Here, David Coupland, co-founder and strategy director of B&T’s Independent Agency of the Year with fewer than 50 employees, Born, opines on the grotesque nature of short-term thinking in marketing and why our culture is the fuel for one enormous Ponzi scheme.
I’ve said it before, I’ll (probably) say it again, but in this industry, we’ve developed a grotesque talent for mistaking output for insight. We’ve built a machine that rewards doing something—anything—as long as it’s fast, optimised, and fills a 9:16 frame.
Well, welcome to the Marketing Ponzi Scheme: a cycle where we use channels as a substitute for meaning and hope the audience doesn’t notice the brand behind the “content” is actually an empty room. And like all Ponzi schemes, the returns look great at first, right up until the moment everyone realises the value was never there to begin with, and it all collapses. And that time might be now.
The mechanics of the collapse
A Ponzi scheme only works as long as there is new input, new capital to pay off the old investors. In marketing, that “input” is our culture. We are strip-mining cultural trends, memes, and human emotion to fuel an ever-accelerating machine of average, optimised as “slop” (the word we seem to have all collectively agreed on).
But here’s the problem: we are running out of culture to burn. Hence why culture is eating itself.
The grotesque logic of short term (GLOST)
There is, unfortunately, a grotesque logic to this synthetic cultural sludge, aka Glostmaxxing. Because it kind of works…for a while. If you keep producing stuff, the algorithms will give you a little hit of dopamine in the form of short-term metrics. Output feels like clarity. Doing something feels like strategy. But this is a debt that compounds. Every time a campaign is asked to carry meaning that the brand never actually built, the “Ponzi scheme” draws closer to collapse. We are sacrificing the stability that brands used to provide in exchange for a temporary “marketing high”.
To escape a Ponzi scheme, you need an asset with intrinsic value, something that doesn’t rely on the next “input” of trend-capital to stay solvent. In our world, that asset is narrative.
Narrative as social glue
This isn’t just marketing theory; it’s anthropology. To understand why the Ponzi collapse is so dangerous, we have to look at the higher-level function of storytelling. Humans have always been coordinated by story; it is the fundamental technology of social cohesion. When a narrative is strong enough and endures long enough, it becomes lore: the ingrained organising logic that allows a group of people to move in the same direction without being told.
And today, in our capitalist reality, brands have become the storytellers of our time. They create our normalcy and provide the markers people use to orient themselves in a noisy market. However, when we disregard narrative in place of ‘more’ to satisfy a channel plan, we weaken the threads that bind us. Just as a society collapses when its shared stories lose their integrity, a brand collapses when its “campaign narrative” stops being a chapter of its lore and starts being a frantic pivot. This constant re-skinning of identity is not “agile”. It is a cheapening of the brand’s soul that results in a profound loss of stability for the consumer, customer, employee.
Time to find coherence
The real advantage in an AI-saturated, budget-constrained market doesn’t go to the loudest brands. Not in the long term. It goes to the ones with a coherent enough story to make fewer, sharper decisions. Narrative coherence is not cosmetic; it is how a brand behaves responsibly, distinctly, and memorably in culture. It is the only way to escape the Ponzi cycle. By building on an enduring organising story rather than reacting to the latest format, a brand stops consuming culture and starts truly contributing to it; truly creating it.
The bravest thing a brand can do right now is withdraw from the Ponzi. Spend time finding clarity in who you are, and what your narrative is, and then express it in all the ways it deserves. Because if we keep pretending that output is a substitute for meaning, we will eventually run out of the cultural capital required to keep the lights on. And the world is starting to look pretty dark.
