Who is in Marketing and Advertising's 3-4%?

Title, salary, and experience are not qualifications.

In his podcast The Great Simplification, systems thinker Nate Hagens interviews experts on energy, economics, ecology and human behavior. He also publishes his own compelling views on shorter podcasts that he calls Frankly’s.

Recently he expressed that “In today's world, only three to 4%, of humans are going to do the right thing and appeal to the better angels of their nature.”

This week he clarified what he meant (my edits below) by that somewhat dramatic remark.

In the past humans did prosocial things which were “the driver of our strong reciprocity behavior in small bands …. where we not only punished cheaters, but we punished those who didn't punish cheaters.”

In the present “the dominant hierarchical metabolic force is sucking out the best of our natural behaviors, so we all are compelled to live within this profit seeking, extractive, growing institutional structure.”

In the future there will be at least two phases.

In the first “we can be good humans and do right by our families and our businesses and our world, but only at the margin with respect to, the debt and energy field economic superorganism.”

Then will come what he calls a bend or break moment, resulting in a great simplification.

In this next, “there will be stability, when we can say ‘here's our energy, here's our, daily economic production, here's our expectations … ?we will have a lot more, social reciprocity and much more than three or 4 percent of our populations … will follow the better angels of their future.’” ?

Before I comment further, I am not in the 3-4%. Educated in the 1970’s in Statistics (‘numbers never lie’) and Marxian Economics (‘historical materialism’), I began my career in the 1980’s working with newly privatized corporations (the ‘Thatcher revolution); then continued my professional work through the 1990's and 2000's to build for-profit brands in categories that included alcohol, airlines, fossil fuels and tobacco.

In the worlds of marketing and advertising it took to the 2010’s for most of us to wake up to the devastating damage our industry and individual anti-social behaviors were causing. We allowed ourselves to be locked into a profit maximizing economic model without regard to the negative impacts caused by extraction of our data, the manipulation of our emotions, and the growing costs of unrestrained consumption on our environment.

In Marketing and Advertising, we did not and still do not punish our cheaters. Nor do we punish those in our institutions who do not punish those cheaters.

Cheater #1 is Facebook/Meta. Who today remembers whistleblower Frances Haugen and An Ugly Truth?

Cheaters are everywhere in digital advertising. They include the AdTech perpetrators of pervasive fraud, and the holding companies today persisting in promoting principle-based media buying a decade after already being revealed as cheating their clients by accepting undisclosed media rebates.

The greatest cheater today may be Google, now convicted as an illegal monopolist. Yet with the coming of a new government, Google is likely to escape the consequences of its behavior in 2024/25 just as Microsoft avoided break-up in 2000/1.

I relate to Hagens’ observation about the 3-4%, and hope he is right in his clarification that their number will inevitably grow as we pass through the ‘bend or break’ moment. And if he is indeed right, it must be a segment of the population present in all walks of life, including marketing and advertising.

According to the American Marketing Association, there are "2.5 million marketers in the United States, and 6 million counting marketing-adjacent roles like sales, public relations, fundraising, user experience, and graphic design." Globally there are at least 6.5 million marketers and 15 million professionals in marketing-adjacent roles. Statista reports the population is 253,000 in Britain.

Following Hagens, we can project there to be up to 10,000 in Britain; 100,000 in America; and 260,000 marketing and advertising professionals globally adopting pro-social behavior in their work.

I’ve written recently about the individuals and organizations in the UK, making a difference through prosocial ideas and behaviors, Britain ranks #1 on a global future possibilities index. They are in Hagens’ 3-4% of the British population.

I’ve written about those specifically in the marketing and advertising business bringing a prosocial approach to their work: Who cares enough to break free from big tech and realize the future? They are in Hagens’ 3-4%, perhaps up to 4,000. If only all the individuals and organizations here would get together, they could become a real force of change, as well as the nucleus of a growing cadre that listens to and behaves in response to their better angels.

Hagens also warns that after his bend or break event “there are probably the same amount of bad actors, sociopaths, Machiavellian, dark triad people alive today as there will be then.”

The good news is that a positive outcome of the last two decades is that more and more of the bad actors are out in the open. We can see who they are.

As he says, we can beat them by acting in a pro planetary, pro future, pro-social way.

After all, Marketing Matters.

Stewart Pearson

Stewart believes in Consilience, the unity of knowledge across disciplines. He has lived, worked, and traveled globally in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He settled in the Evergreen State and Seattle. After studying Statistics and Marxist Economics in the U.K. he had four decades of experience in marketing and advertising focused on building client brands directly and globally.?He was Global Chief Client Officer and Vice-Chairman of Wunderman when it was the fastest-growing major agency in WPP. David Ogilvy once sent him a telex from India and Lester Wunderman told him stories of Picasso from the village in France where both of Stewart’s heroes had lived. Stewart is on LinkedIn and Bluesky, and at [email protected].