02 Oct 2025 Search

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The advertising duopoly of Meta and Google is having a hell of a good year. The two companies are already about half of the total advertising business in the world, depending how you measure. One problem at their moment of triumph, though. The market expects both companies to keep growing at double-digit rates. For years, they have been able to pull off this extreme growth by eating the rest of the advertising business. But within a few years, the duopoly will basically be the advertising business.

In theory, on an infinite planet, the duopoly could grow by making higher-performance software that sells more stuff to more people. But more people can buy more stuff only as fast as the economy grows, and the whole point of a growth stock is that it has to grow faster. So the duopoly is kind of stuck. To grow, as Myles Younger pointed out, they need to keep taking a bigger and bigger fraction of the economy. Average customer acquisition costs (CACs) must increase.

And the pressure on the duopoly to keep growing is creating more and more pressure on everyone else’s ability to make a living. Andrew Tindall, writing for The Drum, points out the problem from the brand point of view. We’ve never spent more on advertising. It’s never done less for us.

Campaigns are less likely to grow awareness, distinctiveness, trust, fame or consideration.

And even the kinds of numbers that the duopoly likes to brag on are going the wrong direction for brands.

Firework.com found Meta ROI has halved from $4 to $1.75 per dollar spent.

As Tindall points out, brands and agencies aren’t blameless, and may have been focusing on the wrong metrics. Webinars about how to throw ad money at the duopoly are free of charge, and Byron Sharp books cost money. And the duopoly will give you nifty graphs showing ROAS or whatever, and most people aren’t the kind of nerds who get good at all this data-driven advertising stuff and notice customer acquisition costs going up over time. Some of the it’s never done less for us problems can be addressed on the brand or agency side.

The solution isn’t more impressions, it’s better creativity. The…marketers who buck the trend are those who create emotional, fluent (distinctive) advertising and commit to it over time. They still deliver incremental profit against the headwinds.

But yes, you can put more effort into each ad (and run the same, hopefully memorable, ads for longer, as Mark Ritson explains) but in a duopoly business, the average CAC has to keep going up. On average, you can’t beat the house. The duopoly crunch, the point where the duopoly extracts more value from a brand than it provides, is either coming or already here.

So what does a post-surveillance brand look like?

A post-surveillance brand is one that is taking steps to avoid having to constantly, in effect, rent the customer list back from the duopoly. A customer who’s better protected from Big Tech must be worth more—anyone who loses less money to deceptive sellers on Big Tech platforms will have more to spend on legit products and services. The problem is how to smoothly cut over the marketing operation as duopoly CACs rise, to a higher-value, lower-surveillance state.

Switching over will be a struggle, because brand decision-makers will have to figure out how to understand and switch sides on the big three surveillance protection issues: habits, tools, and politics. It might turn out that the brands that are best suited to go post-surveillance first are in two categories:

  • Brands where Big Tech disinfo has an oversized negative impact. For example, an HMO that took time to do the research could already show better health outcomes from less exposure to health disinfo on social media. At the high cost of health care, a little better outcomes for patients translates to big money for the HMO.

  • Categories where post-surveillance tools and habits have already caught on. Reaching Big Data developers is a good example—most of the people who understand Big Data technologies like NoSQL are also well-protected from conventional surveillance advertising.

As a first concrete step, it’s important to start measuring the high-privacy audience. Early adopter privacy nerds today might not like to hear it, but they do stand out. It’s possible to do an assessment of a brand’s customer list to determine post-surveillance readiness—if enough of the customers are already protected, then ditching the Big Tech data collection is already a no-brainer. Trackers like the Meta Pixel and CAPI are leaking more in data than they’re worth. If a brand still has highly surveilled customers and decent ROI from duopoly ads, it’s not time to switch, but it’s more about time to measure and wait. The crunch is coming for everyone at some point. More: but I want to turn people into dinosaurs