Is the decay of customer support happening because corporations have grown lazy, corporate greed is rampant, and AI is being deliberately deployed to starve us of human connection?

When I ran that draft by Jake Perry, a colleague at the Marketing Accountability Council (MAC) who has spent years running P&Ls and calculating cost-per-contact models, his feedback shifted the frame:

“Companies aren’t choosing cruelty over kindness. They’re running a cost equation—and mostly, they’re just getting the math wrong.”

Jake was right. The reality isn’t a cartoon conspiracy to isolate humans; it’s worse. It’s an algorithm optimized for a balance sheet that remains completely blind to real-world friction.

AI hasn’t fundamentally changed the objective of customer support—it has simply made a deeply flawed, pre-existing system exponentially cheaper to run. Whether you’re a consumer trying to reclaim an overpayment or a gig worker dealing with an in-transit crisis, we are all dealing with the fallout of an algorithm designed to deflect responsibility rather than solve unpredictable problems.

To understand why this model is failing—and why corporate balance sheets are blind to the damage—we have to look at how friction operates in the wild.

This article explores the future of AI and customer service. We’re tracking two questions on Cauldron as they unfold:

• Will Uber reverse its customer support layoffs before 2027?

• Will AI customer service bots outnumber human agents at a major US company by the end of 2026?

Read the analysis below, then predict what happens next.

Predict on Cauldron

1. A Field Study in Friction Strategy

To test Jake’s thesis that operational friction is a deliberate cost-control strategy rather than a technological glitch, I tracked a personal transaction over seven months.

In January, I visited a dentist in Manhattan for a routine cleaning. Despite having active insurance, I was asked to pay $128.80 upfront and was assured that once insurance cleared, any overpayment would be settled.

Six months passed with no refund check, no follow-up email, and no updated statement.

When I proactively reached out in July, the office emailed back: “It is our policy to request that patients call us within a month to check on their claim so we can issue a refund.” Insurance confirmed my actual responsibility was $74.00, meaning they owed me $54.80. Their solution? I could trek in from Yonkers to pick up a physical paper check at their Manhattan office during business hours.

By defaulting to keeping overpayments unless a customer manually triggers an inquiry, a business relies on the statistical probability that most people will simply give up. It is an operational design built on consumer fatigue to absorb unearned capital.

(Note: Shortly after I filed formal inquiries with NY State, my credit card was credited—without me ever having to step foot in Manhattan).

2. Synthetic Empathy and Unpredictable Reality

Driven purely by analytical curiosity as a founder obsessed with market mechanics, I decided to run this exact billing anomaly through two traditional resolution pipelines: legal intake and public regulatory oversight.

First, I called Morgan & Morgan, a massive personal injury firm—to see if this “forgot-to-ask” refund policy triggered their class-action consumer fraud filters. I laid out the operational pattern plainly. But the offshore intake agent, bound to a rigid sentiment-analysis script, caught the keywords “dentist” and “unlawful” and immediately dropped into a somber, pre-programmed tone:

“Oh, Mr. Mandel... I am so, so sorry for your loss.”

It was a striking example of synthetic empathy. The system was incapable of processing the logic of systemic billing friction; it was hardcoded to perform emotional cues while filtering for high-value personal injury torts. Once the software calculated that my $54.80 problem wasn’t a multi-million-dollar lawsuit, I was filtered out.

Next, I tested public sector accountability by filing a complaint with the New York State Attorney General’s Consumer Frauds Bureau. The result? Total digital silence. Regrettably, this is the exact behavior I have grown to expect from New York—it happens all the time, and frankly, it is an embarrassment for the state. Over the years, I’ve documented how New York’s public infrastructure relies on this exact model of systemic friction.

Whether it’s a government agency managing call queues or a private business forcing you to pick up a physical check, public and private operations have converged on the same flawed model: deflection.

3. Uber Double Down on Automated Downsizing

When a state government ignores your complaint, it’s maddening. But when a private multi-billion-dollar platform uses AI to digitize that exact same wall of silence, it becomes dangerous.

On July 22, 2026, Uber Technologies Inc. announced it was laying off approximately 10% of its Community Operations team—the exact frontline workforce responsible for managing customer support for riders, drivers, and delivery partners. To enforce this shift, Uber simultaneously eliminated remote roles within the unit, ordering remaining customer support employees to relocate to physical hub offices.

In an internal memo, Megha Yethadka, Uber’s Vice President of Global Community Operations, explained that AI presents “a massive opportunity for us to accelerate output, improve quality, and scale customer solutions at pace.” She noted that while the department had made strides, Uber needed a simpler structure because “we cannot scale frontier technology on top of fragmented processes.”

According to corporate trackers, it is the first time Uber has directly linked workforce reductions to AI efficiency pushes, joining companies like Block, IBM, and Snap.

To an executive looking at a balance sheet, firing 10% of your support staff to “scale frontier technology” looks like disciplined capital management. But to anyone on the ground, it begs an urgent question: What actually happens to the humans on both sides of the app when you delegate real-world support to an algorithm?

4. High-Stakes Friction: Automated Deactivations vs. Human Trauma

In March 2026, Uber launched a nationwide campaign celebrating its new “Women Preferences” feature with a crisp corporate slogan: “Women asked for choice, and we listened.”

Uber didn’t build this feature out of progressive altruism. They built it because a decade of systemic safety failures left them no choice.

Uber’s own safety reports logged a sexual assault or misconduct report roughly every 8 minutes in the U.S. between 2017 and 2022. The feature rollout only happened after Uber was cornered by a federal Multi-District Litigation wave of over 3,000 survivor lawsuits—and weeks after a federal jury hit them with a landmark $8.5 million rape verdict that shattered their defense of being “just a tech platform.”

Even worse, turning safety into a consumer toggle switch cleverly shifts the legal burden: if an assault happens now, the corporate defense is pre-baked into the app design: “Well, we gave you the option to filter.”

True responsibility isn’t handing customers a digital shield to survive a toxic ecosystem. It’s fixing the ecosystem. Instead, Uber is delegating crisis support to AI—creating a hostile dead end for everyone inside the car:

• It Crushes Drivers: Ride-hailing is a livelihood, not a game. Yet drivers are routinely deactivated by automated code over false claims or glitches, stripped of any human appeal process. An AI bot trained on low-stakes refunds breaks completely when faced with real-world chaos like detours, threats, or locked accounts.

• It Destroys Rider Safety: AI models rely on rigid decision trees meant for missing order refunds, not physical emergencies. Imagine a traumatized assault survivor opening the app for urgent help, only to be met by a bot offering canned options: “A) Driver was rude, B) Unsafe route taken, C) Fare issue.”

Forcing a victim through an algorithmic decision tree isn’t innovation—it’s grotesque, dismissive, and dangerous. When an enterprise replaces human crisis teams with LLM sentiment analysis, it isn’t eliminating risk. It is outsourcing physical, emotional, and legal liability directly onto the humans inside the vehicle.

Will Uber reverse its customer support layoffs before 2027?

Predict on Cauldron

5. What If Everyone Actually Won?

Look at the counterexample of Chewy, the online pet retailer.

When a customer’s pet passes away, they often call to return an unopened $80 bag of prescription food. A standard cost-per-contact algorithm calculates the transaction like this: Demand the physical return, charge return shipping, inspect the box, issue a partial refund.

Chewy does the opposite. Their agents instantly refund the money, ask the customer to donate the food to a local shelter, and follow up with a handwritten condolence card or flowers.

Chewy isn’t being soft; they have solved the unit economics. They recognized that pet supplies carry a low fraud upside relative to the massive lifetime value (LTV) of a loyal customer. The cost of trusting the customer is drastically lower than the customer acquisition cost (CAC) required to replace someone you alienated over a rigid return policy.

When you apply this positive-sum logic across the entire enterprise exchange, everyone wins:

• Respecting Human Agency: In a world where people feel like line items to be squeezed, treating users and workers as partners gives them a reason to stay. Drivers who are compensated fairly for unpredictable risk deliver better service; customers who are treated with respect remain loyal.

• High-Fidelity Insights: Instead of fragmented, legally grey data or alienated customers, enterprise buyers get high-fidelity insights and loyal relationships that drive real long-term returns without regulatory time bombs.

Profitability shouldn’t come from hiding refund mechanisms, sneaking opt-out buttons into fine print, or replacing support teams with automated chatbots that choke on real-world edge cases. Profitability comes from the scale and health of the ecosystem itself.

The Accountability Standard

Customer service is deteriorating not because AI is inherently evil, but because corporate executives are using AI to turbocharge an obsolete, extractive financial model.

Automating backend workflows is smart business. But using AI as an impenetrable gatekeeper to starve customers and workers of human resolution is operational suicide.

Data and human labor should never be weaponized against the people creating them. Ethical architecture isn’t altruism—it’s long-term market survival. When a platform’s success is directly tethered to its providers’ prosperity and its customers’ satisfaction, you build an enterprise that actually lasts.

It’s time to stop designing algorithms that exploit human output, and start building ecosystems where everyone gets to win.

This phenomenon isn’t theoretical to me; I am living it now. I spent years operating inside the massive corporate marketing machine. When the corporate environment stopped valuing long-term brand equity in favor of short-term algorithmic performance, I took action. After six years of consulting, writing, teaching, and growing, I am now building a startup from the ground up. It is an act of reclamation—unlearning corporate dependency and converting decades of accumulated strategic knowledge into proprietary equity.

The Rise of the Restless Urbanite

Nowhere is this shift toward independent ownership clearer than in what my former “partner in crime” from our Mastercard days, Andrew Bowins, is achieving.

Throughout his career, in addition to his pivotal role at Mastercard, Andrew led global corporate communications at tech giants including Dell, Nokia, and Samsung. He is the definition of a battle-tested executive. Yet his story and his subsequent pivot mirror the systemic failures we track at the Marketing Accountability Council (MAC).

After reaching the pinnacle of corporate comms, Andrew faced a sudden, life-altering health scare: a 99% arterial blockage. This near-fatal event completely reframed his perspective on life, work, and distribution. He looked at the landscape of media and marketing and recognized that mainstream media, advertising agencies, and corporate marketing strategies systematically treat life after 50 as a “winding down” phase.

Andrew’s answer wasn’t to fix his resume. His answer was RestlessUrban, a robust digital lifestyle and media platform dedicated exclusively to adults over 50. Instead of asking an ageist corporate ecosystem for permission to exist, he built a new media infrastructure where strategic clarity, lived experience, and genuine human context are treated as primary assets rather than liabilities. He isn’t just serving an audience; he is proving that the marketing industry’s algorithmic neglect of this demographic is a massive economic miscalculation.

The only path forward is self-determination

My story, Stacey’s story, and Andrew’s story point to the same conclusion. You cannot rely on a corporation to value your decades of experience. You cannot rely on an algorithm to recognize your strategic depth. And you certainly cannot rely on a broken hiring system to grant you permission to build enterprise value.

So you build it yourself, and that is exactly what we are doing at MAC: It’s still early. But here’s where it stands:

• Launched at the B2B Marketing Exchange to 300+ senior marketers — no cold outreach, no ad budget

• 799 LinkedIn followers, growing at 566.7% over the last 30 days

• 49,535 LinkedIn impressions over the past year — 1,277 reactions, 195 comments, 18 reposts, all organic

• 700 Substack subscribers with a 32% open rate, against an industry average closer to 21%

• The MAC’s most-read pieces don’t get measured in likes. Some get opened a dozen times by the same person — because the writing said something they needed to hear and couldn’t find anywhere else.

Follower counts don’t build companies. Open rates don’t close deals. But every one of those subscribers found the work on their own, read it, and came back. That’s not proof of arrival; it’s proof the thesis has traction before there’s a product to sell.

Andrew Bowins built RestlessUrban the same way. No algorithm handed him an audience. He built the infrastructure and let the work do the work.

That’s the only move that actually holds.

RestlessUrban is a media platform for adults over 50 who are still learning, working, traveling, creating, and asking what's next — Subscribe free at restlessurban.com.

After yet another planning meeting where the goal post shifts and then team has to come up new “strategies” to acquire leads, she has a thought she’d like to write about. Most companies don’t actually have a marketing strategy. They have a pile of campaigns that leadership has agreed to call a strategy. She started to put her ideas to paper and writes a headline: Marketing Doesn’t Create a Strategy, They Create a Collection of Tactics.

Headline needs work, but it’s a draft. The argument underneath it isn’t ready yet. Campaigns aren’t automatically unstrategic, a paid media plan can absolutely reflect a real decision about who to compete for. Maya can feel the actual point somewhere nearby, she just hasn’t caught it yet. So she talks it through with a colleague who disagrees with half of it. She rewrites the opening and realizes her original headline promised a cleaner argument that she hasn’t yet built. She sits with the idea and continues to work through her central argument.

A few days later, on a break from drafting her article, she sees a LinkedIn post from another marketing influencer: YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY IS F*CKED. Here are 7 brutal truths your CMO is too scared to tell you.

The seven truths are basic statements you’ve heard a million times. Stop chasing vanity metrics, talk to customers, tie marketing to revenue, be more strategic. None of them are new.

It explodes. Thousands of reactions, marketers tagging their whole team, executives reposting with “finally, someone said it.” Within a week, three other creators are running the exact same format with the exact same fake-outraged energy.

Maya’s actual idea is still sitting in draft mode, half-finished.

And this is what has become of content. Most content that “wins” arrives already shaped to fit the machine and support the algorithm.

Then we let the results decide the validity of the idea.

An idea gets published, gets a scorecard, and either lives or dies based on that one scorecard. If it works, you make five more like it. If it flops, you move on and never think about it again. That’s efficient if you’re manufacturing something with a fixed spec like an IKEA desk. Thoughts and ideas don’t have a fixed spec. Sometimes an idea flops because it’s not finished yet.

Imagine if the first draft had to had to slap every time. We’d never have any classic novels, from To Kill a Mockingbird to 1984. I believe it’s one of the main reasons art, entertainment and content suck now. We’re getting everyone’s first draft. And if it doesn’t perform, we throw it out. Since we “need” instant gratification, we rely on what works. So, we get Beverly Hills Cop 5 and the 50^th version of Jurassic Park.

