The “attention recession” is here (+ 3 things we’re doing to combat it)

We sent boxes of Spam through the mail last week.

As a strategy (not a joke).

I'll explain in a minute. But first, the thing that's been on my mind.

You've heard us talk about digital fatigue. We even put out a whole report on it. 

80%+ of buyers are exhausted by cold calls, marketing emails, and sales outreach. 

Direct mail and gifting is the one channel that still breaks through.

What we didn't say in the report (because we were still figuring it out ourselves) is what comes next.

Because digital fatigue isn't really the problem. It's the symptom.

The actual problem is we’re living through a full-blown attention recession.

Buyers attention has been pulled in too many directions for too long, by too many vendors using the same playbook. 

Attention spans are down 33%. 

Trust in anything that smells AI-generated is collapsing. 

Buyers are 70% of the way through their research before they ever talk to a vendor.

And every quarter the noise gets louder. 

AI-driven outreach is about to take whatever level of noise we're at right now and multiply it. Michael Lock at Upstart said, "Whatever level of noise (which is right now at 9/10), it's about to go to 100."

So here's what we're doing about it.

This is what's actually on our calendar between now and the end of the quarter, and we're going to retro every single one of them right here in this newsletter as they play out.

Play 1: We're going all in on events.

Not "we'll show up at a few conferences." 

All in.

6Sense Inspire in London. Demand & Expand in San Francisco. RevFest where GoNimbly is doing a bodega setup and giving people actual tattoos. The CMO Project's CMO 100. A 10x10 booth in SF, swag sponsorship in London, custom plays at every stop.

Why? Because field marketers, the people who got cut to the bone during COVID when everyone declared events dead, are now building bigger teams than digital. 

The bar for what counts as a good event experience has moved. If someone is driving an hour to be there and making up the work later, "emotional support pens" at a booth isn't going to cut it.

We'll report back on what worked and what bombed.

Play 2: The Spam Box.

This week we’re shipping literal boxes of Spam (the canned meat) to a curated list, using SmartSend and our Address Confirmation Fallbacks to make sure they actually got there. 

The landing page has a Spam Musubi recipe and gifting best practices. 

The CTA is to integrate their Gong instance with Sendoso to drive product adoption of our new SmartSend + Gong integration. The ask is that recipients post their spam box on social, and we'll send a personalized gift back.

The whole thing is a wink. We're a gifting company sending the dumbest possible "gift" on purpose, because the joke makes you stop scrolling and the integration is what we actually want you to care about.

Boxes should hit doorsteps soon. We gave people two weeks to post. We'll tell you what hit and what didn't in a future issue.

Play 3: This newsletter.

This one might sound like a cop-out. It's not.

The thing that's been most uncomfortable for us as a marketing team is that we've been telling other people to be more transparent and human while still doing some of our own marketing through polished launch posts and finished-looking case studies.

So: this newsletter is the third play. Going behind the scenes while we're in the middle of it. 

Telling you about the campaigns that worked and the ones we'd never run again. Showing you the spreadsheet, the call recordings, the team debate about whether to send Spam through the mail.

If you've followed our last three issues, you've already seen this in motion (in case you missed them). 

We pulled back the curtain on the Oso launch - the 48-hour teaser window, why we had our VP of Product write the launch post instead of marketing, the parts that were scary to do. 

We wrote about how a $7 bag of gummy worms beat a $200 bottle of whiskey. We talked about why most "personalization" in 2026 is going to feel like spray-and-pray with fancier wrapping paper.

This is the third play because most companies won't do it. They'll keep launching with the same press-release energy. They'll keep declaring victory in every recap. They'll keep their failures behind the curtain.

We're going to do the opposite. Loudly. In your inbox. Hope ya don’t mind.

Don’t worry. I’m nervous, too.

I don't know which of these three plays is going to land hardest. 

The Spam thing could flop. 

The events could blur together. 

This newsletter could feel too "inside baseball" for some of you.

That's kind of the point.

The attention recession isn't going to be solved by another framework, another channel, another tool.

It's going to be solved by companies who are willing to do things that might not work, in public, and then tell you the truth about how it went.

That's the bet we're making.

More soon… including a Spam Box retro the moment we have results worth sharing.