The Age of Attention Scarcity
I first published The Age of Attention Scarcity in July 2025. In the nearly twelve months since, I been approached by dozens of people who had an epiphany after reading the paper. For some, it was personal – the ability to define something they could feel, but until then couldn’t name. For others, it was recognising that the problems they were addressing in their work were interconnected with others – whether it was in media, industry, communications, government, or society.
I had a growing realisation that these challenges need to be connected in order to be solve. And, in the spirit of optimism, I had faith that they could be addressed by bringing together expertise from across these disciplines. I set up The Attention Practice in the months following to do just that – bring the challenges caused by Attention Scarcity to light, working with others across disciplines, and solve them. Wherever and however they are affecting brands, businesses, industry, media, government, or society-at-large.
One of the people who approached me was James Wickham, my now co-host on ‘Can We Have Your Attention?’. Our work on the podcast has shed even more light onto the subject, together with work through The Attention Practice. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some thoughts on Attention Scarcity, twelve months on.
In the meantime, I’m re-publishing the full paper (minus the illustrations) below. First July 2025 on LinkedIn and Substack. You can download the full paper, including illustrative figures, by getting in touch.
Background
Over the last two decades, thinkers from behavioural science, economics, media, and policy have converged on a shared insight: human attention is finite, and today’s systems are overloading it. From Herbert Simon’s early warning that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” to the rise of platform economies that trade attention as currency, a new landscape has taken shape. The result is what this paper calls the Age of Attention Scarcity.
This paper introduces attention scarcity as a systemic lens for understanding the breakdown of communication effectiveness in environments shaped by digital saturation. It draws on behavioural science, communications data and resource economics to show how and why.
It is written for two overlapping audiences:
Media, advertising, and technology sectors, where platforms and business models are optimised for extraction, but now face diminishing returns and audience depletion.
Government, security, and policy communities, who are navigating the consequences of strategic incoherence, adversarial information operations, and declining public trust.
Understanding that shift is essential for anyone working in communications, policy, technology, or influence today. Rather than prescribing technical interventions or sectoral solutions, this paper proposes a shared conceptual language, drawing from environmental resource management, to help these sectors anticipate, assess, and mitigate the risks of living in an age of attention scarcity.
Introduction
Over the last century, the age of information scarcity gave way to information abundance. This abundance has resulted in a seemingly relentless flood of content, messaging and digital noise. But while information has exploded, attention has not. It remains biologically fixed. Like oil, clean water, or land, human attention is a finite and depleteable resource. And yet, current systems, including digital platforms and media and advertising models, are structured around the assumption that attention is limitless.
This paper argues that we have entered the Age of Attention Scarcity. It lays out the evidence for treating attention as a strategic resource, draws on environmental and economic models of resource depletion to explain the crisis, and proposes a new approach: stewardship over extraction. What follows is a cross-disciplinary analysis that is part economic, part psychological, part cultural. This paper explores the state of attention today, why it matters, and what can be done to manage it sustainably.
What is Attention Scarcity?
Attention scarcity is exactly what it sounds like: we are asking more of people’s minds than they can give. The rest of this paper outlines why this matters, and what evidence shows about how human attention now behaves as a limited resource.
To understand how attention scarcity affects decision-making and behaviour, it helps to start with some foundations from behavioural science and neuroscience developed over the past fifty years. Our brains process information using two systems, a concept popularised by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, working alongside Amos Tversky. System 1 is fast and automatic. It helps us react quickly, form impressions, and make snap judgments with little effort. System 2 is slower and more deliberate. It helps us think things through and make reasoned decisions.
There is a ceiling to what the human brain can process (in other words, its cognitive capacity). But when System 1 becomes overloaded with too much content or too many demands, System 2 cannot function properly. This is because the body prioritises the fast, efficient System 1 to keep itself going, with no cognitive fuel left for System 2. As a result, people’s thinking and judgments are more reactive, less reflective, and more vulnerable to error, bias or manipulation.
In economic terms, attention is therefore both rivalrous and excludable: for every second of attention, there is lots of different content competing for that second of attention (rivalrous) and the content that wins that second takes all of that second (excludable). In other words, if I’m watching your video right now, I’m not listening to someone else’s podcast at the same time. My focus is yours, but only for a time.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” – Herbert Simon
Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s 1971 insight was not a new one, but his warning has gone largely unheeded. In the decades since, as quantitative measurement became more prevalent (though not necessarily robust), entire industries were built on extracting and monetising this finite resource, with little thought for its limits, let alone the consequences of its depletion.
Today, attention functions more like a resource than a reflex. It is no longer just a sign of curiosity or interest; it is something that is tracked, harvested, traded and sold. Entire business models now depend on capturing and holding human attention, with digital platforms extracting value from every scroll, click and pause. These are patterns explored throughout this paper, with examples from marketing, media and platform design.
This shift means attention now behaves like other scarce resources such as water, energy, or minerals. It is limited in supply, high in demand, and increasingly vulnerable to overuse (see Figure 3). Just as overfishing can collapse a fishery, overwhelming the human attention system can drain people’s capacity to process, engage or care.
