In this post, we explore why enshittification drives some of the biggest digital marketing challenges facing our industry. We also explore how to strategically address these challenges in 2025. 

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

— Cory Doctorow, Transmediale Festival lecture

The Macquarie Dictionary, considered the standard reference on Australian English, recently named ‘enshittification’, a term coined by author Cory Doctorow in 2022, as its 2024 Word of the Year. It defines the term as follows:

The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

Elon Musk’s X is a well-known enshittification story. However, there are many more. By kowtowing to shareholder primacy, dozens of tech companies—many of them marketing-related or marketing-adjacent—are plagued by enshittification issues. 

In addition to fueling a vast array of social, environmental, and economic issues, enshittification makes a responsible marketer’s job very difficult. Can we redefine marketing success to head off enshittification issues before they occur? 

Enshittification and Digital Marketing Challenges

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage — when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile — that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service.

— Cory Doctorow, Bluesky and Enshittification

Unfortunately, marketing’s power to influence widespread behavior is sometimes driven by perverse incentives. Some might argue that enshittification is the direct result of marketing’s downward spiral over the past 50+ years. You only need to look as far as the tobacco and fossil fuel industries to find examples. However, not all marketers subscribe to this take on our industry. Some aspire to do better, to be better.

To this end, digital marketing—particularly its content marketing subset—is undergoing radical transformation at the moment, and not in a good way. Potentially existential challenges for responsible marketers include:

1. Content saturation: Platforms are flooded with an overwhelming amount of substandard content, organized and served by algorithmic priorities. 
2. Inbox fatigue: A glut of aggressive, AI-powered email marketing strategies leave many campaigns destined for the spam folder. 
3. Advertising efficacy: Campaign performance is down while costs continue to rise as ad platforms hoard value for themselves. 

The rise of generative AI, updates to search algorithms, widespread mis/disinformation, and general platform decay make it difficult for marketers to create meaningful value through their campaigns. To work around these challenges, we often rely on ineffective vanity metrics such as likes, page views, impressions, and so on. We celebrate clickthrough rates of 2% or less. These are hardly indicators for enduring success.

In turn, enshittification drives ripple effects through the marketing industry. To remain competitive and financially solvent, some agencies squeeze value out of their campaigns by turning to unethical practices that undermine people’s privacy and sow disinformation and ‘rage-bait’. 

Others close their doors. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that happen multiple times this year.

Similarly, in-house marketers look for more cost-effective ways to meet goals when search or ad campaigns don’t produce the results they once did. If organizations don’t provide upskilling or cross-training on new marketing approaches, layoffs occur. 

With all this in mind, let’s explore how enshittification drives the three challenges mentioned above. 

Marketing Challenge #1: Content Saturation

Our internet has now become a wasteland of content that was created for one purpose only: garner as much ‘engagement’ as possible in order to suck every last dollar out of the system.

— Caoilainn, Digital Litter, Substack

First, the flood of content mentioned above—coupled with algorithms that prioritize platform goals over stakeholder needs—reduce chances that your message will be discovered by those you hope to reach:

1. Digital marketers who use social networks to distribute content have seen a sizable dip in performance and engagement over the past few years. 
2. Plus, if you use AI to generate content, there’s a slew of misinformation, data privacy, and data inequality risks to contend with. At this point, the ethics and sustainability issues associated with AI are well-documented.

However, content saturation isn’t exclusive to enshittified social networks. It undermines digital marketing efforts across the web:

• Search rankings: Search marketing continues to be a volatile industry.
  1. Google’s 2024 search algorithm updates and AI Overviews (AIO) have many teams scrambling to improve tanked rankings. 
  2. Google’s recent antitrust lawsuits could force them to spin off their Chrome browser. It remains to be seen how this might impact SEO.
  3. If you weren’t already focusing on EEAT—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness—as a core part of your content and SEO strategy, monumental challenges lie ahead. (However, better content is ultimately a good thing for the enshittified search market.)
• Mis/disinformation: Because of (again, often AI-fueled) content saturation, misinformation and disinformation are widespread on the web. This frustrates stakeholders and undermines content’s ability to drive meaningful interactions. 
• Governance: In desperate attempts to appease the algorithms, some marketers revise content governance policies in one of two directions:
  1. They churn out vast amounts of (often subpar) content which produces less impactful results.
  2. Or, they back away from content marketing altogether, turning to other tactics to meet their goals. 

