Attention Recession
We are creatures of habit. In a time not so long ago, reading printed newspapers every morning was ritual. So was watching television programmes by appointment. Now, opening WhatsApp right after we wake up has become second nature. Checking apps for our different interests represents new habits we’ve all unconsciously developed. In this series, the question I want to explore is: how can brands become daily habits in our customers’ lives? Because failing to become a habit leads to attention recession, which in turn creates reacquisition AdWaste that undermines profitability and sustainable growth.
In the pre-digital era, brands needed only to focus on mass audiences, reaching them through traditional media channels—print, television, radio, and outdoor advertising. This world was simpler, predictable, and profitable. Now, with digital as the norm, marketers face unprecedented media fragmentation requiring sophisticated micro-targeting strategies. Auctions for audiences via adtech platforms have ensured a steady and steep increase in customer outreach costs. For many brands today, marketing and advertising expenditure is rising faster than revenue—a fundamentally unsustainable trajectory that threatens long-term viability.
This new reality demands that brands take a radically different approach, shifting from an extreme focus on new acquisition and retargeting towards maximising growth from existing customers. I call this approach “NeoMarketing”—where retention trumps reacquisition, where trust precedes transactions, and where the focus shifts from broad segments to individual relationships.
The key to unlocking retention lies in building personalised hotlines with existing customers. This means brands must secure meaningful space and salience for top-of-mind recall in the daily lives of their customers—not merely their Best customers (the top 20% who drive 60-80% of revenue), but also the critical Long Tail comprising Rest customers (the middle 40-50% showing declining engagement) and Test customers (the bottom 30-40% who are dormant or churned). Brands must begin thinking like media companies, engaging daily to become ingrained habits. Attention will lead to engagement, which in turn will drive transactions—at dramatically lower cost than traditional acquisition methods.
Without this daily connection, conversions may still occur, but a substantial portion of margin gets consumed by acquisition costs, making each transaction less profitable and growth less sustainable. The brands that thrive in this new era will be those that solve what I call the twin failures of modern marketing: the “Not for Me” problem (generic messaging that fails to resonate individually) and the “No Hotline” problem (absence of reliable daily engagement channels).
New solutions are emerging. AI Agents Collective enables true 1:1 personalisation at scale, creating what I term a “Department of One for a Segment of One.” Progency combines platform capabilities with AI orchestration and outcome-based pricing to solve the critical “Who Will Do It?” problem. NeoMails transform static communications into interactive, app-like experiences that command attention and drive action. NeoN reimagines advertising through authenticated identity, creating direct brand-to-brand collaboration that cuts acquisition costs by 30-50%.
These innovations represent more than incremental improvements—they constitute a fundamental reimagining of marketing for the AI era. Together, they enable what I call NeoMarketing’s core promise: “Max the Best, Double the Rest, Eliminate the Waste, Triple the Profit.”
The central question remains: what can brands do to secure a meaningful 15-60 second slice of our daily lives? Answering this question is the key to eliminating the $500 billion AdWaste crisis and creating sustainable, profitable growth that doesn’t depend on ever-increasing marketing spend. In this series, we’ll explore precisely how brands can make this transformation a reality.