The Crisis: Demand Outstrips Supply
Just like energy, fresh water or rare minerals, attention is now behaving like a scarce resource under stress:
Content volume has exploded. Between 2012 and 2022, content uploaded to YouTube alone increased from 60 hours per minute in 2012 to 500 hours per minute in 2022, representing an increase of less than 4 years uploaded per day to 82 years per day.
Media consumption has reached biological limits. People in developed markets now spend between 6 and 8 hours a day with entertainment media, and has been stable for some time. Multiple sources report screen time to have plateaued in the last several years, or even declined.
Advertising exposure is saturated. Individuals now encounter upwards of 700 to 1,200 ads per day; far more than they can process.
Digital fatigue is setting in. Nearly half of U.S. consumers plan to reduce social media use due to stress, poor content quality and attention overload.
It might seem intuitive to treat human attention as the source of demand, since people actively seek out content. However, in the structure of today’s digital economy, the logic has reversed. Attention has become the supply – finite, human and increasingly overdrawn – while the demand comes from a growing ecosystem of content, platforms and advertisers competing to capture it.
In other words, we are living in a classic demand-induced scarcity environment: too much demand, in this case content, for a fixed supply, which is human attention. The greater the volume of content, the more ferocious the competition. Every image, soundbite, headline and notification gets ever-louder, brasher, more provocative, all vying for a sliver of attention that cannot be multiplied. Like too many buckets lowered into the same shallow well, each trying to draw more than the last, even as the waterline continues to fall. At the same time, the flood of content keeps rising, unchecked and unfiltered, forcing its way toward the audience faster than they can respond.
The consequence is over-saturation. Audiences no longer choose content. Content chooses them. As the balance of choice shifts, so the quality of engagement as measured in depth, duration and resonance, collapses.
The Symptoms of Over-Extraction
Like over-farmed soil or overfished waters, the effects of attention depletion are measurable and costly. The symptoms manifest across individuals, institutions and entire industries.
Declining efficiency: Digital ad costs are rising sharply, yet performance is falling. Over 85% of ads fail to hold attention for more than 2.5 seconds, well below the memory threshold for brand recall. Even as budgets grow, returns are shrinking.
Attention fragmentation: Audiences are splintering across platforms, formats, and devices. To maintain visibility, brands publish an average of nearly 10 posts per day across an ever-expanding array of channels and content formats. This is not greed, but necessity, driven by audience fragmentation and a tsunami of content saturating digital environments.
Algorithmic opacity: With platforms guarding their algorithms, creators and communicators are flying blind. They’re forced to produce more content, more often, at greater cost, with less certainty about what will resonate with existing audiences or attract new ones. This opacity not only increases inefficiency, it removes critical feedback loops that once allowed messaging strategies to be optimised over time.
System 1 overload: Behavioural science reveals that attention overload depletes our fast-thinking brain systems (System 1). This increases errors, reduces discernment, and makes users more vulnerable to misinformation (see: Figure 2). Our intuitive judgment becomes reactive rather than reflective, fast but flawed.
Institutional trust erodes: The more fragmented and saturated the information environment, the more trust declines. We now see growing “news avoidance,” rising cynicism and a collapse in shared social reality. The economic cost is compounded by social damage: polarisation, misinformation and breakdowns in collective action.
These aren’t isolated challenges. Together, they point to a deeper structural failure: a system optimised for extraction that is now cannibalising the very resource it depends on.
Parallels with Resource Scarcity
To understand the dynamics of attention depletion, we can borrow from established frameworks used to govern physical resource extraction, frameworks specifically developed to manage oil, minerals, forests and fisheries. The attention crisis mirrors environmental and economic resource scarcities in striking ways.
The Hotelling model, developed for non-renewable resources like oil and gas, posits that as a resource becomes harder to extract, its value rises, so long as demand persists. This logic now applies to attention: as it becomes rarer and more fragmented, high-quality attention is commanding a premium.
We can also draw from environmental economics. Just as air and water are subject to pollution, attention can be polluted by noise, misinformation and manipulative design. In both cases, the problem becomes not just scarcity, but degradation.
And just as global frameworks have emerged to measure carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, we now see early-stage efforts to measure attention health. Metrics like ‘quality attention’, ‘dwell time’, and ‘meaningful reach’ are replacing click-through rates and impressions as more accurate proxies for effectiveness.
The Cognitive Cost of Saturation
Attention scarcity isn’t just an economic problem. It’s cognitive and emotional, too. Earlier in this paper, we summarised findings from behavioural science, neuroscience, and psychology showing that:
The brain operates on a fixed energy budget. It cannot scale to match the volume of incoming information.
Both System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, reflective) degrade under cognitive load. Overload leads to fatigue, errors and a greater reliance on biases and mental shortcuts.
Under pressure, people default to low-effort behaviours such as scrolling, reacting or clicking, instead of engaging in the slower, more effortful processing required for learning, reflection or change.
