Published July 21-24, 2025
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Mission Impossible
History is marked with “mission impossibles”—challenges thought insurmountable, only to be overcome through a mix of fresh thinking and breakthrough technology. What appeared unimaginable at one moment became inevitable the next.
Breaking the Sound Barrier was believed to be fatal. Aircraft would shake violently as they approached Mach 1, leading many to conclude it was a physical wall that couldn’t be breached. But in 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 past the speed of sound. The breakthrough? Understanding that the problem wasn’t structural strength, but the physics of compressibility—requiring aerodynamic redesign, not brute force.
Landing on the Moon felt like an unattainable dream. Rockets were seen as souped-up artillery, not precise machines of interplanetary travel. But by shifting from linear thinking to orbital mechanics and mission systems design, NASA created a new reality. The Moon landing in 1969 wasn’t just a feat of engineering; it was the triumph of systems thinking.
Instant Global Communication was impossible in the era of letters and long-distance calls. Then TCP/IP protocols redefined information transfer—not as something to be physically moved, but transmitted as digital packets. The Internet didn’t just shrink the world; it rewired it.
Pocket Computing sounded absurd. Computers filled rooms and required special environments. Yet, the convergence of miniaturisation, mobile connectivity, and human-centric design created the smartphone—now a supercomputer in every hand.
Self-Driving Cars were dismissed as fantasy until breakthroughs in computer vision, AI, and sensor fusion made autonomy plausible. What had always required human instinct is now performed by real-time decision engines.
Conversing with Machines was pure science fiction. The idea that computers could understand context, engage in nuanced dialogue, or assist with creative thinking appeared impossibly human. For decades, chatbots could barely handle simple customer service queries without frustrating users. But the convergence of transformer architecture, massive datasets, and computational scale created Large Language Models. Today, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and similar AI systems assist with research, writing, coding, and decision-making—compressing days of work into seconds and making human-machine collaboration feel natural.
Every one of these breakthroughs shares a common thread. What appeared to be a technological impossibility was often a thinking failure. When the problem was reframed—when we stopped trying harder and started thinking differently—the “impossible” began to unravel.
In retrospect, many of these moments feel obvious. But only because the mental models that previously constrained us had been shattered. The same pattern holds true in business: what we accept as impossible trade-offs often mask opportunities for breakthrough thinking.
So, what other “mission impossibles” might we be standing before today? In business. In marketing. In growth. Is it truly impossible to scale profitably and sustainably? Or have we simply been solving the wrong problem with the wrong tools?
As with every past impossible, the answer lies not just in technology, but in reimagining what’s possible.
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Marketing’s MI
Today, marketing faces its own “mission impossible” moment—one that has trapped businesses in an unsustainable paradox:
CMOs deliver Growth. CFOs demand Profits. CEOs want both.
This trifecta of expectations sounds reasonable—until you try to meet it. Traditional marketing, with its deep roots in volume-based outreach and acquisition-led strategies, simply cannot reconcile the push for rapid growth with the pull of profit discipline. Business leaders experience this every day: scaling revenue requires ever-increasing marketing spend but rising spend eats into margins. And so, the faster you grow, the more your profits shrink. The more you focus on efficiency, the more growth suffers.
This is not just a budgeting problem. It’s not a matter of tweaking media mix models, refining attribution, or finding the next campaign innovation. It’s a structural failure—a product of how modern marketing systems have evolved in the digital age.
The problem starts with the addiction to acquisition. Marketers are incentivised to chase new customers, often at any cost. Digital ad platforms, with their opaque auctions and rising CPMs, have become essential gatekeepers. Every time a customer clicks, converts, or comes back, brands pay a toll—to Google, Meta, Amazon, or other marketplaces. These platform “revenue taxes” can consume 20–30% of total revenue, especially in B2C and eCommerce businesses.
