Attention is becoming harder to buy.

Every year, reaching the same audience costs more. CPMs climb, click-through rates fall, and the platforms respond with more automation that mostly benefits the platforms. The era of cheap, precise targeting is over — privacy changes and signal loss have made sure of that.

Brands that built their growth on media buying efficiency are discovering that efficiency was rented, not owned.

When the algorithm can no longer find your perfect customer for you, your creative has to do that job. An ad that speaks directly to a specific person's situation, taste, and aspirations will find its audience — because those people stop, watch, and share.

In that sense, creative quality is no longer a branding concern. It is a performance lever. The best-performing accounts we see are the ones treating creative volume and creative quality as their primary optimisation.

The practical implications are significant:

You cannot out-spend indifference. If people don't care about what you're showing them, no amount of budget will fix it. The brands winning the attention game are the ones saying something worth paying attention to.