Sustained attention fatigue impairs memory, judgment and decision-making capacity.
This creates a paradox: we are simultaneously more connected, yet less attentive; more informed and less reflective. Digital multitasking, once seen as a skill, is now recognised as a hazard. Studies show that media multitasking reduces comprehension, decision quality, and even empathy.
This also affects how societies solve problems. Inattention impairs democratic engagement, community cohesion and the quality of debate. Misinformation thrives in low-attention environments. So does extremism. So do bad decisions. These cognitive and behavioural shifts have commercial consequences. What began as audience fatigue is now rewriting the business logic of digital media.
The Market Impact
The consequences are not just personal or societal; they are market-wide. Attention scarcity is rewriting the economics of communication, branding, and content.
Declining returns: Attention capture is getting more expensive. Influencer rates have tripled, ad placement costs are rising and even modest attention gains can yield large swings in return-on-investment. Advertisers and marketers, increasingly aware that there is no longer enough attention to go around, are adapting tactics and measurement to survive a harder, fragmented market with fewer returns.
Overproduction: The creative economy is burning out. Traditional TV and film production are in decline, while content creators face precarious income despite enormous content output. The oversupply of content has outpaced infrastructure, budgets and audiences.
Platform saturation: Even the platforms themselves face risk. Overload leads to disengagement. Content may be infinite, but user attention isn’t. Platforms that fail to manage attention quality may see falling usage, regulatory scrutiny and reputational harm.
These market trends show that the current way of using attention isn’t holding up. If we want attention to keep having value, we need to take care of it instead of just trying to grab as much as we can.
The Social Impact
The consequences of attention depletion extend far beyond personal wellbeing or marketing performance. They reach into the fabric of democratic life, affecting the way people interact, connect and participate in society. These effects are visible not just in media use, but in public discourse, social trust and civic engagement.
Loss of shared focus: In a saturated media environment, it becomes harder for society to concentrate on shared priorities. Important messages, whether from governments or civil society, compete for attention with entertainment, advertising and distraction. This makes coordinated public action more difficult.
Simplification and polarisation: Short-form and high-volume content formats tend to reward emotionally charged or simplified messages. This shifts public debate away from complexity and towards soundbites, increasing the risk of polarisation and reducing the space for balanced discussion.
Strained social bonds: As attention fragments, the habits and routines that once supported social connection, such as shared media experiences, are eroding. While digital platforms enable connection, they also compete with time spent in deeper, more sustained forms of engagement.
Reduced civic engagement: Attention scarcity can limit the capacity of individuals to engage meaningfully with public issues. Studies show that under cognitive load, people are less likely to vote, take part in community life or evaluate information critically. This has implications for the functioning of democracy.
These outcomes are not inevitable, but they are increasingly observable. If attention continues to be treated as an infinite, low-cost input, its social consequences will grow. Any strategy for stewardship must account for this, not only to protect individuals, but to sustain the systems that rely on informed public participation. This need becomes urgent, as a new phase is accelerating this crisis. Generative AI threatens to turbocharge content production far beyond human capacity to keep up.
The Next Extraction Surge: AI-Driven Content Proliferation
The arrival of scalable synthetic content marks an inflection point in the extraction model of the attention economy.
As generative AI lowers the cost of producing persuasive, personalised or emotionally manipulative content, a new phase of volume-based saturation risk emerges. Brand communications, influence operations and political messaging are already competing not just for attention, but for survival in an overcrowded, poorly filtered content ecosystem.
This has three implications:
Strategic flooding becomes viable at scale. Malicious actors can drown signal in noise, pushing not just topical disinformation, but through sheer volume and ambient saturation.
Extraction becomes cheaper; stewardship becomes harder as platform incentives continue to favour low-effort, high-engagement content.
Boundaries blur between commercial, political and adversarial messaging. Attention fatigue erodes discernment, increasing public reactivity and volatility.
These conditions resemble what security strategists describe as grey-zone escalation. The aim is not to mislead through falsehood alone, but to destabilise through volume and velocity. The cost of delivering strategic incoherence is falling. In practical terms, AI lowers the barriers to entry. It is now easier, faster, and cheaper to flood the information environment.
As a result, the saturation tactics once used in election interference may begin to appear more frequently, across more sectors, and deployed by a wider range of actors.
Stewardship models across platforms, policy and communications strategy must now consider not just what is said, but how much is said, by whom, and at what cognitive cost.
A Shift in Thinking: From Extraction to Stewardship
We need to treat attention like water in a drought, not like oil in a boom. This means prioritising and preserving everyone’s ability to think, making it harder for excess noise to overwhelm cognitive ability, easier to rebuild strength, and easier to think, act and just exist with one another.
Thinking of attention as finite rather than infinite is to fundamentally shift from an extraction model to a stewardship model. In practical terms, this would mean designing the infrastructure, indicators and incentives that underpin the attention ecosystem.
