Marketing Is Dead; 'Marketers' Killed it Confessions of a Recovering Marketer
Every year there’s a new “framework” to explain why nothing works anymore. Meanwhile, the only real winners are the product-led companies that don’t even call what they do marketing. They build something great, tell people about it honestly, and let gravity do the rest.
I was sitting across from yet another CEO — one of those “visionary” types who hires a marketer like a magician, then demands to see the trick explained before the rabbit even hits the table. He wanted guarantees. He wanted proof that if I did X, he’d get Y, on schedule, like a factory line. He asked for conversion ratios before we’d even run a single campaign. I looked at him and realized: this man doesn’t understand that marketing isn’t a science. It’s chaos managed by intuition. It’s a conversation with the unknown.
He had that spreadsheet-glazed look, the kind that comes from reading too many Medium posts by people who have never sold anything in their lives. He asked me what my “plan” was. I told him that plans are for people who don’t have talent — that every plan falls apart the second it meets the market, and that the best plan is the one you can throw out quickly. He didn’t like that. So he started quoting a book on “data-driven storytelling” he’d just finished, and I mentally packed my things.
That was the day I realized I wasn’t a marketer anymore. I was an interpreter in a cult — translating reality for people who mistake analytics dashboards for truth. Marketing had become a religion for people who can’t build anything but PowerPoints. And I was done preaching.
The Cult of Marketing
There was a time when marketing meant something. When you had to have taste, guts, intuition. When risk mattered. But now? It’s a crowded church filled with charlatans, consultants, and MBAs performing rituals they don’t understand. Marketing has been taken over by people who don’t “eat what they kill” — the kind of professionals who have never built a funnel from scratch, never launched a product, never risked their own capital, yet insist they know “the process.”
I’ve sat in rooms full of these people. They worship the metric. They talk about “efficiency,” “alignment,” and “brand voice” like they’re components of an engine. They’re not. They’re euphemisms for bureaucracy. Modern marketing is a cult of plausible deniability — a thousand “strategists” claiming victory whenever the wind happens to blow their way.
As I once wrote in a Letter to CEOs:
“You hire awesome people; that’s your guarantee. But this is nowhere near a science. I used to think it was. I haven’t worked at that level in maybe seven years. There are middle-wits in my MBA class who still believe marketing wins happen from statistics.”
Those middle-wits now run the industry. They’re the gatekeepers — MBAs and middle managers who confuse credentials with competence. They’ve turned marketing into the “psychology major” of the corporate world: what you do when you’re marginally competent and don’t know what else to do. And because everyone’s pretending to be an expert, there’s no signal left — only noise, jargon, and dashboards.
The Subjectification of Objectivity; The Neutering Of Derring-Do & Performative ‘Professionalism’
Marketing used to be about conquest — ideas that cut through indifference, campaigns that made people feel something. Today it’s about consensus. Everyone has to agree, no one can offend, and every idea must survive three rounds of “alignment” meetings before it’s sterilized into mediocrity. The boardroom has become a daycare for grown children clutching their KPIs like juice boxes.
We’ve subjectivized objective outcomes: prioritizing feelings over outcomes, consensus over social courage.
It’s all empathy theater now. Everyone’s “collaborating” while nothing gets built. And while the adults are busy agreeing with each other, the market is being eaten alive by founders who just ship things.
I’ve watched teams spend six weeks planning a content calendar that should’ve been executed in three days. I’ve seen marketers hold more meetings about “brand tone” than posts they’ve actually published. Planning has become the product. Execution is an afterthought. It’s Twister for the talentless — a corporate yoga class of endless alignment where the only measurable outcome is exhaustion.
Every modern company has the same disease: over-strategizing. The “plan” has become the fetish object — the dopamine hit.
The Oversaturation Crisis
Marketing’s tools got too easy. The gates came down, and everyone poured in. A decade ago, if you knew how to build a funnel, write copy, and measure conversions, you were a rare bird. Today, anyone with a Canva account calls themselves a growth hacker. We democratized the craft to death.
