Belief one: human attention is destroyed.

We're essentially at the level of a 3-year-old. The whole internet is now built around the idea of the feed. Everything has to happen within the first 5-7 seconds of any type of content. If your hook doesn't capture, you have nothing.

The whole creative industry is built around how to exploit something that's already a settled fact: you can't hold the attention of an adult human online for more than a few seconds.

Belief two: your customer is a slow, careful deliberator who makes considered, logical decisions.

Open any attribution tool, or their content, and you'll be bombarded with ideas of the customer journey, the conversion window, multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modelling.... 200 points here, 200 points there.... This is how we get them into the funnel, this is how we nurture attention, convert attention...

Essentially diagrams and diagrams of a person moving thoughtfully from awareness to conversion, weighing your brand at every stage like they're choosing a spouse.

Is this a person who can't hold a thought for eight seconds, or a genius who spends several weeks in quiet, peaceful deliberation about a $60 product?

Please don't tell me both, because it isn't.

[Now, before someone jumps in: yes, there are industries where the journey is real. If you're selling $2M enterprise software, or a house, or anything with a procurement team attached, there genuinely are 15 stakeholders, 6 months, and a spreadsheet involved. That's a real deliberation, and I'm not talking about it. I'm talking about my world, and to my audience — D2C, performance marketing, a $60 product and a distracted human with a thumb.]

If you're trying to understand what's going on in their head during those 50 days of deliberation, you'll be in for a big surprise.... Because most likely it's: nothing!

They saw your ad and scrolled past.

Saw it again well later, half-noticed the name, kept scrolling.

Then on a random Tuesday something flipped (and you literally have no idea what) and they wanted the thing.

That's the whole boring story. One moment of decision, preceded by a ton of noise.

Attribution software takes that log and dresses it up as a 50-day consideration window with 15 multi-channel touchpoints.

But as you'd guess, nobody was considering anything for 50 days. You don't wake up on day 23 and think: should I still buy that moisturizer I saw 23 days ago, then again 12 days ago, and then 6 days ago — but that time it was on Reddit?

Those touchpoints aren't steps of deliberation. They're just you being ignored, and that ignorance logged and timestamped.

The customer journey, most of the time [again — in the D2C and performance marketing world, not enterprise], is an artefact of the logging, not a description of customer psychology.

The tool measures the distance between first impression and purchase, then narrates that gap as a mental process.

The gap is real.

The process is fiction.

As you can already guess, the two facts aren't actually in contradiction.

Attention is short, so each ad does almost nothing. The buying moment takes weeks to arrive and seconds to happen, triggered by life, not by a touchpoint.

So why does everyone sell long conversion windows and complicated customer journeys?

Because if a customer makes a quick, simple decision, that customer doesn't need much measuring. A customer on a multi-touch odyssey needs software, dashboards, models, and a team to read them.

[And to be clear, none of this means measurement is useless — it means most of what's being measured in my world is noise dressed as insight.]

The complicated customer isn't your customer. It's their product.

— Brat

P.S. If you'd rather have the boring story measured honestly than a 15-touchpoint saga — that's what we're building. Join the waitlist or poke around the demo.