Digital marketing was one of the most important advances in the history of our profession, and I want to say that clearly before I say anything harder, because I have spent a large part of my career inside the machinery this essay describes and I write about it with as much affection as criticism.
Digital gave businesses direct access to their customers, made experimentation faster and cheaper, and lowered the cost of reaching a market. It let marketers observe behaviour rather than guess at it, personalise experiences that had once been generic, and connect activity more closely to commercial outcomes than the profession had ever managed before. Smaller organisations gained capabilities that had previously belonged only to companies with large media budgets, specialist agencies and established distribution, and the discipline became more accessible, more responsive and more accountable as a result.
It also had an unintended consequence, and the consequence is the subject of this essay. As digital channels became more measurable, the work of operating them became increasingly central to how marketing was organised, evaluated and understood, until the discipline gradually became associated with the platforms it used rather than the markets it served. Marketers became specialists in search, social, automation, analytics, content and conversion, while the broader questions of customer value, positioning, pricing, distribution and long-term demand quietly moved elsewhere in the organisation. Digital did not make marketing strategy less important. It made execution so visible, so immediate and so absorbing that many organisations lost sight of the larger discipline it was supposed to serve.
The result is a contradiction I have watched play out in rooms I was sitting in. Marketing has more data, more technology and more specialist capability than at any point in its history, yet many marketers have less influence over the fundamental decisions that determine whether their business grows. If I had to compress how it happened into a single sentence, it would be this one, and it will return through the essay: we optimised what we could see, and we lost sight of what we could not.
Understanding this history matters right now because we are at risk of repeating it with artificial intelligence. In our first edition Everyone Can Now Build. Few Know How to Market, I argued that AI is creating far more builders than marketers. In the last edition AI Isn't Replacing Marketers. It's Changing What Marketers Are Paid to Do, I went further: execution is becoming abundant, judgement is becoming scarce, and marketing’s value is shifting toward the people who can decide. This edition is the story of where that judgement went, because it did not disappear overnight and it was not taken from us. We traded it away through five quiet substitutions, each of which looked sensible at the time: the channel for the discipline, the measurable for the valuable, optimisation for diagnosis, capture for creation, and finally promotion for marketing itself. Once again a powerful new capability is making execution faster and more accessible, and once again the conversation is being dominated by tools, workflows and output, which is why it is worth asking what digital taught us about the difference between greater capability and better marketing before we accelerate any further.
Digital marketing was a genuine advance
Any critique of digital marketing should begin by acknowledging the scale of what it achieved, because the substitutions that follow were made by intelligent people responding to real progress.
The internet created new ways for organisations and customers to find one another. Search meant a business could appear at the exact moment a potential customer expressed a need. Websites became places where customers could research, compare and buy on their own terms. Email created a direct and inexpensive channel for ongoing communication, and social platforms opened forms of participation and audience-building that traditional media had never offered. Digital also transformed the economics of experimentation, because marketers could launch activity quickly, observe the response and adjust without waiting months for results, while smaller businesses could reach precisely defined audiences without buying national media.
Most importantly for what came next, digital gave marketing a stronger language of accountability. The profession had always struggled to demonstrate how its work contributed to business performance, and digital platforms provided an expanding set of measures that appeared to connect exposure, behaviour and commercial action in a single unbroken chain. Impressions could be counted, clicks could be tracked, leads could be attributed, conversion paths could be observed, and the cost of acquiring a customer could finally be compared with the revenue that customer generated.
This was real progress, and many of those measures remain valuable for understanding whether a campaign is functioning, finding friction in a customer journey, and improving decisions within a channel. The problem was never that marketing became measurable.
The problem was that the most measurable parts of marketing gradually came to represent marketing itself.
The first substitution: the channel for the discipline
The term “digital marketing” originally described a new set of channels and capabilities, and the distinction was useful while organisations were learning how websites, search, email and social advertising actually worked. Over time, however, digital developed its own professional identity, with new roles, teams, agencies, qualifications and bodies of expertise emerging around the operation of the channels themselves. Marketing departments were progressively divided into specialist functions covering paid search, paid social, content, lifecycle, automation, ecommerce, conversion optimisation and analytics.
