Thinks 1750

FT: “The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are betting that shopping will become a major application of AI “agents”, in a shift that is set to transform the multibillion-dollar ecommerce sector. OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, and Microsoft have in recent months introduced AI-powered features that allow users to search for products through chatbots, with autonomous agents able to complete orders on behalf of consumers. The rise of AI-powered agents has prompted sellers and brands to rethink how they sell products online, in particular how their products are spotted by AI systems and recommended by chatbots. Advertisers are employing techniques — such as creating longer URLs with keywords or securing a mention on websites considered to be more authoritative by bots — to appear more prominently in AI-generated results.”

WSJ: “Developers who buy AI by the barrel, for apps that do things like make software or analyze documents, are discovering their bills are higher than expected—and growing. What’s driving up costs? The latest AI models are doing more “thinking,” especially when used for deep research, AI agents and coding. So while the price of a unit of AI, known as a token, continues to drop, the number of tokens needed to accomplish many tasks is skyrocketing. It’s the opposite of what many analysts and experts predicted even a few months ago. That has set off a new debate in the tech world about who the AI winners and losers will be. “The arms race for who can make the smartest thing has resulted in a race for who can make the most expensive thing,” says Theo Browne, chief executive of T3 Chat.”

Ashu Garg: “Often, big-P Purpose reflects what we think we should want or what others expect of us. Taken too far, it can become an “achievement treadmill” – an endless chase for external validation that ends in burnout and emptiness. Even when we achieve the goal we’ve chased so intensely, the satisfaction often falls short – especially if we’ve been pursuing affirmation from others at the expense of our own authentic ambitions. Grumet suggests embracing what he calls “little-p” purpose instead. This is not about one big revelation, but a series of small, repeatable actions rooted in things that bring you joy and serve your immediate community. Rather than announcing your Purpose as a one-time epiphany, you live it daily through concrete, intentional practices. While these acts of lowercase-p purpose may seem humble, over time they can compound into something extraordinary.”

Hemant Taneja: “If you think about the last technology cycle, with social media, we applied that technology to society in a pretty aggressive way. While it’s had a lot of positive impact, for the business models to work, social media also preyed on polarisation which had big consequences in society. That is a global trend. You can go to every country and see polarisation and unrest, a lot of it caused by the fact that the technology cycle and the productivity gains that came from it were put in the hands of very few. It became a world of the haves and the have-nots. If you think about what AI does, it takes that productivity and further concentrates it, into the hands of the very few. And this time it upends the labour productivity equation. If we’re not intentional about thinking about inclusive prosperity, then the people are going to be much unhappier than they were in this last cycle. Capitalism is a privilege: it has to work for society or we won’t be allowed to practice it. Being careful about the role of applied AI in society is really important.”

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 5)

The Cure Cannot Come from Within

We’ve identified the enemy, and it is us. TradMartech—let’s call it what it is, Traditional Martech—isn’t the victim of Adtech; it’s the accomplice. Every abandoned customer, every failed retention campaign, every complex platform that requires armies to operate—these aren’t bugs in the system. They’re features of a model that profits from its own failures.

The Indictment Is Complete

The evidence is damning:

  • TradMartech ignored 80% of customers while obsessing over 20%
  • It promised personalisation but delivered mass stereotypes
  • It charged for inputs while ignoring outcomes
  • It created complexity that only specialists could navigate
  • It abandoned the Rest and Test, forcing brands to buy them back

If Adtech is the tax collector, TradMartech is the tax enabler. And brands are the ones paying—$500 billion annually in unnecessary reacquisition costs, bleeding profits to fix a problem that shouldn’t exist.

Reform Is Impossible, Revolution Is Inevitable

You cannot reform a system that profits from its dysfunction. TradMartech vendors make money whether retention works or not. Send a million ignored emails? Revenue. Customers disengaging? Still revenue. Features unused? Doesn’t matter—revenue.

