I remember the days before Facebook had advertising. When it was only open to those of us with a strange .edu email address. Then, it opened to the public, and the ads followed. 

Since then, it feels like so much of marketing has operated on a simple premise: Buy your way into the conversation. Constantly pay for more impressions, higher frequency, and greater reach. The budget was the strategy.

It’s actually a model that has been around since people (or audiences) had limited options. Three TV networks. One newspaper. A handful of radio stations. Attention was easy to find and pay for.

We know that’s not the case today. And yet, we keep throwing money at the same problem. 

We’ve all heard the stat: The average North American encounters somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 brand messages per day. 

The brain's response is some sort of magic filter, so we don’t absorb most of it. It’s just become noise we can tune out and scroll through at whatever pace you can slide your thumb.

Worse for brands, ad-blockers are on the rise too, up something like 40% in the last few years. I’ll admit I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in like a decade, and mine is blocked on the network level now, so no one in my house has either. 

Regardless of how you consume things, the economics of interruption are deteriorating in plain sight.

The counter to this is hiding in plain sight. 

More and more, I’ve been using the language of the pull. I’ve landed here because I find the ‘Attention Economy’ to be a bit cold and inhumane. It also doesn’t do the heavy lifting. That’s what Pull does. 

It’s not about grabbing attention, it’s about earning it. Creating something so good that the audience wants to come and watch it.

How many brands do you know that have destination watching? Where you can’t wait until the next episode drops, or a new film comes out? 

In a pull model, the brand does not buy a moment of attention. It creates something worth the audience's time. The audience chooses to engage because the work provides genuine value. That could be insight, emotion, perspective, or entertainment. The relationship begins with a gift, not a demand.

In my world, there are a handful of brands that I think are cracking the code. And I feel like too often I put them on a pedestal, but honestly, they’ve earned their right to be there. 

YETI feels like the most consistent case study. Since 2015, they have produced dozens of short documentary films through their YETI Presents series. The films are really all about sharing YETI values through the fishermen, ranchers, snowboarders, and craftspeople around the brand. Products rarely appear. The brand is only mentioned in the credits. And yet YETI grew into a company valued at over $1.5 billion. People haul the coolers because, well, first, they work, and also because the brand stands for something they believe in. The films are how they know what it stands for.

This is not an anomaly.

REI has REI Co-op Studios (we shared a stunning film from them last week) and has dipped a hand into co-producing feature films, including one that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Patagonia has spent a decade producing environmental documentaries with zero product placement. Square won Tribeca's top brand award with an 8-minute film that never mentions the brand.

At least in my world, the brands earning the deepest loyalty are the ones that stopped trying to take attention and started earning it by contributing stories their audience wanted to watch.

Last week, I talked about how story should live at the top of the strategy. It should be foundational. 

Paid reach has a time and a place, but it cannot generate trust. And in categories where differentiation can be hard to communicate (financial services, professional services, B2B, mission-driven organizations), trust is the most valuable thing you can build.

When someone chooses to spend 8, 15, or 90-minutes with a brand film, they are doing something that no media buy can replicate. They are choosing to give you their attention. That psychological state is entirely different from a pre-roll ad that they are waiting to skip. 

Research on narrative transportation shows that when audiences choose to engage, their resistance to narrative persuasion (story) drops, and their emotional connection (trust) to the source deepens. The effect often strengthens over time rather than decaying.

You want to get a little nerdy with the science of it? That is the real advantage of ‘pull’. Paid impressions depreciate when the audience scrolls away. But earned attention compounds the longer they watch.

I think the simplest way to say it is, why not take some time to think about the stories you could tell that your audience would actually give you their time to watch, then make those?

It doesn’t really cost more. It’s not actually harder to make. It’s just a bit different from the norm, and it takes some extra thought and intention to make the shift from interruption to earned attention.