Clark teaches you how to identify marketing frauds before they waste your time and budget. From Adam Robinson's credit default swap background to the red flags of buzzword-heavy consultants, this episode gives you the tools to spot fake expertise. Learn the silver bullet questions that expose frauds instantly and why calling out bullshit will make you enemies - but protect your career.
Key red flags covered:
Warning: Using these techniques will make you enemies in an industry that prefers comfortable lies.
REACH_Ep5_Charlatans
Clark Barron All right, let's just get this out of the way. The Big Bang Theory is not funny. And
I, I know, But I need you to understand exactly why that matters. See, when people laugh at
the Big Bang theory, they're not laughing because the writers crafted a witty, science themed
joke with both actual intellectual legs to stand on and real humor because the writing is
absolute dog shit. No, when people laugh at the Big Bang Theory, those characters could
literally be saying anything and everyone would still clap and yell. Look, Sheldon did a science.
The audience isn't responding to cleverness. They're responding to the performance of
cleverness. And here's the terrifying part most people can't tell the difference. They hear
scientific terminology and they assume depth or confidence and mistake it for competence. or
they witness a performance and applaud it as expertise. I think you're seeing where I'm going
with this. The Big Bang Theory works because it exploits a fundamental flaw in how humans
process information. We mistake complexity for intelligence. And that same flaw, that same
inability to distinguish between someone who sounds smart and someone who is smart. That
is exactly what is destroying marketing today. And you're listening. So strap in. I've been wrong
a lot in my career. But you know what's funny about being right? Nobody wants to hear it. I
used to think that the hardest part about spotting frauds con artists was the detective work.
Learning to see through the performance in recognizing patterns and calling out bullshit. That
is not the hardest part at all. The hard part is what happens after. It's the silence that follows
when you point out that the Emperor has no clothes, and I have done it several times. It's the
way people look at you like you just ruined Christmas morning, or the realization that most
people would rather be lied to by someone confident it than then told the truth by someone
they're not sure they like. I've been shouting into the void for years, and I don't mean in the
performative LinkedIn shouting. That's all theatre, even though I have done theatre a lot in my
day. But that's another story. I mean, the real kind of shouting, the desperate kind. The 2 a.m.
posts hoping someone, anyone would comment back and say Holy shit, I thought I was the
only one that saw this. Because when you can spot the frauds, when you can see through
performance, and when you understand that half the people getting the biggest platforms have
absolutely no idea what they're talking about, you start to feel like you're living in a different
reality than everyone else. It's like you're watching a magic show where all you can see. It's
like you're watching a magic show. Actually, where you can see all the mirrors, but everyone
around you is just gasping at the illusion. But the magician, well, the magician's gonna hate
you because you're. Because you are the one in the audience who just won't play along. Now,
don't get me wrong. I'm a good sport, I. I will let someone pull a quarter out from behind my
ear. I used to think that I hated bad marketing, but it took me a long time to realize that that's
not exactly true. I hate what bad marketing turns good marketers into the ones who started
with real skill and real desire to build something true. But somewhere along the way, they
stopped asking if any of it was working and started and started asking what? And started
asking what would get them. Applause. I've watched brilliant people disappear into the
performance. Strategists become content creators. I have watched I have watched some of the
best practitioners I've ever known become influencers. And when I say influencer, I mean that
kind of influencer. And I've sat there alone, wondering if I was the crazy one for thinking that
any of that mattered. I learned to spot charlatans the hard way by watching them get promoted
while I got fired. Remember that Birmingham boardroom? The one where I closed a $17
million deal that the suits couldn't? Yeah. Two months later, they fired me for insubordination
and then, in the same breath, said it wasn't a culture fit. Hmm. Not not because I was wrong,
but because it was right, they just didn't like the way I did it. Instead of focusing on the
substance and the outcome, they didn't like the tone. And being right in front of people who
were performing expertise. Whew. That is unforgivable. That was my first real education into
how this industry actually works. It was the lesson that wasn't about marketing. It was about
power, about who gets to be the expert and who gets to stay in the room. The suits didn't fire
me because the strategy was bad. They fired me because it worked better than theirs. Call it
what it is. Because when you're surrounded by people who are faking their way through it,
competence actually becomes a threat. But it took me years to understand the full scope of
what I was actually seeing. I thought it was just that agency. Just those people. Bad luck.
Whatever. Boy, was I wrong. Very wrong. It is systemic. I started paying attention to who got
hired, who got promoted, who got the platforms, and I noticed a pattern. The people rising to
the top weren't the ones with the deepest knowledge or the best results. They were the ones
with the best performances. Okay, you've heard me talk about this before, but let's let's briefly
talk about our B2B, the De-anonymization platform that I've just ripped to shreds. Take Adam
Robinson, CEO of B2B, before he became the inbound and outbound guru, before he started
hawking surveillance tools to desperate sales teams. You know what he did? Take a guess.