This is why every attempt to “fix” Martech fails. Better segmentation, more features, fancier dashboards—these are bandages on a corpse. The patient isn’t sick; it’s dead. You don’t cure death with medicine. You need replacement.

What’s needed isn’t better Martech but anti-Martech. Not an evolution but a revolution. Not a company but a movement—a constellation of innovations that attack every point of failure simultaneously:

  • TradMartech charges for inputs → The revolution guarantees outcomes
  • TradMartech focuses on Best customers → The revolution champions the Lost 90%
  • TradMartech adds complexity → The revolution delivers AI-powered simplicity

The Strategic Enemy of TradMartech

This revolution has a philosophy. It believes that marketing shouldn’t be a cost centre haemorrhaging profits to reacquisition. It should be a profit engine that grows revenue from customers you never lose. It follows the OONA principle: Only Once, Never Again—acquire customers once, keep them forever.

The revolution isn’t a single solution but a constellation of breakthroughs:

  • Where TradMartech lost attention, new innovations create daily engagement
  • Where TradMartech created 10 segments for 10 million customers, new systems create 10 million segments of one
  • Where TradMartech failed at retention, new models deliver growth (Alpha)
  • Where TradMartech abandoned customers, new solutions prevent churn entirely
  • Where TradMartech fed Adtech, new networks starve it of oxygen

Each element of this constellation shares a common mission: to be the strategic enemy of TradMartech. Not to improve it, but to replace it. Not to compete within its category, but to create the category that makes it extinct.

The War Declaration

Laura Ries teaches us that breakthrough brands need a strategic enemy—a clear foe that crystallises their mission. TradMartech has been identified as that enemy. Not Google, not Meta, but the very marketing technology that was supposed to be the solution.

The battle lines are drawn:

  • TradMartech vs. what comes next
  • Complexity vs. simplicity
  • Abandonment vs. retention
  • Cost centre vs. profit engine
  • The disease vs. the cure

In the next essay, I’ll reveal the constellation that’s forming to wage this war—the companies, technologies, and philosophies united in their opposition to everything TradMartech represents. You’ll discover how attention, automation, accountability, and advocacy combine to create the systematic cure for marketing’s systematic failure.

The enemy has been unmasked. The revolution is building. And TradMartech’s days of feeding off its own failures are numbered.

Because the cure cannot come from within. It must come from those willing to be the strategic enemy of an entire industry. Those willing to fight not for market share within a broken category, but for the creation of its replacement.

The war isn’t in distant lands. It’s with our own house. And in the next essay, you’ll see how we plan to win it and help brands never lose customers and regain their profits. The cure has a name. The enemy should be afraid.

Thinks 1749

Benjamin Manning and John Horton: “Useful social science theories predict behavior across settings. However, applying a theory to make predictions in new settings is challenging: rarely can it be done without ad hoc modifications to account for setting-specific factors. We argue that AI agents put in simulations of those novel settings offer an alternative for applying theory, requiring minimal or no modifications. We present an approach for building such “general” agents that use theory-grounded natural language instructions, existing empirical data, and knowledge acquired by the underlying AI during training. To demonstrate the approach in settings where no data from that data-generating process exists—as is often the case in applied prediction problems—we design a highly heterogeneous population of 883,320 novel games. AI agents are constructed using human data from a small set of conceptually related, but structurally distinct “seed” games. In preregistered experiments, on average, agents predict human play better than (i) game-theoretic equilibria and (ii) out-of-the-box agents in a random sample of 1,500 games from the population. For a small set of separate novel games, these simulations predict responses from a new sample of human subjects better even than the most plausibly relevant published human data.” [Via Tyler Cowen]

WSJ: “The pursuit of scientific knowledge is beautiful, assert Alan Lightman, an astrophysicist teaching at MIT, and Martin Rees, who is Britain’s former Astronomer Royal. Science is important, they explain, it is fun, and, if you’re a scientist, it might just hand you the keys to the deepest mysteries of the universe. But scientific inquiry is also, insist Messrs. Lightman and Rees, entirely value-free. It has no sense of good or bad, right or wrong: “It is we humans who impose those values.” Written at a time when skepticism about science is surging, “The Shape of Wonder” sets out to remind us of the hardworking human beings who devote their lives to it. The authors re-create simple experiments, such as dropping a weight from different heights and measuring the time it takes to reach the ground, to illustrate how researchers make predictions about the world and shape them into laws, which are themselves always subject to further review. Science thus moves forward, allowing human beings to flourish—so the authors believe—even in a world gripped by environmental challenges and proliferating pathogens.”