The result is an ecosystem drowning in bullshit — fake experts, templated strategies, and recycled “playbooks.” The market is full of people who read Influence once and think they understand human behavior. It’s no wonder CEOs can’t tell a fraud from a prodigy. Recruiters don’t know the difference either; they mitigate risk by hiring someone with Google or Meta on their résumé instead of someone who’s actually built something. The result? Homogeneity. The same tired, data-driven drivel that gets you 4% quarter-over-quarter “growth” and zero soul.
From Why Your Marketing Team Is Planning Itself Into Irrelevance:
“Smart people often overplan. The world is littered with failed startups funded by Ivy-educated MBAs with beautiful plans. The smartest people see the limitation of this approach. It’s only the size of legacy companies that allows them to survive it.”
Marketing is the only profession where everyone lies and nobody gets fired for it. When the campaign works, they’re geniuses. When it fails, it was “market timing.” It’s voodoo with a budget. A Jonestown cult run on vanity metrics and delusion, where every failed prophecy becomes “a learning.”
The Great Corporate Mirage
The real irony? The best marketers don’t stay in marketing. They build their own companies. Because if you can truly pick winners, why work for someone else’s losing bet? Every great marketer eventually hits the same wall: the realization that the system rewards mediocrity and meetings, not mastery or movement. The ones who can sell, sell for themselves. The rest stay behind to teach “growth frameworks.”
I’ve been that marketer staring down the spreadsheet mafia, trying to explain that you can’t A/B test magic. That you can’t quantify the moment an idea cuts through the noise and makes someone care. But the new priests of marketing don’t believe in intuition. They believe in rituals. They believe that if they just measure harder, they’ll find God in the metrics. They won’t.
The truth is simple: if you can predict what works, you should be rich already. If you can’t, stop pretending this is science. Marketing works on chaos, psychology, timing, and luck. There’s no dashboard for that.
The Problem with “Strategy”
Every modern company has the same disease: over-strategizing. The “plan” has become the fetish object — the dopamine hit. People spend their entire workweek tweaking projections instead of executing. I once wrote that most companies are “planning to meet to discuss watching themselves not execute.” It wasn’t a joke. That’s how they operate. The blueprint has replaced the building. Modeling has replaced motion. Nobody’s driving — they’re just updating the GPS.
Marketing’s obsession with control comes from fear. The fear of uncertainty, the fear of risk, the fear of being wrong. But all creation begins with risk. You can’t spreadsheet your way to inspiration. The best campaigns — Red Bull Rampage, Old Spice, Dollar Shave Club — were built on instinct, not approval chains. They worked because someone ignored the committee and shipped something audacious.
The tragedy is that companies used to hire painters. Now they hire paintbrushes and tell them what to paint.
“If we back-and-forth not just on creatives, but on how to get wins, we get fewer wins. The deliverable becomes an amalgam of different creators, and I eventually burn out. You hire an expert. Fund them. Trust them. Judge them by their outcomes.”
That’s what I wrote years ago. Still true. More true now than ever.
The New Religion of “Data”
We turned gut instinct into heresy and data into doctrine. But data isn’t truth — it’s the residue of truth. It tells you what happened, not why it happened. And if you can’t answer “why,” you’re not learning; you’re just counting. Every dashboard is a rear-view mirror masquerading as a compass.
The obsession with analytics is just another way to avoid responsibility. You can’t be blamed if the data “led you astray.” Marketers hide behind dashboards the way bureaucrats hide behind process. The metrics don’t lie — but they don’t speak either. And silence, misread by the mediocre, sounds like insight.
Why I’m Leaving
I’m leaving marketing because the game is rigged — not by conspiracy, but by cowardice. It’s been taken over by people who think in templates, who fear originality, who confuse consensus with competence. Marketing has become a museum of obsolete tactics and self-congratulating amateurs pretending to innovate by committee. Every year there’s a new “framework” to explain why nothing works anymore. Meanwhile, the only real winners are the product-led companies that don’t even call what they do marketing. They build something great, tell people about it honestly, and let gravity do the rest.
Marketing is no longer a craft. It’s a bureaucracy that eats creativity and spits out process. It’s a safe harbor for people allergic to accountability. I’ve had enough. I’m done explaining to paper MBAs why their “brand pillars” don’t convert. I’m done defending intuition to people who’ve never built anything. I’m done pretending that manipulating Google’s algorithm is a strategy. The best marketers became founders. The rest became parasites.
