In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon wrote a sentence that has aged better than almost anything else written about the internet before the internet existed.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbert A. Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World
Simon was writing about organisations, not advertising. But he described the central economic fact of your working life. There is more to read than there is time to read it. More to watch, more to buy, more to ignore. Attention is the scarce thing, and it is getting scarcer.
Most marketing responds to this by trying to take more of it. More reach, more frequency, more surfaces, more clever interruptions. That is understandable. It is also an accounting error.
The accounting error
Attention is not a resource you acquire. It is a loan.
When someone stops to read your post, watch your film, or open your email, they are paying something now — seconds of their life, cognitive effort, the small risk of being bored or sold to — and they expect to be repaid later with something of value. A useful idea. A clear answer. A moment of pleasure. A reason to trust you.
If you do not repay it, you have not simply failed to persuade them. You have taught them something about you. Next time, the loan is smaller, or the rate is higher, or the answer is no.
This is what banner blindness actually is. Not a visual phenomenon, but a credit decision. A market that has been interrupted too often becomes a market that cannot be reached cheaply.
Who pays for the interruption
We usually describe the cost of marketing from the advertiser’s side: cost per thousand, cost per click, cost per acquisition. Those are prices. The real cost is paid by the person on the other end.
They pay in time, which is finite. They pay in attention, which is fragile. They pay in the small irritation of being interrupted while doing something else. And when the interruption is frequent enough, they pay in defence: ad blockers, skip buttons, subscription fatigue, a generalised suspicion of anything that looks like marketing.
Those defences are not irrational. They are the rational response of a lender who keeps not being repaid.
The test
Before a campaign ships, finish this sentence honestly: “After engaging with this, the person will have …”
If the honest ending is “seen my logo”, you are asking for a loan and offering interest. If it is “understood something, felt something, or gained something they can use”, you may have a repayment plan.
Three ways to repay
Attention is repaid in value, and value in marketing tends to arrive in three forms.
1. Relevance
Be about something the person already cares about, rather than something you wish they cared about. This is why the best advertising often feels less like advertising: it enters a conversation that was already happening. Relevance is not a tone of voice. It is a decision about which conversation you are joining.
2. Clarity
Do not make them work. Every unnecessary abstraction, every clever line that has to be decoded, every paragraph that exists to sound impressive — these are small withdrawals. Clarity is not the absence of craft. It is craft pointed at comprehension rather than admiration.
3. Payoff
Leave them with something they did not have before: a fact, a distinction, a tool, a feeling, a reason they can repeat to someone else. The payoff does not have to be grand. It has to be real.
Notice what is not on the list: cleverness, volume, frequency. Those are delivery mechanisms. They can amplify a repayment. They cannot substitute for one.
What changes when you think this way
You write the promise before the campaign. Not the tagline — the promise. What will this piece of work give someone? If you cannot answer in a sentence, the work is not ready.
You prefer being sought to being seen. Search, referral, subscription and reputation are all forms of attention that the audience chose to extend. They are cheaper to repay because the lender already trusts you.
You measure whether the promise was kept. Clicks measure the loan. Return visits, replies, referrals and repeat purchase measure the repayment. Most dashboards are excellent at the first and silent on the second.
You treat frequency as a cost. Every send, every retarget, every reminder spends a little trust. Sometimes that is a good trade. It should be a decision, not a default.
The uncomfortable implication is that attention is not the goal. It is the first instalment. The goal is to be the thing someone remembers when the need arrives — and the thing they are glad they let in.
Borrow accordingly.