Macy CEO Tony Spring: “I read every customer note that I receive. Listening to feedback is one of the most important ways we can improve and grow our business.”

Marc Benioff: “We are at the beginning of the Agentic Era, the most significant transformation of work in history. For the first time, machines can perform not only repetitive tasks, but cognitive work once reserved for humans. These AI agents–which can reason, adapt, and act on their own–are already reshaping thousands of companies and will ultimately touch every job and every person.”

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 4)

What Martech Created

To understand why AdWaste became a $500 billion plague, we need to look not at Google or Meta but at the failings of Martech itself. The uncomfortable truth is simple: customers weren’t stolen by Adtech—they were abandoned by Martech.

The Mirage of Personalisation

Martech promised one-to-one experiences. The reality? Most platforms still deliver eight or ten crude segments for millions of customers. “Women 25–34” or “loyal high-spenders” isn’t personalisation—it’s stereotyping at scale.

Consider the BRTN framework that reveals the true customer distribution: 20% Best customers generate 60% of revenue, 40% Rest customers contribute 30%, and 40% Test customers (dormant or churned) account for just 10%. Yet Martech treats them all with the same blunt instruments. For the Best customers, these campaigns may still convert—they’d likely buy anyway. But for the silent majority—the Rest and Test customers who make up 80% of databases—this broad-brush approach feels irrelevant. They disengage, drift away, and eventually vanish into “One and Done”.

Focus on the Easy Wins

Platforms and marketers alike doubled down on what was easiest: talking to customers who would likely buy anyway. Best customers get the best campaigns because they make the numbers look good. It’s the marketing equivalent of fishing in a stocked pond—impressive catches, but not sustainable growth.

But ignoring the Rest meant ignoring tomorrow’s revenue. The “missing middle”—those who bought once or twice but never returned—became a lost generation of customers. For every brand, this group is the single largest profit leak. And it’s not just lost revenue; it’s the trigger for the reacquisition spiral. When a Rest customer becomes a Test customer (dormant), the only path back is through expensive ads.

Complexity Masquerading as Capability

Another promise Martech made was simplicity. In practice, platforms became so bloated that 60–70% of features go unused. Dashboards multiply, journeys fragment, integrations break, and marketers need armies of specialists just to run basic campaigns. The average enterprise uses tens of marketing tools, yet customer engagement keeps declining.

Faced with this complexity, many brands default to the easy alternative: handing more budget to Google and Meta for quick traffic fixes. When retention tools become too difficult to use, acquisition platforms win by default. Facebook’s ad manager, for all its flaws, at least delivers predictable results with minimal expertise required.

Input Pricing, Zero Accountability

Perhaps the most damaging flaw is how Martech charges. Vendors bill by inputs—emails sent, monthly active users, API calls made—not by outcomes. This model rewards volume, not value. The incentive is to send more campaigns, not to create more conversions.

This creates a perverse dynamic: Martech profits whether retention works or not. Send a million emails that everyone ignores? That’s revenue for the platform. Meanwhile, brands are flooded with vanity metrics—open rates, click rates, engagement scores—that mask the fundamental failure: customers are leaving.

The AdWaste Equation

Put these failures together and the equation becomes inevitable:

  • Failed personalisation → 80% of customers ignored
  • Focus on Best → Rest and Test abandoned (the 80% who need nurturing)
  • Complexity → 60–70% features unused, adoption stalled
  • Input pricing → volume without value, no accountability

The outcome is systematically lost customers. And every lost customer is worth their weight in gold to Google and Meta, who happily sell them back through search and social ads at 5–7x the cost of retention. This is why 70% of marketing budgets now flow to reacquisition. Not because Adtech outsmarted Martech, but because Martech left the door wide open.

