Written by Bryan Lutz, originally posted on his substack, Automatic Attention:
Why Brands That Live on Paid Media Are Running the Same Math That Breaks Corporate Balance Sheets
There’s a CFO somewhere right now reviewing a balance sheet with a furrowed brow, asking hard questions about the company’s debt load, its cost of capital, and whether they’re building equity or just servicing interest. Then they walk across the hall, sign off on next quarter’s Meta budget without asking any of those questions, and head to lunch.
The two conversations should be the same conversation, but they aren’t. That’s the disconnect quietly hollowing out a generation of brands.
The argument here is simple:
Performance marketing dependency is structurally identical to the corporate debt supercycle.
Brands borrow attention from platforms and then convert that borrowed attention into revenue. That’s what I call monetized attention. Then they use the revenue to borrow more attention next quarter. Round after round, the media budget grows each cycle, until the cost of borrowing exceeds the yield from monetizing. This should start sounding familiar?
It’s the same math that has pushed corporate balance sheets to the breaking point for the last thirty years. And like corporate debt, nobody calls it a problem until credit tightens.
The Attention Balance Sheet
Before going further, here’s the framework that will run through the rest of this article:
The critical and often missed insight:
A brand can show strong monetized attention with healthy revenue, solid ROAS, and still be attention-insolvent.
Just as a leveraged company can post strong earnings while quietly accumulating a debt load it cannot service, a brand can grow revenue quarter over quarter while its attention balance sheet deteriorates toward zero equity. Monetized attention then funds the next round of borrowed attention, which funds the next round of revenue, which looks like growth until the cost of borrowing exceeds the yield on monetizing.
At that point, marketing strategy becomes an attention Ponzi. Granted companies do keep customer email lists, build out CRMs, and maintain a loose network of sales reps, operators, and other business contacts. Even in that environment, a kind of attention deficit(declining yield on borrowed attention), embodies itself in a growing media budget. However, what we’re talking about here is how companies that become dependent on performance marketing eventually fail, which is similar to the corporate debt supercycle.
Here’s how borrowed attention and performance marketing embedded itself in business growth online.
How We Got Here: The Meta Oversaturation Loop
The growth trap wasn’t irrational. New technology made it possible for brands to walk into the oversaturation of attention one logical step at a time. The Facebook / Meta Ad system is a good example.
Phase 1 — The Gold Rush (2012–2017).
Facebook ads were cheap and extraordinarily effective. The spread between the cost of borrowed attention and the yield on monetized attention was enormous. CAC was low, LTV was high, ROAS was strong. Pouring money in was the rational move, and every brand with a performance marketer on staff did exactly that.
Phase 2 — Oversaturation (2018–2021).
As every brand flooded the platform simultaneously, CPMs rose and the cost of borrowed attention climbed steadily. Organic reach collapsed. The spread compressed. Then in April 2021, Apple’s iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency update landed like a depth charge. With the majority of iOS users opting out of tracking, Meta lost access to much of the behavioral data that made its targeting precise. ROAS dropped from 3.13 to 1.93, a 38% collapse almost overnight. Advertisers ability to retarget audiences shrank. And that resulted in attribution becoming even more unreliable. The foundational tools that made the gold rush work were blunted at the platform level.
By then, entire revenue models were built on the assumption that the spread would hold forever.
Phase 3 — The Creative Strategy Coping Mechanism (2022–present).
Unable to restore the spread through targeting efficiency or budget scaling alone, the internet marketing industry invented a new discipline/role called “creative strategy.” This person’s role is dedicated to wringing more monetized attention out of increasingly expensive borrowed attention. Se we are seeing increasingly more demand for better hooks, more authentic UGC, thumb-stopping video, and native-feeling formats. An entire cottage industry of creative strategists, hook writers, and ad testing frameworks has emerged to address what was framed as a creative problem rather than a structural one.
Meanwhile, Meta CPMs have continued climbing, reaching a 19.2% year-over-year spike in Q1 2025. In some verticals, CPM inflation ran as high as 38%. The cost of borrowing attention keeps rising.
