São Paulo, September 2026 — Despite retailers and brands allocating increasingly larger portions of their marketing budgets to social media, content creators, and highly targeted programmatic advertising, final conversion rates continue to decline while Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) keep rising.
Confirmation of this trend comes from the recently released The Pace Principle 2.0 study by WARC, which reveals that marketing strategies focused exclusively on social media and content creators are reaching structural growth limits. According to the report, today’s marketing ecosystem has conditioned companies to produce large volumes of content to feed social platforms rather than creating lasting consumer memory and genuine attention.
However, the study also outlines a clear path to unlocking growth: properly aligning target audiences with creative strategy can increase campaign effectiveness by as much as 70%. Consolidated data from Kantar and WARC further show that truly effective, interactive advertising can generate up to four times greater return on investment (ROI) and significantly increase business profitability.
To overcome the challenges identified in the study—such as overreliance on social feeds and the rapid loss of consumer attention—the concept of Driven Media is gaining momentum in the market. Driven Media represents a shift from buying media based on volume to scientifically capturing genuine consumer attention through creative technology, interactivity, and entertainment.
“The old model of purely technical media has collapsed because consumers have simply learned to ignore passive advertising. