You’ve been letting your media strategy be driven by a lobotomized Roomba with a WiFi connection and a caffeine problem.

Over the past three parts, we’ve dismantled the religion of optimization, point by delusional point. And now, we’re going to say the quiet part out loud, in bold, with a bullhorn and probably a little profanity if someone doesn’t stop me.

Here's your no-BS recap of what we’ve actually learned — no dashboards, no excuses, just truth.

Let’s call this what it is: the platforms are great at one thing—optimizing for the most superficial metric you give them.

Tell the algorithm to chase clicks, and congrats, you just bought yourself an army of compulsive clickers, rage tappers, and bots with a gambling addiction.

Want ROAS? It'll show your ads to people who already had their wallets out—like congratulating the waiter for delivering a check after the customer already finished their meal. It’s credit-stealing on autopilot, and you’re the one footing the bill.

🧠 These tools don’t care about nuance. They don’t care about intent, value, LTV, or whether your customer actually likes you. They care about the easiest win, the fastest dopamine spike, and the shortest path to a spreadsheet that looks good in a QBR.

Somewhere along the way, you outsourced critical thinking to the very companies designed to profit off your laziness.

You gave Meta, Google, TikTok and their black-box bidding systems the keys to your media budget, then acted shocked when your CAC looked like it had just gotten back from a weekend in Vegas.

Let’s get one thing crystal clear: If your entire strategy lives inside a platform’s “smart” settings, you don’t have a strategy.
You have a glorified vending machine.
And guess what? That vending machine is broken.

Instead of candy, it's spitting out overpriced nonsense like:

This isn’t strategy. It’s slot machine marketing.
And the house? Yeah, it always wins.

Mid-funnel is where consideration happens. Where people decide if they like you, trust you, and maybe, just maybe, want to give you money.

But your platforms? They treat it like a bad sequel—forgettable, unimportant, and definitely not getting budget.

You throw case studies, testimonial videos, product comparisons, and buyer guides into your campaigns and the algorithm looks at them like a picky toddler being handed a plate of vegetables.

🥬 "Too slow."
🥦 "Not clicky enough."
🍆 "Where’s the conversion, bro?"

So the content that builds actual belief—gets buried.
Gone. Forgotten. Starved of spend like a side character in your customer journey.

If you’ve ever wondered why brand affinity is cratering or why your CAC is bloated—it’s because you abandoned the part of the funnel where decisions actually get made.

Let’s talk about your favorite addiction: retargeting.

Yeah, it feels great. Like a warm blanket of “at least I’m doing something.”
But here’s the hard truth: it’s the comfort food of marketing.
Junk calories. Zero nutritional value.

Retargeting doesn’t build demand. It skims off the top.
It’s a lazy river of ad spend that just floats past the same cart abandoners over and over like Groundhog Day but with banner ads.

Here’s how it plays out:

Congratulations. You just paid a toll to cross a bridge you already owned.
You're not marketing. You're playing "who gets credit for this sale" with a machine.

Let me say that again louder for the folks in the attribution weeds:

You have a spreadsheet cosplay version of growth that exists to placate stakeholders and feed the machine, not serve customers or build anything real.

This is what we’ve built:

Look, you can keep pretending this is working.
You can keep feeding the beast.

Or—you can do the hard, messy, grown-up thing and actually build something that matters.

✅ Reinvest in mid-funnel
✅ Demand incrementality
✅ Stop giving your budget to platforms that punish strategy
✅ Treat ROAS like your ex: useful once, dangerous now, and not worth going back to

This is your wake-up call.

The alarm’s been ringing for three straight columns.
Time to roll out of bed and rethink the entire game.

Because the machines?
They’re not broken.

They’re just not on your side.

If the past three chapters were about tearing down your house of algorithmic cards, this one’s about building something real—something human, something that won’t collapse every time Google updates its “trust signals” or TikTok decides your brand’s no longer cool.

We’re done pretending that “optimization” means anything beyond squeezing one more fraction of a percent out of a very tired, very abused clickstream.

Let’s talk about how to rebuild. From the ashes of clickbait performance, from the ghost town that is your mid-funnel, and from the cold mechanical hands of programmatic junk logic.

Let’s market like a mensch—with intention, with nuance, and with a backbone.

(aka Stop Acting Like QVC with Better Fonts)

Here’s a fun little marketing hallucination:
You run some paid search ads. People click. People buy. You pat yourself on the back.

Except… they were already going to buy. They typed your name. Or your competitor’s. Or “best [whatever] for [desperate problem].”
The machine just showed up at the finish line and took credit like a drunk wedding guest jumping into the bouquet toss.

That’s not marketing. That’s harvesting demand someone else created—probably your competitor, or worse, your PR team.

📉 What happens when you only harvest?
You run out. You dry up. You become a discount faucet with a logo.

The brands that thrive?
They make people want them.
Over time. Across touchpoints. Like a great movie trailer that keeps popping into your head even though you didn’t ask for it.

📺 Think HBO, not HSN.
HBO builds lore, builds hype, builds emotional contracts.
HSN shouts “LIMITED TIME OFFER” until your ears bleed.

If your marketing doesn’t create desire, you’re just fighting over leftovers.

Look around: the brands winning hearts (and revenue) aren’t optimizing for today’s click. They’re engineering longing. They’re curating curiosity.

That’s not fluff. That’s strategy.

(aka Stop Worshipping ROAS Like It's a Golden Calf)

Let me say this one slow for the data team in the back:

ROAS is a vanity metric.

It’s like giving your roommate credit for cooking dinner because they lit the candle after you served the meal.
Looks pretty. Smells nice. Means nothing.

🚨 ROAS only tells you what happened after the ad showed up.
Not whether the ad mattered.
Not whether the customer needed it.
Not whether you changed the outcome.

That’s where iROAS comes in: Incremental Return on Ad Spend.
The grown-up metric. The one that asks, “Would this have happened without us?”

If your marketing didn’t change the outcome, why are you celebrating?
You’re not driving revenue. You’re collecting IOUs from conversions that were already on the way.

Every smart brand you admire already made this shift.
They’re not looking at ROAS dashboards like gospel. They’re studying patterns. Nurture cycles. Sentiment over time.

Because revenue with no relationship is just a one-night stand.
iROAS tells you who’s falling in love.

(aka Be Brave Enough to Look Like a Fool on Paper)

Let’s rip the Band-Aid off:
The cleanest data is usually the dumbest.
Because the more “trackable” your campaign, the more likely you’re just riding coattails.

Real impact? It's messy. It's hard to prove.
It lives in the dark corners of human behavior—DMs, watercooler convos, Slack threads, TikTok stitches.

But that’s where trust is born. That’s where momentum lives.

Run the ad that doesn’t convert today—but makes someone bring you up in a conversation next week.
Invest in the influencer who can’t spell CPM but moves people to care.
Write the explainer no one clicks but everyone reads once they’re actually interested.

Stop chasing algorithmic hygiene. Start chasing emotional messiness.
Because that’s where real brand-building happens.

This isn’t about swapping one metric for another or shifting 5% of spend.
It’s about rejecting platform-induced myopia in favor of long-term market gravity.

The brands that are going to dominate the next decade?

Because honestly?
The performance cult is cracking.
The dashboard worship is getting embarrassing.
And your customers? They’re not data points. They’re people.

So let’s act like it.