How Marketing Got Small, Why Being Right Isn't Enough, and How to Earn the Room
"Our efficiency is unparalleled, our ROI is fantastic, and we'll be out of business in five years."
— Les BinetI was in an exec meeting, walking someone through a campaign that had hit every number on the slide. Pipeline, up. Cost per lead, down. Someone asked what happens to all of that once we turn the spend off. I didn't have an answer. I had a dashboard.
Marketing got smaller over the last fifteen years. A handful of measurement tools could only see part of the job. That's the part that got funded and taught. Everything else, brand, category understanding, buyer psychology, quietly stopped being anyone's job to defend.
I call that the Sliver Cycle. This book is about what it costs, and about the science that explains the part of the job the dashboard can't see.
It's for the marketer who came up running one channel, got handed the whole function, and found out nobody taught them how to manage up, manage across, or read a market. It's for the person who knows the work did something and is tired of not having the words for it.
"Digital marketing is a channel. Marketing is a discipline and a field. A channel has tools. A field has science."
from "Most of Marketing Was Never Opened" →"The measurable thing becomes the manageable thing. The manageable thing becomes the rewarded thing."
from "We Trained a Generation of Marketers" →The manuscript is close. A few more passes, some newer material to fold in, then it goes to readers before it goes live. Targeting fall 2026.
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