A Scarce Commodity: The Attention Economy
Image: ronstik / Adobe Stock
Your customers are bombarded with messages hundreds of times a day, and they’re tired of it. It used to be TV commercials and billboards, but with more people working from home, it frequently has to do with the phone that’s constantly in our hands. Studies have shown the average cell phone user picks up his or her phone 58 times a day —roughly once every 15 minutes.1
The gravitational pull of the phone’s newsfeed is strong, and our attention spans are weakening. A quick example is the lost art of reading books. An article in last fall’s The Atlantic titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” said college professors no longer assign full books to read — only chapters or segments — as students can’t seem to find the focus to read a whole book.2
This lack of focus also extends to video. Over the years, Netflix has consistently shared that viewers decide whether to watch a show within five to seven seconds of first starting it. Therefore, Netflix instructed its producers to start the show in mid-action, such as an explosion or a terrifying fight. Netflix even went so far as to tell its writers to have their characters “tell what they are doing,” just in case people have the show on in the background while doing something else and can still follow along.3
This is your customer today: Someone who is unable to focus, exhausted from too many digital distractions and, likely, still multitasking.
Welcome to trying to sell a product or service to this individual — now known as the “Attention Economy.”
Time Is Money: The User Experience
The Attention Economy represents a fundamental shift from traditional sales-based marketing to competing for customer attention and engagement. For retailers, understanding these principles is crucial as human attention has become a scarce commodity that drives purchasing decisions.
You must grab their attention — and keep it — first, before you can sell to them.
We can produce more widgets and offer additional educational classes. Still, two things we are unable to generate more of are time and attention.
The Attention Economy, as defined by Wikipedia, refers to the “incentives of advertising-driven companies, particularly to maximize the time and attention their users devote to their products.”
How are you incentivizing people to pay attention to you?
Software applications either explicitly or implicitly consider the Attention Economy in their user interface design because if it takes the user too long to locate something, they will likely find it through another application. Consider a customer visiting your website. If the site takes too long to load, they might leave to find the thing they were seeking elsewhere. This means having a “mobile first” responsive website is no longer a “want” but a “need.” Examples include prioritizing vertical video and incorporating interactive features to keep users engaged.
With our “TikTok brains” (a term first coined by a Wall Street Journal author in early 2022), we flit from one task, window or social media platform to another without possibly realizing what we are doing.
The Attention Economy is so extensive and encompassing that Amazon even dedicated a guide to its advertisers.4 Amazon offered three ways to navigate the Attention Economy: break through the clutter with content audiences love, be memorable (lift brand recall) and create lasting relationships.
Let’s review in the context of the shooting industry:
1. Break Through The Clutter With Content Your Audience Loves
Three keys to developing a marketing strategy that keeps attention are to have a strong focus on storytelling, visually compelling designs and delivering quality over quantity. It is a must to know your ideal customer, as you need to know how content will resonate with them and then motivate them to share it.
If you can’t find the time or energy to share three to five posts per week on social media, then focus on one or two posts weekly and make them good.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has shared the biggest takeaways for posts showing up in your followers’ feeds are shares, saves and making it a video. Mosseri explained “sends per reach” is a vital metric.5 Sends or shares metrics indicate how many people shared a post after viewing it, emphasizing the importance of content that sparks conversations and connections among users.
Ask your customers what they want by hosting a poll on Instagram Stories, scheduling an AMA (Ask Me Anything) every Friday as Mosseri does or starting a Broadcast Channel on Instagram for your most engaged followers. (Instagram offers tips for starting a channel in its Help Center.)
2. Be Memorable
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then it’s easy to say humans process visuals faster than text. And the visual of choice social media platform CEOs are pushing? Video. From Mosseri to LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky, video keeps people on the platform longer.
Bloomberg reported in May 2025 that “LinkedIn will begin sharing advertising revenue with creators for the first time, as video content boosts the amount of time people spend on the site.”6
Hesitant to do more video? Here are three tips:
• Start behind the scenes, not in front of the camera. While having a “face” to the brand is ideal, you can still focus on the team at work, creating the product, customer spotlights or even using animated graphics, which are now much easier to create with AI.
• Embrace the “imperfect” and start small. Authenticity trumps polish. Audiences prefer genuine, slightly rough content over overly produced videos that feel fake. And batch create! Record multiple short clips (30 seconds or less) in one session when you are feeling confident.
• Repurpose existing content and leverage your team. You likely already have video-worthy content. Consider turning blog posts into quick video summaries with text overlays and voiceovers (again, AI can help here). And consider transforming customer testimonials into quote graphics with background footage.
3. Create Lasting Relationships
Finally, let’s look at creating relationships from a shopping experience — whether in-person or online.
What if the color or size they want is not available? They’ll abandon the cart or leave the store. Are they not getting free shipping and returns? Forget it. Do they have to take their credit card out of their wallet? They’ll leave it for another day. Consumers want a frictionless experience. They’ll remember a good brand experience, however.
You should respond to direct messages (DMs) and emails within 24 hours, just as you should train employees to be able to answer any in-store questions at the time of sale. Another approach is as simple as offering QR codes at checkout to immediately sign up for a class at the point of sale versus giving them a piece of paper with a website and a coupon code for them to use later. (There is no “later;” their attention is gone to something else.)
Consider placing QR codes on the sales shelf for products, just in case their color of choice or size isn’t available — help them order right then and there from your store versus leaving and potentially buying from a competitor.
Chick-fil-A is known for its memorable customer experience. (Search “Chick-fi-A viral customer service” and you’ll see why.) When approaching the counter in a store, employees are ready and waiting with a smile — not with their heads buried in their phones. Sometimes, being memorable is as simple as doing what’s right by putting the customer first.
Practical Applications
There are practical applications for all three strategies above:
• Product Demonstrations: Use video content to showcase products, accessories and features.
• Educational Content: Create how-to guides, either static images, videos or animated.
• Community Building: Foster engagement through customer stories and experiences.
• Micro-Content: Develop short-form content for social media platforms.
• Personalization: Tailor content to specific shooting disciplines (hunting, sport shooting, tactical).
The most successful brands don’t just grab attention — they create moments worth remembering.
A “Worthy” Focus
Think about your own experiences as a consumer. The purchases you remember aren’t the ones with the flashiest ads but the ones where someone took the time to understand your needs, solved your problem or simply made you feel valued. Chick-fil-A employees in viral videos aren’t following a complex marketing strategy — they’re just genuinely excited to serve customers well.
As these strategies are being considered, remember behind every click, view and purchase is a real person navigating their own overwhelming digital world. When you help them find what they need quickly and treat them well in the process, you’re not just winning the attention game — you’re making their day a little better, and they’re likely to return.
In the end, the Attention Economy isn’t about tricks or hacks. It’s about earning the privilege of someone’s time by making it worthwhile and offering them something no one else can. And that’s something worth focusing on, even in our distracted world.
Footnotes:
1. explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
2. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945
3. worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-writers-to-have-characters-announce-what-theyre-doing-just-in-case-viewer-is-busy-doing-something-else
4. advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/attention-economy
5. balanssocial.com/post/unveiling-instagrams-algorithm-with-adam-mosseri
6. tinyurl.com/bloomberg-linkedin-share
