Stop buying the marketing trend of the year

Every year the marketing trade press crowns a new must-have channel, and every year a slice of the budget walks out the door behind it. AI this season, VR the last, the metaverse for one strange quarter. Most of it never touches the number that pays your salary: customers acquired, for less than they’re worth.

Say a founder shifts 30% of a modest ad budget onto a new platform because a conference said to. The platform works fine. The audience isn’t on it. Three months later the spend shows up as cost with no pipeline behind it, and nobody can name which trend it funded. That’s the pattern. The channel was real. The fit wasn’t.

Here’s the operator’s read on each headline.

AI in marketing is genuine and boring. It sorts data, drafts copy, and personalizes outreach a human team couldn’t match by hand. Most teams already touch it through tools they own. The move isn’t “adopt AI.” It’s “find the one repetitive task eating a person’s week, and hand it over.”

Immersive and VR experiences make a great demo and a poor line item for most companies. Unless you sell something a customer wants to step inside, a property, a car, a venue, the build costs more than the recall it buys. Watch it. Don’t fund it yet.

Personalization is the closest thing to a free lift. A message shaped to the person who opens it beats a blast, and the gap is wide enough that ignoring it is the real mistake. This isn’t a trend. It’s the floor, and has been for years. The teams that win it did the boring work of defining who they’re built for and sharpening how those messages land long before the software got clever.

Influencer partnerships work exactly as well as the trust the influencer already holds. Borrow an audience that believes someone, and you rent that belief for a post. Borrow one that scrolls past them, and you bought impressions nobody counts. The question was never “should we do influencers.” It was “does this audience trust this person, about this thing.”

None of these is a strategy. They’re levers. A lever moves a load or sits there looking like progress. Read your audience and your goal, then pick the one that fits the campaign in front of you. The founder who attracts the right customers first and chases the trend second keeps the budget. Reverse the order and you’re funding a case study for the platform.

The trend of the year is written for the people selling the trend. Your job is narrower and older: reach the specific people who buy from you, for less than they’re worth. Sometimes the new channel does that. More often the old one you stopped optimizing does it cheaper.