Carl Fremont has been in the marketing trenches longer than most of today’s “growth hackers” have been alive. He’s seen every adtech revolution, every acronym trend, every Silicon Valley fever dream that promised to “disrupt everything” before quietly fading into the void. Now, as CEO of Quigley-Simpson, he’s leading the charge with something that has become terrifyingly rare in this industry: actual perspective.

So why does his take matter in 2025?

Because marketing today is basically a chaotic mess of AI-generated nonsense, infinite dashboards, and marketers chasing short-term wins like they’re playing a slot machine. Carl, on the other hand, believes in a radical concept: Keeping marketing simple. 🤯

“Marketing principles have been around for decades and decades. It’s about sales, revenue, and profit,” Carl reminded me. “That’s what it’s always been about.” But instead of sticking to that, we’ve layered on so much jargon and overcomplicated tech that most executives can’t even explain what they’re spending money on anymore. “I love the acronym soup,” he admitted. “And I’m guilty of playing that game too.” But at the end of the day? “It’s about the consumer. Their wants. Their needs. Their desires.”

⚠️ Which, in case anyone needs a reminder, is not the same as stuffing their feeds with creepy, over-personalized ads just because some AI thought they might want socks after buying shoelaces.

And let’s talk about AI for a second, because—shockingly—Carl isn’t panicking about Skynet taking over marketing. Instead, he’s looking at it for what it is: a tool that, when used correctly, can process massive amounts of data to make human decisions better. But, as he put it: “Thou shall not use AI alone.” If you’re letting AI decide your marketing strategy from start to finish, congratulations, you’ve officially outsourced your thinking.

But here’s the real reason Carl’s POV is crucial right now: Brand loyalty is dying, and most marketers don’t seem to care. We live in a world where TikTok—the platform that made short attention spans profitable—might be banned, and nobody’s even protesting. Think about that. If you’re still clinging to the idea that your brand has a deep, emotional connection with consumers, Carl’s here to gently (or not so gently) tell you: Get over yourself.

So, let’s break it down:
🚨 If you think AI is a magic bullet, you’re wrong.
🚨 If you think short-term ROAS is all that matters, you’re wrong.
🚨 If you think marketing today is so much more sophisticated than it was 30 years ago, you’re really, really wrong.

Carl isn’t here to sell you some buzzword-laden fantasy. He’s here to remind you that the fundamentals still matter. And if you’re not paying attention? Well, enjoy watching future marketers laugh at your strategies like we now laugh at MySpace.

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Once upon a time, consumers clung to their favorite brands like a security blanket. They swore by Crest over Colgate, swore at anyone who suggested Pepsi was just as good as Coke, and drove the same car brand for decades as if it were a family heirloom. Brand loyalty was a badge of honor, a generational commitment, a marketing dream.

Today? Loyalty is a joke. Consumers dump brands faster than a bad Tinder date. They hop from one to the next, guided not by deep emotional connections but by whoever’s offering free shipping or trending on TikTok. That artisanal coffee brand you thought had a cult following? One viral post about oat milk carcinogens and your customers are ghosting you for the next wellness fad.

And let’s be clear: This isn’t consumers’ fault. Marketers did this to themselves.

It didn’t happen overnight, but the murder weapon is in plain sight. Instead of nurturing long-term relationships, the industry got hooked on short-term dopamine hits. Brand-building? Too slow. Customer loyalty? Too unpredictable. So, they did what every impatient, ROI-obsessed marketer does: they optimized.

They optimized for clicks. For conversions. For immediate returns. And in doing so, they completely forgot how to make people actually care about a brand.

Carl Fremont, CEO of Quigley-Simpson, has been watching this play out for years. “There’s such a focus on immediacy and driving short-term revenue,” he told me. “I completely understand that. But it’s got to be balanced. You need to look at the long term and what it takes to build a brand.”

Balance. A novel concept.

Except, instead of balance, the industry went all-in on performance marketing, lower-funnel optimizations, and a pathological obsession with ROAS. The results?