Extractive Model
Prioritises volume over value
Measures clicks and views
Encourages frequency, not depth
Rewards outrage and manipulation
Stewardship Model
Prioritises quality over quantity
Measures attention depth, duration, and outcomes
Designs for cognitive ease and user well-being
Rewards trust, usefulness, and clarity
In this model, attention is not just a metric to be maximised - it is a resource to be protected, restored and used wisely. Managing it well allows for clearer thinking, better decisions, stronger audience connection and, ultimately, better outcomes. It also creates competitive advantage. Brands and platforms that steward attention build more loyal audiences, deliver better outcomes, and lower long-term costs.
Encouragingly, the industry is beginning to shift. Calls for better attention metrics, such as those championed by Dentsu and Professor Karen Nelson-Field, have gained traction. McKinsey, too, has explored the need to recalibrate how organisations value attention. Meanwhile, thinkers like Dr Grace Kite and Tom Roach are advancing the concept of ‘story worlds’: strategic frameworks that favour layered, coherent narrative ecosystems over fragmentary bursts. These are promising starts. But systemic change will require collective recognition that attention is not just a target. It is a shared, finite and fragile resource.
Policy and Industry Recommendations
Attention is too important, too critical, to be treated as a byproduct. To be preserved, it must be governed with seriousness and intention. The creative and media industries are as important as key industrial sectors such as the defence, healthcare, and technology sectors. Borrowing from environmental management and regulation, here are key recommendations:
Invest in creative capacity as a stewardship strategy: Invest in, champion and incentivise quality content creators and the creative sector as a whole. These industries are essential to a healthy attention ecosystem, providing the cultural infrastructure that sustains shared meaning and public imagination. The UK government’s tax reliefs, investment packages and global talent visa routes are welcome steps, but more is needed. Touring and market access barriers, especially with the EU, limit not only economic opportunity but creative development and collaboration. In a networked creative economy, isolation undermines innovation.
Repair the broken link between creativity and economic return: Today’s digital platforms extract value from attention without reinvesting in the systems that sustain it. Where traditional media models supported production ecosystems - studios, skills pipelines and original IP - platform giants like Google and Meta profit from content by funding the algorithm, not the art. This model treats creativity as free labour and has hollowed out the commercial base of the creative industries. Reversing this will require more than incentives. It demands regulatory courage, IP protection, education investment and recognition that cultural production is a strategic industry, on par with health, defence or infrastructure.
Recalibrate value and waste in the attention economy: As with any finite resource, sustainable attention ecosystems require both diagnostic tools and pricing mechanisms to identify misuse and correct market failure.
Audit attention flows: Create attention maps and diagnostics for platforms, agencies and brands, adapted from environmental and resource scarcity models. Pinpoint where attention is being wasted (e.g. un-viewed impressions), extracted without return (e.g. low-quality clickbait) or polluted (e.g. misinformation, dark patterns).
Raise the price of scarce attention: Limit the availability of low-quality attention inventory. Platforms and media buyers are already beginning to champion signal-rich formats and experiences. This can be aided by introducing attention minimums, i.e. formats that guarantee meaningful engagement, rather than chasing reach at any cost. Scarcity should drive up quality, not be masked by volume.
Introduce governance mechanisms for sustainable attention flows: As attention becomes a finite and overdrawn resource, we need regulatory and measurement infrastructure that mirrors environmental stewardship models. This means not just asking what we communicate, but how systems are designed to allocate and extract attention, and whether that is done responsibly.
Enforce Algorithmic Transparency: Require platforms to disclose how their systems allocate attention - who gets seen, when and why. Design mechanisms must allow users to opt out of extractive defaults such as infinite scroll, autoplay and engagement-maximising feeds.
Explore legislative models (e.g. GDPR-style rights) or certification schemes akin to the Marine Stewardship Council or Fairtrade, creating a “trust mark” for ethical attention systems.Develop attention sustainability metrics: Standardise how we measure the quality of attention across media, advertising, and content industries. Move beyond vanity metrics (clicks, impressions) to incorporate:
Duration (how long people engage)
Engagement type (active vs passive)
Cognitive load (effort required to process)
Wellbeing impact (emotional and psychological outcomes)
Embed independent validation, modelled on organisations like BARB (UK) or Nielsen (US), to create trusted, sector-wide benchmarks for sustainable content and platform design.
Conclusion: A Scarcity We Can’t Ignore
Attention scarcity is real. It is the problem of our age, reshaping the economic, psychological, and social fabric of modern life. Left unchecked, it will undermine trust, weaken institutions, and hollow out the creative and civic sectors that rely on sustained, meaningful engagement.
But we can adapt. Just as the energy economy is undergoing a transition to renewables, we can guide the attention economy toward sustainability. This means designing for less, not more. We must start treating attention not as something to take, but as something to earn.
The time has come to steward our most precious resource.
Annexe: Further Resources
This annex offers a short introduction to three key areas that underpin this paper. If you don’t work in communications or media, these sections will help you understand the context in which the argument is being made. Each section points to further reading - books, frameworks and other resources - that explain the underlying ideas in more detail.
