Off Kilter 203: Plumbing Not Prophets.

The earth’s most valuable commodity isn’t gold, oil, rare earth metals, data, or Bitcoin—it’s human attention. And Big Tech is its gatekeeper.

The so-called “Magnificent Seven”—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla—are now worth more than entire national stock markets. Their aggregate value floats around $17 trillion, which is more than the entire GDP of the European Union. Their dominance is built not just on software and silicon, but on the algorithmic intermediation of human attention at a global scale. And yet, marketing—the corporate function that pays Big Tech for access to this attention—has become little more than a bystander. This needs to change. 

This is a story with two sides. On one side, it’s a story of economic and regulatory capture: how the false promises of algorithmic oracles seduced an entire profession with tall tales of efficiency as salvation. On the other hand, it’s a story of how marketing itself made two foundational errors that opened the door to this reality, and why the solution isn’t just walking away from Big Tech (plot spoiler, you can’t)—it’s about treating them as plumbing on a journey toward increased business performance. 

But first, a question: We all know that marketing today is working under extreme efficiency constraints, but why such an obsession with efficiency? It’s not as simple as recent economic uncertainty. While that doesn’t make anything easier, marketing budgets have been cut by one-third over the past four years. 

Here’s a simple perspective. If marketing were delivering the business outcomes it’s supposed to deliver, efficiency would be secondary. Therefore, if CFOs are demanding even more efficiency, it’s probably because marketing isn’t meeting corporate expectations for effectiveness. When the function tasked with growing the business fails to do so, cost reduction becomes the inevitable booby prize. And that’s precisely where we seem to be. 

As a result, marketing’s efficiency crisis isn’t a strategic choice. No CMO chooses to slash budgets by a third—it’s a tacit admission of defeat.

How we got here…

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