I found it.

I genuinely think I found the worst lead generation strategy in the entire history of people trying to sell things to other people. And listen, I have SEEN things. I have been in and around the marketing world long enough to have watched brands turn their customers’ deepest fears into a conversion funnel, so the bar for “worst I’ve ever seen” is genuinely quite high. I count one of the world’s best lead generation agencies – whose CEO I have worked with for longer my daughter has been alive – as a client.

I can assure you, I thought I had seen it all, until last night.

Here it is: someone, somewhere, in some meeting room with a whiteboard and a lot of misplaced confidence, decided that the right moment to capture a lead was at the exact second a person was searching for help. Not help as in “help me find the best sneakers.” Help as in: “I don’t know how I’m going to cope.” The strategy is simple, and it is predatory in a way that makes my skin crawl. You identify the keywords people use when they are frightened, overwhelmed, or in crisis. Then you optimise for those keywords. Then you serve them an ad (in this case, it was a job ad on LinkedIn…think about THAT for a minute). Then you capture their details.

Then your system immediately calls them on a WhatsApp call outside of business hours. And that shows your lead generation strategy, when you “strategically” send an email at the same time, literally CONFESSING what you are doing.

And then you send another followup email.

Then you call it growth hacking.

I want you to just sit with that for a second, because I think we’ve all become so accustomed to the machinery of modern marketing that we’ve stopped noticing when it tips over from persuasion into something genuinely ugly.

This is that moment. This is the tip.

The thing is, I understand how we got here. Marketing has been on a slow, strange journey for a few decades now, and somewhere along the way it stopped being about connecting a product to a person who might actually want it, and started being about engineering moments of weakness. The whole discipline pivoted to what they started calling “pain point marketing,” which sounds clinical and strategic but is really just a polished way of saying: find where it hurts, and press there.

For a while, people let it slide. Because the pain points were things like “you’re not productive enough” or “your lawn doesn’t look like your neighbour’s lawn” or “don’t you want to feel more confident?” Uncomfortable, sure. A little manipulative, yeah. But survivable.

Then it escalated.

It always escalates.

We moved into targeting people at their most financially desperate moments, their most emotionally raw moments, their most medically frightening moments. And the industry largely went along with it because the data said it worked. The conversion rates were good. The cost per lead was manageable. The quarterly numbers looked great.

Nobody in those meetings was asking whether it was okay.

That’s the thing that gets me more than anything else. Not that bad actors exist, because they always have. But that an entire professional ecosystem grew up around the idea that a human being in distress is, first and foremost, a marketing opportunity. That became the default. That became the strategy you’d present in a pitch deck without a second thought.

Not everything needs to be a marketing strategy.

I know that sounds almost laughably simple. I know there are people reading this who work in growth or demand gen or whatever we’re calling it this month who want to explain the funnel to me, who want to tell me about intent signals and audience segmentation and the difference between awareness and conversion campaigns. I get it. I genuinely do. I have sat in enough of those rooms.

I am asking you to zoom out with me for a minute.

Because what is actually happening, if you pull back far enough and look at the full picture, is this: we built an entire global marketing infrastructure on the assumption that humans are, at their core, consumers. That the primary thing a person does in the world is to want things and buy things, and therefore the primary way to reach a person is to intercept that wanting and insert your product into it.

It kind of worked, for a while, because people had enough stability in their lives to be reliably consumer-shaped. They had a bit of disposable income. They had a bit of leisure. They had a bit of faith in the future. So sure, show them an ad. Maybe they’d buy something. The contract felt more or less fair.

That contract is broken now.

I look around at the world in 2026 and I genuinely do not know how to explain to anyone who isn’t already feeling it what it is like to be a regular human being right now. The cost of just EXISTING has become incomprehensible. The political landscape is so corroded and so polarised that people have basically stopped believing that leadership of any stripe is going to save them. The climate is doing what we always said it would do and yet somehow we’re still surprised. AI is hoovering up jobs and simultaneously being handed over to the billionaires who already own everything else. And every single one of us is walking around with this low-grade, constant, exhausting hum of anxiety that we can’t quite name because it doesn’t have one source. It has all the sources.

NONE of us are okay. Not even close. I wrote something like that recently and I meant every word of it. I want to connect it to this, because I think it matters.

Right now, in this specific moment in history, all of humanity is in a vulnerable situation.

Not some of us. Not the people who had a hard year. ALL of us. The middle class is being systematically hollowed out. Young people cannot afford to live. Old people cannot afford to retire. Parents cannot afford to parent. We are all, every single day, being BOMBARDED by marketing that wants to solve our problems for a monthly subscription fee.

That is where this predatory lead gen strategy stops being an outlier and starts being a symptom.

When you live in a world where everyone is struggling, “pain point marketing” becomes an entirely different thing. You are no longer nudging someone towards a slightly better version of their already decent life. You are showing up at the door of someone who is genuinely frightened about whether they can heat their home, and you are saying: “I see you’re frightened. Here’s a form to fill in.”

That is not marketing. That is something else.

The industry knows it, somewhere underneath all the frameworks and the jargon and the campaign dashboards. I think there are people who got into this field because they actually believed in the power of a good story, of connecting people to things that might genuinely help them, and who have watched the whole enterprise drift somewhere they don’t recognise anymore.

The hopeful part of me wants to say: it doesn’t have to be this way.

I am also aware that “it doesn’t have to be this way” is a sentence that requires someone to make a different choice. Different choices are hard when the existing playbook is generating leads and the board wants growth and the quarterly review is in three weeks.

Let me just say this plainly, to anyone who makes marketing decisions, or writes copy, or builds audiences, or runs ads, or optimises landing pages, or chooses keywords.

The people on the other side of your screen are not okay right now. They are navigating a world that is, genuinely, harder than it has been in a long time. They are tired and frightened and overwhelmed and they are absolutely, certainly, desperately not sitting there thinking “I hope a brand finds me in this moment and captures my details.”

They are sitting there hoping someone will treat them like a human being.

Marketing has to change. Not tweak. Not “optimise for empathy.” Not run a feelings-forward campaign that’s actually just the same extraction machine with softer copy. Actually change. The model that treats human vulnerability as an acquisition channel has to stop, because the era in which it was merely a bit gross is over. We are now in the era where it is genuinely causing harm, at scale, to a species that is already really struggling.

You cannot market to a drowning person. Or rather, you can. People clearly do. You SHOULDN’T.

Maybe that’s the most important thing any of us in this industry can say right now, out loud, in plain language, without a call to action at the end of it.

Just: stop.

Sit with someone instead.

See them first.

The rest can wait.