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Attention matters, obviously. But we started treating “people engaged with this” as the same thing as “this was worth saying,” and those are not the same claim at all.

Say you post something thoughtful about pricing strategy. It gets 200 views, six likes, zero comments. The dashboard will say the topic didn’t land, try something else next time.

Except the dashboard has no idea why it “flopped”. Maybe you buried the interesting part in paragraph four. Or maybe you hadn’t built enough credibility yet for people to take a contrarian pricing take from you seriously, and the exact same post from someone with ten more years in the space gets 40 comments. The idea wasn’t bad; it just needed work. In the current creator economy, OK ideas never get to become GREAT ideas.

Meanwhile, watch what happens to a post that says something people already believe, wrapped in a slightly more dramatic headline. It’ll outperform the pricing post every time, because agreeing with something you already think takes zero effort and feels great. Confirmation is just easier to like than a new idea is.

That’s the trap. We keep mistaking “this traveled fast” for “this was worth saying,” when a rumor also travels fast and nobody thinks rumors are profound.

Once attention becomes the only scoreboard, content splits into two lanes, and good ideas tend to die in the middle.

Lane one is the safe template. The formula is used and beaten to death until there is nothing left. Strong hook, personal story, three lessons, clean CTA. You’ve read this post a thousand times with different names swapped in. It’s not bad, per se. It’s just completely forgettable, because everyone studying the same “best practices” produces the same output, which is precisely what you’d expect a system to do when everyone’s copying the same winning formula.

Lane two is the extremity lane. When the safe format stops working, people don’t get smarter, they get louder. More outrage, more absolutism, more “everyone else is lying to you.” The idea doesn’t actually improve, it just becomes impossible to scroll past.

The good ideas that could become great get lost in the middle of those two lanes. The things like, “this is true, but only under these conditions,” or “I believed the opposite of this six months ago and changed my mind.” That kind of honesty is slower to process and harder to react to than a hot take, so it loses the algorithm’s popularity contest, even when it’s the only actually correct answer presented.

Real ideas usually start as an itch, something doesn’t quite add up, a pattern that keeps showing up that you can’t name yet. You talk about it, a friend or colleague pokes a hole in it, you do some research, you narrow the claim, and eventually it becomes something actually useful, because it survived contact with other people’s brains.

That process is slow. It might not produce anything postable for months. Our content systems weren’t built for that. They publish the half-formed version once, check the scoreboard, and move on forever.

The Great Gatsby wasn’t a hit when it came out in 1925. It became a classic decades later, partly because the U.S. military printed 155,000 free copies for soldiers in World War II. Fitzgerald’s book didn’t fail. The launch week metrics just weren’t measuring the right thing yet.

That’s not a license to keep publishing a bad idea forever and calling yourself misunderstood. But most ideas need time to become good, but working those ideas out, especially in public, doesn’t feel safe. You risk being called names, harassed or “cancelled”. Where is the “hey guys, I’m just thinking this through” part of the content game?

Every so often, someone says something genuinely original. Gives us a new way to explain an old problem, a voice that doesn’t sound copy-pasted from someone else’s.

The industry’s response is never “let’s sit with this.” It’s “what’s the framework.” How long was the post, can we build a template out of the structure, can we sell an eBook on it. The original idea gets stripped for parts before anyone’s fully understood why it worked in the first place.

That creates an annoying loop. Original thinking gets punished while it’s still risky and unproven. The second it actually works, it gets copied into oblivion until the thing that made it interesting is the thing that makes it feel stale six months later. Then everyone moves on to find the next original spark, and the whole cycle repeats, a little louder each time.

Anyone remember the AI Doll Trend that took over LinkedIn? A cool original idea that was copied so much it became annoying.

Marketing has poured huge resources into producing and distributing content, workflows, calendars, dashboards, now AI tools that can spit out fifty variations in seconds. Almost none of that same energy has gone into building a place where an idea is allowed to just be unfinished for a while.

When can someone on your team say “I’ve noticed something weird, I don’t know what it means yet”? Where can people be wrong out loud long enough to find the actually interesting version of the idea?

Companies keep saying they want original thinking while systematically removing every condition that would let it develop. You can’t put a raw idea straight into a factory and expect it to come out the other end more interesting. Factories are for reproducing things that already work. Original ideas need a workshop first.

So what needs to happen to fix this mess?

The fix is separating the thinking from the publishing. Not every observation needs to become a LinkedIn post by Friday. Build in actual conversations, not “content meetings,” where the goal is sharpening a thought instead of filling next week’s calendar slot. When something underperforms, ask a real question before moving on. Was the idea wrong, or just badly explained, or simply early?

And widen what counts as a win. Did the idea change how a sales call went? Did it give your team language for something you’d never been able to explain clearly before? Did someone come back to it three weeks later still thinking about it? None of that shows up on a weekly dashboard. It’s still real.

The algorithm should help you get a good idea in front of people. It should not be the thing deciding whether the idea was worth having.

The content machine isn’t broken, by the way. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do, produce more content, faster, based on precise data about what already got attention last time. That’s exactly why it keeps getting louder and dumber. It doesn’t need another optimization pass.

It needs a workshop.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

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I would never order it. Yet there I was, watching Starbucks—a brand historically built on the quiet intimacy of European espresso bars, dark roasts, and handcrafted craft—parade around a sports fan convention like a fast-food chain desperate for a viral moment. It felt weird. More importantly, it made me wonder: Is this really the best CEO Brian Niccol can do?

1. The Core Strategic Failure: An Identity Crisis You Can’t Fix with Sponsorships

When Starbucks brought in Brian Niccol—the former Taco Bell and Chipotle executive—the market expected an operational turnaround. Instead, the brand feels like it is suffering from an existential identity crisis.

From a brand equity perspective, Starbucks is committing a textbook cardinal sin: category drift. They are running an operational footprint built for espresso bars while trying to market a menu built for carnival concessions.

Slapping a blue foam on an energy drink and calling it a local sports activation isn’t high-level brand strategy; it’s short-term noise. Clever event sponsorships and hyper-sweet novelty drops don’t solve a fundamental strategic disconnect:

• Chasing the TikTok Economy: Over 75% of Starbucks’ sales are cold beverages, driven by Gen Z customization, extra syrups, and colorful cold foams. Instead of guiding culture, Starbucks is letting social media trends dictate its product development.

• The Price-to-Value Disconnect: Consumers will pay premium prices for a high-end coffee experience. They will not continue to pay $7 to $8 for a cup of ice, fruit juice, and food dye handed to them through a chaotic pickup window.

2. Dunkin’ Mastered Culture; Starbucks Is Just Copying Them

Starbucks’ strategy isn’t groundbreaking—it’s a reactive copy-paste of competitors who are structurally far better suited for this space.

The Dunkin’ Advantage

Dunkin’ never pretended to be an artisanal coffee sanctuary. They are a fast-moving, high-speed refueling station. When Dunkin’ partnered with creators like Charli D’Amelio or Ice Spice to launch sweet, colorful signature drinks, it felt organic to their value proposition. Dunkin’ owns fast-casual, pop-culture energy. Starbucks adopting the same strategy feels like a corporate midlife crisis.

The Fast-Casual Mismatch

Chains like Sonic, Taco Bell, and Dunkin’ have drive-thrus, equipment, and labor models optimized for speed, novelty drinks, and high-margin sugar treats. When Starbucks tries to fight in that arena, it slows down its stores, overwhelms baristas with 10-step custom builds, and alienates its core customer base.

3. Luckin Coffee Is Winning on Pure Execution

While Starbucks tries to figure out if it wants to be a high-end café or a fast-food slushie stand, Luckin Coffee is eating its market share by focusing on efficiency and clarity:

• No Mixed Messages: Luckin doesn’t pretend to be a lounge. They run hyper-efficient, app-first pickup kiosks.

• Operational Discipline: They offer popular, creative drinks (like coconut lattes), but their supply chain and tech stack are built for extreme speed and low costs.

• Value Realism: Luckin delivers fast, reliable caffeine without asking the customer to pay a luxury markup for a chaotic experience.

Time for Real Executive Accountability

Starbucks is stuck in the worst position a major brand can occupy: an expensive option that no longer feels special.

Slapping blue foam on a sports drink for a fan convention doesn’t prove Starbucks understands youth culture—it proves they are running out of ideas to justify their price tag. If this hyper-sweet, trend-chasing playbook is the core strategy coming from executive leadership, then Starbucks isn’t evolving. It’s admitting defeat to fast-food competitors while surrendering the very coffee heritage that made it an icon

True market transformation doesn’t happen through lukewarm, incremental optimizations. It happens when data, marketing, and a deep-seated refusal to accept the status quo collide.

Fanaticism is the ultimate form of brand accountability: it means you actually care enough to disrupt an industry.

When you possess that kind of drive, you realize it isn’t just a personality trait—it is a repeatable cycle. In the corporate and tech worlds, this intense, manic energy manifests as a predictable engine of disruption. I call it The Fanaticism Loop.

1. The Lens You Can’t Turn Off (Deep Data Insights)

The loop begins with an obsession with the truth. Just as a fanatic dissects every micro-detail of their interest, a disruptive business starts by uncovering algorithmic data analysis, predictive patterns, and deeply personalized user profiles. You see the gaps in the world that everyone else is blind to.

I experienced this firsthand recently while walking into Fanatics Fest in New York City with my son. Around us, grown men were carrying rare trading cards like priceless historical artifacts; thousands were queuing just to catch a glimpse of their sports heroes. They were utterly, deeply fanatical about their teams.

But the moment I walked into the venue, my own fanatical lens kicked into overdrive. I wasn’t just looking at the sports stars; I was scanning the activations, the experiential design, the data captures, and the consumer psychology. Right there on the floor, I spotted an activation for a brand called Good Eat’n. Instantly, I was breaking down its positioning, its packaging, and its market execution.

At that exact moment, my son looked at me, thoroughly annoyed, and said: “Can you just stop being so fanatical about marketing for one second?”

It made me laugh, but it also made me realize something fundamental. My lens for viewing most commercial experiences is marketing. Sometimes it annoys him. Sometimes it annoys others. Sometimes people look at me and think, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he keep talking about this?”

The truth is, I can’t turn it off. It’s the reason I find myself waking up at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning, trapped in a self-imposed prison of my own making, forcing my thoughts into an essay like this. My co-founders of The Marketing Accountability Council and my Start-up Dāginty are cut from the identical, obsessive cloth. We are all beautifully, desperately fanatical about what we are building because we dug into the data, found the friction points, and refuse to let our brand become wallpaper.

2. Sizing Up a Broken Model (Massive Financial Risk)

True fanatics don’t hedge their bets. This stage demands high-stakes investments, substantial R&D funding, and aggressive market strategies. You scale rapidly, throwing everything into the fire because you believe your insight is a certainty, not a gamble.

Look no further than the literal festival floor where my son and I were standing. Before Fanatics Fest launched, the sports memorabilia and collector ecosystem was broken. The industry was dominated by old-school, local trading card shows that looked exactly like they did in the 1990s: bad lighting, folding tables, and zero experiential design.

Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin looked at that data and saw a massive unmet obsession. To fix it, he partnered with Lance Fensterman—the mastermind who turned New York Comic Con into a global phenomenon—and applied the “Comic-Con playbook” to sports.

But this wasn’t a safe bet. Rubin took a massive, multi-million dollar corporate risk, openly admitting that the inaugural event was a $15 million marketing investment designed to lose money out of the gate.

Legacy thinking would have killed the idea on day one because the immediate spreadsheet ROI wasn’t there.

But Rubin didn’t build a multi-billion dollar empire by making safe choices. He understood that to win a market completely, you have to invest ahead of the revenue curve. That risk paid off spectacularly, smashing records as over 200,000 passionate fans packed out a million square feet at the Javits Center.

3. The Product of Obsession (Immersive Culture Shift)

When you are that intense, the world starts to bend around you. The fanaticism spreads from the founders to the early adopters, shaping new behaviors, cultivating irrational loyalty, and building dedicated communities. You aren’t just selling a product anymore; you are establishing a shared value system.

When I saw Good Eat’n right as I walked into the fest, it hit me: this product literally would not exist if someone hadn’t been fanatical about fixing a broken system.

Massive legacy conglomerates like Frito-Lay have spent decades optimizing their supply chains to pump out ultra-processed foods loaded with artificial dyes (like Red 40 and Yellow 6) and chemical preservatives to protect their corporate margins. They look at data to protect the status quo.

But Good Eat’n (co-founded by NBA star Chris Paul) represents what happens when a creator gets completely fed up with the junk. Instead of launching just another boring “health food,” they engineered a beautiful, vibrant brand delivering nostalgic flavors (like Nacho Cheeze and Hot Puffs) using clean, plant-based, real-food ingredients.

Joyride exemplifies a shift in the candy industry from traditional, artificial confections to plant-based, low-sugar options. Founded by Tyler Merrick in 2022 and expanded with Ryan Trahan in 2023, it offers flavors like sour strips and ropes made with real ingredients, no fake colors, and less sugar, transforming the candy experience.

These brands are winning because they refuse to compromise. That refusal to compromise is the exact definition of fanaticism at work.

4. The Marketer’s Manifesto: Data, Obsession, and Change

For those of us on the Marketing Accountability Council, this brings us back to our own sandbox.

If you are fanatical about marketing and data, let it take over.

Data shouldn’t just be used to look backward and report on what happened; it should be the fuel that drives your creative obsession. When you dive deep into data, you find the real friction points, like people being fundamentally sick of ultra-processed foods, or sports fans being sick of boring card conventions, and you use that data to take massive risks and build something radically better.

Nothing of consequence changes until you become fanatical. Fanaticism means you refuse to let your brand be wallpaper. It means you stand behind your product with total accountability, ensuring that every touchpoint- from the ingredients in the bag to the experience on the convention floor- proves to your audience that you care just as much as they do.

The Takeaway for the Council: Stop optimizing for the average. Let people ask “who is this person and why do they keep talking about this?” Because when you build with that level of obsession, you don’t just participate in a market—you change it.

Lance Fensterman Interview on Fanatics Fest - This video features an in-depth conversation with Fanatics Events CEO Lance Fensterman, where he discusses the innovative vision behind Fanatics Fest and how they scaled it to revolutionize sports culture.

