Most marketing thinking is a decade out of date.
The entire industry, from global agencies to the latest crop of SaaS startups, is still fundamentally debating the merits of two paradigms: broadcast and narrowcast. They are arguing about the best way to operate a model of distribution that is already obsolete. The future isn't a better ad or a more personalised email; it's the dissolution of the campaign altogether.
The next era of distribution is 'no-cast'. And it will leave a trail of defunct agencies and worthless martech in its wake.
The Distribution S-Curve: From Broadcast to Narrowcast
To understand where we're going, we have to be brutally honest about where we've been. For all its self-congratulatory complexity, marketing has only had two real distribution models.
First came broadcast. One-to-many. Think of the iconic Guinness ‘Surfer’ ad during an episode of Coronation Street on ITV. A single, powerful creative, delivered to millions of largely undifferentiated people simultaneously. The tools were television, radio, and print. The upside was enormous reach. The downside was a total lack of precision. You were paying to reach everyone, including the vast majority for whom the message was irrelevant. It was low-fidelity, high-wastage, but for a long time, it was the only game in town.
Then, the internet enabled narrowcast. One-to-some. This is the paradigm that has dominated the last 20 years. Instead of one message for millions, it’s one message for a few thousand, or even a few hundred. We package people into neat little boxes — demographic, psychographic, behavioural — and target those boxes. Google Search ads, Facebook Custom Audiences, TikTok interest targeting, and your carefully segmented email lists are all classic narrowcast.
The fidelity is higher, the wastage lower. We can target 35-44 year old men in South West London who are interested in rugby and artisanal coffee with a precision that would have seemed like witchcraft to a media buyer in the 1980s. This model built Google and Meta into trillion-dollar monopolies and spawned a thousand SaaS tools to manage the complexity. It also built my career and our agency in its first iteration.
But both models share a fatal flaw. They are both predicated on delivering a static piece of creative to a passive audience. They are monologues, shouted into a void of varying size. And the void is starting to ignore us.
The End of the Line: Why Narrowcast is a Dead End
The narrowcast model is collapsing under the weight of its own success. The very efficiency that made it so powerful has created an arms race that has driven the cost of attention to unsustainable levels. The signal is buried in the noise.
Every brand is now a performance marketer. Every startup is armed with the same playbook. The result? Your inbox is a graveyard of