Attention is not a funnel
Funnels imply gravity. Attention requires repetition, context, and a reason to return, none of which fit a straight line.
Marketing departments still draw customers as if they fall through stages. In reality, people orbit. They see you five times, forget you twice, come back because someone mentioned you, and buy on a Tuesday for a reason no attribution model will ever capture.
The funnel is a PowerPoint convenience
Funnels are useful for explaining budgets to a board. They are terrible for explaining humans. Most purchase journeys are loops: search, compare, get distracted, see a mention, search again, sign up for a list, wait for a sale. Treating that as a leak in a funnel leads to the wrong fix, more pressure at the bottom, instead of the right fix: more reasons to orbit.
We have sat in enough planning meetings to know why the funnel survives: it is easy to draw and easier to defend in a budget cycle. Awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, each with its own line item and its own agency pitching a bigger slice. The trouble is that customers do not experience these stages in sequence. They experience your brand as background noise punctuated by moments of relevance, and those moments rarely line up with the campaign calendar.
A funnel optimises for conversion. An orbit optimises for return. The best businesses optimise for return.
Owned reach is the gravity well
- Email and app notifications are not conversion tools. They are return tools.
- Editorial content earns attention in contexts where the customer already cares.
- A list that trusts you is cheaper to reach than any paid channel, forever.
- The goal is not to close the sale. It is to be present when the customer is ready.
- Community, however small, converts better than any lookalike audience a platform can build.
From forty million monthly readers, the lesson is clear: the publications that retain attention are the ones that show up with something useful even when there is nothing to sell. The brands that do the same, useful updates, honest comparisons, no hard sell every time, build a retargeting base that paid social cannot replicate at any price.
This is not a call to abandon paid media. Paid buys the first look. It cannot buy the fifth look, and the fifth look is usually the one that converts. Treat paid as a tool for filling the top of the orbit and owned channels as the tool for keeping people in it.
Where attribution models lie to you
Last click attribution rewards the channel that happened to be present at the moment of purchase, usually branded search or a retargeting ad. It systematically undercounts the five earlier touches that actually built the intent. Teams that manage to media plans built on last click end up starving the channels that created demand and overfunding the channel that harvested it.
None of this needs a sophisticated data science team to fix. A basic multi-touch model, or even a disciplined survey asking new customers how they first heard of you, will correct the worst distortions. The point is not statistical precision. It is refusing to let a convenient but wrong metric run the media plan.
What the metrics should look like
The commodity discipline is to measure attention as inventory. How many people can you reach without paying a platform? How often do they return? What is the cost to add one person to that pool? Those numbers compound. Cost per click does not, it resets to zero the moment the campaign ends.
What to change on Tuesday
- 01Replace the funnel slide with an orbit map: reach, return, repeat.
- 02Measure cost per owned contact and return rate, not just conversion rate.
- 03Send useful things when you have nothing to sell. It earns the right to sell later.
- 04Use paid channels to add people to owned channels, not to close every sale.
- 05Audit your attribution model for last click bias before the next budget cycle.
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