The attention bottleneck

Getting your ad on TV or your track on the radio used to mean you’d made it.

Distribution was the bottleneck. Attention followed.

Today, you can reach more people from your bedroom than a national agency could in the 90s. But no one celebrates running their first Facebook ad.

That’s because distribution is no longer scarce - but attention is.

We see thousands of brand messages a day. Emails, promoted posts, sponsored video clips, in-feed whitepapers, chatbot prompts, search ads, retargeting loops. Every one designed to be relevant. Every one hoping we’re in-market.

And most of it disappears without trace.

The real challenge in B2B marketing isn’t access. It’s being remembered after the tab closes, the meeting ends, and the buying committee moves on.

But in the race to optimise, most are blending in.

Hyper-targeting isn’t the answer

The promise of hyper-targeting was clarity: send the right message to the right person at the right time.

The reality is clutter.

Study after study shows that ultra-narrow targeting in B2B isn’t just flawed - it’s often wasteful. Gartner’s research on the B2B buying journey shows why: buying groups are messy, cross-functional, and full of people a media platform may never see. Third-party firmographic and demographic data is riddled with errors. Audiences move. Buying groups change. And many real decision-makers are invisible to the data.

Mark Ritson has made the broader case against over-trusting precision targeting for the same reason: the people a platform can target are not the same as the full market that can remember you.

What’s more, if you only speak to who the spreadsheet tells you to, you miss everyone else - future buyers, influencers, even internal champions.

You narrow your message. You narrow your impact.

And paradoxically, you often pay more for it. The tighter the segment, the higher the CPM - and the less room for serendipity or salience.

Broad targeting may feel inefficient. But it builds memory with more people, more often - and in B2B, that’s what wins in the long run.

When everyone optimises, everything looks the same

The problem isn’t targeting alone. It’s what we do with the data.

Marketing teams under pressure follow the path of least resistance: what’s worked before. Best-practice playbooks. The content formats that get clicks. The messaging frameworks that convert.

And if your competitors are doing the same - reading the same reports, chasing the same personas, using the same tools - your campaigns start to converge.

Every whitepaper starts with the same stats. Every landing page says “seamless,” “secure,” “simple.” Every ad uses the same visuals. You’re not standing out. You’re harmonising.

This is the problem Tom Roach describes when he writes about attention and creativity: efficient delivery means very little if the work itself doesn’t earn attention.

Mark Ritson calls a related drift “tactification” - the slide from strategy into a heap of optimised activity.

So you get more iteration.

More default.

More work that looks like marketing before it looks like anything a person might remember.

Data tells you what worked - not what will

Optimisation isn’t inherently bad. But it should be the second move, not the first.

Data tells you what happened. It tells you what worked, in what context, for what audience. It doesn’t tell you what people haven’t seen yet - or what might surprise them.

And the more brands follow the same insights, the less insight any of it has.

It’s the paradox of efficiency: by trying to minimise waste, you maximise sameness.

Barry Schwartz called this the Paradox of Choice - too many similar options overwhelm decision-making. In B2B, it’s more like the paradox of similarity: when everything looks alike, it’s easier to ignore all of it.

That’s how content overload turns into content apathy.

Attention loves difference

To stand out in a saturated environment, difference matters more than precision.

LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that only around 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any one time. That means brand-building - creating mental availability long before intent signals appear - is essential.

And what builds brands? Usually not rational feature lists or gated PDFs.

Campaigns that get remembered give people something to attach to the brand: surprise, emotion, a story, a look, a line, a repeated association.

They earn attention, rather than buying more impressions and hoping memory appears afterwards.

The IPA and WARC work on dull advertising makes the same point from the other side: playing safe can make the media bill do work the creative should have done.

And yet, 80% of B2B ads tested by System1 scored just one star out of five for emotional impact.

The high cost of playing safe

If your ad looks like an ad, and your blog reads like every other blog, what reason does a buyer have to remember you?

In many industries, brands have optimised themselves into invisibility. The result: more spend to achieve the same results.

Or worse - buyers don’t just ignore your content, they downgrade their perception of you because of it.

Edelman’s research with LinkedIn keeps showing the positive version of this: good thought leadership can help buyers build confidence, persuade colleagues, and shortlist suppliers. The ugly mirror is obvious enough. Bad content doesn’t just waste budget. It costs you trust.

Distinctiveness doesn’t mean guesswork

Being bold doesn’t mean being random.

The best creative work is rooted in insight - but it goes beyond what the numbers say.

It sees what the audience sees. It notices what others ignore. It finds the awkward bit in the situation and turns it into something the market can recognise.

The Ehrenberg-Bass distinction between differentiation and distinctiveness is useful here: in crowded categories, being easy to recognise often matters more than proving you are uniquely different.

This is where creative bravery still needs structure. The point is not to let teams do anything. It is to give them enough room to invent something worth repeating.

Creativity is a commercial multiplier

This isn’t about art for art’s sake.

When you create media that surprises, moves, or delights your audience, the rest of the system has more to work with.

A remembered ad makes the next message less cold. A distinctive story gives sales something to point to. A recognisable brand makes the product easier to place when the buying conversation starts.

As Stephan Vogel from Ogilvy said:

“Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. It’s more memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spend, and builds a fan community faster.”

Even the most advanced data strategy can’t fix a campaign no one notices.

AI can help - but the risk must still be human

There’s a lot of fear about AI in marketing right now.

Some of it’s justified. Some of it’s moral panic.

But in B2B - where attention is sparse, and sameness is the status quo - AI makes the sameness easier to produce.

It can speed things up. It can help us iterate, test, produce at scale. It’s useful for generating content and tightening execution.

But it won’t commit to a creative direction.

It won’t take a risk and stand by it.

It won’t fight for an idea in the face of internal critique and market indifference.

Attention doesn’t come from creative safety. It comes from decisions that feel awkward at first because they’re actually distinct.

Take the Jaguar rebrand.

The creative direction was widely mocked - elegant heritage swapped for a sterile future. The execution felt hollow.

But imagine if they’d truly committed. If every brand touchpoint, every ad, every driving experience carried that new aesthetic with consistency and conviction. Over time, the awkwardness would soften. Memory would take hold.

The problem wasn’t just the design. It was the lack of intent to endure.

Because what makes something distinctive isn’t just the idea. It’s how long you live with it.

AI can’t do that.

It can help us make.

But only humans decide what’s worth making.

Only humans carry the weight of taste, judgement, and commitment over time.

And that’s what cuts through.

The real bottleneck

We talk about distribution. About precision, reach, optimisation.

But the real bottleneck is attention - and we don’t earn it by playing the same tune as everyone else.

We earn it by being recognisable enough to be found again in memory.

By taking a creative direction that might be uncomfortable - and holding to it until it becomes part of the brand.

By making work that feels risky, not just relevant.

In B2B, that’s a shift in posture.

From being correct to being remembered.

From following what works to creating what lasts.

When everything can be Ctrl + Alt + Copied, creativity is the only real disruption.