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It’s aged well. The dull truth of marketing in 2025 is that every channel sucks.
Andrew Chen nails it in a recent post:
“The options for marketing are pretty grim right now. Here are my complaints:
SEO: Takes too long, you’re competing against listicles (and Reddit threads), Google might screw you over at any moment, maybe AI one boxing will kill your traffic next year anyway :(
Influencer marketing: Get a big spike of traffic, but none of it converts, the spike goes away after a few days. Big creators are too expensive, and a slew of small creators need to be cobbled together, lots of babysitting :(
PR/comms: Doesn’t actually generate signups, doesn’t scale, and is not repeatable, expensive retainers for PR experts to grab coffee with journalists, your competitors will get the same article next month, and press is as likely to attack you as to cover you :(
Email marketing: hope you like spam folders, building a good list takes forever, open rates are <30% and CTRs are <5% so hope you weren’t expecting a lot of clicks
Viral loops: Do you need an actually great product? All the contacts spamming techniques no longer work (neither email nor SMS!), your UX will be ruined by aggressive popups and onboarding schemes, and it’s nearly impossible to get viral factor >1
Ads: way too expensive, always getting more expensive, your competitors will just copy your copy, lots of fake/low-conversion clicks, your investors hate it, and it’ll kill you if you don’t have a strong business model already
Referral/affiliate/etc: Be ready for a crazy amount of fraud, it’s just as expensive as paid marketing (though people fool themselves into thinking it’s not paid), and surprisingly, most people don’t care and will get fatigued quickly! :(
Big launch on social: it can only happen once, you’ll have to spam all your friends to share, and over time they might come to resent you, the algo is always working against you, and it only lasts for a few hours :(
He’s right. Costs are up, conversion is down, and there’s no new ad network or format to bail us out. TikTok is still the “new kid,” and even that feels middle-aged in internet years. U.S. advertising penetration across Meta, Google, and TikTok is saturated. The buffet is empty, and the price continues to rise.
The End of Cheap Genius
There was a stretch when marketing was easy. Cheap CPMs, generous targeting, attribution dashboards that made us all look like Rain Men of performance spend. Back then, being “data-driven” meant picking bundles of low-hanging fruit.
Those days are gone. CPM inflation is real, CAC keeps climbing, and platform algorithms punish sameness. When times were easy, everyone looked like a genius. When times get hard, the difference between average and exceptional is suddenly exposed.
“Creative Is the New Targeting”
That line has been floating around for a while. But now it’s gospel.
The old game was won by the spreadsheet jockey who could buy cheap traffic and grind it into revenue. The new game is won by whoever puts the right story, the right proof, and the right personality in front of the camera at the right time.
Because when your competitors all have the same lookalike audiences, the same bid strategies, and the same media mix, the only thing left that can differentiate is creative.
What’s more: the creative that works is rarely the one that looks the best. It’s the ad that feels human. The hallway walk-and-talk. The scuffed iPhone clip. The one with imperfect lighting, a shaky hand, and a real claim.
In a world of AI-polished gloss, grit is the pattern-breaker.
From Math to Mad Men (Yet Again)
We aren’t going fully back to the Mad Men era. Data still matters. But the pendulum has swung. Performance is no longer primarily a math problem. It’s a creative problem.
That shift feels disorienting to a generation of marketers raised on attribution dashboards. But it’s healthy. It means your edge can’t be a bidding strategy alone. It has to be idea + execution. It has to be compelling and resonant.
Bernbach’s warning rings louder than ever: it’s not enough to be right, you have to be interesting.
No new channels are coming to save you. The market is saturated. Distribution is expensive. The only way forward is to stop being dull, stop being purely “right,” and start being compelling.
Every channel sucks. The ones who survive will be the ones who make the truth exciting.
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