Nope. He wasn't a marketer. Wasn't in sales. He traded credit default swaps for Lehman
Brothers. Yeah. Yeah, you heard that correctly. And if you were alive, and if you were a
breathing human being around 2008, you know how that story ended. Mortgages, data. It's all
the same. But here's the thing. That background doesn't disqualify him from being a marketing
expert. What disqualifies him is that he's never done marketing. He's never built campaign,
never grown a brand. Until what? Klaviyo a couple of other. A couple of other. A couple of other
data laundering MVPs. But he learned. But he learned the language. Which in the language,
as it turns out, is enough. So can you fault him? I mean, I will, but because. But it's because.
Because most people in this industry can't tell the difference between someone who knows the
words and someone who understands the work. I started documenting this. Not publicly, not
yet, but just for my own sanity. The consultant who built $1 million agency selling growth
frameworks that were just repackaged funnel math. You you still see that crap today? Or a VP
that got hired because he could talk about full funnel attribution, but couldn't explain what it
actually measured. Or I know you've seen these. The conference speaker who gives
presentations about buyer journey optimization based entirely on case studies that they had
read but never actually executed. Each time it was the same pattern. Confident language, zero
substance, 100% total success. And each time I tried to point it out carefully, diplomatically, I
was told that I was being too critical, that the industry needed thought leadership, that these
people were pushing the conversation forward. But they weren't pushing anything forward.
They were recycling old ideas with new vocabulary. In selling shortcuts to people who didn't
know they were buying detours. That's where you get terms like near bound and all bound and
inbound, lead outbound and whatever. I've said for the longest time, if I see another LinkedIn
post about marketing with word bound in it, I am calling the police. Because all of these people
are making up terms for things that already have names. And if they were actually marketers,
they would know that. But that's what happens. They come into this industry and they don't
want to actually make it better. They don't want to help. They just want to be known as the
person that came up with the next big thing. The breaking point for me came at a conference in
2000. The breaking point for me came actually at a conference in 2019. I won't name it, but
you've heard of it. One of the big ones. I was sitting in the back of a section. I was sitting in the
back of a session about an AI powered customer. I was sitting in the back of a session about
the future with AI and yada yada yada. The precursor to what we know now AI powered
customer journey Orchestration. Preparing for what? Whatever the speaker, let's call him
Derek, was explaining how his platform used machine learning to predict buyer behavior.
Okay. Impressive slides. Very confident delivery. Oh, look. A room full of nodding heads. Cool.
But I knew Derek we'd actually worked together three years earlier. Back then, he was selling
email automation software and couldn't explain why open rates were declining. Fun fact he
didn't know what the fun fact didn't actually know what the acronym dMarc was. Now he was
on stage talking about predictive analytics like he invented the concept entirely. During Q&A,
someone asked about data quality. He launched into a five minute response about multidimensional
attribution modeling. And that said, absolutely nothing. And guess what? The
crowd went wild. Everybody applauded. Everybody loved it, ate that shit up. And I realized they
weren't applauding the answer. They were applauding the performance. Most of them didn't
understand what he was talking about either, but they assumed that because they didn't
understand it, it must be advanced. That's when I understood the full scope of what we were
dealing with, and a lot of what we're dealing with today. It isn't a bug in the system at all. It is
very much a feature. The industry, the industry. The industry rewards incomprehensible
complexity because complexity sounds like expertise. Period. It promotes people that can
make simple things sound extremely complicated. Rather than people rather than people who
can make complicated things simple, it elevates performers over practitioners because most
buyers of marketing services cannot tell the difference for some reason. So. So yeah, I started
saying this shit out loud. Not carefully, not diplomatically. I called Derek out by name. I exposed
the consultants, recycled frameworks. I documented the surveillance economy that Abbott. I
documented the entire surveillance economy that Adam Robinson and his ilk were building.
And the response was swift and very predictable. That I was gatekeeping, that I was negative,
that I was trying to hold the industry back. But here's what none of them could say that I was
wrong because I wasn't wrong. I was just inconvenient. Inconvenient to those people making
money, selling repackaged common sense, inconvenient to the conferences that needed
speakers more than they needed people that actually knew what the hell they were talking
about. And of course, I was inconvenient to the ecosystem that had built. And of course, I was
inconvenient to the ecosystem that had been built around performance rather than substance.
Let me tell you, the the isolation is brutal. Not just professional. Existential. I mean that I'd
spent years trying to get good at marketing. I learned from some of the best on the planet
practitioners, theorists, strategists, you name it, studying campaigns that actually worked
understanding buyer psychology, brand positioning, message market fit, all of it. All the math,
all the craft and everything in between. But then suddenly I was surrounded by people who
had never done any of that work, but were teaching others how to do it. Make that make sense
to me. There are people who learned how to sound smart. Whatever. There were people who
learned how to sound smart without ever actually having to be smart. People who built entire
careers on other people's case studies or, you know, worse, they just made the shit up.
