Have marketers lost control of marketing?

Marketers have not become less talented. Quite the opposite. We have smarter people, better tools, more data, more behavioral insight and more ways to reach consumers than at any other moment in history. Entire industries have been built around understanding intent, attribution, conversion and persuasion. And yet… somehow… the industry feels less “powerful” than ever.

That’s what frustrated me while editing my conversation with MichaelAaron Flicker (The Consumer Behavior Lab and co-author of the book Hacking the Human Mind) on this week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel.

It seems obvious (like it’s hiding in plain sight)… marketers spent twenty-plus years through this last digital transformation building systems to capture and nurture attention… and now those systems seem to own us instead. Think about the original promise of digital (which may ultimately become its original sin). The early internet felt decentralized, chaotic and full of possibility. A thousand flowers were supposed to bloom. Brands could build direct relationships with consumers. Independent creators could thrive. Small businesses could compete with massive incumbents. Marketing felt democratized. It felt open. And then something strange happened.

The same technology that decentralized distribution also recentralized power.

Slowly at first… then all at once (as Kevin Kelly likes to say). Google became the gateway to information. Meta became the gateway to social connection. Amazon became the gateway to commerce. Apple controls access to devices and the apps. We didn’t end up with infinite destinations… we ended up with a handful of dominant systems sitting between brands and consumers (which starts to sound a lot like the old television networks… just with much deeper lock-in). That changes the role of marketing in ways I don’t think we fully appreciate yet.

YouTube is the largest media company in the world.

It is also the place where brands pay YouTube to show us ads… and we pay YouTube to not show ads (which is a pretty wild business model when you really stop and think about it). Marketers believed they were building brand equity by engaging with consumers and creating content specifically on these platforms for people that were actively opting in to the connection. Increasingly, they’re actually renting access from platforms that own the customer relationship more than they do. We know this. Your audience on Instagram isn’t really your audience. Your reach depends on an algorithm (and how much you’re willing to spend per post to boost it). Even your customer data often lives inside someone else’s ecosystem.

And now AI is pushing this one step further…

Search engines are becoming answer engines. Discovery is becoming summarized. Recommendation systems are becoming predictive. Consumers increasingly don’t want twenty options… they want “the” option surfaced instantly. Which means the platforms are no longer just distributing attention… they’re shaping decisions before brands even have the chance to compete. That’s a very different form of power that marketers don’t seem to be talking about. Michael made a point during our conversation that humans prefer easier decisions over harder ones (which feels painfully true once you notice it). We tell ourselves we’re choosing rationally, but most of the time we’re simply selecting from whatever the system placed in front of us. Four-star reviews. Prime shipping. “Amazon’s Choice.” Recommended for you. Even when we think we’re exercising agency, the environment itself has already narrowed the outcome.

And marketers helped build this… and that’s the paradox/problem.

We optimized for convenience, frictionless experiences, personalization and efficiency. We trained consumers to expect systems that think for them. We built the infrastructure for algorithmic trust. And now we seem surprised that the platforms (and increasingly the machines) hold so much influence over behavior. Maybe the real issue is that marketing stopped owning the product and started renting the customer? That’s why I keep coming back to something I’ve been saying more and more lately: The Attention Economy is over and The Intimacy Economy has replaced it (most marketers just haven’t realized it yet). Attention can be bought. Reach can be rented. But intimacy is different. Intimacy is when a customer feels seen. Understood. Connected to something beyond the transaction itself. And now, with AI, marketers can scale that sentiment to consumers (if they do it thoughtfully and don’t reduce intimacy to another automation layer).

And… this transition is the one thing platforms can’t fully commoditize from the brands.

Because if everyone has access to the same AI tools, then the real differentiator becomes whether people actually care that you exist. Not whether they clicked… whether they feel something meaningful enough to return for. And that’s not something you automate away. That’s something you earn. Which means the future of marketing doesn’t belong to the brands that capture the most attention…

It belongs to the ones that build relationships strong enough to survive without having to ask permission from the algorithm first.

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.