The Double Taxation of Failure

Think about the economics: every retention failure isn’t just lost revenue, it’s double taxation. First, brands lose the customer’s lifetime value—all their future purchases vanish. Then brands pay again—often more than the original customer acquisition cost—to bring the lost customers back through ads. Because if they don’t, their competitors will. Either way, the profit vanishes into what becomes a permanent leak in the brand’s P&L.

A typical D2C brand with 100,000 customers faces this reality: 20,000 Best customers keep buying, 40,000 Rest customers are slowly disengaging, and 40,000 Test customers are already gone. Martech focuses on the 20,000. Adtech profits from the 80,000. It’s a perfect parasitic relationship—Martech’s neglect becomes Adtech’s nourishment. And the brand bleeds money trying to refill a bucket that Martech keeps emptying.

Martech didn’t just fail to keep customers; it created the very conditions that allowed AdWaste to thrive. By ignoring the missing middle, focusing on features and delinking itself from RoI, hiding behind complexity, and rewarding inputs instead of outcomes, Martech effectively became Adtech’s greatest ally. [It is like in politics where a weak Opposition leader becomes the best friend of the ruling party.]

The result? A half-trillion-dollar tax on growth, paid willingly by brands desperate to win back the very customers they already had. And Martech, the supposed solution, was the cause all along.

Thinks 1748

David Brooks: “I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.””

WSJ speaks to David McCullough: ““At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. History encourages “a sense of proportion about life,” gives us a sense of scale. “What history teaches, it teaches mainly by example.” To live in an era of momentous change and huge transitions is to experience great pressure. Knowing history, reading it, imparts “a sense of navigation,” a new realization of what we’ve been through and are made of. Those who came before us were tough: “There’s no one who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell.” In the end, knowing history “is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive.””

William Boyd: “The tropes of spy fiction are something that everybody can connect with very easily, whereas the tropes of horror or science fiction or ‘romantasy’ are something alien. We’ve all betrayed people and been betrayed and we all lie and we all pretend to be other people that we’re not.”

NYTimes: ““How was your weekend?” “Good, but I spent way too much time watching people make tiny food on TikTok.” “Whoa, like … dollhouse-size?” “Yes! If you want to learn to make a lasagna in a bottle cap, let me know.” “That’s hilarious! We could organize a tiny food potluck — and fit the entire spread on this coaster!” “Ha! And we’d need tiny furniture, too. Should we ask that guy over there wearing Carhartt to build it?” Our research shows that this sort of riffing pays off…Our aim in conversation, then, shouldn’t be to mine for surface-level commonalities or go on a charm offensive. Instead, we should ask ourselves, “What could we create together in this moment?””

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 3)

The Enemy Is Us

With this background, we can return to the question that started it all: What does Netcore—or any Martech company—truly stand against?

The conventional answer would be predictable: we stand against Adtech’s exploitation, against wasted budgets, against the complexity of modern marketing. But these are symptoms, not enemies. They’re problems, not adversaries. And as Ries makes clear, you can’t rally troops against a problem—you need a villain with a face, a foe worth fighting.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that emerged from that colleague’s question: if we apply Ries’s framework honestly, Martech’s strategic enemy isn’t Google or Meta. It isn’t even AdWaste.

Martech’s strategic enemy is Martech itself.

This isn’t wordplay or contrarianism. It’s a sober recognition of reality. Consider the evidence: Martech promised personalisation, delivered mass segmentation. Promised retention, chased only the easy buyers. Promised simplicity, buried brands in complexity. Promised accountability, hid behind input pricing.

