All good marketing is gaming the system

Every marketing channel that actually works does so because most people haven’t figured it out yet.

The day email marketing was invented, open rates were near 100%. There were no spam filters, no promotions tab, no deliverability concerns.

You wrote an email, you sent it, people read it.

By the late 90s, smart folks were running newsletter businesses with much better engagement numbers by contemporary standards.

Then Gmail came, and inbox providers built shared sender-reputation databases, and the same email that would have hit a million inboxes in 1998 now lands in fewer than half. The medium didn’t change. The system around it did.

That’s the pattern. Every channel starts as arbitrage and ends as spam.

If a channel is mature enough that you can simply buy attention on it through an ad auction, the value of that attention has already been competed away. You pay market price. Your competitor pays market price. The platform is the only one with the margin.

This is true on Meta, on Google and on TikTok.

Conventional attention is also discounted by the audience. Humans are good at recognizing an ad. Paid promotion tags, hashtag-ad, problem-solution scripts: these are cues that say that this person didn’t choose to talk to you, they were paid to. The audience knows. Conversion suffers. So you pay market rate for attention the recipient is actively filtering out.

Attention that has exclusivity, effort, or relationship behind it is a different asset class. It cannot be commoditized. Your competitor can’t bid you out of it.

There’s a reason that this is the durable side of the equation. Costly signals cannot be faked at scale.

An Apple keynote works because it visibly cost millions of dollars and years of preparation to produce. A creator’s authentic recommendation works because that creator has spent years building an audience they could deplete by recommending the wrong thing. A founder’s personal phone call to a customer works because most founders won’t make it.

Look at Mr Beast lol.

Conventional advertising fails on this dimension by design. It’s built to scale, which means it’s built to be cheap to produce per impression, which means it carries no costly-signal value. The minute a channel becomes affordable to scale on, it stops being valuable per unit on.

Don't ask for best practices. Best practices are a description of yesterday’s arbitrage, in the moment when it stopped being arbitrage. Now it's just plain stupid.