I had the thought for starting a project like this at some stage late last year when trudging from the office to Oxford Circus in what I remember as a dim and damp November evening, listening to The National’s live album “Rome” as the first track (Runaway) almost echoes into life with a slow, warm build up of guitars and Matt Berninger’s vocal. Around a minute or so in the intonation shifts slightly and almost insists on the question “what makes you think I’m enjoying being led to the flood?”.
At the time I mishear it as “what makes you think I’ll enjoy being left to the flood?” (per the headline) which quite drastically changes the original meaning from being dragged in the direction of said flood to being passively deposited there and waiting for it to wash over, which doesn’t make any sense in the wider context of the lyrics.
It won’t be the first or the last time that a boring bloke in his mid-to-late 30s has a brief, mundane eureka moment to The National, and they really do deserve better than being associated with this moment because they are great. However, it was a moment where the various strands of geopolitics, macroeconomics, climate breakdown and technological evolution seemed to be converging at an inelegant pace which has a habit of frying the brain if you think about them too much when trying to defeat delayed trains and get back for your child’s bedtime.
Equally, I reckoned, it shouldn’t be the kind of thing that fries the brain – it’s interesting to engage with and try to make sense of even if it’s probably impossible to reconcile coherently at any kind of meaningful level.
All that is to say, I’m starting this project partly out of curiosity, but mainly as a medium for organising disparate strands of thoughts that spark off in different directions at any given moment and to not be quite so passive and siloed in my own thinking. So yes, slight vanity project, but if you’re actually reading, indulge me…
I spent my time at university nearly twenty years ago studying politics but for ten reasons or other didn’t pursue it, or anything especially proximate as a career. Instead I gamely took up the themes of my dissertation and pursued a career in “new media”; specifically the bit that didn’t require quite so many connections on the way in. The media planning and buying part of the industry may be many things, but it is a slightly more open access than other parts of the so-called creative industries.
That choice was, at least in part, motivated by (per the logic expressed in the interview for that first role) the notion that politics and digital advertising were united by a desire to understand the human condition. (Buckle up, there’s way more nonsense where that came from.)
From there my career has pursued a relatively linear path, insofar as you can trace a pretty clean line from a grad role in a big network media agency to a much more senior role at a smaller, more independent organisation fifteen-ish years later. Along the route, however, there’s been various areas of interest that have piqued my curiosity, and they’ve all spun out of those two strands which are…I’ll be honest, somewhat less united by the human condition than my fresher-faced earlier incarnation so earnestly assumed. They spindle and whirl off at different points, but the themes are relatively consistent.
The smallest digression was into the world of technology. The “new media” label has long since taken the form of relic, a curio that anyone working in or near the marketing industry would pass by on the way to the artefacts from the years of the mobile. A career that passes the ‘explain it to your Granny’ test by spending time defining the “websites” part of “I put ads in front of people on websites” is going to have at least a passing acquaintance with ones and zeroes.
In that time, however, Big Tech has morphed from apparently benign and zeitgeist-y to having eaten the world, shat it out again and livestreamed us all feeding on the partly digested entrails. This has been both reluctantly and enthusiastically cheered on by what I will lazily call Big Marketing so as to establish a loose logical architecture that I reserve the right to jettison in five to six paragraphs time. You would sense reluctance from the tone and tenor of what most say to accompany their hand-wringing, but you would sense only enthusiasm if you follow the path littered with cold hard cash.
Interrogating what is behind that deleterious effect, and the brute force power of perverse incentives, is an open gateway to economics. The big themes there are obvious. It is hardly a huge stretch to observe how it goes in tandem with the post-Global Financial Crisis world, even just through the prism of ultra low interest rates through the 10s, clattering up through the gears, ostensibly to manage post-pandemic inflation, and the seismic effects that had on the viability of whole swathes of industry.
Equally, booming tech stocks led by advertising revenue traded on the promise (and oftentimes the illusion) of Big Data, cemented Big Tech’s outsized role in the economy and the global political sphere. As investments the likes of Google, Amazon and Meta offered one of the few safe havens of consistent returns even as growth in the real economy globally remained sluggish.
The particularly interesting micro part is how their sneezes led all manner of proximate companies to try to raise similar valuations based on technologies that lacked the means to compete. I will try to explore the specific dynamics more fully in future posts, but suffice to say I believe that the devastation wreaked by the unit economics of the media buying industry through the 2010s has long since finished off the open web as a commercially viable entity at the scale advertisers think they need, but more importantly one worth spending much time with for consumers.
Add to that a perception of a fat middle grazing on rents extracted from using an oversupply of pipes that no-one really needed quite so many of in the first place, and you have an inefficient and often ineffectual business model.
That same business model is conditioned to feed on scale and simplicity, which in time leads back to consolidation into a few big old platforms, which is how you end up with Mark Zuckerberg in his weird glasses proclaiming that all future advertisers will need to launch full-scale, end-to-end marketing campaigns is a couple of images and complete creative control handed over to his totally benign (promise!) AI ad creation and delivery systems.
