The Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am Era of Marketing Is Over

The way many businesses have been selling for the last five years isn't working anymore.

• The countdown timers.
• The fast funnel.
• The webinar-to-low-ticket-to-upsell.
• The 24-hour flash sale.
• The challenge that converts cold strangers into a $50,000 program in 72 hours.
• The group close where you fill the online room and walk away with a stack of yesses.

It had a good run. It's over now.

Here's the part I haven't said yet. If AI is forcing us to rebuild our offers around the things only humans can do (the relationships, the judgment, the taste, the high level strategy, the community, the care), then we have to rebuild our marketing for the same reason.

You cannot sell a human-centric offer with a hyper-automated funnel. The two are at war.

This is the practical sequel. The how. What "rebuild your marketing for the economy that actually exists now" looks like in practice.

The economy moves in cycles. You need to move with it.

Let's dig into something a lot of the gurus teaching marketing will not tell you because they haven't been in business long enough to know it.

I started my first business, a law practice, in 2010. The way I built that business was deeply unsexy by 2022 standards. I went to events to meet people. I built relationships with journalists. I followed up. I spoke to people over the phone (gasp!). I built relationships that made the sales process feel easy (because the trust earned the yes). I wrote a blog because I had things to say that were useful to my small but significant audience, not because a funnel diagram told me to. There was no 17-point funnel. There was no countdown timer. There was no $97 challenge.

It worked. Not because I was a marketing genius (I wasn't yet), but because that was the way you sold a service in 2010. You connected enough to earn the trust and the buyer paid the invoice.

Then just as the online marketing world was mid explosive growth, the pandemic happened. For three to four solid years, every old rule of selling got upended. Captive audiences. Fat inboxes. Stimulus checks. Webinars at 3pm on a Wednesday because nobody had anywhere to be. Your high performing funnel was perhaps not the most genius innovation, maybe it was a perfectly timed accident.

That moment in time is now gone. And it's not coming back. The business math is correcting back to where it was when I started. Entrepreneurs who built their entire revenue model on 2020-era conversion rates are the ones staring at their dashboards right now, watching the numbers fall and wondering what they broke.

Nothing is broken. The moment just ended.

Here's what I want every entrepreneur building a business right now to internalize. The economy moves in cycles. It always has. It always will. The pandemic-era was an anomaly, the 2010 ground game was the rule. AI is the next cycle. There will be one after that, and one after that, and if you are an entrepreneur for the long haul, you have to learn how to sell in every one of them.

You have to build a business that still slaps in downturns. A company that is still desired and in demand during recessions. And then you will naturally be downright unstoppable in upswings.

The women whose names became verbs (think Oprah, Martha, Beyoncé) didn't pick a single cycle and ride it. They built the kind of business that could metabolize a downturn, a recession, a tech disruption, a culture shift, and keep going. That comes from one thing: foundational, sustainable, culture-driven, relationship-based marketing. Not fly-by-night funnels where you pummel a list to death and then build another one through ads.

The market correction has receipts

Email open rates look great on paper: the global average sat above 40% through 2025. The problem is that number is largely fiction, because Apple Mail Privacy Protection now auto-downloads email content on its proxy servers whether the recipient opens the message or not. According to Litmus, Apple Mail accounts for about 58% of all email opens globally. Half of every "open" your platform reports was a machine, not a human.

The number that actually measures whether a real person read your email and cared is your click-through rate. That one is averaging 6.8% across the industry. Run the math on your own list right now if you haven't already. The 42% open rate your dashboard shows you is keeping you comfortable while the real number hides behind it.

Now let's talk about whether webinars are dead. Based on my own data, and my clients' data, it's clear that webinars are absolutely still working but the topic is everything. People no longer have an extra hour of their life for your webinar unless it teaches them something they urgently or desperately need to know. So the question isn't: do webinars still work? The question is: is your topic hyper-relevant to what your ideal client is struggling with right now?

We got very spoiled with webinars that delivered high conversion rates no matter the topic, style of pitch or evidence of results. Now, quick is no longer the name of the game and real conversion happens in the follow-up. Gartner found webinar attendees who got four or more post-event touches converted at 17.4%, versus 9.1% for one follow-up email. During the pandemic, when inboxes were full of bored, captive people, one email was enough. Now the buyer has less money to work with (so is making decisions more carefully) and even less time. The attentive follow-up process is critical.