1. The attention economy: What it is, and how we got here
Over the past two decades, attention has been reframed as an economic input to be tracked, sold, and optimised. This is known as the attention economy. Coined by Herbert Simon in an age of mass media, it gained more notice alongside the rise of digital platforms, social media and programmatic advertising, which are all designed to capture and monetise human focus.
This shift has transformed how media and communications operate. Instead of information being scarce and attention plentiful (as it once was), we now have more information than ever, but not enough attention to process it all. The concept of attention as a scarce resource underpins this paper. It helps explain why so many systems built on visibility, persuasion or engagement are now under pressure.
For further context, see the timeline chart on page 2, which traces key moments in the development of the attention economy across technology, media and governance.
Further reading
For readers interested in exploring the topic further, what follows is a list of accessible books and resources covering the history of the attention economy and how media, technology and communications evolved to treat attention as a commodity:
– Herbert A. Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971)
– Michael Goldhaber, “The Attention Economy and the Net” (1997)
– Davenport & Beck, The Attention Economy (2001)
– Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (2010)
– James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011)
– Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants (2016)
– James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light (2018)
Two recently published books caught my eye. Amazon, likely tracking my recent interest in attention-related topics, recommended them through the app. My brain, currently tuned to spot anything on the subject, immediately added them to my ‘To Read’ list. I haven’t yet read either but, based on their descriptions, both explore themes closely aligned with this paper, particularly around the monetisation of attention and its broader social consequences:
– Chris Hayes, The Siren’s Call (2025)
– Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future (2025)
2. How communications works, and what makes it effective
Communications has one central job: to reach people and influence how they think, feel or act. This is harder than it sounds. The history of marketing and public information is full of attempts to understand what actually works. The most useful insights come from long-term evidence, like the work done by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute or the IPA’s effectiveness studies.
In short: growth is hard, and always has been. The laws of brand and behaviour growth were discovered in an era of mass media, when a single TV ad could reach millions at once. Strategies were built around this: repetition, consistency and distinctive assets. Now, we live in a fragmented media world, where audiences are spread across dozens of platforms and formats. The underlying principles haven’t changed, but it’s both harder and more expensive to apply them and see results. You can’t build mass effect if you can’t build mass reach (at least, not at the same level).
For further reading:
This section includes essential books and frameworks explaining how communications works, including How Brands Grow, The Long and the Short of It, and IPA case studies.
– Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (2010)
– Byron Sharp & Jenni Romaniuk, How Brands Grow, Part 2 (2014)
– Jenni Romaniuk, Better Brand Health (2021)
– Les Binet & Peter Field (published by the IPA), The Long and the Short of It (2013)
– Peter Field (published by the IPA), Creativity in Crisis (2019)
– Wiemar Snijders with the APG, Eat Your Greens (2018)
– Karen Nelson-Field, The Attention Economy and How Media Works (2020)
The following provide a goldmine of resources on media and advertising effect, constantly updated as new evidence emerges:
The World Advertising Research Council (WARC)
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) database
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
3. How communications is made, delivered and brought to life
Unlike law or medicine, communications is a vocation, not a formal profession. People learn through practice, not just theory. Most practitioners pick up the craft by doing the work, learning how to combine data, cultural insight, creativity and production to deliver something that connects with real people in the real world.
Communications is collaborative. Strategists look at data and patterns. Creatives turn ideas into images, words, and experiences. Producers guide work through the complex logistics of real-world delivery. Much of the most valuable insight comes from those closest to the work - directors, editors, designers, writers and creators. Often, the final creative leap is not logical but instinctive.
For further reading:
This section includes recommended books and oral histories about how communications actually gets made. This reading sits alongside key works from behavioural economics, psychology, and sociology that explore how people really think and act, and referenced throughout this paper. As David Ogilvy famously put it, “People don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.” Understanding this gap between what people claim and how they behave is central to how communications work is developed, and why it so often relies on intuition, iteration and deep listening.
– Les Binet & Sarah Carter with the APG, How Not To Plan (2018)
– Richard Shotton, The Choice Factory (2017)
– Alex Bentley, Mark Earls & Michael J. O’Brien, I’ll Have What She’s Having (2011)
– Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! (2022)
– Derek Thompson, The Hit Makers (2018)
– D&AD (ed.), The Copy Book: How Some of the Best Advertising Writers in the World Write Their Advertising (2018)
– Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug (2015) and Why Does the Pedlar Sing? (2019)
– David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (2007)
– John Hegarty, Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic (2011)
– Martin Raymond, The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook (2nd edition) (2019)
Likewise, any creative biography or “oral history” of a creative product can provide deep insight into the sweaty, bloody birth of beloved creative ideas. Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair run these regularly.
The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Wired and The New York Times frequently run oral history-style exposes of tech companies and the ad industry, providing a window into an often opaque and baffling world.
