TL;DR
- Marketing teams can answer how efficiently they acquire customers. Far fewer can answer how much of that acquisition they actually control.
- Depending on platforms was a rational trade. The risk is that it becomes so embedded in the growth model that nobody treats it as a trade anymore.
- Efficiency and dependency grow together. Moving from two platforms to five reduces concentration, but if all five work the same way, you have diversified suppliers rather than changed the model.
- The useful distinction is how much access you have to buy again: temporary access versus accumulated access.
- The question to put next to the performance report: if the rules or economics of our biggest platforms changed tomorrow, which parts of our growth engine could we still influence?
How modern marketing became better at acquiring customers, and more dependent on infrastructure it doesn't control
Most marketing leaders can tell you how efficiently they are acquiring customers. CAC by channel, marginal returns, how much more budget Meta or Google can absorb before performance starts moving in the wrong direction. We have become very good at answering those questions.
There is another one we rarely hear in the same conversation: how much of that acquisition does the company actually control?
This has come up repeatedly in conversations we have with growth teams. A company may have a sophisticated acquisition operation, strong unit economics and several channels working at scale. Yet when we start looking at what sits underneath that growth, a surprisingly large part of it can depend on a handful of external systems: their auctions, their algorithms, their data and, ultimately, their rules.
Nothing has to be going wrong for this to matter. In fact, the interesting cases are often the companies where acquisition is working extremely well.
Look at what has happened inside paid acquisition over the past few years. Audience selection, bidding, placement decisions, and increasingly the combination and delivery of creative have moved deeper into the platforms.
A strong acquisition team increasingly needs to be excellent at the inputs: economics, measurement, creative, strategy, and deciding what the system should optimize toward. More of the execution connecting those inputs to an outcome happens inside technology the company cannot reproduce itself.
We see the consequence when teams talk about diversification. Adding another channel is often treated as reducing dependency, and in one sense it does. But if all five relationships work in roughly the same way, the company has diversified its suppliers without necessarily changing the underlying model.
Efficiency and dependency can grow together.
The advertising auction makes this easy to understand. A team can improve its creative, measurement, and customer targeting and still pay more for the same customer because competition for the inventory has changed.
The same dynamic now reaches much further into the customer relationship. Attribution rules change. Access to data changes. Distribution rules change. Features that marketers built strategies around disappear or get replaced. Sometimes those changes make the ecosystem better. Sometimes they create a commercial problem. Either way, businesses adapt to decisions made somewhere else.
Optional figure. Drop an image here, or delete the block if the article has no visuals.Very little digital distribution is genuinely owned. Organic search depends on Google's algorithms. An app depends on operating systems and app stores. Email and CRM rely on infrastructure providers and on customers continuing to give you permission to contact them.
There are, however, meaningful differences in how much access has to be purchased again. A customer searching specifically for your brand is economically different from someone you can reach only by winning another advertising auction.
I find it more useful to think about temporary access and accumulated access. Some marketing spend gives you access to demand while you are paying for it. Other investments can leave behind brand demand, a direct relationship, repeat behavior, organic discovery, or an audience you can reach again.
Every marketing investment should produce an outcome. A customer, a purchase, a reactivated user, demand that eventually turns into revenue. Long-term arguments about control do not make weak unit economics disappear.
So the question I would put alongside the performance report is this: if the economics or rules of our most important distribution platforms changed tomorrow, which parts of our growth engine would we still be able to influence ourselves?
The answer doesn't need to be everything. But marketing leaders should know what it is.
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