What’s more, increased screen time is linked with higher stress levels. Multiple studies illustrate the correlation between diminished mental health and extensive device use. If we want marketing to serve as an engine of stakeholder well-being, marketing-related content shouldn’t play a role in undermining our health. 

At Mightybytes, we see each of these challenges manifest in client projects and in our own marketing work. Unfortunately, when content is infiltrated and monopolized by Big Tech players, enshittification is inevitable unless we do something about it.

Marketing Challenge #2: Inbox Fatigue

Statista has calculated that 361.6 billion emails will be sent per day in 2024. Total Retail adds that between the period of Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, brands increased their email sends by 24 per cent. In theory, this could result in an additional 86.7 billion emails being sent on Black Friday 2024, bringing the total to 448.3 billion emails.

— Ecosend, The Carbon Cost of Black Friday Emails

Similarly, enshittification in the form of ‘inbox fatigue’ diminishes the effectiveness of outbound sales and marketing efforts. On any given day, we spend valuable time marking emails as spam and unsubscribing from newsletters, many of which we didn’t subscribe to in the first place. 

Email addresses are valuable currency in marketing. However, in addition to fueling massive emissions—up to nearly 10,000 metric tons per day, by some counts—email marketing platforms can pose security risks and allow bad actors to ‘scam at scale’.

Plus, AI plays multiple roles by both increasing output on the marketing side while simultaneously filtering recipients’ inboxes—a zero sum game.

What’s more, if you’re not abiding by always changing data privacy regulations, there’s a chance you could get hit with fines as well. 

Marketing Challenge #3: Advertising Performance

Big surprise: people don’t like to be tracked across the web. Traditional online advertising has become even more enshittified in recent years as platforms attempt to claw back value for themselves in the face of rising data privacy backlash. In this scenario, ad performance declines while costs to advertise remain high. 

On the consumer side, ad blockers and opt-out features built into Apple’s iPhone have reduced the effectiveness of targeted ads, despite high advertising costs. 

Also, many less than reputable ad networks are happy to promote your product or service for the right price. If your ads end up on the wrong sites, you could undermine customer trust.

To combat this, some advertisers turn to performance marketing affiliate models to increase brand awareness and reduce risk. However, this type of marketing suffers from a lack of transparency. If sponsored content, influencer marketing, or related tactics aren’t clearly marked as such you could undermine trust and, potentially, spread misinformation. 

Responsible Digital Marketing in 2025 and Beyond

No one knows what modes of consumption or types of marketing (and non-market) offerings will be needed 20 years from now to optimize wellbeing within healthy thresholds, but marketing and society together, in relationship, can reach this goal. By releasing marketing from its BAU assumptions about what to do and how to do it, guide-and-co-create marketing makes hyper-innovation a possibility.

— Alexis Eyre and Paul Randle, Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future

Given the enshittification challenges listed above, how should conscientious marketers strive to improve stakeholder well-being through their efforts? Here are a few suggestions. 

1. Improve Research and Testing Capabilities

First, no form of marketing or communications will work without knowing who you’re trying to reach. To understand what resonates with stakeholders, start with qualitative and quantitative research methods. Otherwise, you can’t ever hope to connect with them in meaningful ways. 

Similarly, performance data to track goal progress is a baseline prerequisite for any effort to succeed. We live in a time when these capabilities are readily available to all marketers. 

To achieve this, embrace the following: 

• Qualitative research: Interview stakeholders, run content mapping workshops, or conduct other forms of user or customer research to learn more about what people actually need.
• Quantitative research: Data analytics plus practices like A/B testing and closely tracking and comparing ad and marketing campaign performance can help you better understand what’s working and what isn’t (within privacy guardrails, of course).
• Testing: What we measure reveals what we value. Define the metrics that matter most for your organization and its stakeholders, then craft testing practices to measure progress and drive continuous improvement over time. Incorporate stakeholder feedback and perspectives into these cycles as often as possible. 