Every one of these failures created the vacuum that Adtech filled. When Martech failed to retain customers, brands had no choice but to reacquire them through Google. When Martech ignored the “Rest” and “Test” customers—that crucial 80% who aren’t yet loyal—it forced brands into expensive remarketing campaigns. When Martech made itself so complex that brands needed armies of specialists, it made the simplicity of Facebook and Instagram ads irresistible.

Take Ria, a customer who bought once from a D2C beauty brand. Martech labelled her “female, 25-34, urban” and sent her the same email as 50,000 others. She ignored it. After ten generic emails, she vanished. Six months later, that same brand paid Google to show her an ad for the product she’d already bought. That’s not Adtech’s victory—it’s Martech’s surrender.

We need to fight against our own industry’s failures—the broken promises, the abandoned customers, the complexity that killed adoption, the input-based pricing that destroyed accountability. We need to stand against the very thing we’ve been.

This is what will make our position unique and powerful. We must not be another Martech company claiming to be 10% better. We must become the anti-Martech, the cure for what marketing technology has become. As Ries writes, “The mind understands opposition faster than superiority.” By positioning ourselves against Martech itself, we can achieve the clarity she advocates.

Think about the implications through three fundamental inversions:

Traditional Martech focuses on the Best customers; we champion the Lost 90%. Traditional Martech charges for software; we guarantee outcomes. Traditional Martech adds complexity; we deliver radical simplicity.

These aren’t incremental improvements—they’re categorical rejections of everything Martech represents.

This isn’t about internal reform or gradual improvement. You can’t fix something that’s fundamentally broken. You can’t iterate your way out of a category failure. You don’t cure a disease by treating symptoms—you replace the failing organ. When an entire industry has become the problem, the only solution is transplant, not treatment.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Netflix didn’t improve Blockbuster; it eliminated it. And as Ries documents, breakthrough brands don’t iterate on existing categories—they replace them by defining clear enemies. Salesforce didn’t build better CRM software; it positioned against software itself with “No Software” as its rallying cry, moving everything to the cloud. Tide didn’t improve soap; it declared war on soap itself with synthetic detergents. Tropicana didn’t make better frozen concentrate; it stood against frozen entirely with “not from concentrate.”

Each identified their category’s fundamental limitation and built the alternative. They didn’t fight for position within an existing market—they created markets that made the old ones obsolete.

That’s what Next Marketing must represent—not better Martech, but Martech’s replacement. We’re not fighting for market share within a broken category. We’re creating the category that makes the current one extinct.

The enemy is us. And recognising that changes everything about how we build, sell, and position our future.

Thinks 1747

Adam Tooze: “The key difference between 2022 and now is more subtle. We need to look to the very definition of crisis to understand it. The term, common to many western languages, derives from ancient Greek medical doctrine. It refers to the moment in the course of a disease when the patient reaches a turning point between life and death. Either the fever breaks, or it proceeds to a terminal conclusion. A crisis, therefore, requires two things: a body, in the broad sense, an integral unit that is still alive but whose existence is threatened; and a threat that has a naturalised logic of progression. One reason that crisis seems less apt a term in the current moment is that the disruptions are so intentional.”

WSJ: “In “The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China,” Ms. Jia and Mr. Li (with their contributing author, Claire Cousineau) explain why the test so dominates China’s education system and society. The authors direct this lively and informative volume at foreign readers who want to learn about gaokao culture, elements of which might appear in local American schools as large numbers of Chinese students go abroad to study. The gaokao-focused education system, we are told, is “a centralized hierarchical tournament” that promotes fewer and fewer students with each round. It is the epitome of a zero-sum game, children competing against their neighbors for one of the quota-allocated spots at the next level. By high school, those students most intent on achieving a high gaokao score will dedicate endless days to practice tests, training their minds for the marathon exam looming at the end of their secondary education. More than 10 million students take the gaokao each year, with only 500,000 entry spots available at the country’s officially ranked 100 most-elite universities. A single point in either direction can seal a student’s fate.”

