The past decade has seen a significant increase in marketing’s ability to measure and optimise behaviour. We have relentlessly pursued clicks, acquisition costs, conversion rates and their many derivatives, which have come to guide decision-making with unprecedented precision.

At the same time, we have flattened brands and positioning, created predictable messages, and, in doing so, made communication and advertising boring and meaningless. And thanks to all of this, we have “taught” consumers to skip, zap and scroll, in other words, to escape from us.

This comes at a time when Philip Kotler has just published a new book, Marketing 7.0, which puts the human mind back at the centre of strategy. Given that Artificial Intelligence is making the production of stimuli both commonplace and virtually unlimited, the question is shifting from how to capture attention to what value that attention creates.

After years of insisting on the perverse logic of always-on and its associated metrics, we are all beginning to realise that the long-term destruction of brand value is undeniably greater than the short-term sales value it generates.

The digital economy has, wrongly, taught us to think of attention as a resource to be conquered through permanent and excessive presence. The military call this behaviour a war of attrition. We throw everything we have at the enemy, continuously, and wait for the “rival” to give up. The problem is that the rival did not give up. They did exactly the same as us. And those we were trying to serve, the consumers, all of us, have been caught in a battle that exhausts us and that we never wanted to be part of. We give up on the brand, not because it is absent, but because it is too present.

And with this, we have also discovered that not all attention has the same value. The interruptions brands have started creating are not all equally relevant. We generated clicks without generating memory. Brands copied one another and called it “joining the trend”. It is fun, it generates clicks, but then what? Does it differentiate? Is it relevant? Is it memorable? Or are we simply one more brand doing the same thing as everyone else? Through the sheer force of our own stubbornness, we have discovered that we can generate a conversion while simultaneously diminishing a brand’s relevance.

Then, when all organisations have access to similar metrics and the same tools to produce content, brands may become more efficient, but they also, undeniably, become much more alike. Ultimately, we personalise more, but differentiate less, and we produce far more content with very little meaning or added value for brands. In other words, we have become creators of noise and confusion, a criticism I would also extend to a considerable part of the digital creator economy.

It is within this context that we need to develop an Attention Value Economy. The idea is relatively simple. Attention must no longer be measured and evaluated by the amount we are able to capture, but by the value we are able to create through it. Value not only for the brand, but also for the person and for the relationship established between the two. The one-directional approach to evaluation, focused on performance, must be transformed into a view centred on relationships and added value.

This will force us to ask very different questions. How was the attention earned? Was there an interruption? Was my message relevant in the context in which it was presented? What did it produce? Understanding? Memory? Action? Did the experience increase the person’s willingness to engage with that brand again?

I have no doubt that marketing’s next major challenge is not to achieve more attention, but to achieve better attention: more relevant, more meaningful and capable of creating sustainable value.

This is the reflection we will need to explore in greater depth in the months ahead: how to move from an economy centred on capturing attention through interruption to one centred on the value that attention can create. And this will have a major impact not only on brands and Marketing, but, above all, on Media.

If we fail to do so, our brands will suffer, and our consumers will find other paths that will, without a doubt, take them in the opposite direction to ours.


Opinion piece by João Santos, COO at WYgroup, written for ECO +M