Wait, what?! Didnât I just tell you brand is dead and distribution is king?
A couple of months ago, thatâs exactly where the story landed: build a great product, own your audience, forget the branding fairytales.
But, plot twist. Turns out, thereâs a fierce debate bubbling up in marketing circles, and not every heavyweight agrees.
Tom Goodwin, the brand and strategy legend, just dropped a very different take on the Uncensored CMO podcast.
He didnât call out Scott Galloway by name, but you get the challenge loud and clear: âThere are popular people who go around saying otherwise. I think they're catastrophically wrong.â In the chaos of todayâs digital noise, brand might matter more than ever, unlike what Prof G believes.
And if youâve followed my rants on enshittification, you know where I stand: the digital platforms have broken the game. Meta and Google arenât just charging you for reach, theyâre holding your own audience to ransom.
Tom Goodwin lays it out in plain English: right now, the best return on ad spend is buying ads against your own brand name, just so nobody else can steal the clicks.
How broken is that? You built the reputation, you did the work, but you still have to pay the toll to show up in your own lane.
Instead of building trust, the platforms are running a racket. If you want your customers to actually find you, youâve got to pay up, again and again.
Why is that even allowed? He estimates that up to 80% of ad spend is wasted on performance marketing rather than brand marketing.
So hereâs the other side, straight from the source.
Buckle up: this oneâs for the ones who want to cut through the marketing BS and see where the real value is hiding. đđť
The dirty secrets of modern advertising
Forget what the platforms, agencies, and adtech salespeople tell you. Tom Goodwin says the entire advertising system is broken, and if youâre a founder, youâre probably being played. Here are the quotes and the wake-up call you need:
1ď¸âŁ Brand is your only defence against digital chaos
âBrands help us with abundance. They help us make decisions. They make us feel better about the decisions that we make. Theyâre reassuring. Weâre in an era of absolute abundance and weâre also completely overwhelmed.â
In a web flooded with rubbish ads and AI-generated sameness, your brand is the only shield you have. If youâre not memorable, youâre invisible. Donât let the platforms gaslight you into thinking a click is more valuable than actual customer loyalty.
2ď¸âŁ The cult of performance is killing marketing
âAdvertisers have become obsessed with measurability and short-termism⌠The entire industry has sort of shifted not on brand but on performance.â
Ad platforms want you glued to metrics that only make them rich. Optimising for todayâs clickthroughs while ignoring long-term brand building is a slow death. If youâre chasing every last CPM, youâre just feeding the machine and starving your future.
3ď¸âŁ Measurement worship is a trap
âWeâve fallen in love with everything we can measure and at the same time everything that we canât measure we presume is entirely irrelevant⌠itâs unbelievably f*****g stupid to just completely discount the stuff that isnât immediate and isnât with a sort of data trail.â
Google, Meta, and the rest sell you the fantasy of perfect attribution, while they get fat on your spend. The real value is in what canât be tracked: reputation, trust, that gut feeling when your product lands. Stop mistaking analytics for actual impact.
4ď¸âŁ Too much tech, not enough sense
âYour average advertiser today uses 245 different technology products as part of their tech stack⌠the actual lived experience of everything that youâre served is completely disastrousâŚâ
You donât need another marketing tech stack or analytics add-on. You need a product that makes people care. The more layers you add, the less anyone remembers you. The only people winning from SaaS bloat are the SaaS companies.
5ď¸âŁ Digital ad fraud: Nobody cares, everyone pays
ââŚthe amount of money thatâs wasted in digital advertising would be closer to 75 or 80% and nobody seems to care.â
Platforms and agencies donât care how much of your budget gets torched. Bots, fake clicks, invisible impressions, itâs all baked in. If youâre not furious about this, youâre not paying attention. Refuse to bankroll the scam.
6ď¸âŁ Long-term thinking is dangerous, unless you want to win
âYou have to make a short term sacrifice to create a long term gain⌠most marketers donât invest enough in that internal kind of engagementâŚâ
Platforms love impatient advertisers. Founders who sacrifice instant gratification and build real brand equity are the ones whoâll own the next decade. Everyone else is just running on the hamster wheel, making the platforms rich.
7ď¸âŁ If you wouldnât buy from you, why would anyone else?
âBy putting on our human being head and taking a step back, you can see everything really clearly and you can see the stuff thatâs really important⌠Have you tried to buy a car recently? Because everything about the process is awful.â
Step outside your own marketing echo chamber. Use your own funnel. If itâs a nightmare, fix it, donât just pump more money into broken pipes. The platforms canât save a bad experience, no matter how much you bid.
Only the bold build brands
Tom Goodwinâs verdict? âLetâs go back to the basics and letâs be really confident in our conviction and our instinct.â
The digital advertising game is rigged, the pipes are leaky, and the platforms arenât your friend.
Build the brand, fix the product, question the numbers.
But brand alone wonât save you.
Great product and real distribution are still the price of entry.
Ignore this, and youâre just another line on someone elseâs fat spreadsheet.
There is definitely an element of a racket in Digital Ads
I ran digital ad campaigns when my husband and I had an organic beef business. The bots are realâŚand real expensive! And retargeting was usually the best strategyâpeople needed a chance to see the brand a few times before they clicked.