The Marketing Stack Is Lying to You
The stack isn’t "broken." It’s working exactly as intended... just not for you.
Most marketers don’t realize how much they’ve outsourced their thinking to a stack that doesn’t work in their favor.
The tools are sleek, the dashboards are colorful, and the pitches promise automation, optimization, and scale. But under the hood, most of the modern marketing stack is designed to do two things:
1. Obscure what’s actually happening.
2. Keep you dependent.
We see this every day at Untitled. Teams come to us frustrated—performance is slipping, their media dollars feel wasted, and no one can explain why. They’re not bad marketers. But they’ve been sold a system that keeps them flying blind.
Let’s break down how we got here.
Incentives Are Misaligned—On Purpose
The platforms you rely on for targeting, buying, and measurement don’t actually win when you win. They win when:
You spend more.
You stay locked in.
You accept the default logic without asking too many questions.
That means:
Attribution is intentionally murky.
Audience tools are deliberately simplified.
Data transparency is a controlled variable.
Even agencies aren’t immune—they’re often operating under opaque fee structures, volume-based incentives, or vendor kickbacks that don’t reward strategic restraint.
So the stack isn’t broken. It’s just working exactly as intended.
Just not for you.
Most Marketers Mistake Access for Understanding
There’s a dangerous assumption floating around: that if you have access to data, you must be data-driven.
Not true.
You can have every pixel firing, every dashboard lit up, and still have no idea who your audience really is, why they’re converting, or what you should do next.
This is where identity—real identity—comes in. Not just email lists or cookie pools, but resolved, enriched, privacy-conscious profiles that let you actually see your audience and build from there.
That level of clarity is rare, because the system doesn’t want to give it to you. Clarity leads to control. Control leads to spend moving out of platforms.
And that’s bad business for them.
When You Don’t Own the Logic, You Don’t Own the Outcome
If you’re building audiences inside a walled garden, you don’t control the logic.
If you’re measuring performance with a last-click model and calling it insight, you don’t control the truth.
If your data lives in disconnected systems, stitched together with duct tape and hope—you don’t control the foundation.
And if you don’t control the foundation, you can’t fix the cracks.
This Isn’t About Buying New Tools. It’s About Thinking Differently.
I’m not here to say your stack is trash and you need to start over.
I am saying: if you’re not interrogating the incentives behind your stack—if you’re not questioning what the system hides from you—you’re building on shaky ground.
It starts with taking ownership of your data, your audiences, and your measurement. It starts with investing in identity infrastructure you can actually inspect and improve.
That’s what we think about every day at Untitled.
This publication isn’t a pitch. But it is personal.
I write here because I’ve sat in the rooms where things don’t add up. I’ve seen marketers held back by black-box logic and one-size-fits-all workflows. I’ve had to explain to smart people why their “data-driven” campaigns were being driven by the wrong data entirely.
So I’m pulling back the curtain—on the systems, the workflows, the real-world use cases, and the infrastructure it actually takes to make modern marketing work.
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Untitled Thoughts is a space for my writing on marketing systems, identity infrastructure, data strategy, and life as a founder building in a messy, evolving landscape. I use it to share what I’m learning, what I’m seeing, and the ideas I believe more marketers should be paying attention to—whether tactical, philosophical, or somewhere in between. If anything here resonates, I’d love for you to test drive our platform at getuntitled.ai. Your feedback makes us better.