The Attention Economy and What It Means for Marketers

Every marketing conversation eventually arrives at the same complaint: attention is scarce, feeds are saturated, and organic reach is a rumor. All true. All beside the point.

The wrong scarcity

Attention was never really the scarce resource. People happily give hours of undivided attention to things they care about — a game, a longform essay, a video essay about a bridge collapse in 1940.

What’s scarce is reasons to care. The attention economy is downstream of the meaning economy.

You don’t earn attention by being louder. You earn it by being worth remembering.

What this changes in practice

If you accept that framing, several standard practices start to look backwards:

• Frequency over resonance. Posting daily to an audience that doesn’t care compounds nothing except unsubscribes.
• Reach over fit. A thousand ideal readers beat a hundred thousand passersby, in revenue and in signal.
• Hooks over substance. A great hook on an empty piece trains your audience to ignore your next hook.

The compounding alternative

The marketers doing durable work right now share a pattern: they publish fewer, denser things, aimed at a clearly imagined person, and they let those things accumulate into a body of work.

A body of work is the only marketing asset that appreciates. Campaigns depreciate the moment they end.

Where to start

Pick the smallest audience you can serve unreasonably well. Write the thing only you can write for them. Do it again next month. That’s the entire strategy, and almost nobody has the patience for it — which is exactly why it works.