The Flip Side: Two Things Can Be True at the Same Time...

While the Fanatics business model is truly impressive in scale, creativity, and industry disruption, there is a hidden tax that everyday sports fans are paying the second they step onto the convention floor.

While I spent an incredible weekend watching legends and analyzing their brilliant brand activations, the data advocate in me couldn’t ignore the aggressive, clunky, and outright lopsided data-collection funnels targeting unsuspecting fans under the guise of “free giveaways.”

Can a brand be an industry-defining creative enterprise and run a deeply flawed data-mining circus at the exact same time? Absolutely.

👉 Read my full exposé on the real cost of a “Fan Activation” and learn how to protect your digital footprint at the next big event.

But there’s a massive blind spot. A company can have a legendary workplace culture, robust margins, and pristine sustainability reports—while simultaneously burying sneaky subscription traps, hiding fees in the fine print, and utilizing predatory marketing tactics.

To prove this, the Marketing Accountability Council (MAC) took the top of TIME’s list and ran them through TrustGap—an independent accountability framework that pits homepage promises directly against what is written in the legalese. The results show a glaring divide between being a “best company” according to TIME, and being an honest one.

How to Build a “Credible” List When You’re a Legacy Magazine

Let’s be honest: TIME’s “America’s Best Companies” is a brand-new listicle. It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah for a legacy magazine to act as the ultimate judge of corporate America. Once a dominant weekly force, TIME has spent the last decade sliding into digital obscurity—now mostly existing as a website trying to recapture its glory days.

Once upon a time, newsmagazines reported the news. Today, they survive by inventing awards and selling shiny digital badges to corporate PR departments. To turn a print-adjacent relic into an arbiter of corporate truth, you only need three things:

A Big-Name Data Partner: You team up with Statista to look “scientific”. If you throw 217,000 employee surveys and complex ESG algorithms into a blender, no one will notice that the actual definition of “best” is incredibly slippery.

A Billionaire Tech Owner: It certainly doesn’t hurt when your owner, Marc Benioff, also happens to run Salesforce—which magically cruised right into the #3 spot on the very list his magazine published.

An Insatiable Corporate Appetite for Bragging Rights: Companies love trophies. Within five minutes of the list dropping, hundreds of corporate LinkedIn accounts had already posted about being “humbled and honored”.

And just like that, instant credibility.

At least they aren’t U.S. News & World Report. If you think TIME’s ranking system is a bit of a stretch, let us bow our heads in solemn appreciation for U.S. News, the supreme rulers of the “We Rank Everything” business model. They’ve spent decades pitting colleges, hospitals, and even countries against each other using metric systems so notoriously volatile and easily gamed that even the universities playing the game have started staging mass revolts. Compared to U.S. News’ arbitrary popularity contests, TIME’s freshman attempt at a corporate leaderboard looks almost respectable. But let’s not lose sight of the real issue: a flashy award from a media brand does not mean a company plays fair with your wallet.

Exhibit A: The “Graphic Design Is My Passion” Header Art

If you needed any more proof that this list is an amateur-hour cash grab rather than a prestigious, deeply cared-about editorial project, look no further than the absolutely chaotic banner graphic TIME splashed at the top of their announcement:

This image looks like it was mocked up by a high school intern using a trial version of Photoshop, ten minutes before the deadline, while desperately fighting a caffeine crash.

Where do we even begin with what is wrong with this?

The Complete Lack of Hierarchy: It’s just a random, cluttered collage of corporate logos slapped haphazardly over a stock image of a waving American flag. The logos aren’t even sized relative to their ranking; they’re just violently competing for your eyeballs.

Bad Cropping and Awkward Overlaps: Look at the bottom right. Apple’s sleek logo is pasted over what appears to be a vector illustration of an iMac, which in turn overlaps an Adobe logo. Above that, a Mastercard logo is awkwardly crammed into a cropped smartphone outline.

The Hilarious “HubSpot” Ghosting: On the left side, the text “America’s Best Companies of 2026” is overlaid directly on a massive, low-opacity HubSpot logo, making the list title nearly unreadable.

The Clashing Colors: Red, blue, green, orange, black—all pasted with zero color correction or unified aesthetic. It’s a visual assault that looks less like a prestigious publication’s special project and more like a spammy banner ad from 2004.

This is the banner art they chose to represent the “best” of American industry. If this is the level of care and precision they put into the visual presentation, it makes you wonder how rigorous the QA was on the actual data.

The Side-by-Side Comparison

The contrast comes down to what is being measured. TIME is evaluating corporate success and investor metrics; MAC is measuring consumer reality and the honesty of their marketing. When you put these metrics next to actual consumer-facing integrity, the truth gets messy.

The Unicorn: Costco

• TIME Rank: #5

• MAC Accountability Score: 82/100

• The Rare Double-Win: If you want proof that a company can dominate Wall Street’s metrics and still treat its customers like actual human beings, Costco is the ultimate gold standard. They score brilliantly on both lists because their business model doesn’t rely on tricking you. The membership fee is stated upfront, prices are kept low on purpose rather than padded with sneaky, hidden markups, and returns are genuinely hassle-free. Shoppers rarely, if ever, feel like they’ve been conned at the register. Honesty is actually their business model.

Premium Ticket, Economy Truths: Delta Air Lines

• TIME Rank: #6

• MAC Accountability Score: 49/100

• The Disconnect: TIME has Delta near the absolute top as a premium airline darling. But MAC’s score exposes how much of that “premium” feel is built on fine-print quicksand. Delta spends millions on branding its loyalty rewards program, but then quietly changes how many points a flight costs whenever it feels like it—effectively devaluing the “currency” you earned. Worse, that advertised, clean ticket price magically inflates at checkout once baggage fees, seat selection, and other unavoidable add-ons are tacked on.

Just (Pretend to) Do It: Nike

• TIME Rank: #15

• MAC Accountability Score: 57/100

• The Disconnect: Nike wins massive points on TIME’s list for sustainability disclosures and employee empowerment messaging. In the real world, outside investigators routinely flag Nike’s overseas factories for underpaying workers in unsafe conditions. Meanwhile, the Nike membership app—marketed as a fun community hub that unlocks exclusive discounts—is actually a massive data-harvesting machine designed to track your exact shopping habits and real-time location.

The Maze-Maker: Amazon

• TIME Rank: #47

• MAC Accountability Score: 52/100

• The Disconnect: Amazon claims to be “the most customer-obsessed company on Earth.” But as federal regulators famously pointed out in their lawsuits, Amazon’s “obsession” seemed to end the moment you wanted to cancel your Prime membership. Signing up took one accidental click; escaping was a deliberately designed psychological maze of dark patterns, confirmation pages, and “Are you sure?” screens meant to wear you down until you gave up and stayed subscribed.

The Dystopian Care-Denial Factory: Cigna

• TIME Rank: #4

• MAC Accountability Score: 34/100

• The Disconnect: Cigna is the absolute poster child for corporate hypocrisy. According to TIME, they are a top-five American business—financially flawless and an investor’s dream. According to MAC’s accountability metrics, they are a toxic disaster.

• The Brutal Reality:

  
  While Cigna’s multi-million dollar ad campaigns coo that “your health is our priority,” their actual system treats sick people like errors on a spreadsheet. Under their infamous PxDx (”procedure-to-diagnosis”) system, Cigna has been dragged into major class-action lawsuits for using automated software to reject medical claims in massive, automated batches.

  How fast do they deny these claims? Internal spreadsheets and legal complaints revealed that Cigna’s medical directors sign off on bulk rejections spending an average of just 1.2 seconds per claim. In what universe does a doctor thoroughly review a complex medical file, verify a patient’s history, and render a life-altering medical necessity decision in one point two seconds? They don’t. In fact, former medical directors admit they literally just “click and submit”. It takes all of 10 seconds to rubber-stamp 50 denials at a time, entirely bypassing the human review process required by law.
  

  In a single two-month window, Cigna used this automated shortcut to reject over 300,000 claims. One single medical director signed off on 60,000 denials in a single month. Cigna’s entire financial strategy relies on the statistical reality that less than 0.2% of people will actually go through the grueling process of appealing a denial. They know you will either get tired, get confused, or just suffer in silence and pay out of pocket. For a top-five “Best Company” to run a system this ruthlessly indifferent to human suffering is the ultimate proof that TIME’s metric of “best” has absolutely nothing to do with basic decency.

Keep Them Honest: Try It Yourself

If you’re tired of “unlimited” plans with strict limits, “free” trials that secretly auto-renew, and “price lock” guarantees that still go up, you can take matters into your own hands.

The Marketing Accountability Council (MAC) is an independent organization dedicated to exposing deceptive marketing practices. We built TrustGap, a free public tool that lets you pull back the curtain on any company.

What you can do at accountability.marketing:

• Run any company through TrustGap to get a real-time accountability score.

• Compare claims vs. fine print and see a breakdown of the brand’s primary deceptions.

• Verify the receipts with cited, manually checkable evidence before you hand over your credit card.

“Best company” and “most honest company” are two completely different sentences. Don’t let a brand’s stock price, shiny PR campaigns, or media ownership dictate whether they deserve your trust.

When former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned trans fats, forced chain restaurants to post calorie counts, and prohibited smoking in bars and public parks, critics declared it the death of business. They warned of economic collapse and nanny-state overreach.

Instead, national restaurant chains realized it was cheaper to reformulate their menus nationwide than to run separate systems just for New York. National hotel and hospitality brands voluntarily adopted smoke-free policies to match the new cultural baseline.

This is the “New York Effect.” Because of the sheer size of its economy and its cultural gravity, New York City doesn’t just pass local laws; it establishes the default standards for the entire nation.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is reaching for that very same Bloomberg-era playbook. Alongside former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, the administration has introduced a municipal crackdown targeting “subscription traps” and “junk fees.”

This municipal-level policy bypasses federal gridlock to establish a powerful local precedent:

If a company can sign up a New Yorker with one click, they must let them cancel in one click.

The Resilient Momentum of Lina Khan

To understand how we arrived here, you have to look at Lina Khan’s federal trajectory. As the head of the FTC under the Biden administration, Khan built historic momentum. She took on corporate giants, protected the “right to repair,” fought to lower insulin and inhaler prices, and drafted the federal click-to-cancel rule.

But when the political tides shifted and a new federal administration took office, Khan was sidelined from her federal post. Corporate lobbyists celebrated, believing the regulatory threat of a consumer-first market was buried; They were wrong. Her return to the public arena as a key advisor to Mayor Mamdani proves that truly consumer-centric ideas are too powerful to be sidelined for long.

If the federal courts and Washington gridlock won’t protect the American consumer, Mamdani and Khan have shown that a city with an $80 billion local economy gladly will.

The New Marketing Accountability Shift

For decades, marketers have operated under a “buyer beware” framework, relying on fine print and convoluted exit loops to sustain monthly recurring revenue (MRR). This new rule shifts the burden of accountability entirely onto the business through three strict pillars:

• Click-to-Cancel: The cancellation path must be as quick and simple as the sign-up flow. No phone trees, chat-bot loops, or in-person visits required. Violators face a minimum fine of $525 per violation, plus potential restitution of historical fees to the consumer.

• All-In Upfront Pricing: Advertised prices must include all mandatory fees up-front. “Boiler fees,” “lifestyle fees,” and hidden service charges are banned, backed by escalating civil penalties and active enforcement by the DCWP.

• No-Cost Free Trials: Companies cannot require consumers to pay to return a “free” trial item, nor can they hide renewal terms. Violations of this rule will trigger direct civil action by the city.

The “1-to-1” Rule: If you use a single-tap sign-up via Apple Pay or Stripe, your platform must provide an equally accessible, un-monetized single-tap cancel button inside the user portal.

Why Consumer-Centricity is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

For years, growth marketers and product managers have relied on “friction-based retention.” The logic was simple: if we make it 10 times harder to cancel a subscription than to sign up, our churn rate will drop, and our customer lifetime value (LTV) will artificially rise.

But this is a short-sighted strategy built on a house of cards. True consumer-centricity—building products and services that customers stay with out of genuine utility and delight, rather than contractual entrapment—ultimately wins in the marketplace.

• Trust is the Highest-Converting Currency: In a crowded digital economy, the brands that remove friction at every stage of the customer journey, including the exit, build massive brand equity.

• Cleaner Data, Better Products: When you remove subscription traps, your churn metrics reflect genuine consumer dissatisfaction rather than administrative exhaustion. This forces product teams to actually improve the core offering instead of hiding behind artificial retention.

• Word-of-Mouth over Dark Patterns: A customer who cancels easily is a customer who leaves with a positive impression. They are highly likely to return when their budget or needs change. A customer who has to fight a chatbot to cancel will never return and will actively warn others away.

Action Plan: Auditing Your Funnel for Compliance

To avoid costly litigation and public enforcement actions from the DCWP starting this October, product, growth, and marketing teams must audit their flows immediately.

The Bottom Line

The era of inflating retention metrics through friction is coming to a close. Brands that rely on consumer inertia and confusing user experiences to maintain active subscriber bases will face compounding fines and public relations damage.

Ultimately, true marketing accountability means building products so valuable that customers want to stay—not creating traps they can’t escape.

If you want to see the absolute zenith of this lifecycle—where the illusion of a free market has been replaced by cold, calculated, algorithmic collusion—you have to look at how software giants completely broke the American rental market. It is time to talk about RealPage.

Phase 1: The Useful Disrupter (The Promise of Efficiency)

Go back twenty years. For a long time, the rental housing market was messy, localized, and largely human. Property managers and independent landlords looked at physical newspaper classifieds, called the complex down the street to see what they were charging, or manually dropped prices if an apartment sat empty for too long, because a vacant unit meant losing money.

Then came the “prop-tech” revolution. RealPage and its software suites (like YieldStar) entered the market with a compelling, modern premise: revenue management through data. The software promised to eliminate human guesswork by aggregating regional data, tracking localized supply and demand, and providing landlords with an automated dashboard to optimize occupancy rates. It was framed as a cutting-edge utility built to streamline a fractured, legacy industry.

