The Flash Flood of Marketing Complexity

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I once wrote a dissertation titled like this: “Subconscious Repetition in Ancient Greek Literature.” And then defended it successfully in front of a panel of graduate professors. (I actually found a reference to it in internet archives just now!) But what actually works in marketing is largely a mystery to me, in spite of doing my best to understand it.

Now, you might say that’s more a reflection on me than the complexity of marketing, but play along just for a few minutes.

Marketing Effectiveness is in Crisis

Marketing has become so complex that my brain can’t unpack even a portion of it most days.

It’s too complex for yours, too. It’s one of the big mysteries of life (why we buy things; how we establish new patterns; how we change our minds), and you may understand your little narrow slice of your specialized world, like I did mine back then, but you really only know that field better than your generalist brothers and sisters. There’s still a deep mystery around most things marketing. (Because it involves humans: duh.)

And if I can tempt you into a corporate confession with me, a lot of what you recommend to clients is just “the stuff we always recommend.” Attribution is hazy, even after a more digital world was supposed to unlock all those tight connections. It just didn’t. Instead, it created complexity that throws a cloud of doubt over everything. Meta and Google and Nielsen and Cannes want to draw a straight line of cause and effect between what you do and the sound of cash registers, but in the real world, you’d be a hell of a lot richer if you really knew what worked and what didn’t.

Letting Others Think for Us

So I’ve been working on this thought and then this week I came across this article by Paul Worthington:

He starts with this:

In 18 months, marketing will run on someone's theory of truth. The only question is whose.

Currently, AI is infiltrating every corner, including creative automation, synthetic research, customer analytics, and campaign optimization. Most CMOs see the opportunity for efficiency gains and dive in. But they're missing the real game being played.

Every AI system encodes a worldview. When we train it on our data, we're not just teaching it what we do—we're teaching it what we believe. About customers. About value. About what marketing is for. And once those beliefs become encoded, they become invisible, automatic, and nearly impossible to change.

The opportunity is to create epistemological sovereignty—to own our own theory of marketing truth, which is poised to become a powerful form of competitive advantage. But only if we recognize what's happening before it's too late.

Adrift on a Sea of Uncertainty

Later he adds:

Marketing?

We disagree on how marketing creates value.
We disagree on what constitutes proof.
We disagree on what's real, what's noise, or what's noise disguised as math, insight, or a creative breakthrough.

Shit, we can’t even agree on what a customer is.

To illustrate the problems specifically, he notes:

Consider what's already happening:

Marketers are drowning in “dumb data” creating decision incoherence
66% report struggling to demonstrate the impact of campaigns
74% of global marketers are not confident in their audience data
70% of marketing professionals have experienced burnout in the past 12 months
50% report experiencing emotional exhaustion

Imagine encoding this confusion into systems that will confidently make wrong decisions thousands of times per second. Forever.

Bring a Perspective to Data

I think he’s right, and I think you might want to hit pause on this week’s thoughts and at least skim the full article. It’s one of the best articles I’ve read in the last few months, and here’s the takeaway for me: the only way to make sense of the endless recommendations in the world of marketing is to approach every one of them with a provisional thesis. This applies to your agency, as well as to the recommendations you make to clients.

That means you’ll want to:

Read widely.
Develop a coherent “theory/model of change” that helps you sort through the mass of data that drowns us every day.
Articulate this into a written point of view.
Ensure that your team lets it permeate every corner of your work for clients.
Talk about it in prospective client meetings to make sure that you’re a fit for each other.

I think that Worthington’s advice would be valuable at any point in the last twenty-five years or so, but his point is that you, as a firm, are going to get swept away by the flash flood of AI unless you dig a very deep foundation anchored in what you believe about marketing as it applies to your specialization. Here’s how he puts it:

What We Really Don’t Know

The first belief I would question is this whole idea of certainty in targeting. If you don’t believe me, have a quick read of Bob Hoffman’s article about this. He summarizes a study that Adlook did, by noting these highlights:

47% of the people who the data said were women, were men
50% of the people who the data said were men, were women
67% of the people that the data said were parents said they had no children
52% of the people who were supposed to be 18-34 said they were over 35
60% of the people who were supposed to be over 45 said they were under 45
76% of the people who were supposed to be married said they weren’t

He adds: If my dog Roscoe flipped a coin he would be way more accurate than this 'precision data' horseshit. In the understatement of the year, Adlook said, “This suggests that socio-demographics targeting may not provide added value.”No shit.

Staying Thirsty

So, in the inimitable words of that Dos Equis ad, “Stay thirsty my friends.” Stay thirsty for real data, for truth, and for a framework that helps you guide clients like an expert and not a lemming.

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