I’m tired of being marketed to. And I market for a living.
That sentence should tell you everything about the state of modern marketing. When the people who create the noise are the first ones to buy noise-canceling headphones, something’s fundamentally broken.
But here’s what no one talks about: the exhaustion isn’t just on the consumer side. The marketers themselves are drowning. Not because they lack creativity or skill, but because they’re stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma where the only winning move is to become exactly what they hate.
Let me explain why even honest companies are struggling to survive in this environment, and what it means for the next decade of business.
The Overpromise Tax
You want to build a product that actually works. You want to tell the truth about what it does. You want sustainable growth with customers who stick around because you delivered value, not because they fell for hype.
Here’s your reward: you lose.
Not sometimes. Every single time.
Because while you’re crafting honest messaging about your 15% improvement in efficiency, your competitor just launched a campaign promising to “10x your productivity in 30 days with AI-powered magic.”
They’re lying. You know they’re lying. They know they’re lying.
But they’ll grow faster than you for the next 18 months, raise a Series B on inflated metrics, and pivot three times before anyone notices the original promise was bullshit. By then, they’ve built enough momentum that truth becomes optional.
This is the Overpromise Tax. The cost honest companies pay for refusing to play the exaggeration game.
You might think “quality wins in the long run.” That’s true in stable markets with patient capital and rational actors. We don’t live in that world anymore. We live in a world where “in the long run” means “after you’ve already run out of money.”
Think about it like trying to win a marathon where everyone else is taking performance enhancers. Sure, you’ll feel morally superior when they crash and burn at mile 20. But what if the race organizers keep moving the finish line back, and the judges are also on performance enhancers, and the entire crowd is betting on whoever leads at mile 3?
You’re not running a marathon anymore. You’re running an impossible race with rules designed to reward the cheaters.
The AI Gold Rush Problem
Here’s where it gets worse: money.
Specifically, where money’s flowing right now.
In the past 24 months, over $100 billion has poured into AI companies. Not because all these companies have revolutionary products. Not because they’ve found product-market fit. But because investors are terrified of missing the next Google.
This creates what I call the Marketing Inflation Crisis.
When competitors have $50 million in the bank and your entire marketing budget is $50,000, you’re not competing on equal footing. You’re bringing a knife to a drone strike.
They can saturate every channel simultaneously. They can afford to lose money on every customer for years. They can hire celebrity endorsers, sponsor every conference, and run Super Bowl ads for products that don’t actually work yet.
You can’t.
So you watch them dominate the conversation while you’re still trying to explain your actual value proposition to the 147 people who clicked your organic LinkedIn post.
What’s overlooked here is that this isn’t just about having less money. It’s about how money changes the entire marketing game.
With enough capital, you can:
Pay to bury negative reviews
Acquire competitors who might tell the truth
Flood the zone with content until your narrative becomes “common knowledge”
Hire away the best marketers from honest companies
Create artificial urgency and FOMO at scale
The company with better fundamentals doesn’t win. The company with better funding does. And when funding is divorced from fundamentals, lying becomes a competitive advantage.
The Pace Problem
Even if you have the budget and even if you’re willing to overpromise, there’s a third problem: speed.
Marketing used to move at a human pace. You’d launch a campaign, let it run for a quarter, measure results, and adjust. It was slow enough that you could actually think.
Not anymore.
The current marketing cycle looks like this:
Day 1: New trend emerges
Day 2: First movers claim expertise
Day 3: Everyone else panics and creates content
Day 4: Trend is saturated
Day 5: Trend is passé
Day 6: Next trend emerges
I’m not exaggerating. I’ve watched entire marketing narratives birth, peak, and die in a single week.
The result? Nobody’s actually marketing anymore. They’re just reacting. Speed replaces strategy. Volume replaces value. Everyone’s sprinting in random directions, and whoever’s loudest at any given moment wins that moment’s attention.
This relates to something I wrote in “Information Consumption” about the distinction between consuming for depth versus breadth. Modern marketing has become pure breadth—a mile wide, an inch deep, and moving too fast for anyone to notice there’s nothing underneath.
The hidden charge of this pace isn’t just exhaustion. It’s that slow, compounding advantages become invisible.
Building genuine trust takes months. Developing a reputation for quality takes years. Creating content that stays relevant takes careful thought.
All of that loses to someone who can generate 500 pieces of mediocre AI content and flood the algorithm before you finish writing one thoughtful essay.
Depth doesn’t scale at the speed the market currently demands. So depth is punished.
The Fatigue Paradox
Everyone hates this.
Consumers are numb to marketing. Most ads are blocked, skipped, or ignored. People actively distrust brands. “Authentic” has become a marketing term, which means authenticity itself is now suspect.
