The Attention Crisis: A Less Is More Brand Playbook, Part 1
Part 1: social ads keep getting more expensive + maybe we don't need to be making more content
It's not even Black Friday yet, but my inbox is a war zone. "Early Access!" "Preview Sale!" "VIP Pre-Sale!" Every brand is screaming, but is anyone still listening?
The marketing calendar has become a parody of itself - an endless loop of invented urgency where Tuesday's "last chance" bleeds into Wednesday's "early access." We've created a world where the only way brands know how to get attention is to promise a deal that's somehow both exclusive and perpetual. The math doesn't add up, but that hasn't stopped anyone yet.
This isn't just about sale fatigue or overwhelmed inboxes. (But yes, we’re all fatigued and overwhelmed for sure.)
It's about the inevitable endpoint of how we've built brands for the last decade: the belief that if you just shout loud enough, frequently enough, and spend enough money on social ads, people will care about what you're selling.
A Quick Preface
I have many thoughts about this moment in marketing/business—there are countless levers to pull, endless strategies to debate, whole dissertations to write about the evolution of direct-to-consumer business models. But lately, I've been fixated on how we got here: when did more (content, ads, sales, noise) become the only answer to every marketing question?
The next three newsletters will examine what happens when we choose depth over volume:
Part 1—this one—looks at the shift from performance marketing to brand building, as social ad costs skyrocket and returns diminish.
Part 2 will explore why user research matters more than ever, especially as brands chase scale at the expense of actually understanding their customers.
Part 3 will dive into the power of personalization and curation, moving beyond letting algorithms do all the heavy lifting.
I know not every brand out there is trying to be the next $1B unicorn or chasing growth at all costs. Many just want to matter to their customers, to run their businesses like human beings, to build something lasting. This newsletter is for them.
Today, I want to focus on something specific: what happens when we take all that money we're spending on increasingly expensive social ads and invest (some of) it in meaningful brand-building?
Here's what we're exploring today:
When shouting worked: The golden age of DTC and social media marketing
When everyone started screaming: The cost of digital noise
When quiet is the most valuable: Brands finding power in quiet
Hopes for 2025, as we go into planning season
If you're new to my newsletter, The Stories We Sell Ourselves analyzes the narratives around consumption, brand building, and the things we invite into our lives. Today, we're examining what becomes possible when brands choose meaning over performance metrics.
📣 When Shouting Worked 📣
The direct-to-consumer (DTC) boom of 2012-2015 feels almost quaint now. Like a distant dream where venture capitalists threw millions at anyone who promised to "disrupt" perfectly functional industries with sans serif fonts and cute packaging.
The VC money flowed freely (and most of it went straight to Facebook/Instagram ads). Dollar Shave Club and Warby Parker each launched with $10-15 million in funding just to get started. Then came Harry's and Bombas in 2013, Casper and Glossier in 2014, Away in 2015, Allbirds in 2016. Every category suddenly needed its direct-to-consumer savior, each promising to cut out the middleman (while essentially becoming the middleman themselves, an irony lost on exactly no one).
Pretty soon, everyone wanted to be the Warby Parker of something: razors, vitamins, furniture, pet food.
By 2019, brands like Casper, Away, and Glossier had all hit billion-dollar valuations within five years of launching.
But look. The early DTC playbook worked insanely well partly because social advertising was genuinely cheap in 2014. Brands could spend $50 to acquire a customer who'd spend $100 on their first order, and investors were happy to fund that growth based on projected customer lifetime value (LTV).
It created an expectation that you could build a billion-dollar brand through social ads alone. An expectation that's impossible to meet today with customer acquisition costs having risen 222% in just over a decade.
🗣️ When Everyone Started Screaming 🗣️
DTC isn’t dead, but it’s definitely changed. Look at the recent casualties:
Outdoor Voices acquired after closing stores and firing staff in June 2024
Allbirds closing stores and shifting to distributor model in March 2024
SmileDirectClub declaring bankruptcy in Dec 2023
Parade sold in Aug 2023 after struggling to raise money
Everlane taking on debt just to maintain inventory
Winc, the wine subscription box, declared bankruptcy in Dec 2022
Casper going private in Nov 2021 after lackluster public trading
There are many factors at play here (soaring shipping costs, supply chain chaos, fragmented consumer attention, etc etc). But I'm not here to write a DTC obituary.
I'm curious about something specific: how the two cornerstones of DTC's performance marketing strategy - cheap customer acquisition and clear measurement - have completely crumbled.
Let's talk numbers. A SimplicityDX study found that over the last ten years, customer acquisition costs have risen by 222%. "In two years, it's basically doubled to tripled," says David Herrman, a social media ad buyer. "In the U.S. the cost to reach 1,000 people on Facebook jumped from $6 to as much as $18." (This Herrman quote is from a 2022 CNBC report, so CAC may be even higher by now.)
But it's not just that social ads are expensive—they're also harder to track. Thanks to Apple's privacy changes, we can't even properly measure if these costly campaigns are working.
The very tools that made performance marketing so attractive to DTC brands—precise targeting, clear attribution, measurable ROI—have been breaking down.
My preferred move: shift more of your ad dollars to brand-building instead.
