Growth Strategy and Optimisation
Maximising growth potential with precision and purpose.
The Attention Recession
Every channel is getting more expensive and less trusted at the same time
The Attention Recession
Every channel is getting more expensive and less trusted at the same time
Growth teams across nearly every industry are living through a quiet but consistent squeeze: paid customer acquisition costs keep climbing, year over year, even as marketing budgets are simultaneously asked to do more with less. At the same time, the organic and content channels that used to offset rising paid costs are producing diminishing returns of their own, as audiences grow fatigued with a volume of content that has increased faster than anyone’s genuine attention span or trust has. Two forces that used to somewhat offset each other — rising paid costs balanced by growing organic reach — are now compounding in the same direction. Call it the attention recession: a structural condition where nearly every channel simultaneously gets more expensive to buy into and less trusted once you’re there.
Why this is structural, not cyclical
It’s tempting to read rising acquisition costs as a temporary market condition — more competitors bidding on the same auction inventory, a post-pandemic normalization, an economic cycle that will eventually ease. Some of that is real. But the deeper driver is structural, and it isn’t going to reverse on its own: the total volume of content and advertising competing for a fixed amount of human attention has grown dramatically faster than the number of humans, or the hours in their day. Every platform that becomes an effective acquisition channel attracts more advertisers and more content creators chasing the same audience, which mechanically drives up the cost of standing out — whether that cost is paid in advertising dollars, content production hours, or both.
Layered on top of that volume problem is a trust problem. As the volume of marketing content directed at any given person has grown, so has that person’s practiced skepticism toward it. Audiences have become genuinely better, collectively, at recognizing and discounting marketing messaging — not because any individual message got worse, but because the sheer repetition of the format has trained a kind of immune response. A well-crafted ad or a well-optimized piece of content that would have converted reliably a decade ago now competes against an audience actively filtering for authenticity, third-party validation, and signals that something wasn’t produced purely to sell them something.
The combination is what makes this a genuine recession rather than a temporary dip: rising cost per unit of attention, and declining conversion once that attention is captured, happening in most channels simultaneously.
From reach to relationships
The response most growth teams reach for first — optimizing existing channels harder, testing new ad formats, chasing the next platform before it gets saturated — treats the symptom rather than the structural cause. It can produce real short-term wins, and there’s nothing wrong with pursuing them. But it doesn’t change the underlying trajectory, because the next channel eventually saturates too, on a shorter timeline each cycle as more of the industry has learned to chase emerging channels early.
The more durable response is a genuine reallocation of strategy: away from channels that rent attention transactionally, one impression or one click at a time, and toward relationships that compound — an owned audience that chooses, repeatedly, to pay attention to a brand because it has earned that attention over time, rather than because an algorithm placed a message in front of them. This isn’t a rejection of paid channels; they remain a legitimate and often necessary part of a growth strategy. It’s a rebalancing of where growth investment is expected to compound versus where it’s expected to simply convert, one transaction at a time, with no residual value once the campaign ends.
The distinction is worth stating plainly, because it reframes how growth investment should be evaluated: reach buys a moment of attention. Relationship buys a standing invitation to attention, repeatedly, at a marginal cost that decreases the longer the relationship lasts. A growth strategy built primarily on reach faces permanently rising costs, because every unit of attention has to be purchased again from scratch. A growth strategy that has built real owned relationships — an email list people actually open, a community people actually participate in, a brand people actively seek out rather than passively receive — faces a fundamentally different cost curve, because a meaningful share of future attention no longer needs to be purchased at all.
What reallocation actually looks like
First, treat owned-audience growth as a primary growth metric, not a secondary content byproduct. Most organizations track email list growth, community size, or repeat-visitor rate as soft, secondary numbers beneath the primary metrics of paid conversion and lead volume. In an attention recession, this ordering deserves to be inverted, or at least brought level, because owned audience is the one growth asset whose future acquisition cost genuinely decreases as it compounds, rather than staying flat or rising.
Second, invest specifically in content and experiences that don’t require ongoing spend to keep reaching their audience. Paid reach evaporates the moment spend stops. Content that builds genuine search authority, community participation that’s self-sustaining once it reaches critical mass, and reputation-driven word of mouth all continue generating attention with a marginal cost approaching zero, long after the initial investment. Growth budgets built almost entirely around channels that require continuous spend to maintain their current level of output are structurally exposed to exactly the cost pressure driving the attention recession in the first place.
Third, measure trust-building actions with the same rigor as conversion actions. Most marketing measurement is built to track the bottom of the funnel — conversions, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend — because those numbers are clean and immediate. Trust-building actions further up the funnel — a genuinely useful piece of content, a transparent response to a public complaint, a community interaction that builds goodwill without asking for anything — are harder to measure directly, so they get systematically underinvested in relative to their actual long-term impact on acquisition cost. Building even an approximate way to track and value these actions changes what gets prioritized in planning conversations.
Not a retreat from paid growth — a rebalancing of where it compounds
None of this argues for abandoning paid acquisition, and any organization that tried to would likely see growth stall immediately, since owned-audience relationships take real time to build. The argument is narrower and more specific: in an environment where nearly every rented-attention channel faces the same structural cost pressure, a growth strategy with no meaningful owned-relationship component has no offsetting force against that pressure, and will simply keep paying more for less, indefinitely. A growth strategy that deliberately builds owned relationships alongside paid acquisition has a genuine hedge — one channel that gets structurally cheaper as it compounds, sitting alongside channels that will likely keep getting more expensive as the attention recession continues.
Growth Strategy and Optimisation
Maximising growth potential with precision and purpose.
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