Two years ago, I started the Marketing Accountability Council because I couldn’t ignore the widening distance between what institutions claimed to stand for and how they actually operated.
I used to believe in the social contract to work hard, stay useful, and deliver results. I believed that if I aligned with credible institutions, stability would follow. But then, after nearly twenty years in corporate digital marketing, followed by 7 years of building my own marketing and coaching practice, I watched that contract dissolve in real time.
In the 1990s, scale was taken as evidence of value. If you had distribution, shelf space, media weight, and brand recognition, you had earned something tangible. You couldn’t fake national reach or physical demand. Marketing was imperfect, but it was grounded in substance.
Over my career, which began in 2000 and coincided with the rise of the internet era, I observed the traditional values of marketing slowly eroding in real time. In the internet era, scale no longer required durability; it required traffic. In this era, impressions have replaced impact, and click-through rates replaced conviction. This is when we began celebrating dashboards rather than decisions. We also stopped asking people what they needed and started inferring it from behavioral exhaust by stitching together fragments of behavior and calling it personalization.
In the 2010s, algorithms dictated distribution and platforms controlled access. Media planners became platform operators and brand strategy bent to format constraints. Optimization, segmentation, and performance modeling began to feel less like expertise and more like rented utilities within someone else’s system.
In the 2020s, AI accelerated everything as a compression engine. Copy, design, media allocation, and targeting logic were all promptable. The same thinking and communication skills that defined the knowledge economy now feel replicable at scale. The threat isn’t just job displacement; it’s identity erosion. When your behavior becomes the asset, you stop being treated as a person with agency; you become a pattern to be predicted, a variable to be optimized, a resource to be extracted.
This is the era when artificial urgency became normalized. “Only 1 left.” “Sale ends in 3 minutes.” Behavioral inference dressed itself up as personalization. Consent was buried in adhesion contracts that no one reads. Data was collected “just in case.” Somewhere along the line, marketing stopped asking how to make something desirable and started asking how to make it unavoidable.
Now, trust has stalled globally, job insecurity tied to automation is rising, and employer trust is declining. That erosion isn’t separate from marketing; it’s connected to a broader pattern of institutions saying one thing and operating another way. When you live inside that contradiction long enough, company values can no longer be trusted, personalized ads start feeling less like service and more like surveillance, and it creates a low-grade anxiety that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore.
This led to the Great Resignation, which initially felt like liberation until the economy tightened and exits narrowed. The mistake wasn’t leaving a bad job; it was believing the system was stable enough to absorb that risk indefinitely. Meanwhile, within organizations, marketers were instructed to humanize brands while simultaneously optimizing extraction. We were rewarded for performance lifts that built zero long-term trust.
When legacy organizations lobby against reforms they publicly endorse, when industry events turn marketers into inventory for vendors, when surveillance is framed as insight and manipulation is labeled strategy, the gap between rhetoric and reality widens, and people notice.
At the same time, we are entering an era in which audiences are moving toward individuals who risk something to say something. We are starting to see less polish, more honesty, less institutional neutrality, and more accountability. That era started to take shape two years ago when MAC was formed.
In these two years, it became clear to me that my work on promoting something that someone else built, and I didn’t believe in, was no longer what I wanted to do. My future should focus on infrastructure, incentives, and policy. I got tired of watching an entire industry normalize behavior I wouldn’t want anyone to use on me. I got tired of optimizing for vanity metrics that looked brilliant in reports but hollow in reality. That realization is what led directly to the Clean Data Alliance .
CDA wasn’t formed as a side project or a rebrand. It was formed because the conversations within MAC repeatedly pointed to the same root cause: corrupted data, distorted incentives, and an economy built on extraction rather than consent. MAC created the philosophy and the standards. CDA exists to operationalize them; to build the infrastructure, training, and consulting models that make accountable marketing and clean data practices workable within real companies.
In that sense, MAC is the conscience and the proving ground. CDA is the engine and the delivery system. One names the problem and defines the principles. The other builds the tools, curriculum, and systems to operationalize those principles. Together, they’re not separate initiatives; they’re a correction built from experience, pressure, and the lessons of the last decade.
After two years of the Marketing Accountability Council, I’ve seen what happens when you treat marketing not just as a growth engine but as a system that shapes how people feel, decide, and trust.
The next phase of this work is programs you can participate in, including training, certification, and consulting, built from what we’ve tested and learned over the past two years. I’ll share more in the next post.
Amazing man! Thrilled to be along for the voyage!