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: “AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.” More: “He makes a passionate pitch for how we might overcome some of the risks of modern AI systems, developed by “ambitious and competitive men” who envision AI becoming a personal assistant. That sounds benign enough, but not to Hinton. “When the assistant is much smarter than you, how are you going to retain that power? There is only one example we know of a much more intelligent being controlled by a much less intelligent being, and that is a mother and baby . . . If babies couldn’t control their mothers, they would die.” Hinton believes “the only hope” for humanity is engineering AI to become mothers to us, “because the mother is very concerned about the baby, preserving the life of the baby”, and its development. “That’s the kind of relationship we should be aiming for.””

NYTimes: “In mid-2015, the Chinese government announced a program called “Made in China 2025.” It would provide companies in 10 strategic industries with large, low-interest loans from state-owned investment funds and development banks, assistance in acquiring foreign competitors and generous subsidies for scientific research. At the time, the stated goal was that Chinese companies would control 80 percent of the domestic markets of those industries by 2025. That effort has largely succeeded, Dr. Wong Leung and other analysts said. Chinese clean tech companies have come to dominate both domestic and international markets. While Western countries like the United States and Australia pioneered now-widespread technologies like solar panels, batteries and supercapacitors (which are like batteries, only smaller, and provide quick bursts of energy), China is now building on those designs and creating new, groundbreaking versions.”

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 2)

The Strategic Enemy

Let’s begin with a brief discussion about the book which set off my new thinking. Here is what Laura Ries writes in her book, The Strategic Enemy:

A strategic enemy is an oppositional force that your brand or category stands against. It could be a competitor, convention, or concept. Having a strategic enemy will force you to clearly define what you are not, which will enable consumers to more easily understand what you are.

…When you define what you’re against, it becomes clear what you are for. Instead of making claims your brand is better, it’s better to contrast with a strategic enemy how your brand is different. The mind understands opposition faster than superiority. Positioning your brand against a strategic enemy elevates your brand from “just another choice” into the right choice. It forces your brand to sharpen its focus to become a brand worth fighting for. The enemy could be a competitor, but it could also be another category, convention, or concept.

…Finding an enemy forces your brand to focus on a specific idea. This focus will energize the company and consumers alike to rally around your cause. A strategic enemy must be instantly accepted as a worthy adversary. The contrast should be simple and clear. It is best done using an indisputable difference.

…Go out and pick your fight. Just remember, the concept of the strategic enemy is not about conflict for conflict’s sake. It’s about creating a contrast to bring clarity, focus, and commitment to your own brand. Positioning against a clearly defined enemy…will give your brand the sharpness and emotional charge necessary to cut through the clutter and be accepted into the mind of the prospect to become a brand worth fighting for.

Laura Ries added in an interview with John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing): “Here’s the biggest problem is most companies aren’t focused enough to have an enemy. They do too many things in too many markets and try to appeal to too many people. When you do that, you don’t have a focus and without a focus, you don’t have an enemy. So sometimes the first thing is looking at yourself and saying, what can we say no to? If you say no to something that tends to put you in a direction where you can find an enemy.”

A comment from The Financial Brand: “Her antidote is intentionally counterintuitive: stop trying to be “better,” and instead become unmistakably different by defining, and then defeating, a single, visible foe…Ries argues that when brands rally around an “enemy,” and reinforce the fight with a memorable “visual hammer,” they earn a permanent slot in the customer’s mind.”

Thinks 1746

Economist: “Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear…There will be other losses from a reading decline. Few engines of social mobility are more effective than reading: just ask the Scottish shepherds. Rich children may do it more, but reading is an egalitarian invention. No one—not your nanny, not your tutor, your friends or your posh school—can impel you to devour a book except you. Reading is not merely a tool: it is also one of life’s great pleasures, as Dickens knew well. As Joe, the kind blacksmith in “Great Expectations”, says: “Give me a good book…and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better.” Once people forget that, things really will feel bleak.”

