Marketing didn’t break.
Attention ran out.
The tools are better than ever, the execution is sharper than ever, and yet results are flatter, slower, or declining.
It’s not that marketers don’t have the talent, or the tools, or the data. We can create, measure, and attribute faster and with higher production value than we ever could before.
Photo shoots and cinematic films are done for nearly nothing with AI tools, but the effectiveness has disappeared.
The problem isn’t our capabilities. It’s not a competence failure.
The problem is that people have run out of attention to give.
Attention has always been finite
Attention has always been finite. We just didn’t operate at its limits before.
When advertising was found just in newspapers and magazines, maybe handbills and billboards, the message did not absorb all of peoples’ attention.
But then more channels arrived. Radio, movie theaters, television.
We added cable TV, streaming video, web advertising, and eventually social media, bringing us a torrent of marketing messages.
Human attention cannot scale like microchips or software or bandwidth.
Doomed by the doom scroll
The advent of the iPhone didn’t initially create an attention problem. But once the app store allowed people to install social media apps and infinite scroll was invented, we were hooked.
Even digital advertising seemed innocuous at first.
I remember at the start of Google Text Ads how excited we were at our college hockey website to be able to monetize our content. At the start, everyone noticed the ads because they were new and novel.
Sometimes they were downright funny, like the time an article about the Minnesota Golden Gophers hockey team resulted in a “contextual” ad for getting moles out of your lawn.
Eventually those were replaced by display ads, video ads, popups, and interstitials. The drive for more advertising revenue against declining rates caused publishers to saturate their sites with ads.
And now people don’t even notice ads except to get them out of the way.
We went from novelty to clutter to invisibility.
Once Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok came along, there came an endless scroll of advertising messages using up any spare supply of our time.
Every new channel promised more reach, more precision, and more efficiency — and delivered all three, right up until attention became saturated.
It has become a battle for an ever-decreasing share of our ability to pay attention.
Attention didn’t scale. Message volume did.
That mismatch now defines the system.
Entertainment, information, and marketing compete simultaneously to steal our attention.
No wonder it feels overwhelming.
When attention is scarce, misalignment gets punished
This bombardment of irrelevant communication doesn’t just fail. It harms.
What once passed unnoticed now creates irritation, rejection, or negative association.
Life Magazine and other large format weeklies of the 20th century had large, full-page ads.
As someone would slowly flip through an issue, they’d turn the page to some striking artwork and riveting copy. Maybe it would be an appliance ad with a Hollywood celebrity in a fancy kitchen. Or a crooner advertising his favorite cigarette brand.
Or automobile advertising with beautiful photos or paintings of the latest model with emotionally stirring ad copy.
Maybe you weren’t going to be in the market for a Cadillac that year. Or ever. But there was aspiration and reputation-building and entertainment in that quiet ad that grabbed a couple of minutes of your attention.
And if you weren’t interested in Kelvinator refrigerators or Chesterfield cigarettes, you could just turn the page. You weren’t offended by the ad; you just moved on.
Today, what once passed unnoticed when you turned the page or waited for the commercial to end, instead creates irritation, rejection, or a negative association.
A well-known marketing consultant and writer constantly pushes the need for more social media output from brands so that they can reach people “consuming content.”
But do you really want multiple reels from a B2B brand in your Instagram feed at 10:30 p.m. as you doom scroll on the couch? Even worse, do you want to be bombarded?
That wrong message at the wrong time becomes an annoyance. Trust in your brand is tarnished, if not destroyed.
Marketing and sales are both breaking for the same reason
What’s breaking marketing is also breaking sales: both depend on scarce attention and must preserve fragile trust.
The inability to reach people on the phone has created an onslaught of cold email, leading people to use automation to filter and categorize email to wade through their saturated inboxes.
Often the cold emails lack creativity. “We can save your company money and improve your operating efficiency. Worth a chat?”
Then there’s almost-human automation and shallow personalization to convince you that there’s a real person on the other end. But that can backfire, too.
I remember a few years ago when a business financial technology company reached out to me early in the days of personalization.
The email started like this, with a mention of my alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology:
“Hi Ed – Noticed you went to RIT – did you ever get to compete in the Mud Tug? Looks like a blast. I’d probably end up throwing away most of my clothes after though.”
I wrote back and noted that the Mud Tug started as a tradition well after my era.
The same company had sales development reps contact me by email three more times in the next year-and-a-half and each began with, “Hi Ed – Noticed you went to RIT – did you ever get to compete in the Mud Tug?”
When the fourth one wrote, I did reply: “You’re actually the fifth person to reach out to me from [company name] and the fourth to start the email sequence with the same paragraph about the RIT Mud Tug.”
I suppose if a fellow alum reached out, it might be helpful. But random information like that doesn’t make it seem personal; it makes it cringey.
Automated and irrelevant personalization just feels wrong, and people sense it immediately.
That slightly uncomfortable feeling has been called the “uncanny valley.” Things get so close to real, but just enough shy that it feels a little off.
And it destroys the valuable asset of trust.
More is not the answer
Because attention is the constraint, a volume-first messaging strategy accelerates failure. More channels, more frequency, and more content increase noise faster than they increase impact.
I mentioned the channel-context mismatch with B2B ads showing up in leisure feeds. Some channels are not the right ones for your brand.
There’s also the danger of “frequency fatigue.” Increasing the number of times I get a message about a brand I’m not interested in just decreases my interest and the brand’s reputation.
More personalization is not the answer, either, especially the shallow kind. Personalization without judgment feels intrusive.
What are the implications of all this?
How a message is delivered must be optimized and not maximized.
Diagnosing the customer and business goals prevents us from amplifying the wrong message.
Trust is a precious and limited resource.
Relevance is more important than reach.
A steady, planned cadence is more important than campaigns.
Where we’re headed
The question is no longer how to get more attention. The question is how not to waste the attention you’re given.
In a saturated world, restraint can actually become a competitive advantage.
Marketing redesigned around the constraints of saturation reshapes the logic of growth.
These essays will emphasize timeless principles that last instead of the latest tools and trends.
Above all we’ll treasure that most valuable and fragile quality: trust.