This Laurie Anderson "Four Talks" exhibit image has been lodged in my head since I saw it in person a few weeks ago. It carries a lot on its own. Now, prepend "marketing" to "problems" and you've got the modern marketing enterprise captured in a single line.
Before diving in, it's worth grounding this in a concept that explains a lot of what's gone wrong. The intellectual Evgeny Morozov coined the term "solutionism" to describe a kind of cultural enchantment, a widespread belief that every human problem can be coaxed into submission with the right piece of technology. It's a seductive idea. And marketing has swallowed it whole.
The thing is, most marketers who default to technology aren't doing it because they deeply understand their consumers' problems. They're doing it because technology feels like a shortcut. A bypass around the scientifically-proven, slow, unglamorous, frankly humbling work of understanding how brands grow. And that distinction matters enormously.
So we get the marketing version of solutionism:
- Brand growth treated as a tactical tooling problem. Buy the right platform, plug into the right algorithm, co-opt a few hundred thousand digital platform influencers, and the brand will magically matter.
- Insight reduced to data-exhaust. More signals, more segments, more dashboards. Yet ask most teams to articulate the core human tension their brand resolves and you'll get a long silence followed by a deck.
- Effectiveness defined as a targeting problem. As if precision and performance marketing can paper over the absence of genuine mental availability.
Follow that logic far enough and you end up with organizations that worship performance media like it's a vending machine. Put dollars in, get conversions out. And when the machine jams, the answer is always the same: buy a newer machine.
Byron Sharp didn't spend years on rigorous research to produce the marketing manifesto for fun. He produced a scientifically-grounded reminder that brands grow by being easy to think of and easy to buy; not by being the most optimized tile in a retargeting carousel.
Mental availability and physical availability still rule the kingdom. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that the proliferation of dashboards, AI-generated insights, and performance tooling has made it easier to stay busy while failing the fundamentals (tip of the hat to Mark Ritson and Ipsos for the timely reminder).
Neil Postman saw the broader version of this back in the early 90s. His warning was simple and devastating: once the tools start thinking for you, you begin losing the ability to think at all. That's where we are now. A marketing culture running hot on dashboard metrics, algorithmic confidence, and influencer dopamine, genuinely mistaking optimization for strategy and activity for progress. It isn't optimism driving this though. It's closer to a cultural amnesia, the kind that gets dressed up in the language of innovation so nobody notices what's actually been forgotten.
And what has been forgotten? The basics. Brands need to be salient before they can convert. They need memory structures before loyalty makes any sense. Locked frequencies have to be considered over noisy static. Consideration has to precede conversion. These aren't philosophical positions. They're the foundation, and the industry has been quietly eroding it for years while the dashboards reported green.
Doing this properly is slower work. It means sitting with the uncomfortable questions before reaching for tools:
- What problem are we actually solving for the consumer?
- What memory structures are we trying to build and are we actually building them?
- Are we showing up consistently and creatively enough that people will actually think of us when it matters?
Technology absolutely has a role to play. It can amplify and extend genuinely strategic, human-led thinking. But it can't generate the thinking itself, and it can't replace the discipline of asking hard questions before spending money.
Because in marketing, as in every system drunk on solutionism, shortcuts don’t move you forward. They spin you in circles at high speed while a wall of dashboards tells you it’s momentum.
Originally Published April 14, 2026