The Engine of Waste

1. The Quiet Revolt

The most honest feedback on your marketing doesn’t come from your analytics dashboard. It comes from the ad blocker installed on 42% of the world’s computers.

This isn’t user preference. This is a global, coordinated, and near-instinctual revolt against an entire industry. People are not just ignoring marketing; they are deploying active technological countermeasures to keep it out of their lives. The primary motivations aren’t just annoyance, but fundamental concerns about privacy (40% of users) and security (30%).

Even when the message gets through the firewall, it rarely gets through the user’s cognitive filter. “Banner blindness” is a well-documented phenomenon where users have trained themselves to unconsciously ignore anything on a webpage that looks like an ad. The average click-through rate for a banner ad is now a statistical rounding error, at 0.05%.

What this data shows is that we are trying to talk to people who have put on industrial-grade, noise-canceling headphones.

2. The Authenticity Tax

There is a 27-point gap between the percentage of C-level executives who believe their customers trust them (79%) and the percentage of consumers who actually do (52%). This gap isn’t a perception problem; it is an authenticity tax, and it is brutally high.

The marketing industry has systematically destroyed its most valuable asset: trust. They have done this by attempting to simulate values they do not hold. This is often called “woke-washing,” but a better term might be “purpose-washing.” It’s the act of using social causes as a costume.

The consequences are predictable. When Bud Light partnered with a trans influencer, it alienated its core audience. When it wavered, it alienated the community it was trying to court. It was a masterclass in trying to be everything to everyone and ending up as nothing to anyone, vaporizing $27 billion in market value in the process.

Consumers, especially younger ones, can detect inauthenticity with astonishing accuracy. Attempting to simulate values is more damaging than having no stated values at all.

3. The Leaky Engine

What if one of the world’s largest advertisers, Procter & Gamble, just… stopped spending a hundred million dollars on digital ads?

In 2017, they did exactly that. They cut over $100M from their digital ad spend, citing a “murky, non-transparent, inefficient and fraudulent” media supply chain.

The result? The CFO reported that the cut had no discernible impact on their growth rate. His conclusion was blunt: the spending they cut was “largely ineffective.”

This wasn’t an anomaly. It was a clear signal of the two great leaks in the engine of modern marketing.

First, ad fraud. The industry is projected to lose $100 billion to it in 2024. A significant portion of any ad budget is simply stolen by bots and non-human traffic before it even has a chance to be ignored by a real person.

Second, walled gardens. The digital advertising market is not a free market. It’s a duopoly run by Google and Meta, who function as gatekeepers. They control the data, the pricing, and the measurement, operating with near-total opacity. The cost of advertising on these platforms is artificially inflated, not by demand, but by their monopoly power. Courts are now beginning to officially recognize this fact.

So when a company buys digital ads, a large part of its budget is first siphoned off by fraud, and the remainder is used to pay an inflated “monopoly tax” to the platforms. The P&G experiment simply proved what many suspected: they stopped paying the fraud tax and the monopoly tax, and their business was just fine.

4. The Complexity Ratchet

The system is so broken that even the “solutions” have become part of the problem.

Every failure of the marketing machine gives birth to a new layer of complexity, sold as a silver bullet.

• Exposure metrics failed? We invented “attention metrics,” which are impossible to standardize and hard to scale.
• Third-party cookies were killed by privacy laws? We invented “data clean rooms,” which are walled gardens within walled gardens, suffering from poor interoperability and low match rates.
• Third-party data is gone? We now preach the gospel of “zero-party data,” which is incredibly difficult and expensive to collect at scale.
• Digital ads are being ignored? We now pivot to “experiential marketing” and “community,” which are notoriously difficult to scale and whose ROI is almost impossible to prove.

This is a complexity ratchet. Each new solution adds another layer of consultants, software, and acronyms, making the entire process more baroque and unmanageable, without ever addressing the core problem: the fundamentally adversarial relationship between a company that wants to interrupt and a user who wants to be left alone.

5. What This Means

If an engine is structurally designed to leak fuel, the solution is not to get a more efficient fuel pump. The solution is not to invent a new type of fuel.

The solution is to build a different kind of engine.

The old engine required you to shout at millions to be heard by a few. It forced you into an adversarial relationship with your users and made you pay a steep tax to monopolies for the privilege.

The new engine doesn’t need to shout. It’s not based on interruption, but on providing value so clear and information so well-structured that the right people are drawn to it. The challenge is not in raising your voice, but in the rigorous, upfront work of modeling your knowledge so that a machine can understand it as deeply as you do.

And that is what we will discuss next.