Published October 12-16, 2025
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.