I’ve never bought a company, and I’ve never sold one. I build things. And from where I’m standing, the overwhelming majority of marketing agencies and MarTech SaaS businesses are building on quicksand.
They’re clinging to a distribution model that is already obsolete. They just haven’t realised it yet.
Marketing history is a story of distribution. A frantic, expensive, and increasingly futile search for channels to access audiences. We started by shouting at everyone (broadcast). We evolved to shouting at specific groups of people (narrowcast). The next step is not shouting at all. The next step is a one-to-one, autonomous conversation. It’s the era of no-cast.
This isn’t a new channel. It’s the absence of one. It is the single biggest threat to the £30bn UK digital advertising market, and it will liquidate agencies and SaaS platforms that fail to understand what’s coming.
The Brutal Inefficiency of the Broadcast Era
For decades, the name of the game was mass attention. If you were a major UK brand, say British Airways, you bought reach. You bought 30-second slots during Coronation Street on ITV, full-page spreads in The Sunday Times, and billboards on the M4 corridor.
You spoke to everyone to hopefully influence someone. It was the only game in town. The logic was simple: capture enough attention, and a small percentage would convert. The model was built on colossal wastage. A 30-second primetime advertising slot can cost upwards of £200,000. For that spend, a brand speaks to millions of people, of whom perhaps 0.1% are in the market for their product at that specific moment. The other 99.9% is noise. Expensive, inefficient noise.
Broadcast media was a blunt instrument. It built household names, but it did so with the financial precision of a sledgehammer. It was a function of the available technology. There was no way to segregate the audience, so you simply bought all of it.
This entire model was predicated on a captive audience. People who had a limited number of television channels, read one or two newspapers, and drove the same route to work every day. That world is gone. Its ghost still haunts the balance sheets of legacy brands, but its power is terminally diminished.
Narrowcasting: The Great Illusion of Precision
The internet promised to fix the waste of the broadcast era. And for a while, it did. This was the dawn of narrowcasting. Suddenly, with platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, we could move beyond blunt demographics and target intent, interest, and behaviour.
This shift built an entire generation of direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses. Brands could bypass the expensive gatekeepers of broadcast media and speak directly to a curated audience. Performance marketing became the default. We could measure everything: clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA). We built a new religion around the altar of data.