We Have A Trust Problem, Not Just A Reach Problem

I can hear it now, "What did you think was going to happen?" We say people are tired of scrolling. But people scroll for hours a day, happily, when the content is good. So scrolling can't be the disease. The disease has to be something more specific, perhaps a learned defensiveness. We users have been trained, ad by ad, to treat the feed as a place where we get interrupted rather than a place where we participate.

That's the smartest part of a recent industry argument making the rounds suggesting the shift in marketing isn't about reach anymore, but instead it's about relationships. Ergo, attention is moving from public broadcast to private, intentional exchange, including DMs, close friends, small groups, and brands that treat this like a new billboard will lose, while brands that treat it like a conversation will win.

I think this reframe is, for the most part, correct. Differentiation in a crowded feed matters less than we think, because by the time your ad appears, the user's mind is already in defense mode. Now you're competing against a filter that was built by a hundred bad ads before yours, and you're definitely not competing on creativity. What then does this practical shift imply? I posit that it is better to stop asking "how do I break through the noise" and instead start asking "how do I avoid triggering the filter in the first place."

But this same argument, while not necessarily wrong, should be read the way you'd read any claim made by someone with a stake in your believing it. It is a useful lens offered by a motivated messenger.

More on that in Part 2, where we'll look at the psychology this argument leans on and where that psychology quietly overpromises.