Wildly important to irrelevant in 12 seconds.
This is not a car ad (and not a slow-to-accelerate car ad either). This headline is also not a stat. It’s a real experience. An experience that summarizes the current attention economy and its impact on our ability to process important matters. And, to bring it back to brand storytelling, it highlights the need to not only stand out, but also have enough stopping power to make it into our memory banks.
You’ve all heard the unfathomable numbers about how many pieces of content we’re bombarded with daily - it’s been a staggering stat for years, and that number just keeps growing exponentially. According to a new 2025 McKinsey report, we’re at the point where consumers’ time is finite yet how they can spend that time and what they watch online is infinite.
The real experience happened last week on Instagram. It began with literal earth-shattering news. A post that pointed out how David Suzuki believes we’ve crossed the seventh of nine planetary boundaries, and we’re past the point of reversing climate change. Terrifying. Very relevant to my life. But I kept scrolling - truly doomscrolling. Before I knew, I was three more posts in, and I was reading about Lizzo’s workout routine. Not relevant to my life whatsoever. However, I arguably spent a similar amount of time on each post — from climate disaster to celebrity news in 12 seconds. It wasn’t until I stopped to think about it that it occurred to me how easy it is to scroll past even the most important news. News that would have been the day’s big headline and water-cooler talk in years past, just took up a couple of quick seconds before it was nearly forgotten. Once again, terrifying.
So, how are we forgetting such important things so quickly? Are we scrolling too quickly that our minds can’t keep up? Is the abundance of content affecting our memory and ability to process information?
Enter the term “brain rot,” one that I thought only referred to teens’ feeds and a Skibidi toilet. Brain rot was Oxford’s 2024 word of the year. Unpacking that is a separate post. It’s largely defined as the negative impact of consuming loads of low-quality and low-value content. The impacts of said brain rot are unsurprisingly not positive -it’s reducing our attention spans. And in turn, that is impacting our short-term memory because we can’t fully register info that we are only partially taking in. It’s not reaching our long-term storage. It’s lost somewhere in the clutter of our messy front rooms.
Given this, it’s not surprising that I scrolled past David Suzuki’s news. If I hadn’t been in a self-reflective mood, I might have forgotten it altogether. What I remembered was that his news was bad, and I couldn’t have retold it without looking it up.
Attention is the metric. It’s no surprise that it’s being coined as today’s economy. Without it, we’re just telling brilliant stories that are floating around aimlessly in the depths of lost data, perhaps with our lost socks.
Grabbing attention means truly understanding the target and where they are. And then standing out loudly.
