Why the grift economy is killing both marketing and marketers

It’s July in the Bronx. Yankees vs. Red Sox. You’ve already paid $49 to park in the official lot outside Yankee Stadium. As you roll down your window, the attendant leans in and says, “Tip me now and I’ll get you near the exit.”

It’s not the kid’s fault. He’s trying to make a buck in a system that’s already taken yours. But it sticks with you because it’s familiar. You paid for a service, and now you’re being nudged — manipulated, really — into paying more for something that should’ve been included.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s how life feels now — and exactly how marketing has evolved. It’s extraction — when systems take more than they give, then sell the illusion of value back to you.

Welcome to the grift economy

We live in a world where loyalty points, convenience fees and upsell loops have replaced real value. The customer journey feels more like a maze of traps than a path to improvement.

In the viral video, “Why Everything Feels Like a Scam,” Nicole — creator of the YouTube channel According to Nicole — breaks down the absurdity of our daily lives.

• Heated car seats locked behind subscriptions.
• Tipping prompts for self-checkout.
• Fake scarcity.
• Engineered obsolescence.
• Endless surveillance posing as personalization.

“When companies no longer have real problems to solve,” she said, “they start inventing fake ones — then charge us for the solution.”

Nicole isn’t a marketer. She’s just observant — and she’s right. This isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system.

The marketing lie we all know

Most people aren’t mad at marketing. They’re angry at what it’s become: a performance of empathy masking a strategy of pressure. We say we’re solving problems, but we’re often selling cures to conditions we created.

Red Lobster didn’t fail because people stopped liking seafood. It failed because private equity stripped its assets, leased back its buildings at inflated prices and told the marketing team to cover up the erosion with campaigns like Endless Shrimp.

In too many organizations, marketing isn’t the voice of the customer. It’s the airbrush on the corpse.

Dig deeper: Escaping the marketing circus: How empathy can realign brands, audiences and results

The human toll behind the curtain

This isn’t just exhausting for consumers. It’s killing marketers.

• A 2023 study by Marketing Week found that 55% of marketers report burnout.
• One in four has left the profession entirely, according to a survey in Stacked Marketer. 
• Most don’t take breaks because they know their inbox will still be full of the same pressure, just postponed.

It’s not the volume of work. It’s the moral whiplash — being told to chase empathy while executing campaigns that rely on manipulation, illusion and urgency scams.

The system doesn’t reward restraint — it rewards velocity. And that velocity is driving people straight into the ground.

Ad fraud and the emperor’s new dashboard

Dr. Augustine Fou, a well-known ad fraud researcher and former chief digital officer at Omnicom, said it best:

“If turning off your ads doesn’t tank your sales, what were you buying?”

It’s a damning indictment, but it rings true. Ad fraud is projected to drain $172 billion from global ad budgets by 2028. That’s money spent on fake impressions, clicks, and audiences.

Everyone knows the dashboards are padded, and attribution is a mess. But no one wants to admit they’ve been duped, so the cycle continues. We’ve built an entire ecosystem on performance. The cost isn’t just financial, it’s trust.

Dig deeper: The cost of silence in marketing is too high

Dirty data, dirty decisions

The data we depend on? It’s cracked at the foundation. 

• Gartner reports that poor data quality costs U.S. businesses an average of $15 million annually.
• IBM estimates that bad data costs the U.S. economy $3.1 trillion annually. 
• An IDC study found that data professionals waste about 50% of their workweek wrangling data instead of analyzing it.

This isn’t a rounding error. It’s systemic rot. 

Worse still, these broken datasets are now fed into generative AI, creating a future where automated decisions are trained on lies. 

The problem isn’t just that data is messy. It’s that we’re using it to build skyscrapers on sand.

The bigger collapse we won’t admit

The unraveling of marketing mirrors the unraveling of the middle class. For decades, we were told that if we worked hard, followed the rules and innovated, we’d be secure. But since the 1980s, we’ve watched:

• Stock buybacks replace wage increases.
• Pensions vanish.
• Health care becomes contingent on employment.
• Housing morphs into an investment vehicle, not a human right.
• Creative jobs become gig work disguised as freedom.

Like much of modern work, marketing has become a survival tool in a system where trust, loyalty and security have all been monetized.

The line between extraction and enhancement

At some point, we must ask ourselves, “What kind of marketing do I want to do?”

• Extraction marketing takes advantage of your attention, data and psychology. It pushes you to act faster than you should, building dependency. It doesn’t care about outcomes. It cares about transactions.
• Enhancement marketing, on the other hand, builds trust, respects your time and makes you smarter, more capable or freer. It aims for long-term outcomes, not short-term dopamine spikes.

Only one of these has a future.

Dig deeper: Why marketers must move from retention tactics to customer respect

Why data agency is the way forward

We can’t fix marketing until we fix the foundation. That means rethinking how data is collected, shared and valued.

Data agency is the idea that people should control their data, not companies. It means:

• Asking for permission before tracking.
• Sharing value when using it.
• Building with clean, consent-based inputs rather than sludge scraped from surveillance.

We’re building that through the Marketing Accountability Council (MAC). Companies that adopt this model will be more ethical and effective — because when people trust you, they tell you the truth.

Inside MAC’s work

The MAC was born from these frustrations. We’re not just critiquing the system — we’re creating better ones:

• Daginty: A platform where individuals own, manage, and ethically monetize their data.
• The Tool Stack: Resources for marketers who want to lead with integrity while delivering results.
• A growing coalition: Practitioners who reject the false tradeoff between profitability and ethics.

Our belief is simple: enhancement isn’t just possible — it’s necessary.

What now?

For individual marketers: Start by questioning everything you’ve been taught. Look at your funnel. Audit your incentives. If trust isn’t part of the equation, neither is long-term success.

For leaders: Stop asking for faster output and start asking better questions. Redefine what success looks like. Model rest. Reward honesty.

For brands: Reject surveillance. Build consent. Measure what matters.

Burnout isn’t a weakness. It’s the inevitable result of working in a system that extracts more than it gives. But we don’t have to stay in it.

We can rebuild marketing to enhance lives, not just fill carts. To earn trust instead of borrowing it on credit. To make us proud of the work again.

Let’s stop pretending and start building. Let’s write it right.

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