As Uncensored CMO marked its 200th episode, host Jon Evans called on a guest who could deliver a reality check big enough for the milestone: Tom Goodwin. Author, futurist, digital transformation consultant and long-time advertising contrarian, Goodwin has built a career on bold statements. And this episode was no exception.
Billed as “uncensored as ever,” the conversation was less celebration, more reckoning, with Goodwin delivering a scathing critique of advertising’s blind obsession with metrics, and a passionate call to marketers to remember what their job actually is.
“I don’t want to be dramatic here, but I think everyone is completely lost. I think every single person in the entire industry is either lost or they think they’re not lost because they’ve got metrics or a target in mind, and they are probably wrong”.
“We are in this really weird point in time where we have the best tools we could ever have in this industry, we have the best data, the best technology, we have more understanding than ever before, and we are also at a time where brands are unbelievably important. There are popular people who go around saying otherwise, I think they are catastrophically wrong”.
Goodwin was blunt in his analysis of the industry as a whole. “The whole industry is spectacularly wrong in everything it’s doing,” Goodwin declared bluntly. “I think this is the only industry that’s gotten worse over the last twenty years, and you wonder what the fuck is going on to be perfectly honest”.
Goodwin’s words hit hard and cut through the industry’s comforting narratives, exposing a fundamental crisis: marketing has lost its way, blinded by numbers and forgetting its true purpose.
The Spreadsheet Delusion
According to Goodwin, marketing has become so infatuated with attribution, dashboards and ROAS that it’s forgotten how to evaluate creative effectiveness through common sense and cultural impact.
“I think we are completely obsessed with measuring things which are preposterous and wrong,” Goodwin said.
It’s a line that sums up what he sees as one of the industry’s most dangerous addictions: using data not as a tool for better decision-making, but as a shield to justify bad ones.
“I think the entire industry has fallen into a trap of vast amounts of fraud, money wasted all over the place, wastery all over the place and a mass loss of competence. And everyone is kind of ok with it because it looks good in the spreadsheet,” he declared.
What looks neat in a slide deck often bears no resemblance to the reality of what consumers experience. The performance marketing “hackbook,” he argued, has become the industry’s default playbook, not because it delivers long-term success, but because it gives short-term reassurance.
Goodwin painted a picture of a risk-averse industry, one that’s traded its creative confidence for data points that feel safe. And that trade-off is having a disastrous impact on the quality of the work.
“You watch TV and half the CTV ads inventory hasn’t been sold, a lot presume they know something about you and are ultra targeted – and they end up being completely wrong”.
The Work We See vs. The Work We Celebrate
A central theme in Goodwin’s critique is the growing disconnect between the high-gloss work brands and agencies celebrate, and the everyday advertising that actually reaches consumers.
“You will speak to a lot of CMOs who make beautiful ads… the majority of time, they are ads that I’ve never seen in the wild. The majority of time, the ads that I actually see are on Instagram, on Facebook, they’re scattered around the internet, and they are absolutely dire.”
The industry, he argues, has two parallel realities: the polished creative that shows up in Cannes case studies, and the algorithm-choked, poorly executed ads consumers are force-fed online. And the latter, he insists, is being made and scaled because it’s what can be measured, not what works.
This gap is widening, in part because of a fundamental shift in how marketing budgets are deployed.
From Brand To Funnel
“Money is moving closer and closer to the point of purchase, not because it’s more successful, but because it is easier to demonstrate success,” Goodwin explained.
Rather than investing in awareness or brand equity, marketers are pushing more budget into bottom-of-funnel tactics that can be measured easily. Whether those tactics are truly effective is almost beside the point. If the spreadsheet says it worked, it gets funded.
“The contemporary advertisers have become obsessed with measurability and short-termism, and the entire industry has shifted not on brand but on performance and tools of targeting, attribution… the hackbook to performance marketing is obsessed with short-termism”.
That shift, Goodwin suggests, isn’t just a tactical change; it’s a philosophical one. It’s not that brands don’t want to invest in great creative. It’s that they’re afraid to, because you can’t test a jingle, or measure the long-term value of emotional storytelling in a Q4 board meeting.
The Performance Trap
This creates a painful dilemma for marketers, particularly CMOs who are expected to defend every dollar spent.
“You can do wonderful things that look great, that seduce everyone, that make you feel proud, that create a generation of people who know about your product,” Goodwin said. “Or you can put money closer and closer to the point of funnel, microtarget to death, retarget to death, and come up with a spreadsheet that shows a return on ad spend that shows 60.2.”
That 60.2 figure is of course an exaggeration, but intentionally so. It underlines the absurdity of a marketing ecosystem where numerical outputs carry more weight than human ones. And as Goodwin points out, many CMOs are choosing the second option.
“I think a lot of CMOs are choosing that playbook because it’s more defendable.”
It’s safer, sure. But it’s also stifling. Creative bravery, the kind that builds brand legacies, is now the exception, not the rule. And Goodwin believes the industry’s obsession with tracking and targeting is to blame.
A Hard Reset
While the diagnosis is grim, Goodwin’s prescription is surprisingly simple: stop overthinking and start believing in the basics again.
“I would love for every CMO to take a step back and to have the confidence to accept that our playbook at the moment is wrong.”
Goodwin isn’t calling for a return to the Mad Men era of marketing instinct alone; what he wants is balance and a restoration of creative conviction. “A lot of what worked in the 50s and 60s still works, the amount of change that there is in what we should do is very small, it’s remarkably important, but it’s very small.”
“We do need to make the logo bigger, we need taglines, we need jingles, we need to stop fucking changing the logo every time we get bored of seeing it in the canteen.”
Goodwin also warned against being distracted by trends masquerading as progress, metaverse activations, AI press releases, and shiny new tools that nobody fully understands.
“Everyone is chasing the metaverse ads and they are chasing the press release with AI and they’re doing something with a new DMP that no one seems to understand.”
Instead, he urged marketers to stop chasing credibility through complexity and instead focus on clarity, relevance, and resonance, the things that have always made marketing matter.
“Let’s go back to the basics and be really confident in our conviction and our instinct,” he explained. “Let’s do the really simple things that matter and let’s do them really well and let’s have the confidence to set fire to all these contracts that we’ve got and go down in flames as the person who made really good ads.”
For Goodwin, this isn’t just about better ads. It’s about reasserting marketing’s role as a driver of business and culture, not just a delivery mechanism for KPIs.
“Marketing is the only function in a company that faces the customer and is pretty much the only role that actually matters.” It’s a big claim, and a bold one. But in an industry increasingly built on incrementalism, boldness might just be the one metric worth chasing.