Other institutions and resources that can provide an overview on the practice and purpose of the marketing and advertising industries in particular:
The World Advertising Research Council (WARC)
The Account Planning Group (the APG) - based in the UK, with sister groups in the US, Canada, South Africa and around the world
The American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4As)
The Marketing Society
The D&AD
Endnotes
For further reading on the origins of the attention economy, see works by Herbert A. Simon (1971), Michael Goldhaber (1997), Thomas Davenport & John Beck (2001), Tim Wu (2016) and James Williams (2018).
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books.
Schneider, et al (1982); Kahneman (2011), Najmi, et al (2015), Thompson, et al (2023); Zucchelli, et al (2025).
Dual screening is a long-known phenomenon, but it comes at a cost of fragmented attention. There is a long trail of literature revealing the cognitive penalty most people pay for multitasking. The National Institute of Health has a good summary: Madore, K.P. and Wagner, A.D. (2019) ‘Multicosts of multitasking’, Cerebrum: the Dana Forum on Brain Science, 1 April. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7075496/ (Accessed: 3 July 2025).
Dr Karen Nelson-Field at Amplified Intelligence provides a comprehensive breakdown of this problem and the dangers it poses to accurate and robust measurement in The Attention Economy: How Media Works (2020).
Singer, P.W. and Brooking, E.T. (2018) LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and; Wu, T. (2016) The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Wu, T. (2016) The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, and; O’Reilly, T., Strauss, I. and Mazzucato, M. (2023) Algorithmic Attention Rents: A Theory of Digital Platform Market Power. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Working Paper Series (IIPP WP 2023–10). Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/wp2023–10 (Accessed: 26 June 2025)
Science Direct provides introductory primer on resource scarcity sourced from academic texts and reviewed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/resource-scarcity. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation provides an accessible explanation of the effects of overuse and over-extraction: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/.
The YouTube Team (2012) Holy Nyans! 60 hours per minute and 4 billion views a day on YouTube, The YouTube Official Blog, 23 January. Available at: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/holy-nyans-60-hours-per-minute-and-4/ (Accessed: 16 July 2025).
Statista (no date) Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/ (Accessed: 16 July 2025).
Deloitte Insights (2025) 2025 Digital Media Trends: Consumption habits survey, 3 April. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/digital-media-trends-consumption-habits-survey/2025.html (Accessed: 26 June 2025).
PQ Media (2025), eMarketer (2025), Kemp (2024).
Šimkevičiūtė, S. (2025) ‘Daily ad exposure around the world in 2025: Top countries ranked’, Eskimi blog, 6 June. Available at: https://www.eskimi.com/blog/ad-exposure-research (Accessed: 26 June 2025).
The human brain can process external stimuli at a rate of 10 bits/s, but is exposed to billions or trillions of bits of external stimuli in that second (Zheng and Meister, 2024). Working memory has a max capacity of 3-4 items (Cowan, 1995) and energy limitations capped at 20% of the body’s resources (Bruckmaier, et al., 2020) mean that processing power is maxed out.
Gartner (2023) ‘Gartner predicts fifty percent of consumers will significantly limit their interactions with social media by 2025’, Gartner Newsroom, 14 December. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-12-14-gartner-predicts-fifty-percent-of-consumers-will-significantly-limit-their-interactions-with-social-media-by-2025 (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
Competing uses of scarce resources is a fundamental economic concept. Source for the basic definition: Begg, D., Fischer, S. and Dornbusch, R. (2000) Economics, 6th edn. Maidenhead, Berkshire: McGraw‑Hill. More specifically, Thomas Homer-Dixon is the author of a comprehensive set of frameworks for understanding demand-induced scarcity in highly competitive environments (1994). His website (no date) has an extensive set of resources on these frameworks: https://homerdixon.com/library/?_resource_search=environmental scarcity
Coimbra, D. (2024) ‘Marketing in the attention economy: Key insights for 2025’, Mediaweek, 20 December. Available at: https://www.mediaweek.com.au/marketing-in-the-attention-economy-key-insights-for-2025/ (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
Schieren, M. (2024) What the state of social media saturation means for brands, Sprout Social, 16 July. Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-saturation/ (Accessed: 22 June 2025); dentsu (2024) Global Ad Spend Forecasts: May 2024, dentsu, May. Available at: https://info.dentsu.com/AdSpendMay2024 (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
Schieren, M. (2024), and; VCCP Media (2025) ‘Hacking the attention economy: VCCP Media and Dr Karen Nelson‑Field reveal 1.5‑second formula for effective digital advertising’, VCCP UK Newsroom, 16 May. Available at: https://www.vccp.com/uk/news/2025/may/hacking-the-attention-economy-vccp-media-and-dr-karen-nelson-field-reveal-1-5-second-formula-for-effective-digital-advertising (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Anjos, L. (2023) ‘Rethinking algorithmic explainability through the lenses of intellectual property and competition’, SSRN Electronic Journal, 1 November. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4872360 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4872360 (Accessed: 23 June 2025); Kayn, L. (2024) ‘Understanding the rising costs of advertising online’, Dunham Web (blog), 25 November. Available at: https://dunhamweb.com/blog/understanding-the-rising-costs-of-advertising-online (Accessed: 23 June 2025), and; McKinsey & Company (10 June 2025) ‘The attention equation: Winning the right battles for consumer attention’, McKinsey & Company. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-attention-equation-winning-the-right-battles-for-consumer-attention#/ (Accessed: 3 July 2025).