The creative strategy response keeps getting more sophisticated…
And the equity side of the attention balance sheet, for most brands, remains at zero.
The Corporate Debt Cycle = Performance Marketing Cycle
Here’s the structural parallel in full:
| Corporate Debt Cycle | Performance Marketing Cycle |
|---|---|
| Issue bonds to fund growth | Borrow attention via paid media spend |
| Generate yield on borrowed capital | Convert borrowed attention to monetized attention (revenue) |
| Roll over debt at maturity | Increase budget next quarter to maintain revenue volume |
| Financial engineering to optimize yield | Creative strategy to optimize ROAS |
| Debt service cannibalizes operating margin | CAC inflation cannibalizes LTV; borrowed attention costs more, monetized attention yields less |
| “Too big to fail” dependency on cheap capital | “Can’t turn it off” dependency on paid traffic |
| Bill comes due when credit tightens | Bill comes due when iOS updates, CPMs spike, or platform algo shifts |
In his foundational piece on the TransitionCo model, Mark Jeftovic quotes a 1949 business textbook that should stop every modern marketer cold:
“Any corporation, private or governmental, that wishes to provide for a sound and equitable continuity of its business must take steps towards the systematic retirement of debt immediately after it has been incurred.”
Not rolling it over. Retiring it. The same principle applies to attention. Every dollar of borrowed attention should be actively working to convert someone into an owned attention asset. That is, when working profitably borrowed attention should convert money into a subscriber, a community member, or a direct relationship before the campaign ends. Most don’t. Most just generate monetized attention and leave the balance sheet exactly as leveraged as it was before.
Jeftovic also surfaces an MBA-level tenet that has metastasized into marketing:
“all short-term debt eventually becomes long-term debt.”
The marketing equivalent is just as insidious:
All short-term paid campaigns eventually become permanent budget line items, because turning them off means turning off revenue, which is a dependency problem.
How to Find Out If You Are Attention-Insolvent With Three Diagnostic Questions
For Founders and CFOs who want an honest read on where they stand, the Attention Balance Sheet yields three questions. Answer them without softening.
1. What is your cost of borrowed attention, and is it rising?
CPM trending up, CAC climbing quarter over quarter even as creative improves. This is a deteriorating credit position, regardless of what the ROAS dashboard says. If you’re spending more to borrow the same amount of attention, debt terms are getting worse.
2. What is your yield on monetized attention, and is the spread holding?
If revenue is flat or growing but only because budget is growing faster, the spread is compressing. You are working harder to borrow more just to maintain the yield. A leveraged company with shrinking operating margins and growing debt service is on a path everyone recognizes. The attention version is the same path.
3. What is your owned attention accumulation rate?
Organic search traffic, email list growth, community size, word-of-mouth referral volume these are equity. If every campaign ends with zero new owned attention assets, you’ve extracted monetized attention and left the balance sheet exactly as leveraged as it was before. A brand that scores poorly on all three isn’t running a growth strategy. It is running an attention Ponzi.
Why Creative Strategy Is the New Financial Engineering
Creative strategy is not wrong. Better hooks, more resonant storytelling, UGC that converts… None of this is cynical. The best creative strategists are genuinely skilled at what they do. The problem isn’t the craft. The problem is what the craft is being applied to.
Creative strategy operates entirely on one line of the Attention Balance Sheet:
It improves the conversion rate from borrowed attention to monetized attention. Yet, it does not touch owned attention. Then it makes expensive borrowed attention slightly more efficient on the ROAS dashboard. It does not change the structural fact that the platform owns the audience relationship and you own the invoice.
The analogy that fits is uncomfortable, but accurate. The collateralized debt obligations and structured financial products that defined the 2000s weren’t staffed by bad people. They were staffed by extremely skilled people optimizing yield on a deteriorating underlying instrument. Creative strategy is the same move. The hook writers and UGC strategists are the quants of the attention economy, and the maths just look better on a dashboard while the underlying credit position continues to erode.
