Online promotion

Optimisation. That, in essence, is the crisis of modern marketing. Not a shortage of tools. Not a shortage of data. But the illusion — as old as the world, as new as a SaaS product with a fourteen-day free trial — that tools and data are marketing. That if you hold a good axe, the forest fells itself.

"MarTech is a good idea — but until it manifests at the front line, what does it matter? You just have a pile of numbers." — Jay Baer, marketing consultant and author

I once had a conversation with a man who ran the marketing department of a mid-sized company. He was as proud as a peacock. On his desk — metaphorically speaking, since everything was on screen — dashboards were lined up alongside automation platforms, a CRM, e-mail marketing tools, predictive analytics, heatmaps, A/B testing, and at least three subscriptions to services whose names sounded like freshly coined spells: sophisticated, promising, expensive. The total budget allocated to these tools exceeded the combined salaries of five members of his own team.

I asked him: "And how are sales going?"

He hesitated for a second — that second in which a person knows the truth but is searching for a formulation that won't sting. Then he said: "We're working on optimisation."

The Diagnosis: What Has Gone Wrong, and Why?  Before we discuss remedies, we must be honest about the illness. And the illness is not a pretty one.

Marketing has a credibility problem — not with the public, but with itself. There is a saying for this: "A lie has short legs." In a world where we have access to the most sophisticated platforms in the history of commercial communication, global conversion rates are stagnating at around 1%. Just one per cent. Mark Hurd, the former CEO of Oracle, said it plainly in front of over a hundred marketing directors: "Perhaps something is fundamentally broken in the way we think about marketing."

That is not an accusation. It is a diagnosis. And as with any illness, if you do not know what you have, the treatment does more harm than good.

The symptoms are visible to anyone willing to see them — and many are not:

Brand promises that do not match the product delivered. Domo — a business intelligence platform — spent years selling the image of a revolutionary product, with the fervour of a salesman promising the moon. Their campaigns: impeccable. Their targeting: surgical. Their messaging: coherent and dazzling. Customers bought. And then they left — like guests at a wedding where the food ran out before the cake. Why? Because marketing had sold a thoroughbred, and the product delivered a plough horse. No marketing technology can repair a false promise. It merely shouts it more loudly, to more people, more often.

I remember exactly what my father's desk looked like. Not that he had a proper desk — it was a corner of the sitting room, a wooden table with a drawer that never closed completely, where he kept bills, a biro without its cap, and a notebook filled with phone numbers written in a hand I now recognise in my own handwriting when I am in a hurry. There was nothing digital there. Everything was paper, ink, physical trace. If someone wanted to take something, they had to enter the house, open the drawer, touch the paper. Objects had a material resistance.

Now I sit at my own desk — which is a laptop on a table, beside a cup of coffee I left there the previous evening — and I try to come to terms with the fact that everything I have written over the past eight years exists in a format that a machine can hoover up in a matter of seconds, without opening any drawer, without touching anything, without leaving any trace that it passed through.

And the first question that comes to me is not a technical one. It is an older question, a more personal one: what does it mean to defend your work when your work no longer has any physical weight?

Before Any Strategy, an Acknowledgement

I am not a technical person by training. I am someone who came to understand technology through necessity — through years of managing websites for town halls, hospitals, and schools in Botoșani, through configuration errors discovered at midnight, through documentation read with a coffee in hand and a low-grade frustration that things were not working as they should.

And it is precisely for that reason that I believe I can speak about how AI robots read your site from a vantage point that many technical analysts miss: the place where technology meets the question of why it matters to me, as someone who writes.

Because yes, there is a technical dimension to everything that follows. But beneath all of it there is a simpler and, at the same time, harder question: you, as a creator — what relationship do you want to have with the machines that read your content without asking permission?

I arrived at two possible answers. They are not opposites. They are complementary, like two ways of being, simultaneously, both resistant and shrewd.

This article is a confession, not a manifesto. I make no claim to represent a school of thought. I make a more modest and more dangerous claim: to say what I have seen.

The solitude of the one who does not applaud. There is a specific moment — and anyone who has lived through it will know exactly which moment I mean — when you feel that the entire room is clapping and you sit there with your hands in your lap, not from laziness, not from ill will, but because you have seen nothing that merited applause.

That moment is uncomfortable. Not because you are certain you are right. But because you are not certain you are wrong, either. And it is precisely this suspension, this lucid indecision, that makes you invisible in public discourse, where either enthusiasm or fear is required — both at high volume, both selling well on social media, both convenient for the industry that produces hype.

I arrived at my scepticism towards generative artificial intelligence by a route that passes through no laboratory. I arrived at it through day-to-day work with Romanian public institutions — town halls, schools, county councils — that were buying or wanted to buy "AI solutions" without really knowing what they were purchasing and, more importantly, without knowing what they were losing through the mere act of purchasing. I arrived at it through reading: the Philokalia, Jung, Noica, Petre Țuțea. Through conversations with ordinary people who told me, with that direct intuition that poverty and a hard life cultivate, that "many words, little wisdom" — and that a machine producing thousands of words per second ought to be regarded with the same suspicion you reserve for the person talking loudest at a party.

But for a time — to be honest, for more than a time — I felt alone in this position. Not persecuted. Not marginalised. Simply alone. Like the man in the village who says the cloud in the west is bringing rain and everyone else looks at the weather app on their phone.

Then I found them.

Not by systematic searching. I did not compile a thematic bibliography of AI sceptics. I found them one by one, in different periods, each appearing in my field of vision through a reference, an article, a debate that reached me through the oblique channels of the internet. And each time I felt the same thing: recognition. Not mechanical agreement — that we think in exactly the same way — but the deeper recognition: someone had placed their hand on the same wall and felt the same cold.

Their names are Gary Marcus, Ted Chiang, and Karl Friston. None of them is Romanian. None of them reads the Philokalia, in all likelihood. And yet.

This morning I reread an e-mail I had sent three weeks ago to a school headteacher in Dorohoi. It was a Tuesday, I think, or perhaps a Wednesday — I can't be certain any more; days blur into one another during periods when I work a great deal and sleep badly. I was sitting at my desk with a coffee beside the keyboard, Gri (the cat) was asleep in a ball on the chair in the corner, and outside it was raining with that fine, insistent October drizzle — the sort of rain that doesn't bother you, but won't let you forget it's there either.

The e-mail was good. It genuinely was good. I had written it with care, revised it twice, added a reference to a specific school project I had found on the council's website, framed the proposal clearly, and placed the call to action exactly where it ought to be. Every rule observed. Everything I knew to work, applied correctly.

I received no reply.

And that morning, rather than moving on as I usually do — because you normally do move on, because if you don't you seize up and stop doing anything — I paused and asked myself a question that, I realised on the spot, I had never truly asked myself before.

Not "Why" didn't he reply.

But "What did I actually know" about him when I wrote it, and "What is the context" — the local market — in which it was received?

The answer came quickly, and it was uncomfortable in that particular way uncomfortable answers have of being clear and final, with no room for negotiation: I knew almost nothing. I knew his title — headteacher. I knew the institution — a school in a town in the north of Moldavia that I had never visited. I knew the school had run a European project two years earlier, from the public information I had found online. I didn't know whether the man read his e-mails himself or had someone filter them for him. I didn't know whether the local authority had blocked or released budgets that quarter. I didn't know whether he was weary of suppliers writing to him, whether he had just had an inspection, whether he was on sick leave, whether his secretary deleted e-mails from unknown suppliers before they ever reached him.