Even worse, much of this spend is reacquisition—targeting customers the brand already knows, who’ve already bought before. Instead of deepening the relationship through owned channels, brands are paying again and again to re-win attention they once had. It’s a leaky bucket strategy—AdWaste—disguised as growth.
Meanwhile, martech stacks are bloated and underutilised. While companies invest in powerful automation tools and customer data platforms, most only use a fraction of their capabilities. The complexity overwhelms teams, integration takes forever, and the dream of personalisation remains just that—a dream. Campaigns are still built for segments, not individuals. Messages are generic, not contextual. Journeys are broken across channels. The result? Customers tune out. Attention fades. Churn accelerates.
And so the cycle continues: acquisition compensates for poor retention, new spend covers up old inefficiencies, and marketing becomes a black hole of investment with diminishing returns.
This is why the tension between growth and profit feels unresolvable—why it seems like marketing’s own “mission impossible.” It’s not for lack of effort. It’s because the tools, metrics, and mindsets are misaligned with the outcomes business leaders truly want.
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if marketing could be reimagined—not as a cost centre or chaotic collection of campaigns, but as a systematic engine of profitable growth?
That’s the shift we need. That’s the opportunity ahead.
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Five Shifts
To fulfil its true promise as a driver of profitable growth, marketing must evolve beyond the outdated playbooks of the past. Old Marketing cannot deliver what today’s business realities demand.
The mission impossible we’ve described—delivering simultaneous growth and profitability—cannot be solved by optimising existing approaches. Just as supersonic flight wasn’t achieved by building stronger engines but by rethinking aerodynamics, marketing’s breakthrough won’t come from working harder—it will come from thinking differently.
This transformation isn’t about adopting new tools or tactics. It’s about inverting the fundamental assumptions that have governed marketing for two decades. It’s about shifting from a transaction-obsessed, platform-dependent model to a relationship-driven, profit-engineered system.
Marketing has already undergone two major evolutionary leaps. The First Era (1950s-1990s) was Brand Marketing—mass media campaigns that built awareness through creative storytelling but struggled with measurement and accountability. The Second Era (2000s-2020s) became Performance Marketing—digital platforms that solved measurement through data-driven targeting but created platform dependency and the $500 billion AdWaste crisis we face today.
Now begins NeoMarketing—marketing’s third great era.
Old Marketing vs. NeoMarketing: The Five Great Shifts
NeoMarketing achieves the transformation through five fundamental shifts that invert the assumptions underlying traditional (old) marketing.
- Rented Reach –> Owned Attention
Old Marketing: Pay 20-30% revenue tax for rented access through Google, Meta, Amazon, and other marketplaces. Every customer interaction generates platform profit before brand profit.
NeoMarketing: Own direct channels and customer relationships through websites, emails, apps, WhatsApp, and emerging owned media. Control the conversation, timing, and economics of every interaction and engagement.
Impact: End platform dependency, control acquisition costs, improve engagement rates, and reclaim the 20-30% revenue tax flowing to intermediaries.
- Revenue Engineering –> Profit Engineering
Old Marketing: Growth at any cost mentality driven by vanity metrics—impressions, clicks, reach, and top-line revenue regardless of underlying economics.
NeoMarketing: Systematic margin improvement through profit metrics—lifetime value, repeat purchase rates, contribution margins, and Rule of 40 performance.
Impact: Transform marketing from cost centre to profit engine, achieve sustainable growth that strengthens rather than weakens business fundamentals.
- Reacquisition Addiction –> Retention Mastery
Old Marketing: First-sale obsession with 70% of budgets trapped in reacquisition loops—repeatedly paying premium prices to reach customers already in the database.
NeoMarketing: Repeat-sale focus with loyalty and lifecycle programmes that systematically grow customer value over time rather than constantly replacing lost customers.
Impact: Halve AdWaste through retention excellence, double customer lifetime value through systematic relationship building.
