"For as long as marketing's existed, we've lived by a simple gospel: scarcity creates value. If it's rare, it must be worth more. Luxury, limited editions, velvet ropes, black AMEX cards - premium meant few could get in. For a while, that worked. Super Bowl spots, Times Square billboards, splashy activations at Cannes - if only a handful of brands could pull it off, it felt premium."
"But, somewhere along the way, we confused exclusivity with effectiveness. Not everything rare is valuable. A supposedly premium digital environment packed with autoplay ads doesn't feel premium to anyone: it feels like noise. Then came the platforms. Scale became the new shorthand for premium: billions of eyeballs on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Reach everyone, everywhere, and hope something sticks. But no CMO has ever said: "Today, I want cheap eyeballs.""
"Today, the most premium moment isn't algorithmic: it's about finding the user when they are most receptive and ready to engage. It's the pause on a home screen. The hover before a click. The breath before the next action. These are 'leaned-in' moments. No distractions. No doom-scrolling. No sound-off. Just attention, pure and uninterrupted. And that's worth far more than any impression count."
Premium shifts from location and exclusivity to quality of presence, emphasizing where and how users genuinely engage. Scarcity and mass reach no longer guarantee value; rare placements can feel like noise, and scale alone yields cheap impressions. Premium in 2025 prioritizes timing and receptivity, capturing 'leaned-in' moments such as pauses, hovers, and breaths before action. These moments deliver focused attention without distractions, exceeding the value of raw impression counts. Premium experiences are designed to belong rather than interrupt, earning attention through purposeful creative that deserves its context, particularly on mobile where experiences must be native and intentional.
Read at The Drum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]