Specialisation was necessary, and I want to be fair to it. These channels were complex, changed constantly and demanded technical depth: a search specialist needed to understand auction dynamics and keyword intent, an automation practitioner needed to understand data architecture and journey logic, and an analyst needed the skills to interpret enormous volumes of behavioural data. The difficulty arose when specialisation quietly fragmented the discipline it was meant to strengthen.
A customer does not experience a business as a collection of channel teams. They move through the product, the website, the sales conversation, the service experience, the advertising and the price as parts of a single relationship, and every interaction shapes their understanding of the company and their willingness to choose it. Inside the organisation, however, those same interactions sit in separate functions, each with its own objectives, systems and measures, so the search team optimises search, the social team optimises engagement, the website team improves conversion and the media team delivers its campaign targets. Every team can perform competently while the organisation as a whole has no clear answer to the questions that actually determine growth: which customers to prioritise, what value the business creates for them, what position it can credibly own, and how today’s demand capture should be balanced against the creation of tomorrow’s demand.
When marketing is organised around channels, the channel becomes the starting point for the decision, and the conversation begins with what should be done on the social platform, the search engine, email or the website rather than with the customer, the market and the commercial problem.
The capability begins to determine the strategy.
The second substitution: the measurable for the valuable
Digital did more than multiply the available measures; it changed the speed at which they arrived. Traditional marketing effects developed gradually and resisted isolation, while digital platforms offered feedback within hours, producing a constant stream of numbers that could be displayed on a dashboard and discussed at the next performance meeting. That visibility made digital activity far easier to manage, and it also handed short-term measures a decisive organisational advantage.
A click is observable, but a memory created by advertising is not. A lead can be entered into a system, while growing familiarity among buyers who will not purchase for years is almost impossible to record. A conversion can be connected to a campaign, while the cumulative effect of years of brand building, product experience, reputation and distribution cannot be assigned to any single source. When managers face pressure to demonstrate results, the visible measure becomes the defensible one, and investment drifts toward activity that produces an immediate signal even when that signal represents only a small part of how marketing creates value.
I have sat in the meeting where this drift happens, and it is worth describing because nothing about it feels like a mistake at the time. A modest brand investment is on the table beside a retargeting budget, and one of them arrives with a chart while the other arrives with a theory. The chart shows cost per conversion to two decimal places, the theory asks the room to believe in buyers nobody can name yet, and the budget follows the chart. Everyone behaves reasonably, nobody distorts anything, and the organisation still ends up somewhere nobody chose deliberately.
Les Binet and Peter Field documented exactly this tension in The Long and the Short of It, distinguishing short-term activation, which converts existing demand, from longer-term brand building, which creates future demand and broader commercial effects over time. The IPA’s summary of their research warns specifically that using very short-term online metrics as primary performance measures can damage long-term success. Their lesson is not that short-term metrics are meaningless, because a conversion rate can reveal whether a landing page works and cost per acquisition can help compare tactical options. The error occurs when these measures are promoted from indicators of specific activity into definitions of marketing effectiveness, because a campaign can achieve a strong click-through rate without changing customer behaviour in any commercially meaningful way, a channel can report an attractive return while taking credit for customers who would have purchased anyway, and a team can exceed its lead target while creating very little revenue or future demand.
The numbers may be accurate within the system that produced them, and the interpretation can still be wrong.
Metrics do not remain neutral
The second substitution deepens once measures stop being observations and start being targets, so it is worth staying with it a little longer. Once a metric becomes a target, people organise their work around improving it, an idea usually associated with Goodhart’s law: a measure that is useful as an indicator becomes less useful the moment it is turned into an instrument of control.
