Once upon a time, radio advertisements and newspaper spreads dominated, creating shared cultural moments as families gathered around their radios for entertainment and news. These mediums offered businesses a straightforward way to reach mass audiences with simple, direct messaging. The personal touch of radio announcers and the tangibility of newspaper ads created a sense of reliability and trust between brands and consumers.
Billboards and bus advertisements became staples of urban landscapes, capturing attention through size and strategic placement. Then came the digital revolution, dramatically accelerated by the pandemic, which forced businesses to pivot almost exclusively to online channels. Social media, search engine marketing, and targeted ads became the new normal, with algorithms determining which messages reached which consumers.
In an interesting countermovement, we’re seeing the resurgence of direct mail marketing—what some might call ‘lumpy mail’ as a disruptive tactic cutting through digital noise. These physical pieces stand out precisely because they’re tangible in an increasingly virtual world.
Yet despite these cyclical innovations, marketers face a growing challenge: with audiences bombarded by thousands of messages daily across countless platforms, capturing and maintaining attention has never been more difficult.
The concept of attention economics recognises human attention as a finite resource in an era of information abundance. Heard the saying, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” This insight has never been more relevant than it is today.
Your three-second chance
When someone arrives at your website, you have approximately three seconds to convince them they’re in the right place. That’s not a typo—three seconds is the average time visitors take to decide whether to engage with your content or hit the back button and look through the search results again.
This microscopic window makes every element of your digital presence critical. Your headline, imagery, and initial messaging must instantly signal relevance to your ideal client. Before they consciously evaluate your offering, their brain is rapidly making judgments about:
- Is this relevant to me?
- Does this look trustworthy?
- Will this solve my problem?
- Is this worth my time?
The click journey—from search query to Google ad to website to call-to-action—represents a series of attention decision points. At each stage, your potential client is subconsciously asking, “Should I keep going?”
The paradox of doom-scrolling
Doom scrolling (also known as doom surfing) represents a fascinating paradox in the attention economy—it simultaneously captures prolonged user engagement while often leaving people feeling empty and disconnected. This compulsive consumption of negative or anxiety-inducing content creates a cycle where users remain technically ‘engaged’ with media platforms for extended periods. Yet, the quality of this attention is fundamentally different from meaningful engagement.
People caught in doom-scrolling loops are present but not truly attentive; they’re consuming content passively rather than actively processing or connecting with it. For marketers, this presents a critical challenge: metrics might show impressive time-on-site or scroll depth, but these hollow engagement patterns don’t translate to brand affinity, message retention, or conversion actions. The most effective content strategies will recognise this distinction and aim not just to capture attention but to foster the kind of mindful engagement that builds genuine connections with audiences rather than exploiting the psychological vulnerabilities that drive doom-scrolling behaviour.
The most effective approaches embrace radical authenticity rather than polished perfection. Content that acknowledges real human struggles while offering genuine value or moments of relief creates a cognitive pause that doom-scrolling rarely provides. Some brands are finding success with ‘slow content’ that rewards deeper engagement or interactive experiences that transform passive scrolling into active participation.
The key lies not in contributing more content to an already overwhelming stream but in creating thoughtful touchpoints that respect the audience’s attention as a precious resource. In the attention economy, the brands that truly stand out provide a meaningful alternative to the doom-scroll.
The multi-click reality
We had a client who made the most of government funding to get businesses back on their feet in a post-Covid environment. Julie is the founder of Mumma J’s natural skincare products. After recovering from breast cancer, Julie turned her passion for essential oils into healing skin products. While she successfully sold at local markets, she wanted to drive more traffic to her online store.
The traditional path to Julie’s products might look something like this:
- A potential customer experiences a skin issue and searches for natural remedies
- They see a Google ad or organic result for Mumma J’s
- They click through to the website
- They navigate to product pages
- They make a purchase decision
At each of these stages, attention can leak. The search might not yield Julie’s business. The ad might not be compelling enough to click. The website might load too slowly or fail to communicate value immediately. The product pages might not answer critical questions.
For Julie, we created a newsletter strategy that not only showcased her products but served as a platform to share her personal journey, customer stories, and expertise in natural skincare. The results were remarkable: the first newsletter promoting hand and nail cream increased web page traffic by 800%, and a newsletter about healing balm boosted sales by 50%.
This approach worked so well in the attention economy because it created multiple pathways to engagement, built trust through storytelling, and delivered value before asking for a purchase.
