The diminishing returns of paid media and what comes next

Paid media still works. It just works less well for the same budget.

CPMs have climbed sharply across every major platform over the past five years. You are paying more for less attention. Users scroll faster. Ad blockers are more widespread. Competition for the same eyeballs is fiercer than ever. The result: more spend for diminishing returns.

This is not a temporary dip. It is a structural shift in how brands can buy reach. And it forces a different question: if paid reach is getting more expensive and less effective, where do you invest instead?

At Livewall, we see the clearest pattern in how the sharpest brands are responding. They are moving away from passive reach and toward active participation. From media budgets toward owned channels and experiences that people visit voluntarily, share with friends, and come back to.

Why the model is breaking

The problem is not just price. It is the nature of paid media itself.

An ad interrupts. It asks for attention without giving anything back. And the more often people are interrupted, the better they get at not looking. Banner blindness, scrolling behaviour, skip reflexes. The human brain adapts.

Contrast that with participation: a user who actively chooses to engage with a brand. Who plays a game, takes on a challenge, follows a story, wins a prize. That experience writes a fundamentally different memory trace. And that user has not cost you a single CPM.

Participation vs passive reach is not just a philosophical discussion. It comes down to measurable outcomes. Brands that invest in owned engagement channels see longer session times, higher repeat visit rates, and richer first-party data than any paid display campaign could deliver.

Owned engagement: the successor to paid reach

Owned engagement means building an experience people want to visit, without having to pay for them to show up.

That could be a loyalty mechanic that drives daily return. An interactive campaign people share of their own accord. A brand platform where content, community, and prizes come together. A gamified activation built around a product launch.

The common thread: the user chooses it. They are not there because you served them an ad. They are there because there is something to do, something to win, or something to experience.

Livewall works exactly at this intersection. We build brand activations and interactive campaigns that actively involve people rather than passively reaching them. And we connect that engagement to measurable business outcomes, from first-party data collection to store visits.

What leading brands are doing differently

The shift is not about abandoning paid media. It is about changing the balance and redefining what paid media is for.

In the most effective approaches we see, paid reach becomes a narrow funnel into an owned experience. You pay to bring someone in once, then owned engagement takes over. An activation, a platform, or a loyalty mechanic holds attention and generates repeat behaviour.

That model is fundamentally different from the traditional campaign approach, where you keep paying for the same audience over and over. With an owned experience, you invest once in the build and collect returns repeatedly.

We see this pattern clearly in our work on McDonald's Spain MyMcDonald's World, where a gamified world inside the app brings users back without incremental media spend. And in People's Postcode Lottery, where always-on webgames create structural return behaviour that no campaign could replicate.

First-party data as a strategic asset

There is another reason this shift is urgent: third-party cookies are largely gone and audience targeting is getting harder.

For years, paid media was powerful because of precise targeting built on platform behavioural data. That model is eroding. And brands that are already investing in first-party data mechanics through owned engagement experiences are building a competitive advantage that others cannot simply buy.

When someone actively participates in a campaign, plays a game, or signs up for a loyalty programme, they share data that you cannot get anywhere else. Richer data. More reliable data. Data you do not share with competitors advertising on the same platform.

For Decathlon, we built a loyalty campaign where participants shared their sports preferences through an interactive experience, delivering direct CRM enrichment that paid media simply cannot produce.

How to make the shift

The question we hear most often: where do you start? Our answer is always the same. Start with the behaviour you want to drive, not the channel.

Do you want people to return to your app more often? Build a mechanic that rewards daily return. Do you want to grow first-party data? Create an activation where participation comes with useful profile information. Do you want to support a product launch? Build a branded experience that actively involves people in the story.

In every case, the starting point is participation, not passive reach. And in every case, paid media can organise a narrow inflow, then the owned experience does the sustained work.

This is exactly the model Livewall applies for brands like Proximus+ World, where an immersive digital environment partially replaces expensive media campaigns, and Rituals Dream Collection, where an interactive product experience deepens brand connection in ways no ad can match.