🤫 When Silence Became Valuable 🤫
When the playbook that built billion-dollar brands stops working, most brands' first instinct is to double down: Maybe if we just make more content. Maybe if we just try more campaign versions on Instagram ads. Maybe if we get our employees to act/perform on TikTok.
It's understandable. The knee-jerk reaction when hiring a social media agency is often "make more content for us." And yes, there's merit to that approach for some brands. If you're selling $6 noodles like Immi or pushing a free language app like Duolingo, flooding feeds with trial-and-error content can work.
But not every brand needs to be pumping out a firehose of content. Not every product needs a daily TikTok strategy. Often, it's about the right content, in the right places, targeting the right people.
Here are two interesting brand-building moves worth studying, from Calm, a meditation app, and Tracksmith, a running apparel brand.
🧘 Exhibit A: Calm, the meditation app 🧘
During election night coverage, when everyone else was fighting for attention, Calm made a fascinating choice with their media spend: 30 seconds of pure silence. No product shots. No download prompts. No calls to action. Just quiet.
This wasn't about driving app downloads - it was about meeting a cultural moment. They first tested this in 2020 with 30 seconds of rainfall on leaves during election coverage, which drove a 248% increase in social mentions. For 2024, they went even bolder: complete silence. As Calm's VP of Brand Marketing notes, "That silence is actually the thing that is going to draw people in."
But here's what makes it smart brand building: they didn't just buy expensive TV time and hope for the best. They created a complete ecosystem for stressed viewers to land in:
They opened a whole free section of Calm content for “election season support,” which gives new users a product demo, of course
This included a mindfulness series called "Navigating Through World Events" with Jay Shetty, and a sleep story called “The American Dream,” celebrating some of the country’s greatest moments, places, and famous faces
From Nov. 5-7, the crucial days of polling, they partnered with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance to host a calming zoo livestream on Instagram as counterprogramming to the chaotic feeds. (They also gave people tuning in a chance to win a 1-year Calm subscription.)
They showed up meaningfully for people and sweated every little detail. Amazing.
🧘 Exhibit B: Tracksmith, a running apparel brand 🧘
Take Tracksmith, a Boston-born running apparel brand built specifically for serious runners—runners who structure their lives around training and racing but aren't professionals.
Their approach to brand building centers on cinematic storytelling that speaks directly to this audience. Their "That's Running" series (below) celebrates the tiny details only serious runners would recognize: a pair of shoes drying by the fire, legs up against a wall after a long run, a water bottle placed on a mailbox along a route. These aren't product videos—they're love letters to the running community.
As founder Matt Taylor puts it: “[Y]ou can’t buy authenticity or credibility. Instead, they’re earned over a long period of time with consistent, sustained efforts. So although we do spend some money on tactics that have an immediate return, we’re more committed to the little things that don’t, but that do pay dividends establishing a connection with our customers and instilling our brand values in a way that will continue to resonate. You can’t do that with a Facebook ad.”
This approach shows in their dedication to community events (they host a community-driven long run every single Sunday, all year round, in Boston and London) as well as their video strategy.
The results speak for themselves: their Year of the Amateur film series has garnered between 1-3 million views per film. These aren't viral hits designed for maximum reach—they're carefully crafted stories that resonate deeply with their exact target audience.
Taylor adds, “We have big ambitions for content, it’s one of the best entry points to the brand, especially when digital advertising and social media is so fickle. In the long term we believe that creating content that inspires people, alongside community, will have a much stronger and longer-lasting impact than any other.”
I mean… how many times have millennial-coded brands “invested” in a video project, only to create these supposedly “inspiring stories” following some tired, tired template of interviews + montage, pandering to the lowest common denominator of audiences, then declaring the project “not the best use of resources” because it only got 1K views?I say too many to count. Take notes from the extremely targeted/niche storylines below.
What I Hope This Means for 2025
Both as a brand strategist and a consumer, I'm hopeful that all of this digital fatigue results to brands being forced to get more thoughtful about how they show up in people's lives.
(Especially as TikTok is now letting creators become literal merch dropshippers, connecting them directly with factories. And then you've got Amazon over here trying to beat out the Temu with crazy cheap prices - $20 sofas (!?!!), $13 guitars (!!!?), that kind of thing. It's just turning into this total shitshow of more noise, more stuff, more JUNK we probably don't really need.)
As we head into planning season, I won't pretend to have prescriptive advice about where to put your marketing dollars. But I hope the insights and examples I’ve shared above give you food for thought—and some ammo to throw at naysayers in your team. ;-)
Up next, Part 2. We'll dive into something I'm particularly obsessed with: why talking to actual humans might be your best investment in 2025.
Not focus groups, not surveys, but real conversations with people about why they buy what they buy, why they care about what they care about.
Because here's what I've learned after years of working in user research: the most unique insights rarely come from data dashboards. They come from asking good questions and actually listening to the answers.
Make sure to subscribe to get Part 2 in your inbox, and if you found this useful at all, I would appreciate sharing it on your notes/feed/group chats/Slack channels. Thank you! 🙏
In the meantime, feel free to share in the comments below: See something interesting happening in brand building? Drop it in the comments - especially those quiet brand moves that fly under the radar. Your city probably has examples I'm missing.
‘Til next time, nerds—
Arriane
This is excellent — so thorough. Thank you for writing it.
Excellent article. thank you.