In early 2021, I was CMO of a brand incubator called Hologram Sciences. We launched a direct-to-consumer vitamin D brand with legitimately better bioavailability in the middle of COVID. (In 81 days. Madness.)
Anyway, two days in, everything was firing: branded content live, influencers seeded, reviews coming in, the paid flywheel humming. Then we landed in Facebook jail.
We bent over backwards to comply with health-claim guidelines, as everyone in the category does, but it made no difference. An automated filter decided a vitamin D brand discussing immunity during a pandemic might violate policy. The account went dark.
Perhaps now is a good time to mention, the job I’d left three months prior was at Meta. I had just spent two years inside the building. Trust & Safety was part of my remit. Friends returned calls, but I was totally powerless.
What I remember was the silence. From the platform, and then sitting in front of a CEO and a board with no explanation, no remediation plan, and no timeline—just a unilateral decision made by my former employer with zero accountability for creating real, negative financial implications.
I learned overnight how completely over a barrel I was.
OWNERSHIP IS WHO DECIDES
Economists have a precise definition for who actually owns an asset.
Oliver Hart shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics with Bengt Holmström for contract theory.1 Obviously, no contract can anticipate every eventuality. Something will always happen that nobody thought to write down. When the unanticipated occurs, who decides what happens next? Hart’s answer is fairly simple: ownership.2
Ownership is the residual right of control—the right to dictate how an asset is used when the contract doesn’t provide an answer. The owner decides in an unforeseen crisis.
No contract specified what happened when our supplement brand mentioned immunity in 2021. Someone had to decide, and that someone was not me.
FROGS IN A POT
Historically, if you sold through wholesale, you knew you rented shelf space. Retailers owned the consumer data, but reach was cheap, shelf was the strategy, and the margin structure mathed. If you sold direct, you might have an email list, first-party data, owned checkout. But, algorithmic acquisition got so efficient that buying rented attention replaced nurturing owned equity. Owned channels were defunded and the acquisition dashboards stayed green.
Today, Google, Meta, and Amazon capture roughly sixty cents of every advertising dollar in the United States—not every digital dollar, every dollar.3 And, what you are buying has fundamentally changed from the halcyon days of 2010 arbitrage but our approach hasn’t.
And, you don’t buy access to an audience you can inspect, audit, and hold. You buy the output of a black box managed by a counterparty on terms that shift without notice. And frequently, too. Efficiency might look okay on a weekly dashboard, but your control is gone. And with it a lot of the understanding of your customers that fell out of the testing matrices of olde.
Every other dependency this size gets registered, rated and reviewed, regularly in business. Things like single-source suppliers, currency exposure, the plant in a flood zone are flagged. Marketing dependency gets disclosed — it’s in the risk factors of plenty of 10-Ks — but it never gets managed. And an uninsurable risk leaves only two options: reduce it or accept it. We accepted it without ever having a real deep and meaningful.
THE THURSDAY TEST
What’s your level of acceptance?
One way to think about it is whether you have contact rights to a consumer who bought your product. Simple gauge. You can do it before your third coffee.
Pick 100 people at random who bought from you last year. It’s Thursday morning. How many of them can you reach directly, right now, without paying a middleman?
Another test is to think about who makes the decisions when the contract is silent. Or who decides what goes on your package or in your box. Even your owned channels might be a victim of over-reach.
THE HARD PART
The usual response to a question about owned channels is: maintain a website, build an email list, test IRL. If that’s as far as it goes, your GTM is missing the scale of what is actually available.
Direct customer connection can be engineered into the operational surfaces you already fund and can be built into new marketing channels:
Packaging: Moving beyond static UPCs to dynamic 2D barcodes (like the QR-based GS1 standard adopted by Unilever and L’Oréal) turns every physical unit on a store shelf into a direct digital communication channel.4
The tactile: Shifting marketing dollars into formats like direct mail, gift with purchase, things that bypass inbox and platform algorithms entirely.
Internal Advocates: Gap’s cross-brand creator program produced nearly 30,000 posts reaching 154 million accounts in nine months, and in July it opened the same program to its own employees—people who handle the product daily and generally cannot be turned off by an enforcement bot.5
While a meaningful portion of these mechanisms don’t require incremental budget. They do require institutional alignment and political fortitude.
GET OFF THE BUS, GUS
We eventually got our ad account back at Hologram. And like everyone else, we went right back to feeding the machine.
Lately, I’ve thought about how everyone’s trying to figure out what the arbitrage is for LLM visibility. Talk about being over a barrel as a brand — wider, deeper, and filled with sharks.
So, one hot Saturday this summer I sat on a porch with a laptop and an earworm — Paul Simon, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” With no client asking, no budget, no access to anything proprietary, I decided I was going to find 50 ways to route around machines. By the sunset, I had sixty-seven proven tactics (and 13 dismal failures). It is seventy-four now. Tomorrow the project goes live on my new website so you, too, can get creative and take some risk out of your system and get yourself free.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2016, awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström “for their contributions to contract theory.” Nobel Foundation press release, 10 October 2016.
The residual-control-rights framework is Hart’s, developed with Sanford Grossman and John Moore. Grossman, S. & Hart, O., “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration,” Journal of Political Economy 94(4), 1986; Hart, O. & Moore, J., “Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm,” Journal of Political Economy 98(6), 1990.
EMARKETER, “The Triopoly’s Share of Total Ad Spend Is Rising, but Its Hold on Digital Is Slipping,” 29 July 2025. Google, Meta and Amazon at 58.8% of total US ad spend in 2025, against 47.1% in 2020.
GS1 US, Sunrise 2027; Digimarc press release, 29 April 2025 (Unilever, 45,000 SKUs); Stéphane Lannuzel, L’Oréal, Les Echos, June 2024.
Gap Inc., “Gap Inc. Expands Cross-Brand Creator and Social Advocacy Program to Employees,” 22 July 2026. The 30,000 posts and 154 million accounts describe the external creator program launched October 2025; the employee expansion had no performance data at announcement.