''' I sold my last agency for eight figures because we were good at the game. Now I realise the game itself is about to end.
For two decades, marketing has been defined by a simple objective: get the message to the person. We started with a megaphone (broadcast), then we bought a sniper rifle (narrowcast). Both are now becoming obsolete. The future of distribution is not about finding the customer. It’s about building autonomous systems that the customer finds, or more accurately, that act on the customer’s behalf, often without a direct instruction.
This isn't a new channel. It's a new paradigm. Welcome to the "No-Cast" era.
My first marketing agency, the one I built from a graduate loan and sold for a life-changing sum, was a broadcast-first business that pivoted to narrowcast. We burned through £150,000 of a client's money on a regional TV ad campaign that we were convinced was a masterpiece of brand building. The ad agency we hired won an award. The client got a nice vanity metric for their board presentation. The needle on attributable revenue, however, barely twitched. It was an expensive, painful, and vital lesson: shouting at everyone is the same as talking to no one.
Broadcast: The Era of Expensive Bets and Mass Amnesia
Broadcast marketing was the post-war dream. Stick a smiling family eating cereal on ITV at 7 pm, and you could move millions of boxes of product. It was a blunt instrument from a simpler time. Think of the old Halifax ads with Howard Brown. Genuinely iconic. They created enormous brand salience, making Halifax a household name. But what did it really do? It rented space in your brain, hoping that when you needed a mortgage, their jingle would be the first thing to surface.
This model is built on brute force and repetition. Its primary metric is awareness, a metric so foggy and hard to attribute that it’s become a hiding place for mediocre marketing departments. You spend millions of pounds on TV, radio, and out-of-home advertising for a corresponding lift in "brand recognition," a currency that doesn't pay salaries.
The fundamental flaw of the broadcast model is its colossal waste. You’re paying to reach millions of people who will never, ever buy your product. The argument was always that this created a cultural footprint. But in a fragmented media landscape, there is no single culture to leave a footprint on. There are a million tiny islands of attention, and the tide of the social feed washes all footprints away by morning.
Narrowcast: The Performance Marketing Mirage
Then came the internet, and with it, the promise of precision. This was the narrowcast era. Google AdWords (as it was) and Facebook Ads were its temples. We traded the megaphone for a laser pointer. Suddenly, we could target by demographics, interests, and behaviours. This was the world my last agency mastered. We became experts at optimising cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA). We built entire businesses on the back of spreadsheets that tracked ad spend to revenue with beautiful, reassuring precision.
The reality is that we just swapped one landlord for another. Instead of ITV and Clear Channel, our new masters were Google and Meta. The game became about optimising for their algorithms, bidding in their auctions, and being subject to their ever-changing rules. The promise was a direct line to the customer, but it was a rented line, and the rent was always going up.
This is the core problem of narrowcast: the CAC ceiling. In any auction-based system, as competition increases, so does the cost. We saw it time and time again. A successful campaign for a fintech client would start with a CPA of, say, £40. Within 18 months, as competitors flooded the ad exchange, that same customer would cost £120. Your efficiency inevitably degrades as you scale. You are running faster and faster just to stand still.