Time and time again one’s frame of reference goes to extraction and rent-seeking; and questions more deeply the role of each of these in the entire foundations of economies. The economics of Big Marketing (and Small Marketing and everything in between) has always been one of more, more, more. A system defined by a squeeze on unit costs allied to a desire to consistently raise budgets produces an over-saturation of supply without the requisite maintenance of quality.
It becomes, in many ways, an obvious through-line to the fifth theme – climate. Obviously, politically, as a self-respecting milquetoast social democrat and card-carrying member of the woke elite; it would be absolutely bananas not to be extremely cognisant of the threat of global heating in catalysing and amplifying a lot of worst possible outcomes.
Some people don’t think this is a bad thing, but the current dominant form of highly extractive capitalism does not feel especially compatible with planetary boundaries and all that blasting past them entails. It should be said, of course, that those people market themselves and their narratives very effectively.
The economic pressures that come with global heating and climate-driven scarcity make many political choices electorally unpalatable when set against cost-of-living pressures, with seemingly little intent to understand the causal relationship between such factors (who knew that droughts and burning fields that make farming more difficult might increase food prices?!) or little imagination and bravery expended in solving for the consequences.
Technology in this equilibrium is something of a paradox. Innovation is long held as the toolbox that might one day identify the kinds of solutions that wipe the slate of our self-made hubris clean. However, (most of) the masters of the tools exist as some of the greatest monopolists the world has ever known, with business models obsessed with entrenching their tools into societies that somehow become less connected and more miserable as they proliferate.
For Big Tech, sustainability (in whatever breadth of definition you wish to apply to it) and whatever credibility you think it had with those companies at a corporate level was ditched when politically expedient, especially where support for the building of resource-hungry data centres and sweetheart deals on rare earths might be involved.
While marketing may not be quite like the others in scope, sweep and consequence, it catalyses each in very tangible ways. For one; without advertising, Alphabet and Meta would not carry the weight that they do in the global economy. Advertising has, for the best part of the 21st century, been one of the dominant ways that the web gets funded, with the other being literally billions and billions in venture capital and private equity. Subscriptions are a little bit further down the list.
It certainly underpins one of the particularly tangible (and entirely fair) charges of hypocrisy that one can level against that milquetoast social democrat ostensibly working as a foot-soldier for capital – ‘you make your living in this industry/funding these companies so why are you complaining/criticising?’
To which there isn’t really a good answer, assuming you take the position that you should be uncritically defined by your job and as such, unwilling to have opinions and critiques lest you be branded inauthentic.
However many hundred words later and, unsurprisingly, the threads haven’t resolved themselves. Hence the purpose of this project being to establish a long form untangling and trying to do so with some element of discipline set by the accountability by doing it in plain sight. Typically, of course, this has taken many months to even get to this point since life has a habit of taking priority.
I’ll try to run everything through the prism of each of the five themes in question, with a desire to look at things in the medium to long term and not reacting (too much) to the recency of events. This part in particular is crucial for me, as each of the categories are in many ways blighted by different forms of short-termism and the tyranny of cyclical thinking, when analysis of them all would benefit from greater prevalence being afforded to longer-term thinking.
I am absolutely, unequivocally not coming to this fully formed, and to many a lot of this will come out as naive, lacking substance and read as needlessly provocative if I get in a bad mood. I am perfectly content with that, not because I am content with being naive or insubstantial (I’m really, really not) or that I want to be needlessly provocative (I’ll probably back down.) Of course, should this even reach an audience of more than single digits, any feedback, discussion and reasoned debate, especially in challenging any overstepping, is more than welcomed as a loop for developing that.
However, since I am coming into this with the intent to cohere disparate thoughts into a compelling whole, the process of knowledge acquisition and communicating ideas with clarity really is the point. This isn’t, to me, about producing “content” for the sake of “content” or pushing half-baked opinion for the sake of clout, because the world now has large language models for that kind of commoditised output and this will yield about as much clout as a wet fart in a decommissioned lift.
So sometimes the syntax and grammar will be a little bit messy and the structure of arguments and themes will meander out because – for no reason other than it being completely pointless otherwise – I’m not doing this with AI polishing the turd with its pixelly hands.
I’m calling it Martechonomics as it’s a) the easiest and cleanest way of fitting some of the themes into one snappy word and b) I’m surprised no one in the marketing industry has taken it already. I would like to believe I can commit to the discipline of regular and consistent posting but that might not always happen since…again, life has a habit of getting in the way.
However, over the next few weeks (I hope!) I’m going to endeavour to set out some underlying thinking on each of the topics, as my thinking stands at the end of 2025; and perhaps it will be a real time study in the evolution of that perspective over time. So whether you strongly agree, stridently disagree, or more likely sit somewhere more nuanced in the middle, I hope it proves interesting, relevant and useful; and I’d love to hear feedback.
One final point – all views are my own and shouldn’t be taken as representative of the views of any employer, past or present.
Leave a Reply