However, research and testing represents only a small sliver of what is needed to address digital marketing challenges. 

2. Harness the Power of Impactful Storytelling

When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inner lives of other people over long periods of time, that will repattern your consciousness. You too will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that. Your internal voices will become cruder, louder, less able to hear more tender and gentle thoughts. Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

— Jonathan Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again

Next, good stories bring people together. They help us create meaningful connections between what we experience online and our own lived experiences. Effective storytelling can help us create coalitions and build communities for collective action. 

Conversely, rage bait—a primary content driver on social media—causes divisiveness to run amok, undermining our ability to engage in meaningful discourse when opinions differ, and generally fueling widespread communications and marketing challenges.

Instead, crafting meaningful stories can inspire people to take action rather than driving rage-fueled engagement metrics.

3. Take a More Sustainable Approach to Content

If I present you with a flood of information that challenges your beliefs and experiences, you’ll dig in your heels, fight back, and reject it. If, on the other hand, you’re exposed to a small tidbit of information that connects to your life experience, you will be more likely to process the idea, integrate it into your worldview, and accept that information. We want to feel like we have some sort of control.

— Alisa Bonsignore, Sustainable Content: How to Measure and Mitigate the Carbon Footprint of Digital Data 

In her book on sustainable content, Alisa Bonsignore outlines four primary principles for behavior change based on the work of Dr. Natalie Hallinger: 

1. Make it relatable: Find intersectional communications goals. Brute force is not the path of least resistance. Where do your goals and those of others intersect? 
2. Make it desirable: Use social norms to drive behavior. 
3. Make it contextual: Details, coupled with a sense of urgency, can help you create calls to action that help people take immediate action. 
4. Make it easy: How might the right choice become the easy choice? 

Taking a more sustainable approach to content requires that we couple impactful storytelling techniques with long-term practices that help us build capacity, drive shared value, and keep the ESG impacts of our work in mind throughout. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeding the content marketing machine. Instead, focus on creating relatable stories that respect your own capacity, reduce your content’s environmental impact, and will resonate with those you aspire to reach.

4. Rethink the Value of Your Data

When applied to the data domain, decolonisation can become a narrative that unites us, a narrative that can help us redefine the border between what we want and don’t want large-scale technologies to do for us. In short, a new narrative about how we can contribute to our collective human knowledge in non-extractive ways.

— Ulises A. Mejias, Nick Couldry, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Recognizing how algorithms exploit our data to drive engagement can also help us rethink the value of data in our own marketing efforts. Let’s redefine the metrics marketers use to drive success. 

In other words, how might we help our data stakeholders thrive? Here are a few ideas:

• Data hierarchies: Understand the hierarchy of data needs in this age of rising privacy regulations—what do you actually need to help data stakeholders thrive?
• Data equity: Who isn’t represented in your stakeholder ecosystem? How might you foster more inclusive data access and representation? 
• Data sustainability: Can you take a more sustainable approach to SEO, digital strategy, and other data-intensive marketing practices? 
• Data disposal: How might impactful data disposal strategies help you reduce costs, improve efficiency, and drive digital sustainability efforts across your organization (not just in marketing)?
• Data governance: Finally, how might we help stakeholders in our own organizations improve data capabilities and skills through better policies and practices?

In summary, act more strategically on data to help your organization build capacity around data governance in more equitable ways. 

5. Collaborate and Co-Create with Stakeholders

The Kindness Economy moves beyond ‘more, bigger, faster’ to a value system where businesses enrich our lives, contribute to social progress, and respect the planet. As a community, B Corps are creating a kinder, more inclusive, and equitable economic future.

— Mary Portas, Rebuild: How to Thrive in the new Kindness Economy

Unfortunately, the quickest way to undermine enduring project success is to ignore important stakeholder groups. Enshittified Big Tech platforms are riddled with examples of this. So are many large marketing campaigns. 

With this in mind, good collaborative partnerships are critical to shared success. Whether it’s client-vendor relationships or impactful industry, community, or cross-sector partnerships, the process of co-creation and participatory design with stakeholders should be a core component of any leader’s toolkit. 

