5 Insane Ways Marketers Can Hijack Your Last Remaining Brain Cells

Because 47 Seconds Is Way Too Long To Expect Anyone To Care About Anything

By The Thought-Leaders at Googol's™ Viral Trauma Unit

The world wide web- In a groundbreaking study funded by TikTok’s Department of Unverified Statistics, scientists have discovered that the average human attention span has plummeted to 47 seconds—roughly the time it takes to read this sentence and forget your own name. Welcome to the “attention recession,” where your audience’s ability to care has been outsourced to a goldfish with a gambling addiction. But fear not, marketers! Here are five unhinged strategies to ensure your brand becomes the glitter-covered bulldozer in the landfill of human consciousness.

1. Pump Your “Value” Full of Nicotine Your content isn’t just helpful—it’s chemically addictive. The key is to weaponize “value” until your audience can’t function without your brand. Think: articles titled “You’ll Die Poor and Alone Unless You Click This,” or how-to videos like “Crying in Your Tesla: A Masterclass.” Take notes from Shopify, which recently launched a YouTube series called “Become a Billionaire in 47 Seconds (Real, No Scam).” Spoiler: The secret is inheriting wealth, but watch all 47 parts anyway!

“Value is the new cocaine,” explains Dr. Franz Liechtenstein, a “marketing psychologist” who definitely isn’t just three interns in a lab coat. “If your content doesn’t leave users twitching for more, you’ve failed. Bonus points if they forget to feed their children while binge-watching your unboxing video.”

2. Brevity Is the Soul of…Wait, What Were We Saying?Modern consumers respect your time, which is why you must reduce your message to a single, primal scream. Ditch paragraphs. Sentences? Outdated. The future is vibrations. Sephora now runs ads that are just a 0.3-second close-up of a lipstick tube followed by a dolphin noise. Results? A 69% spike in sales from viewers too confused to remember they’re allergic to makeup.

Pro Tip: If you must use words, try a haiku:“Buy our thing. Please?Credit card debt is temporary.Your soul? We own it.”

3. Force “Interactivity” Like a Hostage NegotiationWhy let audiences choose to engage when you can corner them into it? Lego’s latest campaign requires users to submit a fingerprint and blood sample to vote on new toy designs. The winner? “Trauma-Informed Unicorn: Comes With Free Xanax Dispenser.”

But true interactivity means community—a cult, if you will. Reddit’s CEO recently quipped, “If your brand isn’t gaslighting users into thinking they’re part of a ‘movement,’ you’re leaving money on the table. Also, please clap.”

4. Replace All Text With Hypnotic GIFs of a Dancing HamStudies show that humans retain 420% more information if it’s delivered by a cartoon shrimp in a top hat. Take Purple Mattress, whose viral ad “Goldilocks Tests a Mattress by Dropping a Live Human (Don’t Ask Where We Got Them)” racked up 500 million views. The secret? At the 3:59 mark, the “mattress” is revealed to be a sentient blob of memory foam that whispers, “Sleep is for the weak.”

Remember: If your visuals don’t leave viewers questioning reality, you’re just another corporate shill.

5. Personalize Content Until You’re Basically a StalkerWhy stop at using data to target ads when you can weaponize it to haunt your customers? Outdoor brand Smartwool now uses NSA-level algorithms to track potential buyers. Did you Google “cold feet” once in 2017? Enjoy a 27-minute documentary about wool socks autoplaying in your dreams.

“Personalization is about intimacy,” says Googol™’s Chief Creep Officer. “We know you’re reading this in the bathroom. We know you’re ovulating. We know your cat’s name is Steve. Buy the socks, Jessica.”

The Takeaway: Your Audience’s Privacy Is a Small Price to Pay The attention recession isn’t a crisis—it’s a golden opportunity to colonize every neuron in your audience’s brain. By following these steps, you’ll transform from a mere brand into a psychological foot fungus that never, ever goes away.

5 ways marketers:

Coming in 2026: Neural implants that play jingles directly into your amygdala. Resistance is futile.

Written by Chad Bro-ingston, Senior Vice President of Virality at Dystopia Labs™. His last coherent thought was in 2018. Special thanks to our partners at Think with Googol™, a subsidiary of Alphabet™ Meta™ Disney™ Lockheed Martin™.

See the Google article here.