TL;DR
- The attention economy is the new operating reality. Familiar marketing has gone invisible inside it.
- Habituation, banner blindness, and semantic sameness are erasing campaigns before anyone sees them.
- Spending more won’t bring in revenue until it addresses a few key points.
- The move is to find your category’s open area—the lane no one else is running yet—and get there first.
- For faith-driven brands, that lane is where commercial sharpness and cultural fluency finally meet.
Open Instagram. Scroll for thirty seconds. Count the ads you remember.
That number—usually zero, sometimes one—tells you what marketing is actually fighting right now.
Not bad creative. Attention itself.
I’ve spent nearly thirty years building messages for Christian audiences (and a decade running Pillar). The problem most clients walk in with isn’t taste. It isn’t even targeting. It’s that their work looks like the work next to it. And in today’s market, looking like everyone else is the same as not being there at all.
The category goes numb before the audience does
Why familiar marketing disappears: habituation, banner blindness, and semantic satiation.
There’s a clinical name for what’s happening to your campaign. Three, actually.
Habituation—the brain’s decreasing response to repeated stimuli. Show me one image of a smiling family on a mission trip and I look. Show me forty of them across a month and I stop registering any of them.
Banner blindness—the trained instinct to skip anything that looks like an ad. Layout, color, placement, copy rhythm. If the eye recognizes the pattern, the eye is already moving on.
Semantic satiation—the phenomenon where a repeated word or claim temporarily loses meaning. It’s why life-changing no longer changes anything. It’s why transformational stopped transforming around 2018. The phrase didn’t get worse. The audience went numb to it.
These aren’t theories. They’re the operating reality of every feed your buyer scrolls.
Hooks aren’t a new idea. AIDA—Attention, Interest, Desire, Action—put attention at the front of the funnel in 1898 (yes, that far back). Journalists call it the lede. Broadcasters call it the tease. Filmmakers call it the cold open. What’s changed is the cost of failure. In 2026, a weak opener means the algorithm never even surfaces the ad to your buyer. The hook isn’t the icing on the work; the hook is the entire transaction.
Here’s the trap: by the time your team feels comfortable using a phrase, your audience has already heard it from a dozen other brands this month. It didn’t just go stale. It became background noise people scroll past. The pastor, the founder, the executive director, the donor you’re trying to reach has been numb to that approach for months. They’re waiting for someone to show up with something that doesn’t sound like everyone else.
Start something the mind wants to finish
The Zeigarnik effect, open loops, and the videos people can’t scroll past.
There’s a principle from psychology called the Zeigarnik effect: incomplete tasks and unresolved patterns occupy mental space until they close. Bluma Zeigarnik observed it in waiters who could recall unpaid orders perfectly until the bill was settled, after which the memory vanished.
In creative rooms, the same idea has a different name. Open loops.
The reason OK Go’s Here It Goes Again—the treadmill video recorded in one continuous shot—has 70 million views isn’t novelty. It’s that the band engineered a visible pattern of progression you can’t look away from. The treadmills move. Something else has to happen. Will it resolve? Will one fall? You keep watching to find out.
This Too Shall Pass, with its Rube Goldberg sequence (another OK Go video), runs the same play in a longer form. Each beat creates a small open loop—that thing fell, what does it hit next?—and the loop only closes when the song ends. You don’t watch the whole video because you love the song. You watch because the pattern won’t let you go.
This is the most reliable lever a marketer has and the one most consistently squandered. We open with the claim instead of the question. We pay the answer off before the audience cared about it. We resolve the tension on slide one and then wonder why the rest of the deck didn’t land.
Japan figured this out first
A 15-second clutter market and what it teaches us about attention measurement.
If you want to see the attention economy stress-tested, look at Japan.
Television commercials there run fifteen seconds. Clutter density is among the highest in the world. The result is a creative ecosystem where the cold open is everything and the product reveal often arrives in the final two seconds. SoftBank’s long-running White Family campaign features a dog as the family father. Nissin builds Cup Noodles affinity through samurai parodies that bury the product until the close. The opening frame has to demand a second look, or the ad does nothing at all.
