Doom Scroll.
Ever notice how a phrase can go from coinage to cliché at the speed of, what, self-promotion? Bloviation? AI?
“Doom loop” being right up there on the crash cart.
So far, at least by my reckoning, we’ve been blessed with the "urban doom loop" (San Francisco), the "municipal fiscal doom loop" (Chicago), the "downtown crime doom loop" (Portland), the "sovereign debt doom loop" (Italy), the retail doom loop (zillions of malls), the "transportation doom loop” (Philadelphia), the "social media loneliness doom loop" (New York Times), the "political doom loop" (no guessing required) and, of course, the ever popular "climate doom loop" pretty much covering the whole of Planet Earth.
Somehow, I doubt you'll be much surprised to find that advertising has a not-so-virtuous cycle to call its very own.
It’s the "attention doom loop," and it’s a real puzzle why nobody is talking, much less doing, anything about it.
Being entirely lazy, I asked Perplexity.AI to upchuck a quick summary: "An ‘attention doom loop’ is a self-reinforcing cycle featuring ever-increasing volumes of stimuli that fragment and exhaust people’s limited attention. In advertising, this shows up as brands and platforms chasing short-term engagement with louder, more interruptive tactics that collectively erode the very attention they depend on."
Me, I'd put it more so:
Brands, following the "thou shalt" of the content grifters and the dictates of cost-cutting CFOs, put out as much cheap crap as possible, and on the cheapest possible media. This shitstorm of dull devours whatever spare attention people had, while doing nothing for brand aside from some clicks, likes, and similar ephemera, now repackaged as “proof” that we need to double down by pumping out even more uninteresting crap, sprayed by an even bigger firehose — thank god AI makes it pennies to produce — until nobody is paying any attention at all.
And so it goes. All combining in predictively corrosive ways to render advertising less effective and/or efficient.
It would be a vast understatement to call this an industry “problem.” "Killer" would be more on target, and the fact is, there are really only two solutions. The one, requiring a vast collective commitment to frequency caps and similar volume reducers, evokes images of airborne pigs, blue baby faces, and hell imitating this last winter in New York.
What’s left are three simple and entirely imperative words: Don’t. Be. Dull.
Which, as it happens, is absolutely pragmatically doable, assuming you have the team and the talent, with a value that’s conclusively data-demonstrated.
And maybe that’s one way advertising’s doom loop differs from your other sorts. For them, it’s all about collective action and Ben Franklin’s “if we do not hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”
For us, it’s about being distinctive with the risk that a failure to stand out separately condemns us all to drown together.
Thus endeth the doom scroll.