Phase 2: The Quiet Cartel Consolidation

But just like the travel duopoly, the architecture changed entirely when a single entity amassed total control over the information highway. Through a series of aggressive corporate acquisitions, RealPage effectively swallowed its biggest competitors, establishing a near-total monopoly over the revenue management software used by corporate landlords and mega-property management firms across the United States.

Suddenly, it wasn’t just a few isolated landlords using a helpful tool. In major metropolitan areas, virtually every massive corporate apartment complex—the ones everyday people rely on for standard, multi-family housing—was quietly feeding its data into the exact same centralized brain.

The open, competitive rental market was quietly transformed into an outsourced, algorithmic monopoly:

The underlying infrastructure of renting completely changed. Landlords were no longer competing against each other; they were all taking instructions from the exact same corporate tollbooth.

Phase 3: The Extractive Turn (How It Became Anti-Consumer)

Once RealPage achieved total dominance, the software’s optimization parameters shifted from helping landlords run efficiently to extracting the absolute maximum dollar value from captive human beings.

The mechanics of this algorithmic cartel are devastatingly anti-consumer, operating through two primary levers:

1. The Death of Local Price Competition

In a healthy capitalist economy, if an apartment building has too many empty units, the landlord lowers the rent to attract tenants. RealPage completely broke this feedback loop. The software explicitly discourages landlords from lowering rent. Instead, it pools non-public, highly sensitive data from competing landlords to artificially align and raise prices across entire neighborhoods simultaneously.

2. Manufactured Scarcity (The “Withholding” Strategy)

The software found that property managers could increase total profit by intentionally leaving a percentage of their apartments vacant while keeping the remaining units priced at astronomical, supra-competitive premiums. The software literally acts as a digital referee, instructing rival landlords to collectively withhold housing supply to maintain an artificial price floor.

Phase 4: The Memory Trap (Believing a Dead Market Myth)

This brings us straight back to the psychological trap defining this entire series. Why do millions of renters continue to exhaust themselves touring five different apartment complexes, filling out endless applications, and hunting for a fair deal?

Because they believe a myth that is no longer true.

The average renter still operates under the behavioral hangover of the early 2000s. They believe they are participating in a fair, localized negotiation. They assume that if they walk away from an overpriced complex, the landlord will eventually feel the pressure of the free market and drop the price. They experience the psychological illusion of “shopping around.”

They are completely blind to the fact that the entire neighborhood’s pricing has been centralized by a single software algorithm. The “competition” is an illusion. Whether you rent from Corporate Landlord A or Property Group B, you are paying a price calculated by the exact same centralized entity.

The 2026 Reckoning: Tearing Down the Walled Garden

The good news is that the extraction cartel has finally pushed society to a cataclysmic breaking point.

Following a massive, multi-district antitrust lawsuit spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general, the dam has officially burst. In late 2025 and extending into 2026, federal courts granted preliminary approval of an astronomical $359 million class-action settlement against RealPage and dozens of its corporate landlord co-conspirators. Just months ago, the DOJ moved to enter a final judgment that strictly limits RealPage’s ability to pool non-public data to train its models and dictate local rental pricing.

True marketing and corporate accountability mean realizing that when a business model transitions from creating wealth to purely extracting it, it ultimately destroys the fabric of the society it relies on. Tearing down the travel dashboards and ticket syndicates was just the beginning. The global trustbusters of 2026 are proving that the fight for the open web is ultimately a fight for our right to live, survive, and exit the rigged rooms entirely.

Sources & Citations

1. In re RealPage Inc. Rental Software Antitrust Litigation (No. II), MDL No. 3071 (M.D. Tenn., 2025-2026). Preliminary approval of $359.9 million in class-action settlements regarding algorithmic rent-fixing and artificial supply suppression.

2. United States et al. v. RealPage, Inc. et al. (Department of Justice Antitrust Division, Proposed Final Judgment, 2025-2026). Federal enforcement action establishing structural bans on pooling non-public, competitively sensitive landlord data for runtime algorithmic operations.

Phase 1: The Era of Radical Novelty and Useful Disruption

Two decades ago, the internet promised a golden era of information symmetry. For generations, booking travel meant dealing with opaque legacy travel agents who held all the keys to pricing. The first generation of travel tech platforms were genuine consumer heroes because they broke that gatekeeping wide open.

Priceline’s Bidding Revolution: Launched in the late ’90s, Priceline.com introduced its famous “Name Your Own Price” bidding system. It was an incredibly useful, consumer-first utility. Because an unbooked airline seat or an empty hotel room is a highly perishable asset, Priceline gave budget-conscious travelers the power to bid on distressed inventory. It forced hospitality giants to unlock massive, unadvertised discounts for everyday people.

Kayak’s Transparency Crusade: Arriving in 2004, Kayak.com took a completely different but equally noble approach. Instead of acting as an agency, Kayak pioneered metasearch. It didn’t sell anything. It crawled hundreds of airlines, hotels, and booking engines simultaneously, compiling a clean dashboard of the absolute lowest prices on the web. It was an aggregator built explicitly to act as a neutral consumer ally.

In this initial phase, these platforms generated immense consumer goodwill because they were genuinely useful, fiercely independent, and fundamentally rebalanced market power back to the individual.

Phase 2: The Monopoly Consolidation

The shift from an open, helpful marketplace to an extractive tollbooth occurs when growth demands pleasing Wall Street rather than serving the end-user.

In 2005, Priceline bought Amsterdam-based Booking.com, eventually rebranding the entire parent conglomerate as Booking Holdings. To protect its territory and maximize margins, Booking Holdings began quietly swallowing the very tools consumers used to cross-reference prices. They bought up Agoda, and in 2013, they acquired Kayak.com for a staggering $1.8 billion.

Simultaneously, its only true global rival, Expedia Group, went on its own buying spree, scooping up Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotels.com, and Vrbo.

The original, diverse web of independent travel engines was funneled into two corporate cash registers:

The underlying infrastructure changed completely. The free market was replaced by a highly consolidated duopoly.

Phase 3: The Extractive Turn (How it Became Anti-Consumer)

Once a duopoly captures a market, the corporate incentive to maintain a high-quality consumer experience evaporates. Optimization parameters shift entirely toward squeezing value out of captive users.

1. The Death of Metasearch Neutrality

When a traveler visits Kayak.com to “compare prices,” they believe they are using an independent referee. They are not. Kayak is owned by Booking Holdings. The prominent results displayed on your dashboard are heavily populated by its own sister subsidiaries—Priceline, Agoda, and Booking.com. If you try to avoid them, the remaining options are almost entirely owned by Expedia. The dashboard is pure corporate theater; you are comparing Booking Holdings against Expedia Group while standing inside a Booking Holdings building.

2. Squeezing the Supply Chain

Because independent boutique hotels and local accommodations have nowhere else to look for digital traffic, the duopoly leverages its total dominance. They impose aggressive commission rates (often 15% to 30%) on small hotel operators. To survive these massive margins, hotels are forced to artificially inflate their baseline room rates or face algorithmic demotion—buried on page 10 of the search results where no consumer will ever look.

3. Deceptive “Drip Pricing”

The clean, upfront pricing of the early internet has been replaced by predatory dark patterns. Opaque “resort fees,” service charges, and platform fees are intentionally hidden until the absolute final screen of a multi-step checkout process, relying on consumer fatigue to push the transaction through.

Phase 4: The Captive Audience and the Phantom Belief

The most insidious part of this lifecycle is the behavioral lock-in: consumers still use these sites religiously because they believe a myth that is no longer true.

We carry a deep psychological hangover from 2005. We remember when Kayak was the scrappy underdog fighting the travel establishment. When a modern traveler opens Kayak, clicks a Priceline link, and books a room, their brain experiences the dopamine hit of “smart shopping.” They genuinely believe they just beat the system by out-smarting the market.

They are completely blind to the fact that they are browsing inside a tightly controlled walled garden. The massive, multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets of the duopoly have starved out independent discovery infrastructure, leaving consumers with no viable alternative.

Just like StubHub, the travel tech giants are cashing in on a dead, fan-friendly reputation to harvest wealth from a captive audience that still thinks it’s getting a deal. The platform no longer works for you; your attention and your trust have simply become the assets to be systematically extracted for the quarterly earnings report. And as long as we believe the illusion of choice, they will keep taking until there is nothing left.

We talked about this the other day—how the concept of corporate “extraction” is quietly ruining everything we love. Doug Stephens was talking about his book, The Future of Competitive Advantage? He made the powerful point that for the last 45 years, corporations have been trapped in a cycle of constant extraction—squeezing workers, exploiting the environment, and draining the capitalist system itself until there is “not a hell of a lot left to extract”. He warned that while a business using “dark patterns,” drip pricing, or deceptive practices might not seem cataclysmic in isolation, it completely destroys public trust when it scales.

Well, if you want a perfect, real-world example of exactly what we were talking about, look no further than the live entertainment industry. For years, fans have pointed their rage squarely at Ticketmaster. It has become a modern corporate villain, synonymous with dynamic pricing that turns standard tickets into luxury items, exorbitant “service fees” tacked on at checkout, and massive system crashes that leave fans locked out of buying tickets to see their favorite artists. Because Ticketmaster has historically held a near-monopoly on primary ticket sales, fans have felt completely trapped. This massive wave of consumer frustration is precisely what opened the door for StubHub, which once appeared to be the hero fans were waiting for.

The Birth of a “Fan-Friendly” Alternative

The concept was born in 2000, co-founded by two Stanford Graduate School of Business classmates, Eric Baker and Jeff Fluhr. Baker wanted to find tickets to a sold-out show, but navigating the market meant dealing with sketchy street scalpers or unverified classified ads, risking getting scammed or ripped off.

Believing there had to be a safer, more efficient way, Baker and Fluhr entered a school business plan competition. They initially called their idea Liquid Seats, which later evolved into StubHub and was conceptualized as an online “stock market” for tickets, where buyers and sellers could trade freely in a trusted environment.

The original vision of StubHub was explicitly built by fans, for fans.

StubHub aimed to take ticket reselling out of dark parking lots and bring it into a secure, regulated online marketplace. They pioneered the industry’s first “FanProtect Guarantee,” ensuring that if you bought a ticket, it was valid or you got your money back. For years, it felt like a legitimate, safe haven from Ticketmaster’s chaos.

But then it went completely to shit.

How It Went to Shit: The Evolution of the Extractive Model

The downfall unfolded gradually through corporate musical chairs, greed, and the institutionalization of scalping.

In 2004, a massive internal rift led to co-founder Eric Baker being pushed out of operations. StubHub was eventually sold to eBay in 2007 for $310 million. Meanwhile, Baker moved to Europe and started a rival secondary ticketing site called Viagogo, which quickly gained a terrible international reputation for aggressive fees and for hosting speculative ticket listings.

The turning point into total corporate cynicism happened right before the pandemic. In February 2020, Eric Baker’s Viagogo bought StubHub back from eBay for a staggering $4.05 billion. To justify that massive price tag, the platform stopped prioritizing casual “fans selling to other fans” and fully leaned into maximizing profits from institutional ticket brokers.

Instead of fighting the artificial scarcity that plagues the live event industry, StubHub realized it could generate far more revenue by actively leaning into it.

The platform evolved from a transparent peer-to-peer bulletin board into a sophisticated B2B tool tailored for high-volume professional middlemen.

Inside the SEC Disclosures: The Deception Cartel

The true predatory depth of this extractive deception was revealed when a CBC News investigative report pulled back the curtain on StubHub’s internal operations. Following the company’s public listing on the New York Stock Exchange, mandatory U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings exposed a highly calculated, anti-consumer ecosystem operating entirely behind the scenes.

While StubHub’s public relations department meticulously fields press inquiries by claiming they are merely a “marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets,” the SEC documents tell a different story:

• StubHub CEO Eric Baker was revealed to own and manage Andro Capital—a private hedge fund whose core business model relies on mass-scalping millions of dollars worth of tickets directly on StubHub’s own platform. In short, the man who controls the marketplace also controls one of the largest corporate entities that manipulate prices within it.

• The disclosures revealed an even deeper layer of systemic manipulation: StubHub entered into financial agreements to provide bankroll and short-term financing to other mass corporate scalpers. These corporate scalpers then turn around and buy tickets, putting them up for sale on StubHub.

This is the ultimate realization of the extractive corporate greed. StubHub isn’t a neutral venue where scalpers happen to hang out; it actively provides the capital to massive broker syndicates so they can instantly vacuum up thousands of tickets the second they go on sale on primary sites. These professional syndicates then post the hoarded inventory onto StubHub at astronomical markups.

By forcing consumers into a rigged marketplace defined by hidden fees, algorithmic price-gouging, and speculative “ghost tickets,” StubHub has accelerated the total collapse of consumer trust.

The Breaking Point: The 2026 World Cup Disaster

If you’re wondering why everyone is suddenly paying such close attention to StubHub right now, it’s because the ongoing 2026 FIFA World Cup completely broke the illusion. The world’s biggest sporting event acted as the ultimate stress test, and the resulting mass chaos forced their deceptive business model directly into the public eye.

During the tournament, StubHub systematically canceled thousands of World Cup ticket orders, often just hours before group-stage matches kicked off. Fans who had spent small fortunes on international flights and lodging arrived at stadium entrances across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico only to find that their promised passes had vanished or never actually existed.

This disaster exposed the massive consumer risk posed by speculative ticketing, an institutional practice in which corporate brokers list and sell seats they don’t physically possess, gambling that they can secure them later at a lower price. Because FIFA strictly limits third-party sales and explicitly states that only its official platform is authorized to transfer tickets, these mass scalpers couldn’t fulfill the orders.

When the system collapsed, StubHub’s famed “FanProtect Guarantee” offered little solace. Because tickets were so tightly restricted, StubHub couldn’t supply replacements. Refunding the face value of a ticket did absolutely nothing to recoup the thousands of dollars fans lost on useless airfare and hotel expenses.

The Cost of a Failing Ecosystem

“History is pretty unambiguous,” as Stephens noted in his interview. “No business can survive long term in a society that’s failing.” When a corporate entity relies entirely on deception to extract wealth from its customers, it operates on a ticking clock.