Dentsu, Japan’s largest agency, has been measuring attention rather than impressions for over a decade. Eye-tracking studies. Recall scoring. The premise is brutally simple: an ad that ran in front of a hundred thousand eyeballs without earning a single second of held attention didn’t actually run. It produced a number…but not a result.
That distinction is starting to matter in U.S. and Christian-market media buying too. When Inspiration Travel grew over $4 million in tracked revenue in 12 months, the move wasn’t more spend. It was finding the lane the rest of the category wasn’t running yet—the language, the imagery, the cold opens that pulled a numb audience back into the conversation. Strategy moved the number.
Get to the open area
My dad’s phrase, the football receiver’s job, and how it changes the brief.
The framework I keep coming back to didn’t come from a marketing book. It came from my dad.
He’s been a business owner and entrepreneur his whole working life. Built his own companies. Coached sports along the way. His phrase, which I’ve borrowed for almost everything I do, was get to the open area. He used it for football receivers—find the lane the defenders haven’t covered yet, run there, be the place the ball can land. He used it in his own business when he was building between the conglomerates—find the territory the big players haven’t occupied and put down roots before they notice.
The phrase works for marketing because the structural problem is identical. The category is crowded. The patterns are recognizable. The audience has been trained to ignore the familiar.
The open area is the lane no one else is running yet—the image no one is using, the claim no one is making, the form factor no one has tried, the audience no one is speaking to in their actual language.
This gets confused with disruption. They aren’t the same move. Disruption is reactive—it defines itself against what was, which still keeps the eye on what was. The open area is prospective. It looks at the unoccupied space ahead and asks who can get there first.
The open area also isn’t more. Look at signs in Times Square as your cautionary tale for believing that louder always wins. It doesn’t. The open area is a discipline: Read the herd. Map the empty lane next to it. Run there before anyone notices the gap.
In practice, the brief looks like this:
- What’s the category norm right now? Heartfelt, hype, quirky, expert?
- What does the audience actually have appetite for? Conservative, open?
- What can this brand credibly do without losing itself?
- What hook type are we running—curiosity, tension, spectacle, specificity, utility?
- And the kill-list: which clichés have to die for this campaign to land?
That last one is non-negotiable. Every Pillar campaign starts with a list of phrases we won’t use.
Life-changing. Unlock your potential. Your next chapter. The phrases aren’t wrong. They’re empty—semantic satiation that feels right but fails to motivate. They hit like white noise to the audience you most want to reach.
Where Christian audiences are waiting for someone to arrive
Christian audiences have been marketed at with platitudes for forty years. Generic spiritual claims. The same stock imagery. The same five adjectives recycled across denominations, ministries, conferences, books, and products. The attention economy didn’t create that exhaustion. It just exposed it.
The open area, for the brands we work with, is the place where two qualities meet that almost no one is holding together: commercial sharpness and cultural fluency. Marketing that actually moves a number, made by people who understand the audience as a culture rather than a demographic.
Most agencies pick one. The Christian-friendly shops mean well and can’t execute. The secular shops execute and miss the audience culturally. The leader I’m writing this for has been around the block enough to recognize both failure modes—and is tired of choosing between them.
The cost of not finding the open area is a marketing budget that buys impressions instead of revenue—campaigns that ran without producing a result, spend that aged out of the season without converting, and a category position that erodes while quieter competitors find the lane you didn’t.
Getting this right is the future of your ministry or business, and the audience is waiting.
If you’ve recognized your brand somewhere in this piece, the next move is to find your open area. Schedule a Fit and Focus call →
Josh Smith is the Founder and Creative Director of Pillar Brands, a strategy-led marketing agency serving faith-driven organizations and businesses. He’s been working with Christian audiences since 1997 and now leads Pillar’s work with camps, conferences, ministries, and Christian-owned businesses looking for the open area in increasingly crowded markets.