Because guess what? There are no reference checks for case studies. It's people that treated
marketing like a performance art rather than a craft. It just makes no sense to me. It makes no
sense to anybody that gives a shit. But when I pointed this out, Of course I was the problem. I
would lie awake at 3 a.m., wondering if I was losing my mind, if maybe everyone else was right
and I was just bitter. I seriously, I struggled with that a lot. Maybe I was the charlatan. Maybe
they were experts. Maybe attribution really did work the way they said it did. Or intent data
wasn't just recycled guessing. These frameworks and methodologies actually meant
something. Maybe I'd spent years listening to the wrong things. Maybe confidence was
overrated and performance was what actually mattered. Maybe I should stop fighting and learn
to play the game. Hmm. But then the DMs started rolling in. It was quiet at first from people
who had read my post and recognized something familiar. You know, I thought I was the only
one that could see this. Thank you for saying what I was thinking, but afraid to post. I've been
doing this for 15 years and I feel like I don't recognize the industry anymore. Each each
message felt like finding a signal in the static. One by one, they found me or I found them. The
refugees from the performance economy. The ones who still believed marketing was supposed
to be about understanding people and not manipulating them. You know, I've always said that
marketers have no idea the kind of power that they actually have, and they have to make a
conscious effort at some point in their career to use those powers for good. You know, slowly I
started to understand what had happened to our industry. It wasn't that charlatans had invaded
marketing, it's that marketing had become a place where charlatans could thrive. It is where
performance, like I said, was rewarded among everything else. The system wasn't broken. It
was working exactly as it was working exactly as designed, because it was designed to extract
maximum revenue for minimum knowledge. And promote people who could present a river.
People who could deliver. I know that it was designed to promote people who could present
over people who could actually deliver. And I know that in saying that, someone just popped in
your mind. But the people that caught but the people that were caught in the middle, the ones
who actually knew what they were doing, we become. We became dissidents and
Troublemakers, the ones who asked uncomfortable questions and demanded evidence. God
forbid. This is the cost of clarity. When you see everything for what it is, I'm sorry to drag you
into this, but you can't unsee it. Because when you understand the difference between the
tactics and strategy, you can't you can't pretend they're the same thing. And when you know
what good marketing actually looks like, your brain will not allow you to abide or applaud the
theater. And that's what actually makes you dangerous in this industry. Not not to buyers, not
to clients, not to the people marketing is supposed to serve. Dangerous to the ecosystem that
dangerous to the ecosystem that was built around serving itself in an industry that's forgotten
what it was actually supposed to be about in the first place. So here we are, five episodes in
me talking into a microphone, hoping you understand what I'm really saying, but okay, if you
don't. Because this this isn't just about marketing. It's about what happens when an industry
loses. The ability to distinguish between it all comes back to competence versus performance.
We're living through the con because right now we're living through the consequences of that
transformation. Buyers who don't trust us, tactics that don't work, budgets that get wasted on
tools that promise magic but deliver point but deliver her disappointment and usually
severance packages. It's an entire profession. That's. But here's what I've learned from finding
my tribe. We're not alone. There are more of us than you think. And if you're listening to this.
Welcome. You know, there are tons of marketing directors that know that attribution sucks and
CMOs that see enough vendor pitches that, geez, we've been finding each other in the DMs
and the comments, the quiet moments between all these ridiculous performances, and we're
building a network of people who refuse to pretend anymore. And if you're listening to this, if
you've made it through these first five episodes of Reach processing the cost of staying honest
in a dishonest industry, you are probably one of us. That mix of rage and grief and
determination, rage at what this industry has become. Grief for what it used to be and
determination to help. And determination to help it. Remember what it was supposed to be
about and what it can be. All right, so what now? I can't promise you that this gets easier. I
can't promise you won't face consequences. Or that you won't feel isolated when you refuse to
applaud anymore. But I've said this before, and I'm. I'm going to say it again. You're not crazy.
You're not alone. And you're not wrong. The emperor has no clothes. The charlatans are
running the asylum. Have no doubt. But the only way we fix this is by refusing to play along.
One Uncomfortable question and inconvenient truth at a time, until there are enough of us that
the performance just stops working. Because eventually, if you call them out enough, the
charlatans have to find a new industry to infiltrate. This is reach five episodes of processing
what it costs to stay human in an industry that rewards being fake. Morning. What marketing
used to be while fighting for what it could become, and finding your tribe in the wreckage of
what was supposed to be a profession. If this is the last episode you listen to, that's fine. You
got what you needed. But if you're still here, if you're still listening, if you recognize yourself in
any of these stories. Welcome to the resistance. We've been waiting for you.