Now let's talk ads. The cost to acquire a lead through Google ads jumped 25% in a single year while reach fell 15%. One media buyer told Bloomberg that Meta costs doubled in a single quarter, with sales returns dropping 20-40%. So you now get to spend more for less eyeballs — perfect! Most of my clients and peers lowered their paid spending dramatically over the last 12 months and are building better pipelines without it.

So what is working?

The same things that always worked. Long-form, founder-led content. Real relationships. Live, in-person rooms. Slow funnels with multiple touch points. A reason to trust you that took longer than 11 minutes to build.

The data is screaming this:

According to the IPA Bellwether Report, event budgets grew nearly 11% heading into 2026 while overall B2B marketing spend was declining. 78% of marketers plan to keep or grow event budgets this year. 77% of consumers say they trust a brand more after an in-person interaction with it.

Substack just hit 8.4 million paid subscriptions in Q1 of this year, up 68% from the previous March. The platform's newsletters average 40-60% open rates against an industry average of 21.5%. People are paying, actually opening their wallets, to read 2,000-word essays from individual humans.

Authenticity was just named one of the Association of National Advertisers' Words of the Year. 93.4% of U.S. consumers say they prefer interacting with a human over AI for customer service. 55% of consumers, and 66% of Gen Z and Millennials, say they're more likely to trust brands that publish human-generated content.

Here's what's happening: customers got over-digitized, over-automated, and oversold. They want a human. They will pay you to be a human. And they will pay more to be in a room with you.

Human-centric offers and human-centric marketing is what's working. Using AI to get everything else off your plate to make room for that is key.

Receipts from Hello Seven

I spent the first half of 2025 watching my own numbers with the same creeping unease I've been describing. The campaigns that used to feel reliable were taking more effort for less return. The market shifted. I had a choice: keep running the same plays and hope the numbers corrected themselves, or look directly at what was happening and make different decisions.

We looked directly at it. Here's three things we changed.

My best-performing sales campaign of 2025 was a six-week email nurture sequence. Not a webinar. Not a flash sale. Not a 72-hour countdown timer. Six weeks. The first two weeks were warmth and context: something is coming, here's why I built it, here's who it's for and not for. Launch week was daily emails, real client results, real objection handling, and a sales team that was accessible. Then a final week of following up with the people still thinking it through. People got time. They got multiple touch points. They bought from a place of conviction instead of urgency. More of them bought than would have from a faster, harder campaign. Slower sold more. The New Economy requires patience.

I sold out 90% of my Portugal retreat by sending personalized Loom videos to people I already knew. I sat at my desk, opened Loom, hit record, and talked directly to each person. Walked through the retreat details. Then told them why this experience was for them specifically, based on real things I knew about them. Not a template with their name swapped in. Was it scalable? No. Was it effective? Yes. (Sometimes the non-scalable thing is, in fact, the thing.)

We replaced our $97 challenges with $995 workshops, and our conversion rate went from about 5% to about 60%. There is a whole religion in online business built around the idea that low price equals access equals more people equals more conversions. What I found when we made the switch was the complete opposite. Smaller rooms. Higher commitment at the door. Everybody in the room actually shows up and wants to be there. The group close at the end converted 12x better than the equivalent challenge close. More money, less noise.

The pandemic was the anomaly, not the rule. If you've been quietly blaming yourself for revenue numbers that no longer work, please understand it has nothing to do with your talent or ability. It's simply that the market has shifted and your strategy has to shift with it.

So what's the play?

If you are a small business owner who has felt the slow drag of the last 12-18 months (campaigns underperforming, ads getting more expensive, webinars converting like they're full of ghosts), here is what I would actually do.

Slow your funnel. Add weeks, not minutes. The window between discovers you and buys from you needs to grow. Build more points of connection. More reasons for your potential clients to trust that you care (and then, you know, actually care!). The fast-conversion model is gone. The slow-trust model is back.

Get long-form fast. Substack, YouTube, books, podcasts. Pick one and start. The 30-second reels treadmill is not going to save you. People are starved for intellectual and sustained ideas from real thinkers.

It's outside season. Get in rooms with humans. Host workshops. Speak at things. Travel. Run small in-person events you can film and turn into content. The "not scalable" small room becomes the most scalable content you produce.

The window is still open. Now is the time to rebuild.