Media attention has hit a ceiling

Media attention has hit a ceiling, yet most media plans haven't noticed.

BCG puts US active media time at 25.3 hours a week. It peaked in lockdown and has been gently falling ever since.

It feels an industry, we still run on an unspoken assumption that more screens and more apps mean more attention to go round. There isn't any more.

Every new app, show and creator is taking minutes from somebody else.

Your competition isn't just the brand in your category. It's whatever your audience watched last night. A podcast, a 40-minute YouTube video about a bankrupt airline or doomscrolling on TikTok for 30 minutes.

And the minutes you do win are rarely whole. BCG counts more than 13 hours of media a day for the average US consumer, only 28% of it gets focused attention. The rest is background, the TV on while the phone's in your hand. Or a podcast in one ear, which you're scrolling through X on your desktop.

Yet we still plan as if people sit through the ad break with their phone face down and watch the 60-second film to the end. They haven't since the fast-forward button.

In research I've been running on 2,377 top TikTok ads, between 54% and 80% of viewers were gone within the first second.

That's why the thing that matters most is the creative. In a fixed, divided day it's the biggest lever we have, and it has to be good enough to beat whatever's on the other screen.

Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad.

That's a media problem as much as it is a creative one, which is why the two shouldn't sit in separate buildings.

We can't keep planning as if any channel gets undivided attention, or as if attention only lives on TV and social. A lot of it now sits in podcasts, newsletters, Discord servers and micro communities.