WSJ: “At its most basic level, much like eBay, livestreaming lets anyone sell. Sellers stream videos on their phone, tablet or computer via apps like Tilt or Whatnot. In real time, they talk viewers through items they’re selling from the intimacy of their bedroom or a high-production set. Shoppers get answers to their questions in a live-chat before bidding on an item in an auction or committing to a purchase. In the more corporate version, big brands like Poshmark, Amazon and eBay itself now all offer livestream shopping, often with “known quantity” hosts.”

Arnold Kling on reading with AI: “Reading a non-fiction book from cover-to-cover is not efficient. I used to say that I read books “from the outside in.” I look at the book flap to find out about the author, who wrote the blurbs, and the subject matter of the book. Then I read the introduction and conclusion in order to get the main ideas. If I have read something by a different author that seems relevant, I look for that author in the index, and I head to those pages… I start by asking the AI to summarize the key themes of the book. For each theme that the AI lists, I stop and try to put it into my own words. I test my understanding by feeding my words into the AI, in order get confirmation that my interpretation is correct. Another way that I ensure understanding is to suggest possible examples or ask the AI to provide examples.”

Bloomberg: “India’s four-year-old mission to develop a local semiconductor industry is gaining momentum, suggests government data. To date, there are 10 semiconductor projects; $18 billion in investment commitments; subsidies of over $7 allocated; 23 chip design projects sanctioned; a new semiconductor-led technical education curriculum, and over 60,000 students under various training programs.”

“Who Lost My Customers and Killed My Profits?” (Part 1)

A Question

For years, I’ve fought against the $500 billion AdWaste plague—the staggering burn of budgets reacquiring customers brands already knew. In presentation after presentation, I’ve shown how 70% of marketing budgets are wasted on reacquisition—much of it becoming ‘revenue taxes’ paid to Google and Meta for the privilege of finding lost customers. This crusade against AdWaste has become my calling card, the foundation of my thinking about modern marketing’s fundamental dysfunction.

But recently, that foundation was shaken.

I was reading Laura Ries’s provocative new book, The Strategic Enemy, when her central thesis stopped me cold. Ries argues that breakthrough companies don’t succeed by being better—they succeed by defining and defeating a strategic enemy. Uber didn’t just offer better taxis—it declared war on the taxi industry. Tesla didn’t just make electric cars—it declared war on combustion engines. The enemy crystallises the mission, rallies the troops, and clarifies the value proposition.

This made me confront an uncomfortable question: What does Netcore truly stand against?

The obvious answer seemed clear—we fight the Adtechs, those profit-devouring giants who’ve turned customer reacquisition into a trillion-dollar tax on business growth. For years, I’ve positioned them as marketing’s great villain, the strategic enemy that must be defeated.

Then a colleague asked me a question that changed everything.

“What if you’ve got it backwards?”

He continued with surgical precision: “What if Adtechs aren’t the disease but merely the symptom? What if the real story is that Martech platforms—companies like ours—created the very problem we claim to solve? Think about it: brands only pay the Google tax because their marketing technology failed to keep customers engaged. They only need reacquisition because retention didn’t work.”

The implications were staggering. If Martech had delivered on its promise—if it had truly enabled brands to build lasting customer relationships—would the AdWaste problem even exist? When brands ask, “Who lost my customers, moved my profits, and killed my future?” perhaps they shouldn’t point at Mountain View or Menlo Park. Perhaps they should look at their marketing clouds, their customer engagement platforms, their entire Martech stack that promised retention but delivered abandonment.

Every failed retention campaign, every ignored customer, every broken journey creates another profitable transaction for Google and Meta.

Martech hasn’t been fighting Adtech; it’s been feeding it.

This revelation transforms everything. It means the enemy isn’t external—it’s internal. The call isn’t coming from Silicon Valley; it’s coming from inside the house. We haven’t been David fighting Goliath; we’ve been Goliath’s arms dealer.

If this hypothesis is correct—and I believe it is—then NeoMarketing isn’t just the antidote to Adtech. It’s the cure for Martech’s disease. And that single shift changes everything—how we build, how we position, and how we deliver the future of marketing.