Attention isn't something that's owed. It's earned.
Every brief I've ever worked on eventually comes back to one question: why should anyone care?
It's not a case of 'why should they buy it', or 'why should they remember your logo.' But, 'why should they give up thirty seconds of their life that's already crammed full of stuff?'
We often talk about 'cutting through' as if the problem is just about noise. It isn't. The problem is relevance. Nobody's feed is short of content. It's short of things worth stopping for.
I think about the immortal line from David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man. 'The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife.' He didn't stop there. Assuming a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything, he said, is an insult to her intelligence.
Fifty years on, it seems like half the industry still hasn't got it.
We don't seem to write ads for the person standing in the queue at Tesco with a toddler on her hip and forty seconds before the till. Someone who couldn't care less about your brand purpose or your CEO's vision for 2030. She just wants to know if it's worth picking up.
So here's the test I use on every piece of work, every pitch, every campaign:
If this showed up uninvited, would it deserve to stay? Would it make someone laugh, think, feel understood, or genuinely better informed? Or is it just filling space because the media plan said we needed a 6-second bumper?
Attention is the last truly finite resource in marketing. Budgets can stretch. Timelines can move. But attention can't be manufactured, only invited. And the moment we forget that, we're not doing advertising anymore. We're just adding to the pile people have already learned to ignore. We're just wallpaper.
The best work I've been part of over twenty years never demanded attention. It deserved it.
What's the last piece of advertising that actually earned yours?
