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That's the problem only a few people in marketing like to say out loud. When every brand follows the same playbook for grabbing attention, grabbing attention starts to look identical. Loud stops being distinctive when everyone is loud. Funny stops standing out when every brand has hired the same kind of funny.
So perhaps the question needs to change. Instead of asking "How do we stop the scroll?", brands might get further by asking "Why would anyone want to stop for us?"
There are two ways to get someone to look at you. You can demand it, or you can earn it.
Demanding attention is a car alarm. Everyone turns their head, so in the narrowest sense it works. But nobody feels any warmth towards the car, and by the third time that week they've stopped turning round at all. A lot of "scroll-stopping" creatives behave exactly like this. Shock openers, bait headlines and frantic editing buy a second or two of looking without giving anyone a reason to care who's behind it.
Earning attention is closer to spotting a friend across a busy room. Your eyes go there because the face is familiar and you want to see it. There's no trick involved. The attention is given freely, and that's precisely what makes it valuable.
This matters because attention on its own was never the prize. What brands want is for that moment of looking to leave something behind: a memory, a feeling, a slightly stronger link between the brand and a need. Demanded attention often leaves nothing. Earned attention tends to leave a trace.
Dashboards reward whatever held eyeballs the longest last week. Teams copy what worked, platforms push what's trending, and within months the same tactics have spread across every category. A bank, a crisp brand and a skincare start-up end up using the same formats, the same captions and quite often the same creators.
The result is a strange sort of camouflage. Brands put more effort than ever into being noticed and become harder than ever to tell apart. Someone can watch your video to the very end and, ten minutes later, have no idea whose it was.
We touched on this in our piece on the Memory Test: if you removed the logo from your last ten posts, would anyone know they were yours? For plenty of brands locked in the attention race, the answer is no.
Behavioural science offers a far more useful vocabulary than "engagement". Four ideas in particular explain why some brands get attention without having to beg for it.
Salience. In an explanation used by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, salience has little to do with being eye-catching. It's about how easily a brand comes to mind when someone is ready to buy. A brand can be highly salient without being especially exciting. Think about which name pops into your head when you need plasters.
Relevance. People notice what connects to something they already care about. Adverts for boilers are invisible right up until the day yours breaks, and then they're everywhere. Relevance is the reason to stop, which is a very different thing from a mechanism for stopping people.
Familiarity. The brain gives a small, easy nod to things it has seen before. Familiar things feel safer and take less effort to process, which is why consistent exposure builds preference over time. We explored this in more depth when we asked our in-house behavioural scientist why familiarity beats attention.
Distinctiveness. Being recognisably yourself through colours, characters, sounds or a particular turn of phrase. Distinctiveness is what turns a moment of attention into a moment of attention for you specifically.
You'll notice that none of the four depends on being the loudest thing in the feed.
Here's the part that should reassure anyone worn out by the arms race. In 2025, VCCP Media worked with attention researcher Dr Karen Nelson-Field on a study covering more than 20,000 ad views across 72 digital video ads from brands including O2, Cadbury, Domino's and easyJet. They found that around 1.5 seconds of active attention was enough to encode a memory, and that well-branded ads were 2.5 times more effective even in low-attention environments.
In other words, you don't need to hold people hostage for fifteen seconds. You need the second and a half you get to be unmistakably yours. The same research estimated that weak use of distinctive assets wastes around 66p of every £1 spent on digital display advertising. That's a great deal of money spent on attention that doesn't point back to anyone.
It also changes where creative energy should go. Less of it into inventing a new hook every week, and more into building brand assets that register in a glance.
It's a harder question than "How do we stop the scroll?" and a far more useful one. When brands take it seriously, a handful of answers tend to come up.
Because they recognise you. Familiar brand codes work like a known face in a crowd.
Because you're useful. A good recipe, a clear answer or a handy tip earns attention with no tricks required.
Because you entertain in a way only you could. Humour lands best when it grows out of the brand's own character rather than being borrowed from whichever meme is doing the rounds.
Because it's the right moment. Turning up when someone is actually in the market beats shouting at them when they aren't.
None of this rules out bold creative. Boldness is central to how we work at Together. The point is that bold should mean confidently distinctive, rather than simply louder than the post before.
There's nothing wrong with being interesting. Trouble starts when "interesting" becomes the entire strategy and a brand chases novelty for its own sake, reinventing its look and tone with every new trend. Each idea might get noticed. Very few of them add up to anything.
The brands that tend to win over time are a little more patient. They work out what makes them recognisable and stick with it long enough for people to learn it. They make work that fits real moments in people's lives. And they trust that a smaller amount of attention, pointed clearly at them, is worth more than a lot of attention pointed nowhere in particular.
The attention economy isn't going anywhere. The brands that do well in it, though, may be the ones that stop competing to be the most interesting thing in the room and concentrate on being the most recognisable.
At Together, we help brands create work that earns attention instead of demanding it, using behavioural insight and distinctive brand assets to make every second count. If your brand is working hard to be noticed but struggling to be remembered, let's talk.
What is the attention economy?
The attention economy describes a marketplace where people's attention is the scarce resource that brands, platforms and publishers compete for. Because attention is limited, the pressure to grab it has pushed many brands towards similar loud, fast tactics.
What is the difference between earning and demanding attention?
Demanded attention is taken through tricks such as shock openers or bait headlines, and it rarely leaves a lasting memory. Earned attention is given freely because a brand is familiar, relevant, useful or entertaining, and it's far more likely to build recognition.
How much attention does an ad need to be effective?
Research by VCCP Media and Dr Karen Nelson-Field found that around 1.5 seconds of active attention can be enough to encode a memory, provided the ad makes strong use of distinctive brand assets.