Marketing supplies endless examples of how this plays out in practice. When a team is rewarded for lead volume, it acquires an incentive to pursue audiences and tactics that generate inexpensive responses regardless of whether those leads will ever become valuable customers. When cost per acquisition dominates, investment concentrates on the people who are easiest to convert rather than those who represent the greatest opportunity. When return on advertising spend is treated as a complete measure of effectiveness, the channels that capture existing intent will always appear more productive than the ones that helped create the intent in the first place.
I have run a team that lived this pattern, and the memory still stings usefully. We beat our lead target for four consecutive quarters, celebrated each one, and watched the revenue number quietly travel in the other direction the whole time, because the system we had built was superb at generating the thing we counted and indifferent to the thing we needed. Nobody manipulated anything dishonestly; we simply made rational decisions inside the system we had been given, which is precisely how the distortion always works.
This is why measurement frameworks are strategic choices rather than administrative ones. They announce what the organisation values and they steer where resources flow, so a business whose every measure rewards immediate response will gradually assemble a marketing system designed to produce immediate response, one that becomes highly efficient at harvesting existing demand while growing progressively weaker at creating the conditions for future growth. Digital did not invent this problem, because businesses have always managed through imperfect proxies, but it multiplied the number and authority of those proxies while lending them an appearance of precision that exceeded what they could legitimately tell us.
Attribution offered certainty it could not always support
Attribution became one of digital marketing’s most compelling promises, because for the first time marketers appeared able to follow a customer from exposure to action and assign value to every touchpoint along the way, as though marketing investment could finally be evaluated with the precision of an accounting system. The difficulty is that observing an event before a purchase does not establish that it caused the purchase. A customer who searches for a company by name, clicks an advertisement and buys may have been shaped by years of prior experience, recommendations, brand advertising and product reputation, and the final click is visible only because it happened close to the transaction rather than because it created the demand.
The distinction between correlation and causation sits at the centre of marketing measurement, and the research here is sobering. A study published in Marketing Science by Brett Gordon and colleagues, using large-scale randomised experiments conducted on a major social platform, found that commonly used observational attribution methods often failed to recover the causal effects the experiments identified. Randall Lewis and Justin Rao reached an equally uncomfortable conclusion from 25 large field experiments with major US advertisers: the commercial effect of advertising is often so small relative to the natural variation in customer purchasing that even experiments involving millions of customers produced wide confidence intervals around return on investment. None of this means marketing cannot be measured, but it does mean the answer is rarely as simple as a platform dashboard suggests.
Les Binet has described how the early ability to count clicks encouraged systematic misattribution, because a click did not necessarily represent an incremental conversion, and his recommendation points the way forward: combine attribution, experiments and marketing mix modelling in a deliberately holistic approach, recognising that each method answers a different question and carries different limitations. Digital gave organisations vastly more information about observable behaviour, and the mistake was treating observable behaviour as a complete explanation of why customers acted. We optimised what we could see, and we lost sight of what we could not.
The third substitution: optimisation for diagnosis
Optimisation is one of digital marketing’s greatest strengths, because campaigns can be adjusted in response to performance, audiences refined, creative tested, friction removed and resources shifted toward whatever is working. But optimisation always begins with an existing system, improving the performance of a chosen activity against a chosen objective, and it cannot tell you whether the system itself was the right one to build. A team can lift the conversion rate of a landing page without questioning whether the proposition is strong enough, reduce the cost of a lead without examining whether the business is targeting the right market, and improve email engagement without asking whether customers find the communication valuable at all.
The distinction that matters is between optimisation and diagnosis. Diagnosis begins with the business problem, examining the market, the customer, the category, the product and the organisation before deciding which intervention is appropriate, whereas optimisation begins only after the intervention has already been chosen. Digital tilted organisations heavily toward the former because improvement could be observed continuously: the dashboard reported what had moved since yesterday, the platform offered its recommendations, and the next test was always ready to launch. Strategic diagnosis moves at a different pace, drawing on customer research, sales data, category behaviour, competitive analysis and commercial performance, and it carries an occupational hazard that optimisation never does, which is that it may reveal the problem does not belong to the marketing communications team at all. Perhaps the offer is undifferentiated, the price misaligned with perceived value, the product wrong for the intended segment, or the business simply difficult to buy from. Those findings cross functional boundaries and ask the organisation to reconsider decisions it believes it has already made.
