Your argument is essentially the same thing as the joke about the old and young economist. The young economist sees $20 on the ground and says "is that a $20 bi

Your argument is essentially the same thing as the joke about the old and young economist. The young economist sees $20 on the ground and says "is that a $20 bill?" to which the old economist says "it couldn't be, someone would have picked it up by now" and they move on. Just because something is the status quo doesn't imply that the it is the optimized reality. I work in data science and quite a bit with marketing data, and in my experience, its highly ineffective most of the time. More surprising to though, is the sheer number of people, companies, and dollars, on both sides of the marketing business, with major investments in the idea of marketing being effective.