growth leads, the people who spend real money on Google and Meta every day.
By speaking primarily to retention, I was preaching to the converted. By using language unfamiliar to acquisition leaders, I was never really entering the room where decisions were made.
I was right about the disease. I was wrong about the door.