It is always easier to adjust the campaign than to reopen a decision the organisation has already made.
The fourth substitution: capture for creation
Digital channels are exceptionally good at identifying and responding to existing intent. Search lets a business appear when a customer is actively looking, retargeting reaches people who have already visited, automation nurtures known prospects, and review platforms influence buyers who are actively comparing alternatives. These capabilities are commercially valuable, because a business should absolutely make it easy for interested customers to find, understand and choose it. The problem arises when demand capture is mistaken for the whole of marketing.
Most potential customers are not buying at any particular moment, especially in B2B categories with long replacement cycles. Professor John Dawes’ 95:5 rule uses a deliberately simplified ratio to make the point, and Dawes is careful to present 95 per cent as a heuristic rather than a law, but the implication holds across most categories: the large majority of your future buyers are out of market right now. They cannot be converted today no matter how precisely a platform can target them, because they already have a supplier, or lack an immediate need, or sit under contract without budget. What marketing can do is influence their future behaviour, because Dawes argues that advertising works principally by creating and refreshing brand-relevant memories that become useful when the buying situation eventually arrives, which is why a strategy focused only on buyers who are already searching will capture current demand while failing to build the mental availability that sustained growth requires.
Digital performance systems naturally favour the people closest to purchase, whose behaviour is easy to observe and whose response arrives quickly, so investment accumulates around search, retargeting, lead generation and conversion because those activities can demonstrate proximity to revenue. Yet proximity to revenue is not the same as responsibility for creating it. Capture and creation are complementary, and a business needs both; the danger is simply that one of them looks more accountable because its effects are easier to count.
The fifth substitution: promotion for marketing
The narrowing of marketing was never only a measurement problem, because over time it changed the function’s position within the organisation itself. Marketing in its broader sense concerns the creation, communication, delivery and exchange of value, which is the breadth the American Marketing Association’s definition still reflects, and Philip Kotler’s planning framework similarly begins with research and moves through segmentation, targeting, positioning and the value proposition before it ever reaches implementation. The discipline was designed as a sequence of choices about the market and the value an organisation intends to create, with execution arriving near the end.
In many modern organisations, marketing now enters near the end instead. Product teams determine what will be built, leadership selects the growth market, finance shapes the price, sales defines the priority accounts, and customer experience sits in a function of its own, after which marketing receives the finished offer and is asked to create awareness, generate leads and accelerate revenue. I know exactly how this feels from the inside, because I have been handed a product I first encountered at its launch briefing, carrying a price I was never consulted on, aimed at a segment chosen in a spreadsheet I never saw, and asked to make it famous. The team I led operated sophisticated technology and ran precisely targeted campaigns, and none of that capability bought us a seat at the decisions that actually determined whether the thing could grow.
This arrangement reduces marketing to promotion even when the department is technically excellent, and digital specialisation quietly reinforces it, because a function valued for operating the channels will be framed in terms of campaign delivery rather than market understanding. The organisation then meets a predictable problem: when growth falls short, marketing is asked to increase demand for an offer it did not help shape, among customers it did not select, at a price it did not set, and promotion becomes responsible for compensating for every weakness upstream. Stronger communication sometimes helps, but the constraint usually lives somewhere the campaign cannot reach.
What we lost sight of
The purpose of marketing did not change when customers moved online. Businesses still need to understand the markets they operate in, identify customer needs, decide which segments to serve and develop offers that create genuine value, and they still need to determine how those offers are positioned, priced, distributed and made easy to buy. They also still need to create demand beyond the customers who are ready to act today, which means building familiarity, trust and mental availability over time while maintaining the physical and digital availability to convert that demand when it finally emerges.
