The Four Pests Campaign

For whatever the reason, I wasn't aware of this "Great Moment in Political Leadership" (click here).

• If you kill the sparrows, considering them a "pest", you might not realize that locust populations will grow, creating an even bigger problem.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I carried this book with me to most meetings (#nerd).

The book was a dense mathematical exploration of the interconnectedness of different biological situations. If you had an area with 10 wolves and 200 rabbits and somebody killed 100 rabbits, seven wolves would starve to death, leaving you with three wolves, causing the population of 100 rabbits to grow to 500 rabbits (because there weren't enough wolves to eat the rabbits).

That same level of interconnectedness is happening in modern marketing ... specifically, Customer Media Marketing.

As customers leak out of Direct Response Marketing, there isn't enough "food" for Direct Response Marketing. This causes marketers to spend more on the customers that remain, not even knowing that fewer customers remain, driving down the performance of their marketing efforts. All of a sudden people are lamenting the cost of clicks and grumbling about "Facebook being dead".

Eventually, the lack of "performance" causes marketers to look for other ways to reach customers (pushing them to Customer Media Marketing), transforming Direct Response Marketing. I mean, in 2000 we thought that Digital Marketing was fundamentally different than Direct Response marketing ... in 2025 we know they are essentially similar. Customer Media Marketing seems different today. Who knows how we'll view it in 2050?

Regardless, marketing concepts closely relate to biology and ecology. We're heading down an interesting path with both AI and Customer Media Marketing changing the "ecosystem" we belong to.