Anjos, L. (2023).
Greene, J. (2013) Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them. London: Atlantic Books. Other sources as per Figure 2, and footnote 3.
Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Robertson, C.T., Ross Arguedas, A. and Nielsen, R.K. (2024) Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Available at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2024 (Accessed: 22 June 2025), and; Edelman (2025) 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. Available at: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
Hotelling, H. (1929) ‘Stability in competition’, The Economic Journal, 39(153), pp. 41–57. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2224214 (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
WARC (2024), dentsu (2024), McKinsey (2025), VCCP (2025).
Hassler, J., Krusell, P. and Smith, A.A. Jr. (2016) Environmental macroeconomics, 18 March. Available at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/newdraft.pdf (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
dentsu (2021) Attention Economy Phase 2, dentsu, [PDF]. Available at: https://assets-eu-01.kc-usercontent.com/27bd3334-62dd-01a3-d049-720ae980f906/887ba048-d8e4-4b28-9836-9b0ce45fa9e4/dentsu%20Attention%20Economy%20Phase%202%202021.pdf (Accessed: 22 June 2025), and; SmartFrame (no date) ‘Attention metrics: what they are and why you should use them’, SmartFrame Insights. Available at: https://smartframe.io/attention-metrics-what-they-are-and-why-you-should-use-them/ (Accessed: 22 June 2025).
Clinton-Lisell, V. (2021) ‘Stop multitasking and just read: meta-analyses of multitasking’s effects on reading performance and reading time’, Journal of Research in Reading, 44(4), pp. 787–816. doi: 10.1111/1467-9817.12372, and; Lopez, R.B., Salinger, J.M., Heatherton, T.F. and Wagner, D.D. (2018) ‘Media multitasking is associated with altered processing of incidental, irrelevant cues during person perception’, BMC Psychology, 6(1), p. 44. doi: 10.1186/s40359-018-0256-x, and; Schutten, D., Stokes, K.A. and Arnell, K.M. (2017) ‘I want to media multitask and I want to do it now: Individual differences in media multitasking predict delay of gratification and system‑1 thinking’, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2(1), article no. 8. doi: 10.1186/s41235-016-0048-x.
Greene, J. (2013) Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them. London: Atlantic Books, and; Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. London: Penguin Books.
Stewart, A.J., Arechar, A.A., Rand, D.G. and Plotkin, J.B. (2024) ‘The distorting effects of producer strategies: why engagement does not reveal consumer preferences for misinformation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(10), article e2315195121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2315195121.
Zmigrod, L., Eisenberg, I.W., Bissett, P.G., Robbins, T.W. and Poldrack, R.A. (2021) ‘The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1822), article 20200424. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0424,, and; Zmigrod, L. and Tsakiris, M. (2021) ‘Computational and neurocognitive approaches to the political brain: key insights and future avenues for political neuroscience’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1822), article 20200130. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0130.
Schwartz, B. (2009) The Paradox of Choice [Amazon Kindle edition]. New York: Harper Perennial; Heffernan, M. (2019) Wilful Blindness. London: Simon & Schuster, and; Allen, P.M., Edwards, J.A., Snyder, F.J., Makinson, K.A. and Hamby, D.M. (2014) ‘The effect of cognitive load on decision making with graphically displayed uncertainty information’, Risk Analysis, 34(8), pp. 1495–1505. doi: 10.1111/risa.12161.
VCCP Media (2025) ‘Hacking the attention economy: VCCP Media and Dr Karen Nelson‑Field reveal 1.5‑second formula for effective digital advertising’, VCCP UK Newsroom, 16 May. Available at: https://www.vccp.com/uk/news/2025/may/hacking-the-attention-economy-vccp-media-and-dr-karen-nelson-field-reveal-1-5-second-formula-for-effective-digital-advertising (Accessed: 15 July 2025), and; WARC (2024) The Future of Media 2025. London: WARC.
Bitdefender (2025) ‘Influencer burnout is on the rise: The quiet mental health struggles of content creators’, Bitdefender Hot for Security blog, 20 June. Available at: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-gb/blog/hotforsecurity/influencer-burnout-is-on-the-rise-the-quiet-mental-health-struggles-of-content-creators (Accessed: 5 July 2025); Creativebrief (2025) ‘Creators are facing a burnout crisis’, Creativebrief Bite, 10 July. Available at: https://www.creativebrief.com/bite/trend/creators-are-facing-a-burnout-crisis (Accessed: 15 July 2025), and; Lorenz, T. (2021) ‘Creator burnout is real: why so many social‑media stars are stepping back’, The New York Times, 8 June. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/style/creator-burnout-social-media.html (Accessed: 2 July 2025).
