Brands are wasting money filling a leaky bucket
Published May 26, 2026
Marketing leaders are committing commercial self-sabotage by funneling 70 per cent of budgets into aggressive customer acquisition while ignoring the fractured experiences driving away customers, writes Digitas’ Davey Rennie.
Marketing has never been better equipped, yet it has never been under greater pressure. The data available to most marketing teams today would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago. Even a year ago, it would have felt ambitious. But attracting customers is getting harder. Keeping them is secondary. And while AI accelerates the volume of advertising content being produced, the vast majority of it goes unseen.
With brands struggling to cut through, is meaningful growth getting harder to sustain?
The answer is way less complicated than most people will admit.
The problem is not the budget. It’s not technology. The problem is a connection gap between brands and their customer.
Brands spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to attract new customers, while existing customers churn. While this is seen consistently across categories, marketers continue spending at the top, with approximately 70 per cent of budgets spent on acquisition. But the irony is, the customers who spend the most are the ones brands already have.
There is a widening gap between what brands believe they’re delivering to customers and what customers actually experience. We call this The Connection Gap. And it’s costing brands billions.
It shows up as shallow relationships, one-to-one marketing that’s little more than matching luggage, creative measured on non-commercial outcomes, data left unused, and technology promises unfulfilled.
The most successful marketing leaders are investing in intelligent media, building weapons grade one-to-one advertising, pushing creative that cuts through a sea of sameness to drive relevance and reach, and connecting it all through identity solutions that make investments more efficient and messaging more effective.
For the rest, until that connection gap is closed, marketing investment is simply poured into a leaky bucket. The good news is the leaks are identifiable and fixable for brands paying close enough attention.
The first leak appears when data fails to inform the creative. The intelligence exists, but by the time it reaches the team building the next campaign, it has been diluted into a tactical brief, two steps removed from the insight. The creative is then built on hypothesis, not intelligence.
“Aldicore” by Aldi is proof of the commercial impact of using real customer intelligence. By understanding what their loyal customers, or fans, genuinely love about the brand, and how they shop, Aldi unlocked a campaign rooted in genuine passion, boosting NPS and store visits.
The second is a customer experience fractured across channels. Loyal customers are repeatedly re-targeted like strangers. Someone who’s just bought something is marketed the same product again. Individually small, collectively death by a thousand cuts.
The third leak is the big one. It’s where investment concentrates on the wrong part of the journey. Most brands over-invest in acquisition and under-invest in the most critical part of the customer relationship – just after the customer says “yes”. This is the moment where loyalty is either built or quietly lost. When brands get this right, the impact is visible. Qantas’s recent move to reward infrequent flyers as part of their loyalty program shows it’s a brand that’s listening to their consumers.
Closing the connection gap requires a rich customer database, paired with experiences and content that makes people feel heard and valued.
In retail, the problem can present as a media challenge when it’s really an experience challenge. Paid media efficiency is often impressive, but if a new range fails to translate from screen to store, traffic won’t convert. The issue isn’t reach, but what happens after arrival.
In trade, loyalty bases are strong and repeat rates are high. Yet digital journeys are rarely designed for how trade customers actually shop: time-poor, mobile-first, and needing certainty fast.
These are not isolated gaps, but are patterns visible across most categories when brands take an honest look at where investment sits, relative to where customers make decisions.
Finding your connection gap doesn’t require a major research program. It requires three honest conversations, grounded in the right data.
Where does your customer make the decision to stay or leave? Behavioural data reveals that decisive moments are fewer, more concentrated, and more valuable than most investment models suggest.
At those moments, does your creative or experience reflect what you actually know about that human? Or is it built for an audience approximation that was accurate at planning stage but is no longer relevant?
Where are customers disengaging and failing to return? Drop-off concentrates at the seams, between channels, teams and the experience brands believe they’ve designed, and the one customers actually receive. These are the fastest places to compound improvement, because retention gains don’t reset at the end of each financial year.
Addressing the connection gap is not a budget challenge. It’s a priorities challenge. Most of what is needed already exists: the data, the customer relationships, the creative resource. But they are rarely aligned at the same time, and campaigns that drive reach is often a more palatable boardroom story to tell.
When alignment happens, the efficiency of existing investment rises.
The brands with a sustainable advantage will not be those that spend the most, but those that are clearest about where spend genuinely connects, and most honest about where it does not.
That diagnostic is available to any organisation willing to ask the hard questions and break free of the belief that a leaky bucket needs a tap that is constantly on, rather than proper repair. Or if you get it right, a bigger bucket altogether.
Davy Rennie is the chief executive officer of Digitas Australia.