If you go back twenty years and walk through any marketing department, the room felt different. The conversations sounded different. The skill sets looked different. People talked about customers, not dashboards. They debated messaging, not attribution windows. They obsessed over how to create desire, not how to feed an algorithm. Marketing, for all its chaos, was still deeply human.

Then the tools arrived.

Slowly at first — Google Ads here, early SEO practices there — but the acceleration was ruthless. Ad platforms, analytics stacks, CRM systems, targeting models, optimization loops. The industry didn’t just adopt them; it surrendered to them. And the people doing the work adapted because they had to. They learned how to sculpt keywords, tune bids, decode dashboards, interpret pixel events, and squeeze fractional improvements out of levers that didn’t exist a decade prior.

In the process, something happened quietly — so quietly most marketers didn’t notice the shift until they woke up one day and realized their entire mental world had been rearranged.

Marketers became technicians.

Not because they wanted to.
Not because they lacked creativity or curiosity.
But because the job slowly reshaped itself around the machine.

And when that happened, the original center of the profession — persuasion — began to thin out.

You can see it in the kinds of questions that dominate meetings now. Instead of, “What emotional state are we creating?” it’s “What’s the ROAS on the new ad set?” Instead of, “Why would someone care about this?” it’s “What’s our competitive CPC this quarter?” Instead of, “What problem are we solving for a human being?” it’s “Which version of the headline gets the highest CTR?”

The tools didn’t just give marketers new capabilities.
They took up the cognitive space persuasion used to occupy.

And while marketers were learning to think like technicians, consumers were changing just as fast — maybe faster. The average person’s day became a barrage of notifications, emails, pings, banners, alerts, pop-ups, nudges, reminders, Slack messages, and social interruptions. You could see the shift in real time: attention shrinking, patience thinning, interpretation speeding up, emotional bandwidth dropping.

People didn’t stop being persuadable.
They just started rationing their attention like water in a drought.

This is where the entire industry drifted into a strange, unintended mismatch.
Marketers became masters of reaching people… right as people became harder to move.

Because reaching someone is mechanical.
Moving someone is psychological.

And we’ve spent twenty years optimizing the mechanics while starving the psychology.

The truth is, we’re still as human as ever. We still respond to emotion before logic, to story before data, to framing before facts. We still make decisions with our intuition long before our spreadsheets. We still fall for the same cognitive shortcuts, the same biases, the same gut-level interpretations our grandparents did.

That’s why I tell the story about [INSERT STORY #1].
It’s a perfect example of how perception can outrun reality without anyone noticing it happen.

And it’s why I use [INSERT STORY #2] in my classes.
Because every time I tell it, you can watch people recalibrate their entire understanding of choice and behavior in a single breath.

Those stories work because they remind us of something the modern marketing machine has almost trained us to forget:

Humans are not rational processors.
They’re meaning-makers.
And persuasion is the art of shaping meaning.

It’s not that the technical side of marketing doesn’t matter — it does. These tools can get your message in front of the right person at the right time with uncanny precision. But once the message arrives, the machine steps aside. The psychology takes over. And that’s where too many teams today are underdeveloped, undertrained, or simply unpracticed.

We’ve built an industry where everything that’s easy to measure has become important… and everything that’s important is harder to see.

But persuasion is the part that actually moves people.
It always has been.

And as attention gets thinner, noise gets louder, and digital life becomes more fractured, persuasion isn’t becoming obsolete — it’s becoming essential. The companies that will rise over the next decade won’t be the ones with the most dashboards. They’ll be the ones who can combine technical precision with human insight — the ones who remember that the tools exist to support persuasion, not replace it.

If you’re a marketing leader and some part of this feels uncomfortably familiar — the campaigns that perform but don’t resonate, the traffic that doesn’t convert, the messaging that’s “fine” but never quite lands — that’s not a failure of execution. It’s a symptom of the drift.

And if you’re ready to rebuild the persuasion side — the human side — the part that actually shifts behavior and creates momentum, then reach out. This is the work I do with teams: helping them reclaim the psychological craft that marketing was built on in the first place.