Marketers Suck Because They Get This Premise Wrong

The premise: Attention can be bought and converted predictably.

This worked when media was scarce. Three TV channels. A few magazines. Limited supply meant you could interrupt people and they had nowhere else to go.

But we're now swimming in infinite content. The average person sees 10,000+ brand messages daily. The brain adapted. We learned to filter aggressively.

This is actually something deeper: evolved pattern recognition against commercial intent.

Humans developed over millennia to detect when someone is trying to extract value from them. Your lizard brain knows the difference between a friend recommending something and a stranger selling something.

This is why the economics inverted.

The Depreciating Asset Problem

Every dollar spent on ads is worth less than the dollar before because audiences are getting better at ignoring you.

Think about your own behavior. When was the last time you clicked a banner ad? When did you last watch a YouTube ad without hitting skip? When did a sponsored post actually change your mind about anything?

You've trained yourself to filter. So has everyone else.

The traditional marketing playbook assumed a captive audience. That audience escaped years ago. They have infinite alternatives. They have ad blockers. They have pattern recognition that fires the moment something feels commercial.

And yet companies keep pouring money into the same channels, watching returns diminish quarter after quarter, convinced that the next campaign will be different.

It won't.

The Psychology No One Talks About

Here's what's actually happening in your brain when you encounter marketing:

Commercial intent triggers skepticism. The moment your brain detects someone is trying to sell you something, it activates defensive processing. You become more critical. You look for flaws. You assume exaggeration.

Peer recommendations bypass this filter entirely. When someone you follow shares something they genuinely use, it registers in the same neural pathway as a friend's recommendation. The guard drops. You're actually open to the information.

This isn't a marketing tactic. It's an arbitrage on human psychology.

The difference between these two scenarios isn't the message. It's the messenger. It's the context. It's whether your brain classifies the information as "someone helping me" or "someone selling to me."

The Proof Is Already Here

I was talking to the team at Scribble about how Mantle Network ran their creator campaign. The numbers tell the story:

• 1.97M impressions
• 1,274 creators activated
• $8 CPM
• 5% engagement rate

Traditional ads couldn't touch those numbers. A 5% engagement rate from paid media? Impossible. You'd be lucky to get 0.5%.

But here's the thing that matters more than the metrics: the content lives on.

Ads disappear when you stop paying. Creator content compounds. Those 1,274 people who wrote about Mantle didn't just post and vanish. Many of them developed genuine interest through the research they did. They continue covering the project organically.

You're not buying impressions. You're building a network of people who actually understand what you do.

Why Creator Content Works

Paid ads interrupt. Creator content educates.

That's the fundamental shift.

When someone you follow breaks down a complex topic in a way that makes sense, you listen. When a banner ad tells you to "Learn More," you scroll past.

The economics reflect this:

The swarm beats the whale. Small creators with engaged, niche audiences deliver better targeting, higher trust, and more authentic content than any single big account could provide.

Why?

• Better targeting: Small creators have more engaged, niche audiences
• Higher trust: Their followers know they're selective about partnerships
• More authentic: They're building a reputation, not just cashing checks
• Better ROI: Combined reach often exceeds single activations at a fraction of the cost

The Numbers Across 80+ Campaigns

Scribble Network has run campaigns for over 80 projects. The pattern is consistent:

3x-5x lower CPM than traditional agencies. When you're not paying for wasted impressions on people who will never care, your costs drop dramatically.

2x-3x higher engagement rates. Because the content is actually worth reading. Because it comes from voices people chose to follow.

$500K+ distributed directly to creators. No middlemen extracting value. Creators get paid fairly for substantive work.

Some highlights from the campaign data:

These aren't vanity metrics. These are people actually engaging with content about products they might actually use.

The Hard Truth About Your Ad Budget

If you're a company still scaling paid ads, understand what you're actually doing:

You're investing in a depreciating asset.

Every month, audiences get better at ignoring you. Every month, the platforms charge more for less. Every month, the arbitrage between what you pay and what you get widens.

Meanwhile, creator relationships appreciate. A creator who covers you once might cover you again. Their audience remembers. The content stays indexed. The trust compounds.

One strategy fights against human psychology. The other works with it.

How This Actually Works

Scribble's model is simple: quality over quantity.

For projects:

• Launch campaigns with clear narrative briefs
• Access a pre-vetted network of creators who understand the space
• Review and approve content before rewarding anyone
• Measure impact via real engagement, not vanity metrics

For creators:

• Participate in campaigns with real standards
• Get paid fairly for substantive work
• Build a portfolio that matters
• Monetize content across X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube

No spam. No bots. No low-effort posts. Just authentic voices telling your story.

The curation is what makes it work. Anyone can blast money at influencers. The hard part is finding people who will actually produce content worth reading, from voices that audiences actually trust.

The Shift Already Happened

People don't trust ads anymore. They scroll past banners. They skip sponsored posts. They've trained themselves to ignore anything that looks like it was paid for.

But people trust people. And people buy from people.

That's the shift. Attention has moved from paid placements to authentic voices. The projects winning today aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones with the best creator relationships.

You can keep investing in channels that work less every year. Or you can build something that compounds.

The arbitrage is still wide open. Human psychology isn't changing anytime soon.

Scribble Network is a curated creator marketplace connecting projects with thousands of vetted content creators across X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Want to see what a campaign could look like for your project? Get in touch.