I watched a client fire their creative team last Tuesday.
Not in a dramatic way. Nobody got walked out. There was a Zoom call. Polite language. "We're going in a different direction." The kind of sentence that means everything and nothing at the same time. The creative team nodded, because they'd been nodding for three months while the campaigns underperformed, and they knew this call was coming the way you know rain is coming when the air gets heavy and the dog won't stop pacing.
The creative was fine. Not extraordinary. But fine. Competent images, decent hooks, copy that did what copy is supposed to do. I know because I'd looked at it before the call, and I'd looked at the metrics, and I'd looked at the thing nobody wanted to look at, which was the audience targeting and the offer.
The offer was the problem. The offer had been the problem for twelve weeks. But nobody wanted to say that, because the offer was the founder's idea, and the targeting was the media buyer's strategy, and admitting either of those was wrong meant admitting that the people in charge had made a structural mistake. So the creative got blamed. Because someone has to be blamed.
Rene Girard would have recognized this instantly.
Girard spent his career studying a pattern so old it predates language: when a community is in crisis, it finds a victim. Not the cause of the crisis. A substitute. Someone close enough to the problem to be plausible but peripheral enough to be expendable. The scapegoat absorbs the community's anxiety, gets expelled or destroyed, and everyone else gets to feel like the problem is solved. For a while. Until the next crisis, when they need another one.
He traced this through mythology, religion, literature, anthropology. The pattern is everywhere once you see it. And I'm telling you, it's in your ad account.
Here's how it works in practice. A campaign launches. The founder is excited. The media buyer is confident. The creative team delivered assets on time. Everyone's bought in. Then the numbers come back, and they're not good. Not catastrophic, but not good. The CPA is too high. The ROAS is too low. The click-through rate is fine but nothing converts after the click.
Now there's tension. Somebody has to explain why the money isn't working. And this is where the Girardian mechanism kicks in, because the explanation follows a very specific pattern. It almost never starts with "our offer doesn't match what this audience actually wants." It almost never starts with "we're targeting the wrong people." Those explanations implicate the strategy, and the strategy belongs to the people with the most power in the room.
Instead, the conversation gravitates toward the creative. The images aren't stopping the scroll. The hooks aren't sharp enough. The copy doesn't "pop." These are real things that can be real problems, but they're also the easiest things to point at because creative is visible. It sits right there on the screen. You can look at it and have an opinion. You can't look at an audience targeting structure and have an opinion unless you understand the data underneath it, and most people in the room don't.
Except we haven't actually fixed anything. We've just expelled the scapegoat and called it progress.
Elaine Pagels wrote about this pattern in a different context. She traced how early Christian communities manufactured adversaries to maintain institutional coherence. The Gnostics, the heretics, the questioners. They weren't necessarily wrong. They were inconvenient. The institution needed unity more than it needed accuracy, so the people asking hard questions became the enemy. Not because their questions threatened God. Because their questions threatened the people who'd positioned themselves as God's interpreters.
Ad accounts work the same way. The institution of the campaign, the team, the strategy, needs coherence. When results don't match expectations, the institution doesn't re-examine its foundations. It finds a heretic. The creative team. The copywriter. The designer who "doesn't get it." And everyone else maintains their position.
I've seen this happen dozens of times. The creative gets swapped. New images, new hooks, new copy. The campaign runs again. And if the offer is still wrong and the targeting is still off, the numbers stay flat. But now there's a new creative team to blame, and the cycle continues. Girard called this the "sacrificial crisis," the moment when one scapegoat isn't enough and the community starts consuming itself looking for the next one.
This is why we built the Hidden Layer the way we built it.
Not because I read Girard and thought "this would make a good marketing framework." That would be too clean, too intentional, too much like a business school case study. It happened messier than that. It happened because I kept watching the scapegoat pattern play out in client accounts, and I kept noticing that the campaigns that actually worked, the ones where the creative performed and the numbers held, shared a common feature: somebody had done the work of understanding the buyer before anything else happened.
Not demographic data. Not persona documents. Actual buyer intelligence. Real quotes from real humans about why they bought, what they were afraid of, what they almost did instead, what the moment of decision felt like from the inside.
When you start with that, the offer isn't a guess. It's a response to something real. The targeting isn't a hypothesis. It's built around actual behavioral patterns, not optimizationguesswork. And the creative isn't a Hail Mary. It's an articulation of something the buyer already feels but hasn't heard anyone say out loud yet.
The scapegoat mechanism dissolves when you remove the structural uncertainty. When the offer is built on buyer intelligence, and the targeting reflects actual behavior, and the creative translates real desire into real language, there's no crisis to displace. There's just iteration. This hook works better than that one. This image outperforms that one. Normal, boring, productive iteration. No sacrificial victims required.
But here's the part that's harder to say, the part that makes this more than a process argument.
The reason the scapegoat pattern persists in ad accounts isn't ignorance. The founders aren't stupid. The media buyers aren't lazy. The creative teams aren't incompetent. The pattern persists because admitting the real problem is expensive in ways that have nothing to do with money.
If the offer is wrong, somebody's vision was wrong. If the targeting is off, somebody's judgment was wrong. And in most teams, especially small ones, especially founder-led ones, vision and judgment are identity. They're not just strategic choices. They're expressions of who the founder believes they are. Questioning the offer means questioning the founder's understanding of their own market. Questioning the targeting means questioning the media buyer's expertise. These are existential threats dressed up as tactical feedback.
So the creative gets blamed. Not because anyone is lying. Because the truth is too expensive. Because the institution, even a three-person marketing team is an institution, needs someone to carry the failure so that everyone else can keep believing the strategy is sound.
Girard would say this is how all institutions work. Pagels would say the pattern is as old as organized religion. I'd say it's the reason most ad accounts plateau and nobody can explain why.
I'm not immune to this, by the way. I've been the person who blamed the creative. I've been the person who swapped images instead of re-examining the offer. I've been the scapegoater and, earlier in my career, the scapegoat. Neither role is comfortable. Both are easier than the alternative, which is sitting in a room and saying: the strategy might be wrong, and if it is, we need to start over, and starting over is terrifying because it means the last three months of work and spend were building toward the wrong thing.
Nobody wants to say that. So they blame the creative.
The next time a campaign underperforms and the first conversation is about the images or the hooks or the copy, ask a different question first. Ask whether anyone talked to the buyers. Ask whether the offer was tested against real desire or assumed desire. Ask who the audience actually is, not who you want them to be.
You might not like the answers. But at least you'll stop sacrificing the wrong thing.
It's late. The yerba mate is doing its job. And I keep thinking about that creative team on the Zoom call, nodding, accepting the blame for a problem that started three layers above them. They'll land somewhere else. They'll do good work. And somewhere, in the account they just left, someone is uploading new images to the same broken campaign and wondering why nothing changes.