Marketers are equally miserable. Everyone I talk to feels like they’re on a treadmill that keeps speeding up. They know their claims are inflated. They know the content is forgettable. They know they’re contributing to the noise.
But here’s the paradox: the collective disgust with marketing just makes everything worse.
Because when nobody trusts marketing, the only way to break through is to market harder. Bigger promises. Louder claims. More aggressive tactics.
We’ve created a tragedy of the commons where the shared resource—audience attention and trust—is being depleted faster than it can regenerate. And the rational individual response is to extract as much as possible before it runs out completely.
This is what I call Marketing Fatigue: the systematic exhaustion of both marketers and audiences in a zero-sum war for attention that nobody actually wins.
What’s overlooked is that this isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a market structure problem.
Why This Isn’t Sustainable
Let’s play this forward.
If overpromising companies consistently outperform honest ones, what happens to market quality over time?
If capital allocation rewards narrative over fundamentals, what happens to innovation?
If marketing moves faster than product development, what happens to the relationship between claims and reality?
We’re already seeing the answers:
Product launches with zero actual product
“AI-powered” as a prefix to everything, even when there’s no AI
Fake testimonials, manufactured urgency, inflated metrics
Customers who are increasingly skeptical of everything
The system is eating itself.
And the first companies to suffer won’t be the aggressive overpromisers. They’ll continue to raise capital and pivot until they accidentally find something real or implode spectacularly.
The first to suffer will be the honest companies who needed time to build something genuine. They’ll suffocate from lack of attention before they ever get a chance to prove their value.
We’re selecting for the wrong traits at a systemic level.
What Actually Matters Now
If you’re building something real and refusing to overpromise, here’s what you need to understand:
You’re not competing on marketing. You’re competing on survival duration.
Your advantage isn’t that you’re better. It’s that you might still be here when the current wave of overpromisers crashes and burns. When the music stops and the market realizes half the “AI companies” were just regular SaaS products with a GPT wrapper.
This means your strategy isn’t growth at all costs. It’s survival until credibility matters again.
Some practical implications:
Focus on customers who’ve already been burned by overpromisers
Build word-of-mouth that’s immune to marketing fatigue
Create value that compounds over years, not quarters
Accept slower growth as the price of sustainability
Find the specific niches where your honesty is an advantage
The path forward isn’t trying to out-market the overpromisers. That’s a losing game. The path forward is building something resilient enough to outlast them.
Think of it like this: when everyone’s sprinting, the person who survives the marathon isn’t the fastest runner. It’s the one who correctly identified that this was a marathon disguised as a sprint.
The Deeper Truth
Marketing Fatigue isn’t just a problem for marketers. It’s a symptom of what happens when information flow outpaces wisdom accumulation.
We have infinite channels, zero patience, and decreasing ability to distinguish signal from noise. This isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the system working exactly as incentivized.
The companies that will win the next decade won’t be the ones who figured out how to market harder. They’ll be the ones who figured out how to build trust in a world where marketing destroyed trust.
And that’s a fundamentally different problem.
You don’t solve it with better copy or smarter campaigns. You solve it by being so consistently valuable that people start seeking you out rather than being sold to.
This is what I discussed in “The Marketing Contrarian”—the people who hate marketing the most are often the ones who do it best. Because they’re motivated to find approaches that actually respect the audience.
The fatigue is real. The system is broken. But like all broken systems, it creates opportunities for those who see the cracks and build differently.
The question is whether you can survive long enough to prove the doubters wrong.
That’s the real marketing challenge right now: not getting attention, but keeping your integrity while you wait for integrity to matter again.
Post-Credit Scene
For those navigating the marketing hellscape, here are resources that cut through the noise:
📚 Books:
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout – timeless principles when everything else is noise
This Is Marketing by Seth Godin – marketing as service, not interruption
Traction by Gabriel Weinberg – systematic channel testing when you have zero budget
🎥 Content:
The Social Dilemma – understand what you’re competing against
Marketing Against the Grain podcast – Kipp Bodnar & Kieran Flanagan keeping it real
How I Built This – stories of people who built before they marketed
🔗 Communities for Honest Marketers:
Forget The Funnel – customer-led growth when you’re tired of “hacks”
Indie Hackers – bootstrap stories without the BS
r/sweatystartup – real business, real numbers, zero fluff
💭 One Thought Experiment:
The “Five-Year Filter”: Before launching any marketing campaign, ask yourself, “Will I be embarrassed by this in five years?” If the answer is yes, don’t do it. If the answer is no, you might have something worth building on.
Thanks.
Vlad