The Cult of Accountability Is Killing Accountability

In trying to make marketing more accountable, we’ve made it less effective. The obsession with immediate outputs has dragged us away from the real work of long-term impact.

Marketing was never supposed to be easy to measure. That was the point. It was a bet on memory, on emotion, on culture. But in our desperate need to prove its value in real time, we’ve turned a discipline of influence into an industry of dashboards.

We’ve made a false trade: real accountability for fake certainty.

I find it maddening. We didn’t get into this business to count what’s easy. We got into it to make companies stronger, build organic sales growth and make people feel something, do something, remember something. And yet here we are polishing peanuts to death.

Take Amplified Intelligence’s Cost of Dull Media report. It shows that most digital ads, though technically viewable, receive zero active attention. In other words, the majority of what gets bought, served, and reported never actually gets seen. And yet the numbers stack neatly in post-campaign PowerPoints. The budget was spent. The impressions were delivered. The media plan was followed.

But no one looked. No one remembered. No one acted.

This isn’t accountability. It’s abdication.

And it's not just media reports. We see the same in how we approach audiences.

MG OMD’s Belonging in Britain study reveals that broad demographic targeting doesn't build meaningful connection. It doesn’t create mental availability. It doesn’t shift preference. The brands that win are the ones that take community seriously, not just by showing up, but by earning trust through cultural fluency, contextual relevance, and proper participation. This is not “inclusive marketing” as a moral add-on. This is effectiveness. Done properly, community marketing delivers attention, resonance, and growth.

But done poorly, as it often is, it becomes a colouring-in exercise for compliance. A proxy for reach that fails to reach hearts or minds.

We’ve confused visibility with impact. Inclusion with influence. Served with seen.

The result? Campaigns that tick every metric but miss every outcome. We buy cheap inventory, churn out beige creative, and then sit in post-campaign reviews wondering why no one gave a damn. It's maddening and it's avoidable! We invest in brand health trackers but not in the health of the ideas. We optimise for KPIs that no customer has ever heard of.

Just when you think it couldn’t get any more absurd, the platforms double down. Giving us a new threat. The promise of full automation.

Meta recently announced plans to automate 95% of ad creation by 2026. The goal? Let AI handle everything from targeting to message delivery. It sounds like progress. But it’s a trap, a seductive vision built on overconfident data and underexamined assumptions. No model, no matter how advanced, has a complete view of why people choose. And thank God it doesn’t. Because if it did, we’d be living in Orwell’s dystopia not just tracked, but understood, reduced, predicted, and nudged to death.

Human decision-making is gloriously messy. And that mess is what makes great marketing possible.

The platforms would have us believe that effectiveness can be systematised, automated, and scaled with perfect efficiency. But real impact doesn’t come from alignment. It comes from disruption. From relevance. From being remembered.

True accountability doesn’t mean faster feedback. It means clearer outcomes. Not just reach, but recall. Not just presence, but preference. Not just data, but decisions.

The Cost of Dull report deserves credit. It’s a powerful study, It gives us a vital lens. But it is one methodology. It captures a crucial part of the story, but advertising effectiveness also depends on creative quality, brand maturity, contextual nuance, and campaign objectives. Not all low-attention formats are valueless, and not all high-attention formats guarantee results.

We should also be cantankerously cautious of attractive averages. Roughly 20% of the population is neurodivergent, and attention doesn’t work the same way for all minds. Relying too heavily on biometric norms risks excluding non-neurotypical responses that are no less real, or valuable, to brand growth. The moment we stop questioning, even our best data becomes dogma.

If we really want marketing to be accountable, we need to raise our sights, from what’s easily measured to what actually matters. That means backing bold ideas. Buying media people actually notice. And building brands that live in people’s lives, not just in media plans.

Because the real cost of dull isn’t wasted spend. It’s missed impact.

And the illusion of accountability? That’s what makes the waste invisible.

And amid all this noise, the dashboards, the dogma, the delusion. It has never been more important to be good at this. Truly good. Not just operationally competent, but intellectually defiant. To plan media that earns attention, not just serves it. To buy space in minds, not just platforms.

In a world saturated with the false confidence of algorithms and averages, it takes real expertise to know where to show up, how often, and with what. Not the kind of expertise that worships benchmarks, but the kind that interrogates them. That understands audiences not as segments, but as communities. That sees planning as craft, not compliance.

Those who practise media like this, with precision, with perspective, and with an actual point of view, will not just survive the age of automation. They will outperform it.

Real accountability demands more than speed. It requires judgment and nerve. It means choosing courage over convenience. In a world of easy answers and automated outputs, leadership lies in backing the ideas that take longer, cost more, and resist instant proof, but actually move people.