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Alright, let’s get into it:

For the last decade, direct response has run the table. Launch an ad in the morning, see the data by lunch, kill it or scale it by end of day. Test, learn, iterate, optimize. It's the most measurable form of marketing that has ever existed, and for a while it worked beautifully. The dashboards stayed green, the ROAS climbed, the MER held, and inside the four walls of Ads Manager everything looked efficient.

Meanwhile, the demand for content exploded. Platforms now burn through AI slop and short-form UGC the way ash falls off a cigarette, a quick hit of nicotine and the user is back minutes later for another. The noise has never been louder, and the response from most brands has been to add to it. More creative, more spend, more ads, more of the same format, expecting that sheer volume will eventually break through.

I think this framing is wrong for where advertising is heading over the next few years. We're not moving from the attention economy into a bigger attention economy. We're moving into a memory economy. Attention is the cheap part now. Holding it is the hard part. Whoever holds it best is going to win.

Step back from the dashboards for a second and look at the actual business. Is the brand growing? Are customers coming back? Is anyone outside of a retargeting audience even able to name the company a week later? Often the answer is no. We've optimized ourselves into a corner where the metrics look great and the business is quietly stalling.

Which brings me to the question I can't stop thinking about: why don't performance marketers ever talk about ad recall?

The honest answer is that ad recall isn't a metric we can measure on the campaigns most of us actually run. Yes, it exists inside Meta. It lives inside a specific Awareness campaign type, alongside an Ad Recall Lift objective most DTC brands have never touched. But if you're running Sales conversion campaigns (and almost every performance marketer is) ad recall is invisible to you. You can't see it next to your ROAS. You can't optimize toward it. It doesn't roll up into a CAC number. So we ignore it. Not because it doesn't matter, but because the tools have trained us to optimize what's right in front of us, and ad recall isn't. Honestly, this feels like an obvious gap in Meta's product. Surfacing an Ad Recall Lift estimate inside a Sales campaign would change how a lot of us think about creative, immediately.

I've watched this play out across a real client roster, not just in theory. Brands hit a ceiling. ROAS still looks fine, the auction still clears, the algorithm still finds buyers, but the growth curve flattens. New customer acquisition gets more expensive every quarter. The fix is never "spend more on Meta." The brand simply stopped giving people a reason to remember it. The ads are doing the closing and the introducing, which is a job ads were never designed to do alone. The growth we all remember from the early 2020s, where you could turn the spend up and watch the revenue follow, doesn't happen anymore. Not because Meta got worse, but because the brands that won that era stopped building anything beneath the paid layer.

I've had a lot of conversations recently with founders about organic content, and the framing I keep coming back to is this: organic isn't a cheaper version of paid. It's a fundamentally different job. Paid is the closer. Organic is the introduction. When a customer encounters your ad already knowing who you are, already having laughed at one of your videos, or seen a piece of content from you that made them feel something, the ad doesn't have to convince them. It just has to convert them. That's a completely different economic equation than the one most DTC brands are running.

A quick caveat, because I know someone will push back on this: organic isn't free. The talent costs money. The production costs money. The team running the channel costs money. What I mean when I say organic is "free" is the distribution. Meta charges nothing to put a piece of organic content in front of a follower or a viewer who finds you on the FYP. The CAC arbitrage is real, but it's not literally zero. It's that earned attention compounds in a way paid attention never does. A paid impression is rented. The moment you stop paying, it's gone. An organic impression, the kind that builds an actual memory of your brand, keeps working for you long after the content is posted.

So what would it look like to actually operationalize this? A few things I think performance marketers should be doing differently:

Stop optimizing creative purely on CTR and three-second video views, and start paying attention to hold rate, completion rate, and the qualitative signal of which ads people actually comment on and share. Those are the closest in-platform proxies for recall we have. If a piece of creative gets a great CTR but no one remembers it the next day, it's not actually doing the job you think it's doing.

Run real brand lift studies on your top-spending campaigns. Meta offers them. Almost no one in the DTC world actually uses them, which tells you everything about where the industry's attention is.

Carve out a piece of your paid budget, even ten percent, and redirect it toward producing organic content series that don't have a direct response objective at all. Test it for two quarters. Watch what happens to your paid efficiency when the audience walking into your ads already knows you.

And the bigger shift, the one that's harder: stop measuring marketing on a 7-day click attribution window. The brands that win the next five years are going to be the ones that have made peace with the fact that the most valuable thing marketing does, building a memory, doesn't show up in a 7-day window. It shows up six months later when someone searches your brand name unprompted, or tells a friend about you, or sees your ad and feels something other than fatigue.

Performance marketers don't need to abandon what we do. The discipline, the rigor, the measurement obsession all still matter. But we have to stop pretending that everything that matters can be measured inside the platform. The next era of growth belongs to the people who can do both: optimize the close and build the memory.

Whoever holds the attention best wins. The data won't show that until it's already too late to catch up.