The immediate fallout is now playing out in real-time. Angry soccer fans have hit back by filing a $5 million US class-action lawsuit against StubHub in a Manhattan federal court, formally accusing the platform of false advertising, misleading sales practices, and knowingly selling unauthorized tickets it could not supply. Simultaneously, government regulators have stepped in, with official consumer fraud investigations launched by Consumer Protection BC and calls for legal action mounting across North America.

As industry experts have observed regarding these revelations, it is incredibly deceptive because StubHub publicly demands to be treated as a simple fan marketplace, yet omits the fact that its own executive leadership is a massive ticket seller that fuels and finances the platform. It is a small number of corporations who are selling tickets at scale, driving up prices, and leaving everyday fans completely screwed.

StubHub is a perfect example of a business that has abandoned any sense of core values just to feed the money machine. And in an era where consumers are increasingly demanding accountability, businesses built purely on extraction may soon find they have nothing left to take.

Sources & Citations

1. CBC News Investigative Report (Broadcast/Video, July 10, 2026). “StubHub CEO is a mass scalper.” Featuring reporting by Dave Seglins regarding StubHub’s New York Stock Exchange filings, SEC disclosures, Andro Capital, and institutional financing of ticket brokers.

2. Moghal et al. v. StubHub, Inc. (Manhattan Federal Court, 2026). Proposed class-action lawsuit alleging violations of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, false advertising, and breach of the FanProtect Guarantee regarding 2026 FIFA World Cup ticket cancellations.

It’s the only viable strategy left.

The Worst Business Advice of the Last 45 Years?

We all can agree, business and politics don’t mix and we should keep them apart, right? Well what if in reality, they’re a package deal?

Doug has spent 35 years watching the retail and consumer goods industry debate the same marketing softball questions. Omni-channel commerce. Loyalty programs. Whether a button should be blue. Meanwhile, he says, the world has been coming apart.

“As of 2024, income and wealth inequality had hit a tipping point,” says Doug. “AI is poised to widen and deepen that gap. We had basically priced out an entire generation from the lifestyle that their parents had taken for granted. And the retail industry was still debating omni-channel commerce?”

There was a gap Doug was seeing, between what business was discussing and what was actually happening, which drove him to write The Future of Competitive Advantage: A Business Plan to Save Your Customers, Your Company, and Democracy.

This book is part history lesson, part business lecture, but all backed by credible research and Doug’s experience and centers around a prescient take; the worst business advice of the last 45 years has been to keep politics and business separate.

“I was educated in the school of thought that said one should never mix business with politics,” writes Doug. “I know now that this was dead wrong. I realize that, in fact, the two are not only inseparable but are mutually dependent. Indeed, as one of democracy’s prime beneficiaries, business leaders have nothing less than a fiduciary responsibility to defend democracy and the institutions that uphold it. Because without democracy the free and fair market that our businesses depend on disappears.”

Recently Doug brought his aplomb and that argument to the Marketing Accountability Council’s “Reality Check,” where MAC co-founders Jake Sanders, Jay Mandel, Jessica Smiley, and Moni Oloyede sat down with him for a conversation about where business went wrong and what it would take to go right.

The 45-Year March (In The Wrong Direction)

Doug proves that, after a great boom during the post-war through to the 70s, the downturn started in the early 1980s, when Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics convinced enough politicians that making the shareholder the only concern was the path to extraordinary growth. The promise: wealth would trickle down.

“That,” says Doug, “was just really a load of bullshit.”

What followed was four and a half decades of extraction — from the environment, from workers, from the capitalist system itself. “Constant extraction,” he says. “And we’re kind of at the point where there’s not a hell of a lot left to extract.”

The cost after 45 years of marching are visible: collapsed trust in institutions, a generation locked out of homeownership, a democracy Doug describes as hanging by a thread. None of it is abstract. It is a direct business problem.

“History is pretty unambiguous,” says Doug. “No business can survive long term in a society that’s failing.”

Bud Light, Patagonia, and the Question of Legitimate Footing

Jake Sanders raises the question of politics in business — and the near-universal reflex to keep them separate. When should a marketer or brand bring up politics, and in what way?

Not every brand should weigh in on everything, says Doug — but when they do, the question isn’t whether to engage. It’s whether they have legitimate footing to stand on. He uses two brands to draw the line.

When Bud Light partnered with Dylan Mulvaney and then retreated the moment the backlash arrived, it lost both sides. “They really didn’t have a deeply held, anchored, legitimate reason for bringing it up in the first place,” says Doug. “There was no attachment to core values.”

Contrast that with Patagonia in 2017, when the Trump administration moved to reclaim Bears Ears National Monument. Within an hour, Patagonia had updated their website: The president just stole your land. Within 24 hours, they had filed a lawsuit.

“Environmental protection and public lands — that is a core value of the organization,” says Doug. “They were on very solid footing. I rest my case.”

For council member Moni Oloyede, the Bud Light example is less an outlier than a pattern. “It’s the money at all costs. Revenue growth, shareholder returns — that’s the onus. And I think a lot of companies that were established went away from that.”

The Costco Proof Point

Doug is deliberate about one thing: this book is not meant to be a moral argument.

“If this book becomes a moral soapbox, it’s gonna fail spectacularly,” he says. “There isn’t a CEO in America that’s gonna give a rat’s ass. When you talk to a CEO from the standpoint of morality, they glaze over.”

So he looked for a business case to support the argument in his book. One of the clearest examples is Costco.

For decades, Costco CEO Jim Sinegal paid his employees roughly 42% more than Walmart paid theirs. He offered strong benefits, limited his own compensation, and held the line when Wall Street told him to cut. His response was consistent: “You guys are mistaking what I’m doing here for charity. This isn’t altruism. This is good business.”

The numbers held and continue to do so. Costco runs 8% annual employee turnover. Walmart runs 60%. The downstream cost difference — in recruiting, retraining, lost productivity — is enormous.

“If your employees don’t trust you,” says Doug, “and if they come to work every day believing they are being treated unfairly — I’m not talking about unequally, I’m talking about unfairly — there is no ingredient, no new machine, no new marketing program that will save you. Because those employees will undermine you every step of the way.”

Citing Starbucks as a counterexample lands just as hard. Doug notes that incoming CEO Brian Niccol’s compensation package works out to roughly 6,666 times the average Starbucks employee’s pay. One of Niccol’s early moves: making it easier for customers to tip baristas.

“It wasn’t about paying people a living wage,” says Doug. “It was finding more ways for consumers to subsidize their employees.” He pauses. “Is that fair?”

What Monday Morning Looks Like

Toward the end, Jake Sanders brings it to the practical question: for the everyday marketer, what does all this mean come Monday?

Doug’s answer is about compounding.

“The decisions we make every day — drip pricing, dark patterns in the way we deal with consumers, lying about the quality or performance of a product — in isolation may not seem cataclysmic,” says Doug. “But if this is happening at 100,000 different businesses, that begins to really shape the future.”

Council member Jessica Smiley names the real friction: incentives. “When the incentives align in a capitalistic society,” she says, “truth or good can be incorporated into the money machine. So what does that look like?”

Doug’s answer is that trust and fairness are measurable. 84% of consumers say fair pay is important to them. 77% say it directly shapes their trust in a business. Trust shapes purchase intent. Purchase intent shapes revenue.

“What you will be in a position of having to do,” says Doug, of companies that ignore this, “is nothing but share buybacks until your business goes out of business.”

The book doesn’t end with a moral manifesto, but closes with a 13-page business plan, a set of specific, financially defensible moves. Doug’s argument, and one the MAC council keeps returning to, is that being a good company is no longer in tension with being a profitable one.

“Maybe we look at it from a legacy standpoint, if nothing else,” says Doug. “I have grandchildren. I want to leave a world to them where they can trust their government, work and make a living, afford a decent life — and don’t feel that every corporation is trying to cheat them.”

This conversation with Doug and his book make the case that the future is in our hands; the question is; what will we do with it?

Watch the full Marketing Accountability Council conversation with Doug Stephens above or on Youtube. His book, The Future of Competitive Advantage: A Business Plan to Save Your Customers, Your Company, and Democracy, is available at retailprophet.com and wherever books are sold.

They say focus on business outcomes, so I focused on revenue generating campaigns. They say support all your recommendations with data, so I show up with so many reports the data is coming out of my ass. They say speak up, be vocal and call out issues when you see them, so I name problems, pushback on unrealistic asks and provide alternatives.

I AM being strategic, damn it! But I’m not moving up in my career and the “be more strategic” advice kept coming up. What the heck am I missing??

So, when people in the marketing community continued to preach strategy, I nodded along every time, because disagreeing felt like admitting I didn’t understand my own job. But I’d leave those discussions with zero idea of what I was supposed to do differently that I wasn’t already doing. I’m diving into conversion rates, I’m understanding how to improve lead quality, I’m building cross functional relationships! What am I not doing that they are?

“Be more strategic” became one of those phrases everyone repeats and nobody defines, like “synergy” or “circle back,” except this one actually gates who gets promoted.

I came from marketing operations, so naturally I concluded that “strategic” meant getting sharper at proving marketing’s value. I dug into attribution. I got better at reporting. I learned exactly how long it took an MQL to become an opportunity and which campaigns touched closed revenue. I could walk into any meeting and explain where every lead in the funnel currently was.

I thought I was zooming out. I was actually just getting more sophisticated inside the same tiny space I’d always been standing in.

Marketing can often get trapped in IT helpdesk mode. Someone asks you to fix something or to do a task and you respond with either yes, no, or describe what is possible. What you don’t always understand is that your “what’s possible” is a narrowly controlled space.

And when you don’t completely understand the business that space looks like this. The business needs revenue, so marketing needs pipeline. That means we need more leads, so we need more people to fill out a form.

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Every “fix” or “what’s possible” is through the lens of collecting leads. Forms, content, ads, digital assets.

If the form isn’t converting, then we fix the form. I’d suggest fewer fields. If people are dropping off, then we optimize the landing page. I’d suggest new images and shorter copy. If we need better quality leads, then we need to do better targeting. If we need to improve lead conversion, then I suggest we build a new nurture cadence. If we need to get more leads that fit in our target ICP, then we need another platform to fix personalization or intent data or routing. This all sounds perfectly reasonable. But none of these “fixes” has to do with business outcomes. They are tactical fixes focused on execution.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the business outcome I was supposed to be focused on had disappeared long before it got to me and I didn’t have the business acumen at the time to know which questions to ask to get it back.

What was the business goal? Were we shifting markets, launching a new product category, assuming a new market position? And how was marketing going to support it? Customer retention, channel partner strategy, new customer acquisition? How do I keep that in the forefront and make sure we don’t move away from it?

Because by the time a business goal reaches the person building the campaign, it’s already been translated four or five times, and each translation shrinks it. Leadership sets a revenue number. That becomes a pipeline number. That becomes an MQL number. That becomes a lead number. That becomes and a tactic like “get 600 people registered for this webinar.”

By the time it lands on your desk, the actual business problem is long gone, and you’re just optimizing a form. You can build an entire career getting excellent at solving that smaller problem without ever once asking whether it was the right problem. I know, because I did it for years.

The better approach and the more strategic way to handle marketing challenges isn’t by solving the problem itself.

Let’s say the form isn’t converting. The strategic solution is to say, actually, this program isn’t worth the dollars we put into it, that same spend is better split between our partner support program and retargeting campaigns. That will allow us to grow quicker by using the partners to help us expand our brand presence and by focusing on retargeting, we only spend our ad dollars with people who are visiting our website, reducing waste. See how there is no mention of the tactical problem? We elevated the solution to the business outcome, support market expansion while preventing budget waste.

Let’s say the issue is that people are dropping off the landing page. The strategic solution is to say, we’re using a freelancer to manage landing pages and our SEO strategy. We should just hire a graphic designer and bring SEO back in-house and tie it to the overall website strategy plan, so we streamline operations and while growing our overall web presence. Again, no mention of tactics. The solution is tied to reducing cost and improving brand awareness.

It’s frustrating when people say “be strategic” but no one tells you want that looks like. Spoiler alert, it’s because most people, even some seasoned marketers, don’t know what it really means.

The difference is that the tactical marketer accepts the problem as given. The strategic marketer treats the problem as evidence and then determines what are the tradeoffs required to make improvements and then determines the resources required to make those improvements happen.

Strategy requires deciding where the business should put its finite money, people, and time.

The tactical person asks: How do we improve conversion from 2.1% to 3%?

The strategic thinker asks: Before we spend another quarter improving conversion, is this program still the best place to put $10,000?

Then they investigate.

Maybe the program produces customers but at double the rate of the acquisition cost. Maybe partner-generated opportunities close three times faster. Maybe 70% of closed business involves prospects who visited the website multiple times before engaging with sales.

Once they investigate, they assess the business requirements and then they produce a recommendation. Reduce investment in cold acquisition. Put 40% of the budget into a partner program that expands trusted distribution. Use another portion to retarget existing website visitors showing intent. Keep a smaller acquisition budget to test new audiences.

That person isn’t more strategic because they mentioned revenue. They’re more strategic because they expanded the problem, evaluated alternatives, considered tradeoffs, and recommended where the business should invest.

When your career is built around a function, you learn to defend that function’s importance, often without noticing you’re doing it. Demand gen believes the fix is always more demand gen. Ops believes it’s always better systems. Paid media believes it’s always sharper targeting. And it’s just a wild coincidence how often an agency’s strategic recommendation happens to be exactly the service already sitting on their invoice.

But being genuinely strategic means having enough distance from your own work to say the uncomfortable thing out loud. If I run the nurture program, I have to be willing to recommend spending less on nurture. If I own paid media, I have to be able to say the ad budget isn’t the problem. That’s a genuinely scary thing to say when your headcount, your budget, and your job security are built on people believing your function is essential. It is so much safer to run one more test, build one more dashboard, buy one more platform, launch one more campaign, and ask for one more quarter. You can spend years polishing a program the company should have killed two years ago, and every single report will say you’re doing great.

The C-level and senior leadership isn’t immune to the “strategic” trap. They fall for it too, in a different way. Seasoned marketers can get so deep into the business side that every conversation starts sounding like a finance meeting with better slides. Margins, CAC, retention, growth. All real, important and necessary. However, none of it is the finish line.

