Most legacy marketing tools ignore how humans actually behave, according to Raja Rajamannar, senior fellow and former chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard.
Speaking at AANA's RESET 2026: Growth Through Disruption conference today, Rajamannar argued the industry had a fundamental implementation problem because its existing toolkit ignored basic human psychology.
"What percentage of ads are working based on the stated objectives of companies or ad campaigns? Less than 2%," he said.
"98% of the ads say that you're wasting money. It's a trillion-dollar industry."
The cause, Rajamannar argued, was not a lack of spending but a fundamental misattribution of what constituted success.
To illustrate, he described the customer experience of being served a YouTube advertisement.
"When I go to YouTube, I watch, like a good Indian, Bollywood songs and crap like that,” he said.
“Right into the middle of the song, YouTube decides to stop the experience and serve me an ad which I cannot skip for five full seconds.
“I'm waiting for the damn skip button. I'm not focusing on the ad.
"This is called blackmail. This is not marketing, guys."
His point was that this style of advertising may register as a viewed impression, but does little to endear brands to consumers, effectively just transferring agency money to big tech.
“Kudos to YouTube. If any Google people are there, I applaud you. You know how to extract money.
“Marketers lost to Silicon Valley.”
The same logic applied to loyalty marketing, which Rajamannar said was built on a false premise about human behaviour.
“People, human beings, are not hardwired for loyalty,” said the Harvard lecturer.
“You need stickiness programs, which is very different.”
As for AI, Rajamannar cautioned against treating the technology as a creative solution, warning it would homogenise rather than differentiate.
“It's going to result in every company coming to the same common solution, the same set of AI recommendations. It becomes the sea of sameness," said Rajamannar.
“AI is not going to solve your psychology, emotion, inspiration, all these human elements. That is where you actually bring in value what anybody has for your organisation.”
Rajamannar closed by urging the industry to return to the fundamentals of human psychology rather than delegating strategy to artificial intelligence, or antiquated metrics.
“You have to go back to the foundations of the human brain, and even if things are completely delegated to agents, this is going to be profound," he said.
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