The psychology of attention
Our brains are wired to filter information. With the capacity to consciously process only about 60 bits of information per second—while being bombarded with an estimated 11 million bits per second—our filtering mechanisms are sophisticated and necessary.
In practical terms, this means your content needs to:
- Trigger pattern recognition (familiarity with the problem you solve)
- Activate emotional response (connection to desires or pain points)
- Promise value (clear benefits for continued attention)
- Reduce cognitive load (easy to understand and navigate)
The businesses that succeed in the attention economy understand these psychological principles and craft their content accordingly.
Attention filters to find your ideal client
Counter-intuitively, one of the most effective strategies in the attention economy is intentionally filtering out non-ideal clients. By creating content that strongly resonates with your target audience, you naturally repel those who aren’t a good fit.
For Julie’s skincare business, her personal cancer journey and focus on natural healing attracted customers who valued authenticity and natural products. Her content wasn’t trying to appeal to everyone—and that was precisely its strength.
Ask yourself: Does your content clearly signal who it’s for? The more specific and relevant your messaging is to your ideal client, the more likely you are to capture and maintain their attention.
Strategic attention management
So how do you adapt to the realities of the attention economy? Here are practical strategies:
- Content alignment. Ensure every step of the click journey delivers on the promise of the previous step. If your Google ad mentions “natural eczema relief,” your landing page should immediately address this specific topic, not general skincare.
- Value front-loading. Put your most valuable content at the beginning. Don’t make people hunt for the insights or benefits you’re offering. In those crucial first seconds, make it unmistakably clear why they should stay.
- Attention hooks. Use psychological triggers like curiosity gaps, social proof, or pattern interrupts to capture initial attention. Julie’s personal cancer recovery story serves as a powerful pattern interrupt that makes people stop and take notice.
- Consistent value delivery. Once you’ve captured attention, maintain it by continuing to deliver value throughout the engagement. Each newsletter, social post, or webpage should leave people feeling their attention was well-invested.
- Focused messaging. Resist the urge to tell people everything at once. In the attention economy, less is often more. Focus on a single, clear message rather than trying to communicate multiple points simultaneously.
Measure attention, not just clicks
Traditional metrics like page views or click-through rates tell only part of the story. To truly understand how well you’re competing in the attention economy, consider measuring time on page (how long people engage with your content), scroll depth (how far down your page people read), return rates (how often people come back), completion rates (for videos, articles, or forms), and micro-conversions (small actions that indicate engagement). For Julie’s newsletters, we looked beyond open rates to measure specific product page visits, time spent reading, and, ultimately, purchase behaviour. These deeper metrics revealed the true impact of capturing and maintaining attention.
The future of attention
As AI tools become more prevalent and content creation becomes increasingly automated, human attention will only become more valuable. Paradoxically, the more content that exists, the more difficult it becomes to capture meaningful attention.
It’s happening already. People are beginning to develop an ‘AI radar’ for detecting machine-generated content. This detection might happen subconsciously—a subtle feeling that something seems off about the tone, structure, or perspective being presented. As people consume more AI-written material, they’ll begin to recognise patterns: the overly balanced viewpoints, the predictable sentence structures, or the generic insights that lack the nuanced understanding that comes from lived human experience.
This growing awareness will create significant challenges for marketers relying heavily on AI-generated content. When audiences sense they’re reading or viewing content created by machines rather than humans, they may quickly disengage, perceiving it as less valuable, less authentic, and ultimately less worthy of their precious attention. Content that fails to demonstrate unique human perspectives, personal stories, or genuine emotional connections will increasingly be dismissed in an already oversaturated attention economy.
The brands that will thrive will be those that use AI as a complement to human creativity rather than a replacement—leveraging technology for efficiency while ensuring their core messages still carry the unmistakable fingerprints of human thought, imperfection, and emotional resonance. In a world where attention is the ultimate currency, authenticity will become an even more powerful differentiator, with audiences gravitating toward content that feels genuinely human in its conception and execution.
And if you’ve made it this far—congratulations! My words actually captured your attention better than this image. Though let’s be honest, the photo probably didn’t hurt. Call it marketing psychology or just shameless tactics, but sometimes in the attention economy, you need to pull out all the stops. Is using an attractive woman to sell marketing advice a bit cliché? Perhaps. Effective? Well, you’re still reading, aren’t you? Don’t judge—we’re all fighting for eyeballs in a world where most people would rather doom-scroll through cat videos. Sometimes the difference between being ignored and being noticed comes down to knowing when to play it straight… and when to wink at your audience.