The whole point of moving backward through the business problem is to end up back at the customer. If leadership decides to move upmarket, your job is to understand what made bigger customers suddenly worth chasing and then ask what that decision requires those specific buyers to believe, trust, or understand before they’ll ever say yes. That’s the actual bridge between business strategy and marketing strategy. The business decides where to compete. Marketing figures out what has to be true in the customer’s head for that bet to pay off. Only after that do you get to pick the tactic, like the webinar, the ad, the case study, the partner program, whatever it turns out to be.

So the next time someone tells you to “be more strategic”, don’t reach for another dashboard or another finance term to memorize. Take the actual problem sitting on your desk right now and walk it outward. Improve the work if it genuinely needs improving. Diagnose the system around it. Ask honestly whether that system deserves the investment. Compare it to what else the company could be doing with the same time and money. Then, and only then, bring it back to what you actually know about how your customer thinks, decides, and buys.

You might find out the form needs fewer fields. You might also find out your company has spent three years perfecting a form attached to a program it should have shut down two years ago. Knowing the difference is the whole job.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

At the top tier, the metrics reflect sound, value-generative marketing principles.

Front-line personnel are publicly praised for achieving 100% Friendliness Ratings on post-purchase surveys.

Others are commended for operational efficiency, successfully picking hundreds of omnichannel orders for curbside pickup.

In these dimensions, the business-to-consumer relationship operates as a transparent, mutually beneficial exchange. The employee takes pride in seamless execution, the store optimizes throughput, and the consumer leaves satisfied.

But as your eyes travel down the board, the corporate utopian image completely shatters.

Right alongside the accolades for empathy and efficiency hangs a bright orange starburst loudly celebrating an aggressive transaction metric:

“Credit Captures.”

The Linguistics of the Trap

From an institutional accountability perspective, the terminology alone drops all corporate pretense. Retailers do not use sanitized phrases like “financial partnership” or “loyalty optimization” on their internal walls; they call it a capture.

The language treats the target demographic not as a valued patron to be retained, but as prey to be trapped at the point of sale. The checkout lane is transformed into a financial net, and the consumer is the asset to be captured before they can exit the front door.

Once a shopper is successfully captured, the product's financial architecture shifts entirely toward extraction. The consumer is enticed by a minor, highly visible transactional inducement—such as a one-time 20% off and a 5% discount every day. To the consumer, caught in a moment of behavioral bias at the register, it feels like a short-term win.

The mathematical reality, however, is devastatingly one-sided. With ongoing purchase Annual Percentage Rates (APRs) sitting at an astronomical 31.99%, there is virtually zero long-term benefit for the consumer. If a homeowner maintains a balance on a major appliance or raw materials, that compounding interest aggressively neutralizes the initial discount within a highly compressed time horizon. The fleeting, single-store perk is entirely eclipsed by subprime liability.

Why Capital and the Consumer Are Misaligned

This zero-sum game mirrors the exact same extractive logic seen across the gig economy and the data brokerage market. Corporate capital extracts the immediate financial margin and the long-term interest portfolio, while the human element absorbs 100% of the operational and economic risk.

For a specialized big-box retailer whose enterprise value depends on recurring, high-capital-project financing, introducing high-interest friction at the register is incredibly counterproductive. Driving everyday families into compounding debt cycles heavily interrupts their long-term purchasing power. It breeds post-purchase dissonance, degrades the store’s broader customer experience (CX) indices, and severely dilutes systemic brand trust.

Furthermore, this extraction weaponizes human capital. Frontline retail employees, typically compensated at standard hourly rates, are effectively forced to act as aggressive, uncredentialed loan officers. When internal performance systems link shift allocations, job security, or weekly scheduling to “credit capture” quotas, the organizational culture shifts from genuine service delivery to forced financial compliance.

What If Everyone Actually Won?

True market leadership requires rejecting the premise that a consumer must be financially compromised for a retail marketplace to thrive. Shifting from an extractive model to a positive-sum framework yields measurable dividends across the entire corporate structure:

• Consumers win: When an enterprise respects the financial well-being of its demographic, it builds authentic loyalty. Eliminating predatory register traps protects consumer purchasing power, giving them a structural reason to return for future high-capital projects.

• Frontline talent wins: Employees are energized when their metrics align with authentic service. Removing the coercive pressure of credit quotas allows floor staff to focus on operational velocity and genuine engagement, driving down employee turnover.

• Corporate boards win: Ethics are not an obstacle to margin—they are the mechanism for long-term equity valuation. Aligning enterprise success with consumer financial health secures higher lifetime value (CLV) and isolates the brand from regulatory interventions and negative word-of-mouth.

The Accountability Standard

A transaction should never be weaponized against the person who initiated it. Ethical operational architecture is not altruism; it is long-term market survival. Celebrating friendliness and fulfillment velocity drives authentic market share. Conversely, gamifying consumer debt under the banner of “Credit Captures” erodes the foundational trust upon which sustainable enterprises are built. Corporate governance must retire extractive, predatory metrics and return to accountability frameworks where enterprise victory does not require the literal capture and financial deficit of the consumer.

To understand where the current marketplace model breaks down, we can analyze a recent, real-world delivery sequence that serves as a perfect case study of operational inefficiency.

A logistics platform dispatched a provider on an initial $8 contract to source and deliver 12 heavy bags of wood mulch from a major retailer, spanning a 20-mile transit radius.

Upon reaching the target destination, the provider encountered a literal systemic wall: a severe storm the previous night had knocked down trees, completely blocking the street. With local law enforcement declaring the road impassable, the provider was forced to initiate a massive detour just to find an alternative approach.

The provider made multiple attempts to navigate a labyrinth of side streets to reach the destination from the back, but the storm damage had severed the route entirely. This unforeseen act of God added nearly an hour of unpaid, grueling operational time to the ticket, draining the transport vehicle’s fuel supply.

At the very least, the cargo was wood mulch. Had those 12 heavy, water-logged bags soaking in the vehicle been manure, the literal stench of the situation would have perfectly matched the operational execution.

When the provider escalated the crisis to customer support, the platform’s internal routing revealed its own awareness of the chaos. The system bypassed standard tier-one customer service teams in India and auto-routed the ticket to a more empowered tier-two support center in the Philippines to handle the complexity.

The platform’s solution? Instruct the provider to halt operations, drive 30 minutes back to the retail store, and manually unload and return the items. The final resolution for hours of physical labor, out-of-pocket refueling, and a locked application that blocked any other revenue streams? A final payout of roughly $12 and change (roughly $8 for the original delivery $4 for restocking!)

The Value Trap: Why Capital and Labor Are Misaligned

When we look at the sheer amount of time spent, the immense physical effort expended, and the premium-level care delivered under hazardous conditions, a poignant question emerges for modern enterprise builders:

Is twelve dollars and change what a partner’s time, effort, and compliance are worth?

The traditional gig economy algorithm says yes.

It views labor purely as an expense to be minimized and squeezed. In this zero-sum game, capital extracts all the value, leaving the human element to absorb 100% of the operational risk.

While an extractive model might satisfy short-term quarterly margins, it destroys long-term brand equity. It breeds deep-seated resentment, degrades data and service quality, and creates a highly volatile ecosystem.

Data Brokers Run the Same Playbook

This dynamic doesn’t just play out for gig workers. The exact same extractive logic runs every second in the global data brokerage market.

Traditional data brokers treat the people generating data the way that platform treated its driver: as a resource to be harvested, minimized, and squeezed. Corporate capital extracts the value; the human element absorbs all the privacy, security, and operational risk.

Just as a driver got $12 for a multi-hour ordeal, individuals, creators, and professionals have their digital footprints and behavioral data silently harvested, packaged into premium profiles, and sold to enterprise buyers for billions — while the people who actually generated that value get nothing. The result is a fragile ecosystem all around:

• Buyers get low-fidelity, scraped, or ethically compromised data carrying real compliance risk.

• Providers (the public) grow resentful and actively poison their own data trails with ad-blockers, privacy tools, and opt-outs.

• Brokers end up playing cat-and-mouse against tightening regulation and deteriorating data quality.

What If Everyone Actually Won?

What if we rejected the premise that someone has to get cheated for a data marketplace to succeed and shifted from an extractive model to a positive-sum one, where value is co-created and shared?

• Consumers win. In an economy where people usually feel like a line item to be squeezed, respecting data agency gives them a reason to participate. More trust leads to more (and better) data sharing.

• The marketing and insights industry wins. A transparent ecosystem produces cleaner data. Buyers get real efficacy and higher returns because they’re no longer purchasing low-quality or manipulated datasets.

• Employees and talent win. People are energized to work for an organization that respects data. That reputation attracts the developers, data scientists, and strategists who want to build something accountable.

• Corporate boards win. Ethics aren’t an obstacle to profit — they’re the mechanism for it. This alignment yields greater efficiency, lower costs, and higher returns, thereby securing the long-term survival of the enterprise.

Reimagining Each Side of the Exchange

The buyer wins on fidelity, not just volume. Instead of fragmented, legally grey data scraped from the dark corners of the web, enterprise buyers get high-fidelity, explicitly consented insight — data that drives real results without the regulatory time bomb attached.

The provider wins through real digital autonomy. Imagine a data broker that treats the people powering its engine as true capital partners — compensating them transparently, through micro-payments or direct dividends, whenever their data trains a model, optimizes a supply chain, or targets an ad. When participants are respected and protected, trust deepens, accuracy improves, and retention becomes near-absolute.

The broker wins through velocity, not squeezing. Profitability shouldn’t come from sneaking data out the back door or burying opt-out buttons in fine print. It should come from the scale and health of the ecosystem itself — a transparent, ethical clearinghouse builds a far more defensible long-term position than one built on data no one can legally stand behind.

The Accountability Standard

Data should not be weaponized against the person who created it.

Ethical data architecture isn’t altruism — it’s long-term market survival. When the broker's success is directly tethered to the provider's prosperity and the buyer's satisfaction, you build something that lasts.

It’s time to stop designing algorithms that exploit human output, and start building ecosystems where everyone gets to win.

If you’ve discovered my work through my articles, it’s natural to form a quick impression of who I am. But as someone dedicated to uncovering the truth, I know that a few pieces rarely tell the whole story.

My personal life, my professional career, and my creative work aren’t separate compartments. They are one and the same; all driven by the exact same pursuit of what is real and authentic. If you’re curious about how all these pieces connect, I’d love for you to read on, or simply reach out and ask!

From Scale to Substance

My professional journey began in 2000, at the dawn of the consumer internet era. Fresh out of Syracuse University, I believed that if I worked hard, delivered real value, and aligned with credible institutions, stability would follow.

In the early 2000s, corporate scale was tangible evidence of value. If a brand had distribution, national media weight, and physical demand, it had earned something grounded in substance.

Over a twenty-year career in corporate digital marketing, followed by seven years of building my own independent marketing and coaching practice, I watched that contract slowly erode.

In the internet era, scale no longer required structural durability; it just required traffic.

• Impressions replaced impact.

• Click-through rates replaced genuine conviction.

• Digital dashboards eliminated the need to observe real human decisions.

We stopped asking human beings what they actually needed. Instead, we began capturing fragments of their online behavior, stitching them together, and calling it “personalization.”

By the time the 2020s arrived, artificial urgency (“Only 3 minutes left!”) became standard operating procedure. Marketing shifted from making something genuinely desirable to making it structurally unavailable through dark patterns and hidden tracking.

I spent years inside corporate spaces demanding operational integrity. But eventually, I reached a point where I could no longer normalize behavior in my professional life that I wouldn’t want anyone to use on me or my family.

The Integration of Personal, Professional, & Creative

For me, identity cannot be compartmentalized. The human dignity, sovereign agency, and creative persistence I demand from an enterprise must be lived out in the street.

While my team and I raise a $3M Seed round for Dāginty, I use TikTok as my hyper-localized laboratory and cultural radar.

@jayeatswestchester.

Where I critique the local restaurants while driving organic traffic and B2B relationships to advance my vision. Like reminding people why independent local spots like Martine’s Fine Bake Shop matter in a world full of forgettable, corporate chains.

@jayeatswestchesterIndependent bakeries are getting harder to find, so you end up settling for places like Paris Baguette—reliable, convenient, fine… but forgettable. Then you walk into Martine’s Fine Bake Shoppe and remember what this is supposed to feel like.

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@marketingrealitycheck

This channel is my strategic, B2B-facing platform. It is where I deconstruct consumer psychology, expose lazy corporate copycats, and analyze exactly why certain pieces of content trigger dopamine loops while others fail. It serves as the intellectual filter for my marketing theories and shows brands how to build substance rather than just chase trends.

@marketingrealitycheckwait are you telling me that if you go to @McDonald’s for apples, this is what you get?

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@jaywalkingnyc

This channel is my high-engagement, boots-on-the-ground B2C machine. It leverages the raw, fast-paced, unpredictable energy of New York City.

@jaywalkingnycThe robot says Knicks in five

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I am using this exact same raw, vulnerable, and unvarnished storytelling style to expose the data crisis we are solving with Dāginty. Modern enterprise buyers and investors have an acute radar for polished inauthenticity. By bringing this raw, documented perspective directly into the enterprise data space, the hustle becomes a proprietary narrative asset.

Fierce Advocacy: Bypassing the Bureaucracy

While I was demanding accountability in marketing, my family was forced into a grueling battle with a special education system that operates with zero accountability toward the families it is legally mandated to protect. I chose to apply my accountability frameworks directly to these personal battles.

Simultaneously, my advocacy means mentoring my children to bypass permission-based corporate systems entirely. Recently, I walked into NYC PrideFest holding media credentials to support my son, a dedicated independent civic journalist who has independently climbed into the top contributors on the entire Citizen platform.

He didn’t wait for an institution to hand him a career; he went out on the pavement, captured the moment, and built his own digital media enterprise. I am out there on the concrete learning from his success, protecting his independence, and proving that the community’s eyes follow authentic human voices.

Stripping the Theater from Corporate Exploitation

I am not afraid to publicly challenge anything that doesn’t feel right to me. Whether it is a food conglomerate quietly downgrading its ingredients to pad profit margins, a family entertainment franchise hiding aggressive upsells and draconian liability waivers behind a wall of marketing emails, or the university I attended, which is now charging close to $100k a year while simultaneously gutting programs, I call out corporate overreach when I see it. When consumer trust is traded for artificial margins, I use my platform to strip away the corporate theater and expose the reality underneath.