Consumer-brand relationships turned purely transactional. The second a competitor offers a slightly better deal, a free trial, or—heaven forbid—a TikTok influencer endorses another brand, your customers are gone. They don’t love you. They love convenience. They love trends. They love whatever the algorithm tells them to love today.

And if you think they’ll stay because of a loyalty program, I have bad news for you: “loyalty” programs don’t build loyalty. They just train consumers to expect discounts, which is not the same thing as actually liking your brand.

One of the biggest killers of brand loyalty? The algorithmic chaos machine known as social media.

It used to be that brands could control their own messaging. They set the narrative. They shaped their identity. Now? Brands don’t dictate consumer perception—TikTok does.

The new path to consumer discovery is a 12-second viral clip with a trending song. A random influencer declares some $7 serum “the holy grail,” and it sells out overnight. Two weeks later, another influencer calls it “overhyped,” and suddenly, it’s garbage. Consumers don’t even remember why they bought it in the first place.

Carl calls this the affinity problem. “Unless you build a brand’s affinity, it’s not even about awareness,” he says. “You need something that people actually feel connected to.”

But connection takes time, and marketers aren’t exactly known for patience.

Instead, they chase virality, praying for their moment in the algorithmic sun. And while some brands hit the jackpot—who knew Stanley cups would become a thirst trap accessory?—most burn out just as fast as they rise. Because chasing trends is not the same thing as building a brand.

At some point, someone in a boardroom asked, “What if we just buy loyalty?” Enter performance marketing: the crack cocaine of modern advertising.

For years, it worked—sort of. Need more sales? Turn up the ad spend. Want better retention? Offer a promo code. Looking to optimize? Let AI run your bids.

Except now, the entire industry is seeing the consequences of this addiction.

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) are skyrocketing. The more brands flood the same digital channels, the more expensive it gets to reach customers. Facebook and Google are happy to take your money, but they're the real winners in this game.

Ad fatigue is real. Consumers are over being followed around the internet by the same product they casually looked at once. Retargeting isn’t personalization—it’s a digital restraining order waiting to happen.

ROAS is a trap. Brands obsess over it like it’s gospel, but guess what? Optimizing for ROAS means you’re optimizing for short-term transactions, not long-term relationships. Eventually, you run out of new customers to hit, and then what?

Carl’s warning is clear: “If you want long-term sustainable growth and profit, you have to focus on driving long-term value. And that doesn’t come from constantly chasing the next short-term win.”

Translation: Quit treating customers like disposable revenue sources and start acting like a brand again.

Stop throwing all your money into lower-funnel tactics that only drive impulse buys. Start thinking about what makes your brand actually worth sticking around for.

That means:

Brand loyalty isn’t dead—it’s just been suffocated by bad marketing. The brands that figure out how to reverse the damage? They’ll win.

The rest? They’ll keep chasing performance metrics until there’s nothing left to measure.

Let’s be real: Marketing has always been a game of selling stuff. But somewhere along the way, we decided that wasn’t fancy enough, so we slapped a bunch of acronyms on it, hired some consultants, and now half the industry speaks in AI-generated gibberish.

Carl Fremont has seen it all—the rise of CRM, programmatic, big data, and now the AI hype train barreling through the industry like a drunk intern on a company Slack channel. And guess what? None of it changes the basic truth of marketing.

🔥 “Marketing has always been about sales, revenue, and profit. The rest is just noise.”

That’s what Carl told me, and honestly, he’s right. But instead of sticking to that, marketers today are out here making things insanely complicated.

We’re drowning in buzzwords. CDPs, DMPs, LTVs, ROAS, AI-optimized, programmatic-first, omnichannel touchpoints. Yeah, yeah, it all sounds impressive, but let’s be honest: Does any of it actually make marketing better? Or have we just built a giant Rube Goldberg machine that makes us feel like we’re working smarter while actually just running in circles?

Carl thinks we’ve lost the plot. “We need to remember to keep marketing simple. It’s so easy to make it complex.” And why does that happen? Because marketers can’t help themselves. The more tech we add, the more layers we slap on, the more it looks like we’re doing something revolutionary. When in reality, we’re just playing a fancier version of the same game that’s been running since the Mad Men era.