- Anonymous Segments –> Identified Individuals
Old Marketing: Third-party cookies, probabilistic targeting, and generic demographic segments that treat customers as statistical approximations rather than unique individuals.
NeoMarketing: First-party data, deterministic matching, and N=1 personalisation that recognises each customer’s unique preferences, behaviours, and value potential.
Impact: True personalisation at scale, shift from broad segments to individual relationships, solve the “Not for Me” problem that drives attention recession.
- Fragmented Tools à AI-First Integration
Old Marketing: Manual operations across fragmented martech stacks requiring constant human intervention, complex integrations, and reactive campaign management.
NeoMarketing: AI agents powering integrated autonomous systems that learn, adapt, and optimise continuously without human bottlenecks or integration complexity.
Impact: Faster execution, lower cost per campaign, always-on optimisation, and systematic improvement rather than periodic campaign bursts.
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4 A’s
The five transitions are not incremental upgrades—they represent a foundational rethinking of how marketing delivers value.
- Old Marketing’s goal: Acquire more customers through volume and transactions.
- NeoMarketing’s goal: Grow customer value through retention, engagement, and profitable relationships.
Customers are no longer targets to be captured—they are value partners to be cultivated.
The result transforms marketing’s role within the business. Rather than being the department that spends money to bring in revenue (cost centre model), marketing becomes the department that engineers profitable relationships that compound over time (profit centre model).
Why Now
What once seemed like marketing’s “mission impossible”—delivering both growth and profitability—is now within reach, thanks to four breakthrough innovations. Together, they form the “4 A’s” of NeoMarketing:
- Agents: The rise of multi-agent systems enables true 1:1 relationships at scale. Through the AI Agents Collective, brands can orchestrate journeys, personalise messages, and optimise campaigns autonomously—making every customer feel like the only customer, without adding human overhead.
- Agency: Progency reinvents the agency model. Instead of charging for time or media, it aligns incentives through outcome-based pricing—earning only when measurable growth is delivered. This shift from input to impact makes the agency a true partner in profit.
- Attention: NeoMails solve the “No Hotline” problem by creating always-on, habit-forming engagement channels. Delivered via email but experienced like apps, they transform the inbox into a daily owned media asset—ending reliance on platforms and reclaiming attention.
- Acquisition: NeoN creates the world’s first brand-to-brand cooperative ad network using authenticated identity targeting. Every participating brand simultaneously makes money as a publisher (monetising their engaged audiences) and saves money as an advertiser (reaching dormant customers at 30-50% lower costs than traditional platforms). This cooperative structure eliminates platform intermediaries whilst delivering precision targeting through deterministic PII matching.
For decades, marketing lacked the capabilities to engineer profits systematically. The data was fragmented. The tools were limited. The models were misaligned. But now—with AI-powered agents, performance-aligned agencies, owned attention channels, and cooperative acquisition networks—NeoMarketing transforms the impossible into the inevitable.
From Vision to Execution
NeoMarketing is not just a theory. It is a blueprint for marketing’s reinvention—anchored in first principles, powered by AI, and driven by outcomes. For leaders tired of choosing between growth and profitability, it offers a third path: systematic, sustainable, profitable growth that achieves Rule of 40 (revenue growth + profit margin) performance.
Every business now faces a fundamental choice: continue paying the platform tax whilst trapped in the growth-versus-profit paradox, or embrace the systematic profit engineering that NeoMarketing makes possible.
History shows us that when breakthrough thinking meets enabling technology, adoption follows one of two paths: lead the transformation and capture competitive advantage, or wait until the new paradigm becomes table stakes.
The challenge is not in recognising the need for change—it’s in committing to it. Whilst competitors remain trapped in AdWaste cycles, early adopters can engineer systematic profit improvements that compound over time. NeoMarketing isn’t just about better marketing—it’s about fundamentally superior business economics.
The tools are here. The opportunity is unprecedented. The moment is now.
The only question left is: will you be a bystander—or a pioneer of the new era?