My Focus

I shifted my entire career toward building data infrastructure, corporate incentives, and systemic policy. I stopped trying to help legacy organizations humanize their brands while optimizing extraction, and I started building the functional alternatives.

1. Co-Founder at Dāginty

AI cannot scale safely on data it cannot defend. At Dāginty, we are actively deploying the enterprise architecture that turns data rights into anonymous, consented, and verified human signal profiles. We ensure every data point comes with a transparent receipt, shattering the lazy, identity-heavy assumptions that break corporate strategies and moving enterprise standards toward trusted, sovereign data participation. This remains my absolute top priority.

2. Founder at the Marketing Accountability Council (MAC)

Built as the philosophy and the conscience for the industry, using frameworks like the BS Continuum (Honest Signal → Theater → Manipulation → Deception) to audit corporate behavior and create a safe space for open dialogue about the unspoken issues impacting our careers.

3. Co-Founder at the Clean Data Alliance (CDA)

A foundational coalition addressing the structural harms of dirty data across marketing, AI, and enterprise intelligence. My involvement here is highly deliberate, strategic, and time-bound:

• Spearhead the Initial Launch: Taking the lead on early-stage rollout and marketing alignment to anchor the Alliance’s foundational messaging.

• Establish & Transition: Framing the core mission, curating evidence, and facilitating working groups with a clear, definitive plan to step down once the Alliance is firmly established.

• Strategic Profile Alignment: Maintaining a flexible presence tailored to meet investor, board, and leadership expectations, ensuring friction-free momentum for the CDA while driving transparent dialogue through writing and speaking.

  Clean Data Alliance

  If They Can Unmask Tucker Carlson, You Are Already Exposed

  During a live recording of his podcast, Tucker Carlson sat down with Ryan Montgomery—a world-class ethical hacker known online as “0day,” the CTO of the Sentinel Foundation, and co-founder of Pentester.com. What was meant to be an interview about cyber vulnerabilities quickly turned into a real-time demonstration of total digital exposure…

  Read more

  a month ago · Jay Mandel

Moving Forward Without Assumptions

If you are looking for the polite, traditional corporate marketer I used to be, or if the bluntness of my critique makes you uncomfortable, that is completely okay. You are welcome to leave a comment, share your thoughts, and go your own way.

Leave a comment

But if you are a founder, an investor, an enterprise leader, or a creator who is tired of the corporate theater, tired of lazy data assumptions, and ready to build a future grounded in data dignity and absolute integrity—let’s connect and build something real.

Join the conversation. If this resonated with you, consider subscribing to the Marketing Accountability Council (MAC) Substack for weekly deep dives, audits, and unvarnished truths about the data and marketing landscapes.

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This past weekend, I walked into NYC PrideFest with official media press credentials, not as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, but as a proud father supporting my son’s independent journalism operation.

On his own initiative, my son secured those credentials. He is a dedicated, independent civic journalist whose account has officially climbed into the top 200 contributors on the entire Citizen platform.

With my support and mentorship, he is out on the pavement making real money covering parades, fires, and community events. I am not exaggerating when I say I am learning a lot from his success.

Yet, because of our environment and our credentials, people immediately wrote our stories for us:

• On the train, a stranger saw my pass, assumed my identity, and offered immediate, warm solidarity: “I’m not gay, but I support you.”

• Later, when I mentioned my son was livestreaming the parade, the immediate response was: “Oh wow, is your son gay?”

They looked at the context and filled in the blanks before asking a single factual question. But while observers were making snap judgments, I was being completely transformed by the world-class talent unfolding right before our eyes.

The music set an incredible tone, moving from the global rhythms of DJ Armana Khan to the electric energy of Kemmii, and then to the legendary Kevin Aviance, who left me feeling a sense of pure, unapologetic freedom deep in my chest. The lineup concluded with Bree Runway and Rico Nasty absolutely igniting the audience.

While Bree Runway and Rico Nasty performed, both Kevin and Kemmii stepped right down into the audience to watch their peers. Seeing them standing alongside us, I stepped forward. I expressed my genuine gratitude to Kevin face-to-face, and right there in the crowd, I shared a deeply heartfelt conversation with Kemmii. For a moment, all the noise and external assumptions stripped away, leaving only mutual respect and authentic human connection.

The Dark Side of Data

That stranger on the train who made a snap judgment? They weren’t an outlier. They are the human equivalent of a modern data algorithm.

Right now, data brokers are tracking everyone. They monitor your location, your purchases, and the events you attend. If a data broker’s algorithm tracked me this weekend, it saw a sequence of metadata:

• Attended a Pride parade.

• Stood in the media section. Interacted with LGBTQ+ icons.

Based on those superficial data points, their legacy systems would instantly flag me, group me into a neat little demographic box, and begin serving me targeted ads based on who they assume I am.

But their assumption would be flat wrong.

• They would completely miss the fact that I am a straight father supporting his son’s digital media enterprise.

• They would miss the fact that I am an entrepreneur analyzing market psychology.

Legacy data brokers sell corporations proxies of human behavior; lazy guesses wrapped in high-tech packaging. They look at where someone stands and assume they know what that person thinks, wants, and needs. This hurts enterprises by driving up wasted ad spend, corrupting market research, and causing brands to misfire when communicating with real people.

Millions of dollars in budgetary decisions are being built on fiction.

The product my partners and I am inventing strips away the guesswork. We don’t deal in assumptions. We deal in factual, self-sovereign human intent—the raw, uncorrupted truth of what the market actually needs.

The Ultimate Proof of Concept

The parade wasn’t just an event for me; it was the ultimate validation of my business model. It exposed a massive, systemic failure in how data is collected and weaponized.

If a corporate leader relies entirely on traditional data brokers, they are buying a box full of flat stereotypes, completely missing the real-time, ground-level shifts, the independent innovators, and the nuanced consumers altering the market right under their noses.

My son didn’t wait for permission to climb the ranks of digital journalism.

Kevin Aviance didn’t fit into anyone’s predefined box.

And I’m not staying in mine.

I am bringing forth a B2B innovation that gets to the absolute truth of data. We are shattering the lazy assumptions that break corporate strategies, delivering a solution that respects the nuance of the consumer and unlocks genuine, bulletproof market needs.

The age of the lazy assumption is over. It’s time to build for the reality of who people actually are.

Driving for a modern delivery app doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like playing a high-stakes slot machine.

When you log onto a gig app, you aren’t just entering a marketplace; you are entering a finely tuned psychological ecosystem built on variable reward schedules—the exact same mechanism casinos use to keep players pulling the lever. The app gives you a great payout often enough to keep you believing the next one is just around the corner, while the vast majority of the offers barely cover your fuel.

But the unpredictability of the payouts is only half the gamble. Once you accept an order, the platform shifts from a slot machine to a high-stress pressure cooker, enforced by absolute algorithmic metrics:

• The Illusion of the Perfect Route: The app tracks performance through strict On-Time Rates, calculated down to the minute. It dictates delivery windows that assume perfect traffic, immediate restaurant prep, and effortless parking—variables that simply do not exist in the real world.

• The Volatility of Customer Sentiment: Drivers are entirely at the mercy of Satisfaction Ratings. A customer who receives cold food because the kitchen took 30 minutes to cook it can leave a “thumbs down” that heavily penalizes the driver. You are constantly managing the emotional fallout of a supply chain you don’t control.

• The Threat of Deactivation: In this marketplace, customer complaints aren’t just feedback—they are an existential threat to your livelihood. Drop below a specific algorithmic threshold (often an 85% to 90% satisfaction rate), and the system permanently deactivates your account. There is no HR department; there is only a line of code enforcing the house rules.

It is an incredibly sophisticated form of gamification in which the house always wins.

Hacking the House: From Worker to Creator

But I am not writing this to complain. I am writing this because I am doing exactly what I need to do to fund my vision. I refuse to be a victim of the algorithm. Instead, I hacked it. I am using their infrastructure to fund my creative experiment while using their house money to build my own venture.

When you shift your mindset from worker to creator, look at what the platform inadvertently provides:

• Primary Market Research: They pay me to conduct boots-on-the-ground research. I am filming local restaurants, interviewing owners, discovering niche products, and watching consumer behavior change in real-time.

• Radical Brand Equity: Modern audiences have an acute radar for polished, corporate inauthenticity. By being completely transparent about the bridge gig funding my dream, the hustle becomes a proprietary narrative asset.

• A High-Yield Content Engine: The algorithmic chaos of the road provides an endless stream of material, from encountering delivery robots to testing limited-edition menus.

The Business Case for the Side Quest

To prove this isn’t just theory, look at the asset I’m actively building under the handle @jayeatswestchester on TikTok. By documenting this journey, I have built a localized, highly engaged audience from the driver’s seat. If we audit this “side quest” through standard marketing frameworks, the numbers speak for themselves:

• Earned Media Value (EMV): In a niche like food and local business, CPMs run anywhere from $10 to $20+. When a single organic video hits the local algorithm and pulls tens of thousands of views, it generates hundreds of dollars in equivalent ad placement value for free.

• Avoided R&D Costs: I am mapping out the local culinary, economic, and small-business landscape with a level of granularity that would cost a consultant $5,000 to $15,000+ to synthesize.

• B2B Pipeline Equity: I am building warm, digitally documented relationships with local business owners by giving them free exposure. In terms of Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), I am building a massive network for $0.

But let’s be entirely clear: @jayeatswestchester is just the experiment. The metrics are great, but the real value isn’t just about getting views on TikTok. The real value is mastering the exact distribution techniques, content loops, and attention mechanics required to remain relevant in today’s hyper-fragmented media environment. I am learning how to command an audience from scratch under the harshest algorithmic conditions possible. And make no mistake—these are the exact battle-tested strategies I am weaponizing for my primary venture, which remains my absolute top priority. ---

The Proof is in the Pivot

This framework is actively working right now. To see it in real-time, look no further than what I’m doing today with my son.

Today, we are heading to the Pride Parade. On his own initiative, my son requested and was granted official media press passes for us to secure prime access. He will be broadcasting live on the Citizen app, where our account has officially climbed into the top 200 contributors on the entire platform. He is making real money covering parades, fires, and community events.

But here is the kicker that makes me an incredibly proud dad: he is already monetizing his independent content better than I have, and I am learning a lot from him.

My son is out on the pavement proving the exact thesis we preach at the Council: The community’s eyes have moved, and they are following independent, authentic voices who know how to capture a moment.

There is no shame in the bridge job, and there is no shame in the hustle. For any creator, founder, or marketer navigating the messy middle while keeping the lights on: stop looking strictly at the pavement.

When you understand the mechanics of the game being played against you, you stop being the player and start being the author. I will keep driving, keep filming, and keep building, because I know exactly where my venture is going. Sometimes, the algorithmic side quest is the exact thing that gives your main story its ultimate value.

Want to see the algorithmic casino in action? I’m documenting the entire reality of the driver’s seat—from delivery robots to the behind-the-scenes hustle funding my next enterprise. Download TikTok, follow along at @jayeatswestchester, and watch the side quest become the main story in real-time.

The “Right” Myth We Built for Ourselves

The big issue I’m having recently is how to appropriately respond to and deal with the virulent strain of magical thinking behind the idea of “Right Message, Right Person, Right Time” (RMRPRT) that pervades advertising and business brains.

Search “RMRPRT” in Google and you get +2 million hits, claiming that RMRPRT is “the gold standard” for effective marketing communications and relationship building. I’ve been in marketing for 12 years now, and I’ve heard it since day one.

And it feels like a “truth” - people see an ad at the right moment, take the right action, maybe that’s how this all works? I’m not in marketing, I’m some kinda eagle-eyed communications sniper…

It’s something the marketing/advertising community almost has to believe in, or else, why are we doing this?

We have to believe that we can/will/must craft the right message that will hit the right person at the right time. I know when I started as a marketer, I was convinced that RMPRT was the way, because all of the tech must be here to do just that.

Let’s look a little deeper at the inferences behind RMRPRT….

The Data Doesn’t Prove the Doctrine

It’s easy to think that with AI and better data access, this targeting is solved/possible/happening, but I’m suss on this, not because I’m a hater, but based on experience.

Consumer data profiles (and yes, even intent data in B2B), right now, are riddled with probabilistic inferences, outdated attributes, competing identity graphs, and inferred interests, not objective truth. When I downloaded my own profiles from major data brokers, they contained incorrect demographics, outdated locations, and interests that simply weren’t mine. This is the data layer for RMRPRT.

Meanwhile, due to the digital ad impression delusion, the industry still debates what it even means for an ad to be “seen,” with an impression often counted after only a fraction of a second on screen. This is how we prove RMRPRT.

If we can’t reliably identify the person, confidently describe the person, or even confirm that the message was actually noticed, then claiming we’ve mastered “right message, right person, right time” is an act of collective delusion, not a solved-for engineering achievement.

None of this means targeted campaigns or account-based marketing doesn’t work. I’ve run ABM campaigns that produced solid results. But success is not proof of the mechanism.

It’s an annoying truth in this industry, but one we all have to admit to; a sale after an ad doesn’t prove the ad created the sale, let alone prove it was the “right message” delivered at the “right time.” The ad may have accelerated a decision, reinforced an existing preference, or simply received attribution for a purchase that was already underway.

In a Rumsfeldian way, it’s the unknown-unknowns that are missing, we can’t observe the counterfactuals, what that buyer would have done had they never seen the ad. This is why attribution remains one of marketing’s longest-running debates, and why RMRPRT can never be conclusively proven or disproven.

But that’s not stopping me…

Consumers Don’t Experience Life One Ad at a Time

To the average person in the marketplace, the concept of RMRPRT is non-existent, invisible.

I can’t imagine anyone in our busy modern world sets aside any portion of their time or brainspace to wonder if the ads they’re seeing are properly aligned to their context, or hold out hope for such a holy alignment to occur.

“Thank Jesus, the ad I’ve been waiting for is here!” isn’t something you hear outside of bible sales.

The upsetting, near-religious/mythical part is, RMRPRT assumes that there is a “right person” out there, a divine match that’s just hankering for the right message at the right moment…..

