My phone handed me the weekly screen time summary on Sunday morning and I did the thing where you look at it, feel something briefly, and swipe it away. Seven hours and change, daily average. That is not up a little from last November. That is up like a fever.
Every client dashboard I have looked at this fall shows the same shape. Impressions climbing. Time on platform climbing. Reach numbers that would have gotten somebody promoted in 2018.
And every one of those clients is quietly panicking, because none of it is landing.
We do not have less attention than we did a year ago, we have the same attention sliced into smaller pieces across more surfaces, and the pieces are not worth what the old ones were.
Call it what it is. An attention recession does not look like a shortage, it looks like inflation. The supply of impressions went vertical in March and never came back down, and the purchasing power of any single impression collapsed underneath it. Your reach is up. Your currency is worthless. Anyone who has lived through real inflation will recognize the feeling of carrying more money and buying less with it.
What still works is anything a person chose on purpose. Podcasts work because somebody put in earbuds and pressed play. Newsletters work because somebody typed an address. A show people sit down for works. A recipe they went looking for works. The through line is not format and it is not length, it is intent, and intent is the only scarce input left in the system.
What separated the winners this year from the noise was not volume. It was earning a deliberate act. Peloton did not win because more people saw it, it won because people put it on the calendar. Trader Joe's runs a podcast that is genuinely about groceries, and people finish the episodes. Oatly keeps writing on the side of the carton, which you read while pouring, alone, holding the thing in your hand. None of that is reach. All of it is consent.
The through line is not format and it is not length, it is intent, and intent is the only scarce input left in the system.
The karaoke bar in Southeast has been dark since March. I miss it in a specific way I did not anticipate, and it is not the singing. It is the eighty seconds when a room of strangers gives you their whole face because there is nothing else in the room to look at. That is what attention used to feel like. It is still available. It just costs more than a media buy now.