WARC (2024) The Future of Media 2025. London: WARC.
Gartner (2023), Sprout Social (2024).
Edelman (2025) 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. Available at: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer (Accessed: 22 June 2025); The New York Times (2024) ‘Europe pushes back: Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft face new antitrust scrutiny’, The New York Times, 4 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/technology/europe-apple-meta-google-microsoft.html (Accessed: 28 June 2025); Edelman (2022) 2022 Trust Barometer special report – Trust in technology. Available at: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer/special-report-trust-technology (Accessed: 28 June 2025), and; Bloomberg (2024) ‘AI solution or big tech trust problem?’, Bloomberg Graphics, 2024. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-ai-solution-big-tech-trust-problem/?embedded-checkout=true(Accessed: 28 June 2025).
Newman (2024); Sunstein, C.R. (2018) #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Greene (2013); Haidt (2012).
Törnberg, P. (2022) ‘How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(42), article e2207159119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2207159119, and; Sunstein (2018).
Schwartz (2009); Zmigrod et al. (2021).
Clinton-Lisell (2021).
NVIDIA (no date) ‘Synthetic data generation’, NVIDIA Glossary. Available at: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/glossary/synthetic-data-generation/ (Accessed: 15 July 2025); Bateman, J. and Jackson, D. (2024) Countering Disinformation Effectively: An Evidence‑Based Policy Guide. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (2025) ‘Topics: Disinformation’, NATO, 3 February. Available at: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_219728.htm (Accessed: 15 July 2025); Giustozzi, A. (2025) ‘Can AI help Russia decisively improve its information war against the West?’, RUSI Commentary, 27 June. Available at: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/can-ai-help-russia-decisively-improve-its-information-war-against-west (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Roose, K. (2021) ‘Facebook reportedly gave the angry emoji five times the weight of a “like”’, The Washington Post, 26 October. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/facebook-angry-emoji-algorithm/ (Accessed: 28 June 2025); Brady, W.J., McLoughlin, K., Doan, T.N. and Crockett, M.J. (2021) ‘How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks’, Science Advances, 7(33), article eabe5641. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe5641; Metricool (2025) ‘How the Facebook algorithm works in 2025’, Metricool. Available at: https://metricool.com/facebook-algorithm/ (Accessed: 28 June 2025); Sendible (no date) ‘Algorithm decoding to drive social media engagement’, Sendible Insights. Available at: https://www.sendible.com/insights/algorithm-decoding-to-drive-social-media-engagement (Accessed: 28 June 2025).
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2020) ‘Information overload: an introduction’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 30 June. Available at: https://oxfordre.com/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-1360 (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Pettyjohn, S.L. and Wasser, B. (2019) Competing in the Gray Zone: Russian Tactics and Western Responses. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation; Cordesman, A.H. and Hwang, G. (2020) Chronology of Possible Chinese Gray Area and Hybrid Warfare Operations. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
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Bateman and Jackson (2024); Giustozzi (2025).
NVIDIA (no date); Bateman and Jackson (2024); Giustozzi (2025).
dentsu (2021), McKinsey (2025).
dentsu (2021), dentsu (2024); Nelson-Field (2020); McKinsey (2025).
McKinsey (2025).
WARC (2024).
Hay, B. and Hopkins, E. (2025) ‘What does the 2025 Spending Review mean for the creative industries?’, Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre Blog, 19 June. Available at: https://pec.ac.uk/blog_entries/creative-pec-spending-review-2025-read-out/ (Accessed: 10 July 2025); Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre (2022) Post-Brexit potential of the UK creative industries, July. Available at: https://www.wearecreative.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Post-Brexit-potential-of-the-UK-Creative-Industries_July2022-1.pdf (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
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Economics Observatory (2024) ‘How has digitalisation changed the economics of the creative industries’, Economics Observatory, 22 April. Available at: https://www.economicsobservatory.com/how-has-digitalisation-changed-the-economics-of-the-creative-industries (Accessed: 17 July 2025); Hödl, T. and Myrach, T. (2023) ‘Content Creators Between Platform Control and User Autonomy: The Role of Algorithms and Revenue Sharing’, Business & Information Systems Engineering, 65(5), pp. 497–519. doi: 10.1007/s12599-023-00808-9 (Accessed: 17 July 2025); Shepherd, I. (2024) ‘Meta’s new creator program – a step forward or too little too late?’, Forbes, 7 October. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianshepherd/2024/10/07/metas-new-creator-program-a-step-forward-or-too-little-too-late/ (Accessed: 17 July 2025).
BARB (no date) BARB – Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board. Available at: https://www.barb.co.uk (Accessed: 17 July 2025); Nielsen (no date) ‘Audience measurement – National TV’, Nielsen. Available at: https://www.nielsen.com/solutions/audience-measurement/national-tv/ (Accessed: 17 July 2025).