Something happened to digital marketing.
It used to be the most transparent and highest-return marketing activity. If you were a master of your craft, you could identify the parameters that would get your company in front of the people you wanted to reach. You could track how you reached them, learn from that, and drive better and better ROI.
Today, digital marketing is expensive. Your left hand is tied by the ad platforms’ AI engines, and your right hand is tied by data privacy regulations.
Most companies running digital marketing on different digital advertising platforms are like gamblers who enter a casino. They go because other gamblers are there, too. Hoping for a big win. But we all know who the biggest winner is, right? The casino.
At the same time, legislation providers think they best understand data privacy. In my humble opinion, they don’t. Let’s look at what such regulations resulted in. Most platforms that have ad services (e.g., Meta) create massive marketing noise with their ads. Ads are served regardless of whether they are relevant or not. You don’t have to believe me. Test it yourself. Scroll for 60 seconds on any of your favourite social media platforms and count how many ads you saw. How many were relevant? Depending on the country and platform, you will see between 8–12 ads, and 1 to 3 will be relevant. Relevant means you would tap/click on it because you are interested in buying that product/service now or in the upcoming days.
This setup is way too comfortable for ad platforms. In the last few years, this helped them fill their pockets with billions in revenue.
The problem started bothering us (Cognitive Creators) when, year by year, we had to consult our clients to spend more on advertising to achieve the same results as in previous years. We kind of asked for money for the big tech (Google, Meta, Microsoft) without gaining anything from it. Not only wasn’t this motivating, but it felt like we should do better. We started experimenting to find ways to get out of the rat race of ever-increasing digital marketing budgets.
The good news is we found a way. I have collected all of our learnings and intend to share them soon in a short book. The book will cover:
- Why most companies are trapped in their digital marketing efforts to spend more and more without improving their performance;
- How can you escape this trap;
- What mindset shift is required to get back to massively positive ROI digital marketing efforts;
- What technology adaptation is needed to be able to execute a better ROI strategy;
- A glimpse into a sci-fi future where marketing noise is eradicated;
- And what can we do to get there (or at least close to this future);
- What the privacy paradox is, and how it holds our society back from understanding and using data in our daily lives more effectively.
In the mission to put digital marketing back into people's hands, we will give away 50 print copies of the book to those who want to lead their marketing efforts to new performance heights: stop overpaying advertising giants for mediocre results.
What I promise is that this isn’t a typical book, it doesn’t contain any sales material. Also, I promise I won’t reach out to you with any sales pitches afterwards. From time to time, I’ll do share more insight about our findings and learnings.
To have a chance to get your copy free of charge you need to fill out a short form that will be published soon.
This is not a lottery or a “first come, first served” mechanism. I will handpick the 50 most relevant answers. The subscription form will be published soon, so stay tuned.
If you would like to get a notification about the launch of the form, sign up here.
Attila Tóth,
Head of Digital Strategy @Cognitive Creators