👉 Jingles became brand TikToks.
👉 Billboards became display ads.
👉 Direct mail became email marketing.
👉 Cold calls became retargeting ads that stalk you across the internet.

Same tactics, new packaging. The only real difference? Now we need a five-page deck to explain it.

So Carl’s message is clear: Cut the crap. Stop overcomplicating things. Stop pretending every new acronym is a revolution. Focus on what actually matters: The customer. The sale. The bottom line.

Because if you strip away all the dashboards, all the machine-learning-generated campaign insights, and all the “data-driven” nonsense, what’s left? Persuasion. And if you can’t do that, no AI tool in the world is gonna save your marketing.

Let’s talk about marketing’s worst-kept dirty little secret: The industry is addicted to instant gratification. Not the kind you’d find on a sketchy website, but the kind that keeps CMOs and media buyers refreshing their dashboards like they’re waiting for a dopamine hit.

Clicks. Conversions. ROAS. CTR. KPI. CPM. If you’re not speaking in acronyms, are you even a marketer?

The problem is, this entire system is a house of cards. Everyone’s optimizing for the next quick win, and no one is building anything that actually lasts.

Carl Fremont, CEO of Quigley-Simpson and a guy who’s been around long enough to see this industry reinvent itself more times than Madonna, has one clear warning: Marketing has become obsessed with short-term revenue at the expense of sustainable growth.

“There’s such a focus on immediacy and driving short-term revenue,” Carl told me. “And I completely understand that. But it’s got to be balanced. You need to look at the long term and what it takes to build a brand.”

Here’s the problem: Marketers don’t do balance. They do whatever gets them results today.

For the uninitiated, ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is the industry’s go-to justification for every performance marketing campaign. It’s the ultimate CYA metric—if the ROAS looks good, nobody asks too many questions.

But Carl? He’s calling BS.

“If you’re only focused on short-term revenue goals without building for the longer term, you’re going to hit a proverbial wall of diminishing returns,” he says.

Let’s break that down.

And worst of all? It’s completely unsustainable.

“You’re just going to get those customers who are interested in being impulsive and having an offer in front of them,” Carl explains. “But if you want long-term sustainable growth and profit, then you have to focus on driving long-term value.”

That’s the difference. Brands obsessed with ROAS are running on a hamster wheel. The second they stop spending, the machine grinds to a halt. And then what? They have no organic demand, no brand equity, and no real customer loyalty.

Congratulations, you just spent millions of dollars renting customers from Meta and Google.

Look, performance marketing isn’t bad. The problem is when it becomes the entire strategy. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Take a look at the modern marketing playbook:

Sounds smart, right? Except, it’s completely unsustainable.

Carl puts it bluntly: “If you’re only focused on short-term revenue goals without building business for the longer term, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

Why? Because you’re not actually building anything. You’re just buying attention.

And the second a competitor outbids you? The second CPMs go up? The second your customer acquisition cost (CAC) spikes because Facebook decided to “adjust” its algorithm again?

You’re screwed.

Carl knows this because he’s seen it before.

“We’ve done this always in the past,” he says. “So I'd like us to have a better balance between the short-term and long-term of achieving revenue goals.”

A novel idea. Except balance doesn’t fit neatly into a performance marketing dashboard.

If you really want to see the dangers of short-term thinking, look no further than retail media networks.

Amazon, Walmart, Target—they’ve all built massive pay-to-play ecosystems where brands have no choice but to buy ads just to stay visible.

And at first, it looks great.

Carl sees the trap.

“What drives long-term value is a brand that consumers associate with and feel very strongly about,” he says. “If you’re only optimizing for short-term results, you will hit a wall.”

And yet, every brand is playing the same game. They don’t own their own customers anymore—Amazon does. Walmart does. The platforms do.

Carl’s answer is simple: Stop treating marketing like a slot machine.

“We need to build sustainable brands that people connect with, that they have an affinity to,” he says.

That means taking a step back from performance marketing addiction and actually investing in brand equity.

In other words: Play the long game.

Because at the end of the day, the brands that win aren’t the ones with the best ROAS. They’re the ones that actually mean something to people.

Everything else? Just a race to the bottom.