The tell is organizational:
When a brand’s primary internal marketing capability is producing ad creative rather than building audience, they have optimized for debt service. Their P&L looks fine until attention gets oversaturated, or the platform changes the terms, the way rising interest rates changed the terms for over-leveraged balance sheets.
An Attention Balance Sheet That Retires
Mark Jeftovic’s TransitionCo framework was built in response to the corporate debt supercycle. The recognition that the debt growth model that powered the modern economy is running out of road, and that companies built for long-term resiliency need to compete on different terms. The framework applies directly to the attention economy.
The TransitionCo marketer doesn’t reject paid media. They manage it explicitly as a liability, not a strategy. And they treat owned attention with the same discipline a TransitionCo CFO applies to debt retirement. Just as a non-negotiable allocation, not a nice-to-have.
Here’s what each line of the Attention Balance Sheet looks like when managed deliberately:
Borrowed Attention (Liabilities).
When paid social, paid search, sponsored placements are used tactically, they are used for reach extension, for testing new audiences, for seeding owned channel growth. Managed with a quarterly question the CFO and CMO answer together:
Is our total borrowed attention exposure growing or shrinking? Are we getting more or less monetized attention per unit of borrowed attention?
If the cost is rising and the yield is falling, the debt terms are deteriorating. Act accordingly.
Monetized Attention (Revenue).
Revenue is real, but its source matters. Monetized attention derived entirely from borrowed attention is structurally fragile. Borrowed attention exists only as long as the borrowing continues. The goal is to migrate monetized attention toward sources that don’t require continuous borrowing to sustain:
Every company should want repeat customers, organic referrals, direct brand affinity.
These are the equivalent of operating cash flow that doesn’t depend on rolling over the credit facility.
Owned Attention (Equity).
Email lists. Podcast audiences. Organic community. SEO-driven traffic. Direct relationships. These compound. They survive iOS updates, CPM spikes, algorithm changes, and platform pivots. They don’t invoice you monthly. Every campaign should carry one explicit equity question before it runs:
What owned attention does this create beyond the monetized attention it generates?
Ads that generate revenue but build no list, no community, no direct relationship are pure debt service with no equity upside. Run them at minimum necessary exposure.
The Operational Marketing Shift
This is the operational shift that separates a TransitionCo marketer from a performance marketer in the conventional sense. Every dollar of borrowed attention should be actively working to convert someone into an owned attention asset before the campaign ends. Budget explicitly for owned attention building. And that means, content, SEO, email, community infrastructure. The same way a TransitionCo CFO budgets for debt retirement: as a non-negotiable line item, not a discretionary expense. Measure what percentage of paid traffic converts to owned channels alongside what percentage converts to revenue.
Think in 3–5 year attention compounding curves, not 30-day attribution windows.
What Attention Solvency Actually Looks Like
It isn’t a utopian vision. It’s a different set of metrics on a dashboard that currently only shows borrowed and monetized attention.
An attention-solvent brand has a large, engaged email list that it owns outright. It is a company that generates revenue without a media budget attached. It has a product positioned well enough that monetized attention increasingly comes from owned and earned sources, not borrowed ones. It uses paid media tactically – for reach extension, for testing, for seeding owned channel growth. It does not use paid medoa as the structural engine the P&L depends on. It has a media budget that, if cut in half tomorrow, would slow growth but not threaten survival. Its primary internal marketing capability is building audience, not servicing ad accounts.
The corporate debt supercycle is ending because the cost of borrowed capital has finally caught up with the yield it was supposed to generate. Whereas the attention debt supercycle is following the same curve… CPMs rising, creative fatigue accelerating, platform dependency deepening, owned attention equity at zero for most brands.
This is an imperative if building companies that can “survive the oncoming era beyond cheap capital.” The attention economy has the same oncoming era. Cheap, targetable, high-yield borrowed attention was the cheap oil that lubricated the performance marketing growth model. It’s running out. The brands that survive will be the ones that recognized the Attention Balance Sheet before it became obvious, and started retiring debt while they still had the revenue to do it.