Working across clients constantly keeps your brain ticking, trying to work out what’s working and what’s not. We’ve been expanding channels for one of my financial services clients, running multi-channel activity across Google and Meta, alongside working in partnership with relevant publications. A key goal was to build familiarity with our brand, reaching new customers before they’re in market.
Sales are up, dramatically – brilliant! But digging into the data, we just can’t work out where the growth is coming from. Most of the signals we’d normally use to explain success have gone dark.
We’ve got Google searches that aren’t ending in clicks. Social platforms optimising for volume, not engagement, with little ability for you to influence the audience who you actually want to reach. And then we have the AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini etc.), steering customer decisions based on a lottery of whether your brand shows up. And a whole raft of AI visibility measurement tools that give you a different take on how visible your brand actually is.
We’re spending more on measurement infrastructure than at any point in the industry’s history, and getting less clarity out of it than we ever did. That should worry us a lot more than it currently does.
The trade we made, and never renegotiated
Here’s my take on what I believe is actually happening. We willingly traded the art of earning customer attention with the ability to drive marketing performance at a granular level. I’m not saying that’s bad, but we handed over our performance tracking to the big digital platforms and over time that performance data has become more and more opaque. They’re in control, not us.
A decade or so ago we shifted budgets towards digital, performance and programmatic, chasing the ability to track, optimise and prove a return in a way traditional media never allowed. Statista are forecasting that by 2030 digital’s share of global ad will stand at 82%. Global ad investment this year will be pushing close to $1.3 trillion. The entire advertising industry has restructured towards digital channels, with Google and Meta the largest beneficiaries.
The trade underneath that shift was simple: we’ll accept blander, more homogenous, more formulaic marketing in exchange for being able to prove it worked. Distinctiveness for traceability. And it was a reasonable trade, while the tracking held up.
It doesn’t hold up any more. Signal loss, privacy regulation, zero-click search, AI-mediated discovery and platforms where attribution is becoming more obscured, have all broken the mechanism we built the trade on. We’re still optimising for the metrics that have stopped meaning what we think they mean. Times are changing.
Our client is the proof. The tracking went dark. What we tracked when we did something similar 6 months earlier, just wasn’t giving us conclusive signals this time around. We know the combined aggregate push of all the channels working together was earning us attention, but we couldn’t attribute individual channel impact and therefore calculate an ROI at channel level (how our performance mindset has been reprogrammed to think over the years).
The industry’s measurement bodies are also admitting this. The importance of ‘attention’ versus channel performance is coming back into focus, with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Media Rating Council and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measure, publishing standardised attention measurement guidelines in November 2025; creating a common framework for what “attention” means across the industry. That’s not a minor technical update. That’s the plumbing being rebuilt in public because the old plumbing stopped working.
Who knew (apologies for the sarcasm) that placement, context and creative would be the key influencing elements driving attention? Elements we’re increasingly handing over to the ad platforms. Where has our drive for being distinctive and grabbing attention gone?
Sameness by design
Whilst we’re aware of the attribution problem we face, something else is creeping up on us that is threatening the industry’s ability to earn attention. It’s not AI itself, it’s the choices many in the industry are making with it: reaching for the fastest, easiest output instead of the most distinctive one. If we’re not eyes-wide-open, AI is making it extraordinarily easy for everyone to look, sound and think the same.
You can now spot an AI-generated pitch deck at fifty paces now. Same three-act structure, stock imagery and icons. Same confident, faintly generic voice that reads like it was written by someone summarising someone else’s summary. We’ve built tools that make content faster to produce, and somehow we’re in danger of making an entire industry, whose job it is to create stand-out, increasingly identical.
We’re seeing Meta, Google, LinkedIn and Adobe all embedding AI tools to aid content and creative creation, making it easy for us to jump on the ‘generic’ bandwagon to win efficiency gains. But where does that take us longer-term? We’re applying short-cuts across the board, with thousands of businesses using the same handful of tools, with the same underlying training data, that produces convergence, not differentiation. That’s a real strategic risk, not an efficiency win.
Attention has a price, and most of us are overpaying for it
Here’s where this gets commercial. Attention is a market. It has a price, set by supply and demand like any other market. And right now, digital attention is expensive because everyone is fighting over the same inches of the same feeds, with the same handful of platforms setting the rules.
2025 data shows that over 20% of US digital ad revenues are spent on Meta, with that spend capturing around 7% of US adults daily time with media. The economics don’t stack up. So where are you seeing better bang for your buck?
Kantar’s five-year study with Clear Channel Outdoor, published in 2025, found out-of-home advertising consistently beating digital on ad awareness, brand favourability and purchase intent. Nobody is fighting you for space on a bus shelter, in the same way they’re fighting you for a scroll-stopping second on Instagram. Direct mail is another channel that sees higher performing metrics across ROI, memorability, trust and commercial action.
This isn’t nostalgia for traditional marketing channels, it’s an arbitrage opportunity in a market where your competitors may not be looking. Where you can grab customer attention!
When everyone zigs, zag
There’s a strategic layer here too. It’s not just that offline attention has better cut-through, it’s that choosing it right now is itself a distinctiveness decision, not just a media-buying one.
If your entire category is fighting for the same six inches of the same feed, using the same platforms, the same formats and increasingly the same AI tools to produce work that looks the same, then the businesses actively choosing to compete elsewhere stand out by default. Direct mail that lands on someone’s actual desk. A sponsored event where a prospect meets a real person instead of a retargeted ad. A print piece that sits on a table rather than disappearing in a scroll. These aren’t retro gestures. They’re a deliberate refusal to look like everyone else. That’s the zig-when-everyone-zags logic in practice, a genuine competitive move.
We’re putting our money where our mouth is at Open Velocity, reducing our online spend and investing in our Scale-up dinner programme, focusing on forging face-to-face relationships where we know we can gain traction through conversations.
Back to our financial services client, we’ve invested in partnered content in print media, alongside a digital engagement programme. The investment in broader brand-building activity is paying dividends with brand searches, traffic to our website and sales all up by a meaningful margin. When you bring offline activity into the mix, instead of direct attribution, look for an overall trend in reduced acquisition cost per customer.
Two different jobs, two different economics
None of this makes digital wrong, and I don’t think that’s a caveat, I think it’s the actual point.
If you’re selling something simple, low-risk, where the buying decision is instant and largely rational, digital is very often still the right channel, and rightly the dominant one. That’s activation. Binet and Field’s long-standing research on this is still the clearest articulation available: short-term activation and long-term brand building are different jobs, with different economics, and they need to be funded and measured differently, roughly 40% and 60% respectively for most businesses playing a long game.
Brand building is the harder, slower job. It’s what compounds pricing power, reduces price sensitivity and builds the kind of demand that doesn’t need to be continually bought fresh. That job depends on your ability to grab attention and be distinct. That’s where offline attention currently has the advantage, because the market for it hasn’t been bid up in the same way digital has.
Renegotiating the trade
In making channel based budget allocation decisions, be clear on what job that channel is doing and where that job can be done most effectively. Don’t solely opt for operating in an overpriced attention market. Traceability is no longer the advantage it once was and attention is the game to play.
I’m not advocating for nostalgia and going back in time, I’m talking about consciously making decisions that don’t follow the herd! I think the industry built an entire accountability culture on a signal that has stopped telling us the truth, and most of us are still reporting against it because we trained our leadership teams to be driven by the data.
The real question is simple: are you still optimising for a signal that stopped being meaningful, and have you actually checked whether the channel everyone’s fighting over is worth what it costs?
