The Death of Digital Marketing: How the Hustle Bros Hijacked the Craft
From strategy to theater; how fake marketers hijacked a $500B industry
Once upon a time, being a “digital marketer” meant something. It was a craft—part science, part art—grounded in customer psychology, strategic positioning, and ethical persuasion.
Today? The term’s been hijacked by hustle culture cosplayers and resale reskin artists armed with Canva templates and a ChatGPT prompt.
Welcome to the Wild West of Marketing Theater.
While this may be a mild departure from my usual content, it’s an important detour. Especially for those of you building brands, selling expertise, or trying to navigate the noisy ecosystem of growth advice online.
Because here’s the thing:
There’s a critical difference between marketing—the discipline—and the hacks who merely sell marketing assets, or worse, perform marketing theater that passes as expertise.
And understanding that difference might be the single most important filter for protecting your reputation, your budget, and your brand equity.
💥 From PLR to Pretenders: What Went Wrong?
Private Label Rights (PLR), Master Resell Rights (MRR), and Resell Rights (RR) weren’t always dirty words. Originally, they were frameworks—shortcuts for content repurposing, licensing, and scaling. But over the past decade, they’ve been twisted into something almost unrecognizable.
What used to be smart content leverage has morphed into:
📦 Cloned funnels repackaged as “coaching programs”
🧠 AI-scraped eBooks pitched as “thought leadership”
🏴☠️ Stolen intellectual property with new covers and bold claims
🤡 Fake expertise with no training, strategy, or accountability
These aren’t marketers. They’re middlemen in disguise.
🎭 The Great Pretend
The barrier to entry is nearly zero. All you need is a Wi-Fi signal, a handful of affiliate links, and the nerve to call yourself a “7-figure marketer.” What we’re seeing now is the rise of:
Fake Authority: Emoji-filled bios claiming “growth expert” status based on copied screenshots.
Zero Strategy: No segmentation, no funnel design, no ICP insight—just spammed DMs and fake urgency.
Stolen Goods: Templates, courses, and swipe files lifted wholesale, then re-listed under new names.
Imagine calling yourself a contractor because you bought a hammer.
That’s where we are.
📜 Real Marketers Know the Difference
Great marketing isn't about selling someone else’s script. It’s about orchestrating trust, timing, and transformation. Here’s what the pros know:
PLR is a starting point, not a finished product. Use it as a draft—never the final delivery.
Copywriting ≠ words. It’s psychology, behavior science, and structured testing. See: Neuromarketing principles like the Framing Effect or Endowment Effect.
Marketing ≠ Monetization. Building a business means building systems—positioning, acquisition, retention—not just pushing digital files.
🚨 The Fallout: What This Trend is Costing Us
The rise of untrained resellers parading as strategists isn’t harmless—it’s damaging the whole industry, and it might be damaging your brand if you’ve unknowingly fallen prey to their schemes:
❌ Client Confusion: They don’t know who to trust—and many get burned.
❌ Eroded Trust: The signal-to-noise ratio in marketing has collapsed.
❌ Wasted Budget: Real marketers spend the first half of client engagements unteaching what bad actors taught.
It’s no longer enough to be good at what you do—you have to unseat the loudest voice in the room to earn trust again.
🧰 If You’re the Real Deal—Here’s Your Move
Don’t let resellers define the industry and give it a bad name as if it were a used-car sales lot. Instead:
Own your methodology. Whether you're leveraging the NBD-Dirichlet modelor running creative analysis based on scroll stop rate, show your work.
Share proof, not platitudes. Go beyond ROI screenshots—share thinking, frameworks, trade-offs, and failures.
Educate your audience. Teach the difference between marketing strategy and marketing theater.
🔥 Bottom Line
If digital marketing is a toolbox, the fakes are swinging the hammer and yelling “I build houses.” Meanwhile, real pros are designing blueprints, sourcing materials, and overseeing projects that actually last.
The industry doesn’t need more noise.
It needs fewer resellers and more architects.
It need authenticity.
It needs better, stronger signals.
Very pertinent. Never liked the term "hustle". The hijacking comes with a ransom note. It's a strong person who withstands the pressure to conform.