Consider the following: 

• Values alignment: Start with a core Code of Ethics to find partners that share your values. Embrace projects like a Hippocratic Oath for marketers or the Sustainable Marketing Compass to alert potential partners what’s important for an impactful, mutually beneficial relationship. 
• Understand scale: It’s not the size of your community, but the shared value it generates. Smaller stakeholder groups may prove more meaningful for effective partnerships than large, impersonal networks.
• Shared learning experiences: People often learn better through experience as opposed to, say, rote memorization and recitation. Prioritize collaborative, in-person learning workshops when possible. When facilitating online webinars or workshops, include discussion breakouts when relevant to foster better communication. 
• Content partnerships: Effective partnerships can serve as key drivers for your content strategy. Understanding stakeholder needs and pain points in your business ecosystem will help you create more useful content with potential partners. 
• Co-design: Finally, good collaboration doesn’t come easily for most organizations. Devote time and resources to build capacity and co-design solutions with the right partners.

These recommendations reinforce the idea that coalition- and community-building can offer impactful ways to combat enshittification in the digital products and services we create, use, and manage.  

Which brings us to our next point…

6. Find (or Design) More Responsible Alternatives

The stakes to address climate change, authoritarianism, education and inequality through design are monumental.

— Andrew Boardman, Cutting Class: Design Education in an Age of Austerity

Marketers, designers, or other communications stakeholders shouldn’t have to rely on tech monopolies that undermine our collective ability to thrive. Instead, we can vote with our dollars and model behaviors necessary to create change within business ecosystems.

• Ethical providers: Find more ethical third-party tools and suppliers to reduce reliance on Big Tech platforms. We started a handy list in this post. Know of any we should add?
• Digital supply chain: Similarly, audit your existing digital supply chain to improve resilience and minimize enshittified third-party tools. This should help you reduce Scope 3 emissions as well.
• Design better solutions: Most importantly, every organization is enabled by software in some way. If it’s within your means to design more responsible digital solutions, consider doing so. 

This is the primary reason we launched our web sustainability tool Ecograder in 2013. At the time, no one was talking about web sustainability. We wanted to help people understand both the problem and potential solutions. Twelve years later, Ecograder is still doing that.

7. Advocate for Responsible Tech Policies

Changing the system requires us to create a tipping point whereby the economy better recognizes the costs of business on society. Business activists can help us advance that idea by drawing attention to new models and building partnerships with other organizations to amplify efforts and bring more resources and expertise to bear on the issue.

— Christopher Marquis, The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs

Most important of all, we can’t address enshittification or any of its related marketing challenges without impactful regulatory guidance. Google’s recent monopoly ruling is a step in the right direction, as are evolving data privacy, accessibility, and sustainability laws. 

However, there’s still so much more to do:

• What if interoperability laws gave us the freedom to move social accounts—including data, followers, friends, etc.—from one platform to another with ease versus trapping us in an enshittified, walled garden?
• Imagine a world where digital product passports let us quickly and easily view all of a product or service’s social, environmental, and economic impact data in a single location.
• And what if sustainability reporting, eco-design, and greenwashing standards included the impacts of digital products and services by default?

Here’s where marketing can make the biggest difference. By partnering and advocating for policy change, then telling those stories, we inspire others to do the same. Collectively, this shifts industries and carves pathways to better practices through legislation. 

Mightybytes’ work on the Web Sustainability Guidelines—now part of the World Wide Web Consortium—is our own example of this. Coupled with collective efforts from the B Corp community to drive economic policy change, we show how a small firm can create an outsized impact. If our tiny little agency can do this, so can you. 

Combatting Enshittification Through Marketing

A digital detox is not the solution for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.

— Jonathan Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again

Enshittification examples all have one thing in common: they are driven by tech platforms trying to hoard value to appease shareholders. However, we can use marketing as a conduit through which to combat enshittification in its many forms. Let’s do better and be better together.

Addressing these communications and marketing challenges requires a mindset shift and a significant amount of leg work. However, if enough marketers shift their practices and call for real industry change we can reach a tipping point. 

As Cory Doctorow notes, “everyone has a stake in disenshittification”.