The Death Of Rented Attention: Why CMOs Are Leaning Into Experiential

"Digital marketing promised control. Instead, it turned brands into tenants. For the past decade, marketing has been refreshingly simple: Buy media, optimize creative, watch the dashboards, repeat. It was efficient. It was scalable. It was also building your brand house on someone else's land. At any time, platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon can change the rules-or worse, change the algorithm without telling you."

"The problem isn't that digital stopped working. It's that we stopped building brand assets that compound- signature experiences, owned channels, communities and the like. Over the past decade, the infatuation with digital ads pulled investment out of brand building and tangible real-world assets, but that's changing in a big way now."

"Research by Boston Consulting Group shows how important brand marketing still is-every $1 cut from brand spend today can cost brands $1.92 in future investment just to win back the "mind share" they gave up."

Digital marketing promised efficiency and scalability but left brands dependent on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that control algorithms and can change rules unilaterally. CMOs increasingly recognize experiential marketing as core infrastructure rather than optional brand moments because it represents one of the few truly owned marketing channels. Research shows cutting brand spend costs $1.92 in future investment to recover lost mind share. Consumer attention remains fixed at approximately six hours daily per person and isn't growing, while advertisers proliferate. This creates pressure to build compounding brand assets through owned channels, signature experiences, and communities rather than relying on ephemeral digital advertising.

Read at Forbes