Marketing learned to attract attention, but forgot what to do with it | MarTech

I remember seeing the famous Dollar Shave Club commercial “Our knives are fucking amazing“For the first time. Someone walked up to my desk and said, “You have to see this.” It’s certainly absurd, but that was the point. It made the point: “Dollar Shave Club razors are better, cheaper and easier to find than the competition.”

Within two days, Dollar Shave Club had 12,000 orders and their servers crashed. Within three years they reached $152 million in sales. In 2016, Unilever bought them for $1 billion.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was witnessing the birth of something new and misunderstood: the attention economy.

Learning the wrong lesson

After the ad went viral, I saw hundreds of copycats. None worked.

To quote Basher from “Ocean’s 13”: “You don’t do the same joke twice. You do the next joke.” Marketers tried and failed because they learned the wrong lesson.

The Dollar Shave Club ad worked because it used novelty to cut through the noise, allowing a single, concrete claim to resonate with the viewer. The comedy was just a delivery mechanism.

Dig Deeper: Why CreativeOps and MOps Can’t Survive Independently

However, marketing has been given a simpler solution: attract attention at all costs. Over the next decade, all the training, tools, and incentives tried to do just that, but mostly failed. They lost the second half of the story: having something credible and valuable to say once you got attention. Clearly, that’s more important than most teams realize.

The credibility gap

Over the past three months, dozens of people have pitched me about writing a book. They use the same metric in their pitch: When it says “author” next to your name, it’s easier to grab the attention of your target audience because the author’s title gives you credibility. That scares me.

People hire ghostwriters to buy credibility with their good writing and clear thoughts. The existence of so many ghostwriting companies shows that many people and companies recognize that a lack of credibility is a problem. It shows that customers no longer respond to attention-grabbing advertisements as they used to. It also shows that marketers must prepare for the next ‘economy’: the trust economy.

You can’t buy credibility

When too many people fight for customer attention, and too few people have anything valuable to say, marketers double down on the credibility of their purchase. But if everyone has “author” or some other fabricated title next to their name, the title becomes meaningless.

You can’t buy credibility. And borrowed credibility doesn’t go over well. It decays quickly under supervision.

Credibility must be earned through experience. There is a difference between 10 years of marketing experience and a year you repeat 10 times.

Attention is still important. Novelty and humor are still important. But the next phase of marketing won’t reward the eyes so much as those who are still reliable once attention has been captured. That’s a shift that many marketing teams I’ve worked with don’t prepare for.

Dig deeper: 3 brand mistakes that AI will continue to amplify in 2026

Here are three rules marketing teams can use to start building credibility today.

1: Use novelty to make usefulness unmistakable

In 2006, Microsoft teamed up with comedian Demetri Martin to roll out Windows Vista, its next operating system. The campaign was smart, funny and well funded. It got great marks and won awards. It also failed to boost sales of Windows Vista, and many users opted to stick with Windows XP.

When people were asked about the campaign, they remembered Demetri Martin, but not why Vista was better than XP. Dollar Shave Club used absurdity to grab attention while making an important point. Novelty was a tool, not the point. Microsoft made novelty the goal and forgot that attention is not the same as trust. They forgot that selling is the art of getting someone to trust you to solve their painful problems.

2: Never make a claim you can’t defend in a hostile room

A few minutes into a sales call, a founder said, “Our customer retention is 90%.” I knew it wasn’t true. I’ve spent years reviewing the retention data of companies under $10 million. Such figures do not yet exist at that time.

So I asked how they measured it. There was a pause, then a clarification, and then the truth came out. Retention was closer to 20%. At that point the meeting was effectively over. I doubt I was the only prospect to walk away that week.

Not because the song was bad. Early-stage SaaS retention is ugly. It is because their claim failed to pass basic scrutiny. If they had tried to hide something so fundamental, what else were they hiding?

That’s how credibility works. You can’t fake it. It is earned by knowing why something is true because you have stress-tested it against reality. In credibility economics, every claim is examined. And those that cannot be defended disqualify you completely.

3: Don’t pretend to have security you haven’t earned

Last month I got a LinkedIn message from a guy not yet old enough to drink, who promised in no uncertain terms: “5 qualified lead calls per week with your exact target audience.” No context or conditions. Pure bravado. I ignored it.

Regardless of age, anyone who has tried to book buyer conversations knows how many variables can destroy that promise. You learn those limits by failing. He hadn’t failed enough yet. Markets are very good at signaling this mismatch.

He is far from alone. Many people think that outperforming the competition will increase confidence in their product or service. It does the opposite. It reduces trust.

The alternative to bold claims is not timid ones, but credible ones. Credible operators don’t make big promises. They make precise. They know exactly what they can and cannot do, and are not afraid to share both.

The coming correction

This is an uncomfortable time for marketing. I see teams that are very good at being seen, but increasingly poor at being believed. They are optimized for attention, while ignoring the credibility they need when people no longer believe every claim they hear. That shift is already happening.

Buyers make fewer impulsive decisions. Sales cycles are longer and more thorough. Posts that used to convert don’t because they lack credibility.

Dig deeper: what efficiency-oriented martech gets wrong when it comes to creativity

When markets tighten and capital becomes cautious, the margin for error disappears. Every purchasing decision is vetted as if someone’s career is on the line, because it probably is. Brands that cannot explain where, when and why they are right are quietly and immediately disqualified.

The teams that win in the future won’t do so by being louder than everyone else. They will do it because their claims remain under a microscope. Because they know that attention can be rented, but credibility must be earned.

When the market shifts from rewarding attention to demanding credibility, will you know how to build it? Or have you been focused on attention for so long that you’re not even sure where to start?