From creative misses to media waste to blind spots in competition, here’s how top marketers are fixing the hidden gaps.

If you want to get ahead in marketing, one hidden threat demands your attention: Signal Waste.

Coined by Sooth, the predictive strategy firm behind the world’s first Emotional Logic Interface (ELI), Signal Waste is the silent killer quietly draining budgets, stalling growth, and eroding marketing’s credibility in the boardroom. It shows up as misaligned creative, mistargeted audiences, irrelevant media placements, and overlooked competitive threats. As Sooth warns: “It’s not just a leak—it’s a full-blown vulnerability hiding in plain sight.”

Signal Waste is a systemic blind spot, and unless leaders confront it head-on, it will keep siphoning millions in wasted spend.

With a group of marketing executives, including the CMO’s of top brands, they identified how Signal Waste shows up and how to fix it so you know what to look for in your organization:

Creative & Targeting Failures – Messaging That Misses

When creative or targeting is even slightly off, the waste compounds quickly. misalignment at the top and storytelling built on assumptions—not truth—creates a cascade of wasted effort.

• Without clear, audience-driven storytelling, up to 90% of marketing effort is wasted.
• Brands must reset around real research, not internal echo chambers.
• Leadership alignment is critical: everyone should be speaking from the same playbook.

Quote to remember: “If our messaging and storytelling is not right, then it’s nonstop waste—up to 90%.”

Media Waste – When the Spend Doesn’t Match the Signal

With as much as 80% of ad spend wasted, how inertia drives dollars into channels that no longer deliver.

• A “zero-based” planning approach forces teams to abandon assumptions and rebuild from the ground up.
• Start with the audiences most likely to move, not the channels that are easiest to buy.
• Even if organizations can’t fully implement zero-basing, the exercise forces hard conversations about what’s actually working.

Quote to remember: “Ask yourself: if we could zero-base tomorrow, what would we do differently?”

Competitive Myopia – The Threats You’re Not Watching

While many marketers obsess over known competitors, the real disruptors are often nonlinear. Technology—especially AI—as the blind spot too many brands are ignoring.

• AI threatens to flatten differentiation, replacing underperforming content with undifferentiated “assets.”
• In AI-driven ad models, brands risk becoming interchangeable if they don’t adapt.
• Competitive scanning must evolve to capture cultural shifts and nonlinear threats.

Quote to remember: “It wasn’t talent, it wasn’t competition, it wasn’t the consumer. The real disruptor is technology.”

Closing the Gap

By naming and framing Signal Waste, Sooth has given CMOs a new lens for diagnosing performance gaps and the tools to eliminate them. This inside look from top brands shows that Signal Waste isn’t just a concept to keep an eye on; it’s a real and immediate threat to marketing performance.

The mandate for marketers is to confront these cracks, align around truth not assumptions, and build smarter mechanisms for detecting and eliminating waste. The organizations that do will not only reclaim wasted dollars but also restore marketing’s credibility.