From Scarcity to Saturation: Why Attention Alone No Longer Wins

By Eric Druckenmiller, VP of Strategy, DEPT®

Sixty-six commercials aired during Super Bowl LX. The average cost per 30-second spot was $8 million. Total spend on airtime alone reached roughly $500 million—before anyone even starts counting production budgets that often matched the media buy.

Elmo tweeted “Good Bunny” and got 9 million views for free. Chipotle gave away burritos via text during halftime and dominated Monday morning’s post-game conversation. Kraft Mac and Cheese had comedian John Mulaney roast every Super Bowl advertiser in real time. DoorDash skipped the broadcast entirely and built social content with 50 Cent all weekend. None of them bought a second of airtime.

So, did the brands that spent $8 million win?

The 126 million viewers who tuned in suggest the reach was worth it. But what they did with those 30 seconds is where it gets interesting.

Simon’s Warning, Fifty-Five Years Later

In 1971, Herbert Simon—Nobel laureate and economist—wrote about designing organizations for “an information-rich world.” His famous line: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

The logic was clean. Flood people with information and attention becomes a scarce resource. Filtering becomes the bottleneck. The advertising industry built an entire economic model on this: attention was rare, so you paid for it. Prime-time spots, magazine spreads, highway billboards—transactions in the attention marketplace. The Super Bowl was the apex. Maximum scarcity, maximum price.

That model is inverted.

In 2026, a wealth of attention creates a poverty of engagement. During a live event, a brand can force people to watch. What it cannot force is that people care, share, talk, or act. Captive eyeballs without engagement are worth nothing.

The Second Screen Did This

The cause isn’t mysterious. People rarely watch anything with full attention anymore.

Live events—games, award shows, even breaking news—have become ambient background for social conversation. Phones stay out. Group chats run continuously. Social feeds get checked between plays. The broadcast is wallpaper. The real event is happening on the second screen.

The brands that won Super Bowl LX understood this. They didn’t try to compete for attention during the commercial break. They showed up where the actual conversation was happening—in feeds, in texts, in the real-time cultural moment that was already in motion.

Elmo had a better read on the room than most agencies with nine-figure budgets.

Buy vs. Earn

The old model was transactional: pay for reach, measure by impressions. The new model is relational: create something worth engaging with, and measure by what people do next.

Attention abundance makes attention cheap. When everyone has guaranteed eyeballs, eyeballs lose their value. Engagement remains scarce. You cannot manufacture it at scale. You cannot buy it in bulk. You earn it by giving people a reason to participate—or you don’t get it at all.

Super Bowl advertisers paid $8 million for the first model in a market that had already moved to the second.

The question for every brand right now isn’t “how do we buy more attention?” It’s “why would anyone choose to participate?”

That’s a harder question. It’s also the right one.