Pricing in marketing is an incredibly broad discipline. More often than not, what you’re actually selling is a blend of artistry and attention. And the ultimate bottleneck isn't capital—it's time. It’s no surprise, then, that this very dynamic built some of the biggest communities of our era, like Google and Meta.
Since attention is a finite resource, emerging sectors like humanoid robotics must find clever ways to capture their audience's focus if they want to scale. The rise of television was fueled by the mass-market products it helped sell, ranging from refrigerators and cars to everyday shampoo and dictators. Conformity became the norm, and the trajectory of television closely mirrored the rise and fall of modern empires.
Social media, by contrast, thrived on niche products tailored to highly specific communities—think action cameras, party drones, or electric skateboards. Success in this landscape requires finding a compelling product, pricing it smartly, and capturing the right audience's attention. Today, hitting that success is impossible without leveraging data and AI.
Every stakeholder, including investors, has to buy into this model. After all, society has always been highly fragmented, whether you're looking at the US, India, or the UK. High-net-worth individuals looking to preserve family wealth have always sought out different financial institutions. Impressions there mean preservation of capital. The marketing agency to them is like an investment bank generating recurring income.
Wealth seeks stability, typically favoring private companies to have control and to avoid the higher risks. This is generations of wealth. The current generation's skills may be limited to regain losses. Investments on this side are often funneled into startups that own a guaranteed or at least recurring market share. Startup funding competes with a restaurant, or a movie. This stable market brings higher margins and limited growth. Arts in marketing will be the goal rather than numbers.
A large portion of startup exits are, de facto, a transfer of wealth across generations. Sky-high valuations belong to startups addressing niche markets, finding their customers through unique artistry. Often, it’s a well-established startup factory that cranks out these successes on a virtual conveyor belt.
The lack of broad money supply constrained growth to lower single digits, the most successful modern products—like search engines and social apps—are monetized through user data rather than cash.
Historically, technology was designed to favor the consumer. Early ADSL connections, for example, featured asymmetric bandwidth that prioritized downloading potential product introductions over uploading our personal interests. Today, AI has compressed the collective knowledge of the entire world into a package small enough to fit on a classic Blu-Ray disc.
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Everyday consumers are different trying to buy and finance a new car or house. Impressions there are business. Creating more connections will reduce risks, especially if AI to AI (A2A) transactions are involved. Some investors will readily buy into A2A marketing.
Companies with high growth potential are already heavily invested in their technology. They usually grow by reinvesting their earnings. Rapid growth requires price cuts pleasing customers. This, in turn, limits the budget available for further marketing.
That is exactly where new investors come into play. They can step in with the capital, promote the business, and cash in on the results. Why would an existing investor risk their current assets?
Diversification allows professional investors to maintain an outsider perspective. They are highly likely to invest in entire industries and promote demand generation. For instance, investors paid companies to buy Google Ads, which pushed revenues high enough to acquire and promote YouTube—where many videos promote an entire industry rather than a single product. Investors in Temu and Shein did the exact same thing with TikTok. Marketing is the interest of the investor more than of the management.
The logic here is identical to insurance. Dividends are naturally lowered by claims and risk, so investors will buy into multiple competitors to hedge their bets. The industry specific risks become an earnings potential to resolve. These opportunities might seem small for an individual company, they are massive at the portfolio level. Investors will identify conflicts, market imbalances, and inefficiencies, work to get them resolved, and cash in on the outcome. Activist investors have a portfolio not a single product.
Sophisticated VCs usually ask one fundamental question: You know the technology, have a market, a product, or a promotion, but you're missing one of them. How will you use funding to close the circle?
Our own practical experiments reselling clicks highlighted Google's massive gross margins; we bought ads from them and sold ads on our own search site powered by Gemini. We had gross losses most of the time. Technology was the same search as Google. The promotion and brand strength that allow these giants to command such high margins.
Imagine the big companies as pools from which you build your market. They are the ground to build your company on. They are public, they have high prices, and their products are a wide standard. Some smaller platforms thrived by playing in the gap, leveraging the pricing gap find their target audience.