Digital capability can serve every part of that work. Search data can reveal how customers describe their own needs, website behaviour can expose friction, customer systems can illuminate buying journeys, online communities can surface category problems, and experiments can test propositions before serious money is committed. But these capabilities only become marketing when they are connected to a broader commercial purpose, and that connection is precisely what the five substitutions severed. A dashboard cannot determine the purpose, a platform cannot know which market the organisation should enter, and an attribution model cannot decide how much current revenue should be traded for future demand. Those decisions require marketers who understand the discipline beyond the operation of its tools.
Digital marketing is not the enemy
It would be easy to bend this argument into a rejection of digital marketing, and that would be both wrong and a little dishonest, because the problem was never digital. The problem is the separation of digital capability from marketing thought, and the responsibility for that separation is widely shared. Organisations rewarded immediacy, precision and visible activity, quarterly targets amplified the appeal of short-term response, structures fragmented responsibility for the customer, and technology companies promoted measurement systems that conveniently made their own platforms look accountable. Marketers played our part too, and I include myself in this: there were years when technical expertise felt like safer professional ground than difficult commercial judgement, because the expertise could be demonstrated on a dashboard while the judgement had to be defended in a room.
The industry also manufactured a false distinction between “traditional” and “digital” marketing, as though customer value, positioning, brand building and distribution belonged to an earlier era while data, automation and performance represented the future. Customers never experienced that distinction, because their behaviour always moved across physical and digital environments, and they encountered advertising, recommendations, salespeople, websites, products and service as parts of one relationship. The task was always to understand how those elements work together to create value and influence choice, which is why the answer is not a return to some pre-digital version of the discipline. The answer is to stop treating digital marketing as a substitute for marketing.
Reconnecting capability with cause
Reversing the five substitutions begins by placing the market and the customer ahead of the channel, which means that before deciding how to use search, social, content, automation or AI, a marketer needs a clear diagnosis of the growth problem and a considered view of whether the real constraint is awareness, relevance, distinctiveness, availability, customer experience, pricing, product fit or sales conversion. Measurement should then be designed around the commercial objective rather than inherited from the platform, which requires distinguishing between the metrics used to manage activity and the measures used to evaluate business impact, because clicks, engagement and cost per lead can improve execution without ever constituting evidence of incremental growth.
Different questions also demand different methods, because attribution supports continuous tactical optimisation, experiments establish whether an intervention actually changed behaviour, marketing mix modelling offers a broader view of how investment contributes over time, and customer and brand research detects effects that have not yet reached the sales data. No single method is sufficient, and better measurement comes from combining the evidence, understanding the limitations of each source and exercising judgement across them. Alongside better measurement, organisations need to restore marketing’s influence upstream, so that the customer and market perspective is represented in decisions about products, propositions, price and routes to market before the organisation commits to an offer and asks communications to rescue it.
Finally, marketing teams need broader foundations beneath their specialist expertise. Channel skills remain valuable, but they belong inside an understanding of how markets grow, how customers choose, how brands are built and how value is created, because the strongest search strategist understands demand beyond search, the strongest automation practitioner understands customers beyond the database, and the strongest performance marketer understands effects that no conversion window will ever capture. Specialists become more valuable, not less, when they understand the whole system their specialism operates within.
Before your next campaign plan
The argument above compresses into five checks, and they are worth running before the next brief is written:
Diagnose before you optimise. Name the actual growth constraint, whether awareness, relevance, distinctiveness, availability, price, product or conversion, before choosing the intervention, because a campaign without a diagnosis is a guess.
Design measurement around the objective, not the platform. Decide what business outcome the activity must change, then choose measures capable of detecting it.
Separate activity metrics from impact measures. Clicks and cost per lead help manage execution, and they should never be reported as though they were evidence of incremental growth.
Balance capture with creation, deliberately. Write down the split between converting today’s demand and building tomorrow’s, and defend it as a choice rather than inheriting it from last year’s dashboard.
