Digital advertising is a scam 🔥 Build a brand or get burned

7 reasons why the ad machine is rigged, from Tom Goodwin

Aug 01, 2025

Wait, what?! Didn’t I just tell you brand is dead and distribution is king? A couple of months ago, that’s exactly where the story landed: build a great product, own your audience, forget the branding fairytales.

But, plot twist. Turns out, there’s 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 didn’t call out Scott Galloway by name, but you get the challenge loud and clear: “There are popular people who go around saying otherwise. I think they're catastrophically wrong.” In the chaos of today’s digital noise, brand might matter more than ever, unlike what Prof G believes.

Running hard, paying more, getting nowhere: Welcome to the digital ad treadmill. *Illustration: ImageFX/MM*

And if you’ve followed my rants on enshittification, you know where I stand: the digital platforms have broken the game. Meta and Google aren’t just charging you for reach, they’re 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, you’ve 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 here’s the other side, straight from the source. Buckle up: this one’s for the ones who want to cut through the marketing BS and see where the real value is hiding. 👇🏻

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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 you’re a founder, you’re probably being played. Here are the quotes and the wake-up call you need:

1️⃣ Brand is your only defence against digital chaos

“Brands help us with abundance. They help us make decisions. They make us feel better about the decisions that we make. They’re reassuring. We’re in an era of absolute abundance and we’re also completely overwhelmed.”

In a web flooded with rubbish ads and AI-generated sameness, your brand is the only shield you have. If you’re not memorable, you’re invisible. Don’t let the platforms gaslight you into thinking a click is more valuable than actual customer loyalty.

2️⃣ The cult of performance is killing marketing

“Advertisers have become obsessed with measurability and short-termism… The entire industry has sort of shifted not on brand but on performance.”

Ad platforms want you glued to metrics that only make them rich. Optimising for today’s clickthroughs while ignoring long-term brand building is a slow death. If you’re chasing every last CPM, you’re just feeding the machine and starving your future.

3️⃣ Measurement worship is a trap

“We’ve fallen in love with everything we can measure and at the same time everything that we can’t measure we presume is entirely irrelevant… it’s unbelievably f*****g stupid to just completely discount the stuff that isn’t immediate and isn’t with a sort of data trail.”

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 can’t be tracked: reputation, trust, that gut feeling when your product lands. Stop mistaking analytics for actual impact.

4️⃣ Too much tech, not enough sense

“Your average advertiser today uses 245 different technology products as part of their tech stack… the actual lived experience of everything that you’re served is completely disastrous…”

You don’t 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.

5️⃣ Digital ad fraud: Nobody cares, everyone pays

“…the amount of money that’s wasted in digital advertising would be closer to 75 or 80% and nobody seems to care.”

Platforms and agencies don’t care how much of your budget gets torched. Bots, fake clicks, invisible impressions, it’s all baked in. If you’re not furious about this, you’re not paying attention. Refuse to bankroll the scam.

6️⃣ Long-term thinking is dangerous, unless you want to win

“You have to make a short term sacrifice to create a long term gain… most marketers don’t invest enough in that internal kind of engagement…”

Platforms love impatient advertisers. Founders who sacrifice instant gratification and build real brand equity are the ones who’ll own the next decade. Everyone else is just running on the hamster wheel, making the platforms rich.

7️⃣ If you wouldn’t buy from you, why would anyone else?

“By putting on our human being head and taking a step back, you can see everything really clearly and you can see the stuff that’s really important… Have you tried to buy a car recently? Because everything about the process is awful.”

Step outside your own marketing echo chamber. Use your own funnel. If it’s a nightmare, fix it, don’t just pump more money into broken pipes. The platforms can’t save a bad experience, no matter how much you bid.