Your customers were born with three billion heartbeats. Are you wasting them?

You were born with approximately three billion heartbeats. So was everyone you're trying to reach. Three billion contractions of cardiac muscle, and then nothing.

Every moment of attention someone gives you costs them some of those heartbeats. Not figuratively. Their heart is beating while they read your white paper. While they scroll your email. While they sit through your webinar wondering when you'll say something that matters to them.

Three billion sounds like a lot. It isn't. And the question every B2B marketer should be asking right now is whether the content they're producing is worth the biological cost of paying attention to it.

The attention economy just flipped

In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon wrote something that has become more relevant with every passing year: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." When supply is abundant, the scarce resource shifts entirely to the demand side. What's scarce isn't information. It's the willingness to consume it.

For most of B2B marketing's history, producing content was hard enough that supply stayed roughly in proportion to demand. You had to commission a writer, work with a designer, coordinate with a product team. The friction was a natural quality filter. Not everything that got published was good, but the cost of producing it meant somebody at least had to care.

That friction disappeared about eighteen months ago. AI made it possible to produce content at near-zero marginal cost, and organisations responded the way markets always respond to a supply shock: they produced more. More white papers. More emails. More LinkedIn posts. More nurture sequences. Volume went vertical.

But attention didn't. Attention is biological. It runs on heartbeats. You can't scale it with better hardware.

What we've created is content inflation. When you flood any market with supply, each unit becomes worth less. The response to inflation isn't to print more currency. It's to increase the value of each unit you produce. And yet most B2B marketing organisations are doing the equivalent of running the printing press faster and wondering why nobody values the output.

We went from "content marketing" to "content pollution" in about eighteen months. The medium hasn't changed. The signal-to-noise ratio collapsed.

The slop machine

Here's what the loop actually looks like right now. A marketing team uses AI to generate a research report. They send it to a list of prospects. Those prospects, already overwhelmed, don't read it. Instead they feed it into their own AI tools to pull out the key points. So now you have a machine writing content that gets sent to a human who hands it to another machine to summarise. Nobody's heartbeats were engaged at any point. The only outcome is a few thousand inference tokens got burned and the planet got marginally warmer.

We've built the most extraordinary slop machine in history. And the irony, which isn't lost on me as someone who runs an AI company, is that the technology capable of making content genuinely better is being used primarily to make more of what already wasn't working.

There's a distillation paradox buried in this loop. If your audience is going to use AI to distil your content anyway, why not create a version that's actually relevant to them in the first place? Start where they'd end up. Give them the thinking that speaks to their situation, their industry, their specific role. Otherwise you're adding steps and burning energy for no one's benefit.

Attention debt

Here's the part most marketers haven't thought through.

Every piece of irrelevant content you send doesn't just fail to land. It actively erodes future willingness to pay attention. You're not just wasting one interaction. You're making the next one harder.

Think of it like technical debt in software. Every shortcut you take, every piece of poorly structured code you ship, makes the next piece of work slower and more expensive. Attention debt works the same way. Every generic email, every irrelevant white paper, every "thought leadership" piece that's actually just a product pitch in a trench coat accumulates in your audience's experience of your brand. And it compounds. The fifth irrelevant email isn't five times as bad as the first. It's worse, because by now the recipient has learned to ignore you. You've trained them to stop paying attention.

This matters more than it used to because of where B2B buying has gone. Gartner's research shows that buyers now spend only about 17% of their purchasing journey interacting with sales reps. The remaining 83% is independent research, peer conversations, and content. Your content is the relationship for five-sixths of the journey. If that content wastes their heartbeats, you haven't just wasted a marketing impression. You've wasted the relationship.

When your content is the primary way a buyer experiences your brand, every piece either builds something or erodes it. There is no neutral. And brands that have accumulated attention debt find that even good content stops landing, because the audience stopped opening it three months ago.

Make every beat count

Three billion heartbeats. That's the budget your audience was born with. Every piece of content you produce is a request to spend some of that budget on you. The question isn't whether you can produce more. You can. The machines will happily oblige. The question is whether what you produce is worth the cost to the person reading it.

Herbert Simon saw this coming over fifty years ago. The scarce resource was never information. It was always attention. The only thing that's changed is the scale of the imbalance, and the speed at which you can get it wrong.

The concept of relevant and making every beat count is something our Co-Founder, Jonathon Bates, discussed on the Steep and Think podcast with world renowned behavioural psychologist Dr Paul Marsden and ABM leaders, Meg Heuer and Dorothea Gosling.