Represent the market upstream. If the offer, the price or the segment is the real constraint, say so before promotion is asked to compensate for it.
The lesson for the AI era
The digital era taught marketers to associate progress with greater speed, more data and tighter optimisation, and AI is now amplifying every one of those capabilities at once. It can produce more content, analyse larger datasets, automate more decisions and accelerate execution to the point where a small team can operate with the output of a large one, which is an enormous opportunity and also a sharpened risk, because AI raises the cost of acting without a clear marketing foundation. A weak proposition can now be promoted at unprecedented scale, an undifferentiated position can generate hundreds of content variations, a poorly chosen metric can be optimised continuously, and a fragmented customer experience can be automated end to end.
Left undirected, AI will intensify exactly the habits that narrowed marketing through the digital era, making organisations ever more efficient at producing and measuring activity while remaining unclear about whether any of it contributes to growth. The lesson is not to slow the technology down but to strengthen the judgement directing it, because digital gave us remarkable capabilities and we forgot that capability is not strategy, that activity is not effectiveness, and that a measurable response is not the same thing as customer value. AI now offers us the chance to learn from that mistake while it still costs little to do so.
Remembering marketing
Marketing has never been defined by the tools available at any particular moment. Its purpose is to understand markets and customers, create value, build demand and help the organisation make better commercial decisions, and channels, platforms and technologies matter precisely because they serve that work. In the last edition I described marketing as the orchestration of growth, and the digital era, for all it gave us, was the period when much of the profession put down the conductor’s baton and picked up a single instrument. We played it with real skill, and the orchestra gradually stopped expecting us to conduct.
Digital marketing should have expanded the influence of the discipline, and in many organisations it narrowed it instead, leaving the profession more technically capable while drawing it steadily downstream, further from the choices that shape the business. Recovering the broader discipline does not require abandoning digital expertise; it requires placing that expertise back inside marketing, where the starting point is the market rather than the platform, the objective is commercial progress rather than activity, and the role of measurement is to sharpen judgement rather than to replace it. The role of marketing, in turn, was never simply to promote whatever the business decided to build, but to help the business decide what value it can create, for whom, and how that value becomes a source of growth that lasts.
Digital did not make us forget marketing on its own; we allowed the tools, the metrics and the pace of execution to consume attention that belonged to customers, markets and strategy, and we optimised what we could see until we lost sight of what we could not. The next era hands us the same choice at a faster tempo. We can use AI to produce more of the same at greater speed, or we can use it to lift the execution load off the profession and return our attention to the work that was waiting underneath it the whole time. That is not a rejection of digital marketing. It is the completion of its promise.
Evidence informs. Judgement decides.
This is the version of marketing FP Collectiv teaches. Not channel tricks and tool tours: the evidence, frameworks and commercial judgement to diagnose growth problems, design measurement that answers real questions, and defend the strategy in the room that matters. AI is taught as a layer on top of those fundamentals, never a substitute for them. Explore the courses and membership → FP Collectiv
Sources
American Marketing Association, Definitions of Marketing, on marketing as the creation, communication, delivery and exchange of value.
Philip Kotler, The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing, on marketing research, segmentation, targeting, positioning and value creation as part of the planning process.
Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, on the distinction between short-term response and long-term brand building, and the risks of relying on short-term online measures.
Les Binet, Unlocking Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Age, on misattribution, incrementality and the complementary roles of attribution, experiments and marketing mix modelling. (Verify exact publication title and outlet before publishing.)
Brett Gordon, Florian Zettelmeyer, Neha Bhargava and Dan Chapsky, A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement, Marketing Science, on differences between observational measurement and randomised advertising experiments.
Randall Lewis and Justin Rao, The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising, on the statistical difficulty of estimating advertising returns.
John Dawes and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Advertising Effectiveness and the 95:5 Rule, on out-of-market buyers and advertising’s role in building future brand-relevant memories.
Charles Goodhart, Problems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience, on the instability created when observ