I don’t want to speak for normal people, because again, I’m in marketing, I mean I’m the Jason Bourne of lazer-targeted marketing, but I don’t think actual people are thinking about ads at all.

No actual person is experiencing life, “one targeted ad at a time.”

No one sees an advertisement and then drops everything and adjusts their whole life around purchasing that thing.

No one wakes up thinking, “I’m finally the right person at the right time,” and goes a-courting for some right sized marketing message to fill that hole in their soul.

What is this “Seven Brands for Seven Brothers” marketing match-maker financial fantasy?

You don’t ever hear marriage proposals characterized as “Right message, right person, right time.” Thoughtful, well deliberated, long term commitment decisions between parties that are overly familiar with one another, are rarely thought of as the 1-1 result of properly engineered kismet.

More likely, the acceptance of the proposal from the proposed is what confirms the proper alignment of the proposition, not solely how/when the proposer proposed….

What Would RMRPRT Actually Look Like?

After I took stock and personally reflected on how almost none of the advertising that was addressing me throughout my day could ever be characterized as “the right message, right time,” I decided to run a poll on LinkedIn…

With the amount of search hits for RMRPRT, counting all the number of times I’ve heard the phrase leave client, staff, teammates, non-marketers mouths, tallying up every single webinar and whitepaper ever released on how to dial RMRPRT in and win big; these poll numbers should be drastically different.

Why aren’t we ALL seeing the right messages constantly in our rightest moments?

I’ll ask again, because it seems everyone believes the exact opposite - does RMRPRT actually exist?

If RMRPRT exists in marketing and advertising, then we’d have to question a few wonky things about decision making...

Someone ALREADY wants to buy a thing - is that 100% RMRPRT?

Someone wants you but changes to cheaper competition - their RMRPRT beat yours?

Are you, personally and currently, being assailed by the right messages at the right time because you are the right person? If so, how are you handling it? That sounds terrifying!

Why Do I Care So Much? Why Am I Rambling? Why Did I Capitalize This Sentence Like This?

Right now, I bet you’re wondering, “Okay…even if you’re right…who cares?” I guess I’m off on a tangent, because not only do I think RMRPRT is imaginary bullshit, it’s real-world harmful in four distinct ways.

1. Creates endless, low-value work

If we accept RMRPRT as true (we already do), then any and every ad campaign, strategy & tactic, every line of marketing copy, every color, shape, design or layout must be treated as fungible; it has to be for another audience, persona, variation, timing trigger, optimization layer. Instead of asking “what’s the best story we can tell?” teams are asking, “what are the next batch of 700 variations?” Production over strategy, endless optimization over authentic communication. Nothing stays, everything goes, forever. What’s memorable about the constantly new kid on the block?

2. Mistakes precision for effectiveness

A perfectly targeted message isn’t necessarily a memorable message. Advertising rarely works because it found someone in exactly the right five-minute window. It works because it builds familiarity until a buying situation eventually arrives. Memory lasts longer than targeting. Read “The Advertised Mind” by Erik DuPlessis for the research, or just look at your own life; is a targeted ad with your name on it more memorable than Flo from Progressive or the Oscar Mayer jingle?

3. Encourages tactical thinking instead of pondering probabilities

Marketers will gladly flatten their fellow humans into consumer behavior categories and data silos; but if someone told us data, brands, and consumption patterns define our lives, we’d reject them outright as dismissing our complex nature.

People are not moving through life as a stable dataset. The right person changes faster than the data pinpointing them. The right moment changes faster than any model update. Our “right” message is chasing a moving target. Brands that consistently say one memorable thing, rather than 1,000 “right” ones, often win despite less precision. Marketing isn’t a real-time Rubiks Cube. Marketing comms has always been, and will always be, a memory game.

4. Fundamentally alters the perception & purpose of marketing

If all marketing is, is just engineering the infrastructure of RMRPRT (this is how it is), then our professional purpose tectonically shifts from working the crowd and establishing durable meaning, to working machinery and intercepting temporary intent.

We don’t have to be meaningful or memorable to anyone without intent, we don’t have to touch anyone without a hand up, we don’t ever have to wastefully remind anyone about us because with enough surveillance, we’ll know exactly when we’re in their mind and then we’ll strike….isn’t that neat?

The Person Moves. The Moment Moves. Marketing Shouldn’t.

Brands, marketing agencies, and businesses have thousands of versions of the right message and make more daily, hundreds of the exact right people have been identified, and you got 24 hours and 365 days to get the right time - just one of these “right” metrics being wrong, can throw the whole game off - so, you’ll HAVE to make guesses, which is what this is anyway....or it isn’t because....like we said at the top….

AI and data (which isn’t ever in real-time) and access to more measurements of messages, times, and people will help us find more messages and times and people; but by the time you find the perfect RMRPRT, the TIME and the PERSON have changed, so now your MESSAGE has to change as much as they do, and now, no one can remember you because you never stood still yelling one thing well to the room, but whispering a million personalized and perfect messages into the corners.....

And, the result of someone seeing an ad and remembering it at the point of decision (and that could be hours to months later), is not RMRPRT, it’s called HOW ADS WORK ANYWAY.

A chain of perfect RMRPRT wins isn’t a charm bracelet of perfectly timed tactics, but the result of planning & strategy; if a group of the right people saw the right message at the right time, that’s called media planning...

“The consumer is in control” is a marketing philosophy *not* created by consumers, nor is it one they adhere to. It’s safe to say that RMRPRT is the same thing, something we created that isn’t reflected in reality or how consumers operate, but is nonetheless treated as an operational reality and guiding principle.

Maybe I just hate targeted ads because they are too good and I just have an ax to grind about super efficient advertising that is the best; that sounds like me.

Or maybe, RMRPRT deserves its time in the barrel as a wasteful and hopeless task that saps our energy, budgets, and mental acuity.

Whatever, hand me that grindstone…

Remembered Beats Targeted

Instead of

Right Message, Right Person, Right Time,

I’d propose something like,

The remembered message, at the buying moment.

The goal of marketing and advertising isn’t to tactically deliver the perfect message at the perfect instant. The goal is to strategically create something memorable enough that, when the moment eventually arrives, whether hours, weeks, or months later, the buyer retrieves you.

This is a fundamentally different model of advertising/marketing than we’re currently experiencing. It’s a shift away from defining success as ever-finer interception and back toward memory, consistency, and long-term brand building.

Making RMRPRT Right

The real constraint in all of this is MARKETING BUDGET, as in, no one ever has it. So if you say RMRPRT is bullshit, which is true, you now have to explain the “brand building” alternative. And when anyone in business sees the words, ‘brand building’ they read; EXPENSIVE.

I can hear the counterargument; “Memory is nice, but I have $20k, not $2m, I can’t afford brand campaigns, I have to target.”

This argument is CORRECT. We can’t expect a regional HVAC company or B2B SaaS startup to go and become Coca-Cola. The answer isn’t “stop targeting” but, stop pretending that a chain of 15,746 personalized ads replaces the singular task of brand building.

Targeting in ads determines who gets exposed, but the branding determines what gets remembered.

If you only have enough money to do one thing, don’t spend it making 700 versions of an ad. Put your resources into making one version worth remembering. Then use targeting to help more of the right people encounter that same memory, not 700 different ones.

Targeting can improve the efficiency of distribution, maybe get you the RMRPRT, but it can’t continue to operate as an excuse for never standing for one thing, or a substitute for not even having something memorable to distribute in the first place.

Every dollar you spend making your targeting smarter is a dollar you aren’t spending making your company easier to remember. One compounds. The other resets every campaign.

Hopefully this message hit you at the right time, because time is the one resource we are in complete control of; don’t waste yours trying to find and target Mr./Mrs. Right, do the “right” and memorable thing which allows more of the right people to find you.

Easy to find, easy to buy, and easily thought worth it.

Better get it right….

During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, bluntly titled “Reforming the U.S. Postal Service’s Broken Business Model,” lawmakers lined up to chastise Postmaster General David Steiner, expressing intense frustration with operational spending, putting the postal head in an impossible vice grip.

The USPS is legally bound to a strict Universal Service Obligation—a mandate requiring it to deliver physical mail to more than 167 million addresses, six days a week, regardless of how remote or resource-intensive those routes are. They are forcing a 1970s operating structure onto a modern reality. Postmaster General Steiner laid out this mandate clearly during his testimony:

“The Postal Service has a broken business model. In a normal business model, if 70% of routes are losing money, you would adjust the routes. In a normal business model, if 60% of the stores you had were losing money, you’d close them. We’re not allowed to do either.”

But as accountability advocates, we have to ask the hardest, most fundamental question:

When was the last time you opened your mailbox and found something you actually valued?

The Reality of the Modern Mailbox

In marketing, we frequently call out brands that measure success by “vanity metrics”—empty clicks, impressions, and rapid, surface-level engagement data that don’t build real value or long-term trust. The USPS network has become the ultimate physical manifestation of a vanity metric ecosystem.

According to congressional testimony, mail volume has plummeted from a historic peak of 213 billion pieces per year to just 109 billion pieces—an annual collapse of over 104 billion pieces of mail. Yet the system continues to add over 1 million new delivery points every year. We are forcing carriers to drive more miles to deliver less content.

Think about your own daily routine. For the vast majority of Americans, the mailbox has transitioned into a physical spam folder. It is an accumulation of paper bills you’ve already paid online, grocery flyers for stores you don’t visit, and junk mail solicitations.

I recently heard a story about a woman who insisted on mailing a physical letter because she explicitly “didn’t want it to be online.” It was a deliberate act of digital evasion. But that sentiment is a rare anomaly. For most of us, it has been years since we received a handwritten letter, postcard, or meaningful piece of correspondence from another human being.

The 6-Day Delivery Illusion

If the commercial ecosystem has evolved, why are we still pretending we need a person walking up to our doorstep six days a week?

I believe we no longer need daily mail delivery PERIOD. The rigid adherence to a six-day schedule is a relic of a time when the mailbox was our primary link to the outside world. Today, if physical mail is needed at all, one to three times a week is perfectly fine. By forcing a six-day delivery mandate for a product that has largely lost its utility, Congress is widening the “Trust Gap” between public institutions and real people. They are spending billions of dollars to enforce “control” over an inefficient network rather than adapting to human behavior. While massive logistics operations like FedEx, UPS, or independent couriers use highly efficient, data-driven networks to handle essential high-value deliveries, the USPS is forced to drag an incredibly complex, 110-billion-piece legacy network behind it simply to keep delivering paper that consumers throw away instantly.

A Systemic Relevance Problem

At MAC, we believe that when a system breaks down, it’s usually because the system stopped seeing people for who they actually are and how they actually live. The USPS doesn’t just have an operational problem or a funding problem. It has a relevance problem. If the content waiting inside America’s mailboxes isn’t worth the walk down the driveway, demanding that a Postmaster General deliver it six times a week is an exercise in futility.

It is time to stop measuring success by the sheer volume of paper we can move, and start measuring it by actual consumer utility. Until Congress stops clinging to the illusion of daily delivery and shrinks the schedule to match modern necessity, no amount of political theater will save the mailbox from the recycling bin of history.

If you watch The Eric André Show, you might think being Eric André is a blast. It looks like a fever-dream playground where you get to smash desks, stress out C-list celebrities, and get paid to run around in a neon green morph suit.

But if you listen to André talk about his craft, especially his recent sit-down on The Howard Stern Show while promoting his new Netflix film Little Brother, a very different picture emerges.

According to Eric André, being a professional comedian today is a grueling psychological war of attrition in which the landscape is actively crumbling beneath your feet.

According to Andre, this is what it is like to make a living in comedy in today’s devolving media landscape:

1. Traditional Cable TV is Formally “In the Graveyard”

We tend to think of legendary alternative comedy hubs like Adult Swim and Comedy Central as permanent institutions. André flatly states that the legacy structures that gave rise to his career are now dead or unrecognizable due to constant corporate mergers, mix-ups, and studio consolidations.

“The network I was on doesn’t really exist in its old form... Beyond like Daily Show clips, which I watch on YouTube, I don’t even have Comedy Central. I don’t have cable anymore.” The structural collapse means that the mid-budget, experimental safety nets for weird art have vanished.

2. Comedians Are Literally “Homeless”

Because of network consolidation, the avenues to actually get a show on the air have shrunk from a dozen competing networks to exactly two tech behemoths.

“Comics now are kinda homeless if they want to do a television show,” André explained. “If you pitch a show to Netflix and they pass, and you pitch a comedy show to HBO and they pass, that’s kinda it. There is no more Comedy Central or Adult Swim.”

Because everyone is forced to crowd into the same two entryways, André notes that HBO and Netflix have cups that “overfloweth,” giving corporate executives all the power to say no.

3. The Pitching Nightmare

Even with global name recognition, André has faced total rejection trying to get his newest show, Taboo, off the ground. He pitched the concept—which he describes as “Anthony Bourdain meets Jackass,” using illegal, controversial, and extreme local taboos to tap into a country’s culture—to both Netflix and HBO. Both passed.

“They’re more touchy now. Nobody wants controversy like they did before... Executives don’t want internet backlash, but the people still do. They wanna see something shocking that they can’t get anywhere else.”

4. Forced Into the DIY YouTube Grind

With television options dried up, André admits the state of comedy is forcing creators backward into a self-funded, fiercely independent digital landscape.

If he wants to bring The Eric André Show back to life, he told Howard it will likely have to be on YouTube or a social media outlet. The catch? You have to navigate the entire system alone, find your own capital, and self-fund the madness. “It’s a bit DIY at first, and it’s tough. To make that kind of comedy now... it doesn’t have a home yet.” ---

Why Do It?

If the networks are inactive, the remaining executives are paralyzed by fear of internet comments, and you’re pitching show segments about unconventional topics to silence, why continue? Because to André, the audience’s appetite for raw, unfiltered, and genuinely surprising content hasn’t changed—even if the suits are afraid of it. He persists because breaking through the polished, dull, and predictable television landscape isn’t just a career move anymore. For an alternative comedian, it’s a matter of survival.

What do you think? Is the consolidation of TV suppressing innovative comedy, or will the YouTube DIY model lead to a new era of even more unpredictable humor? Let’s discuss.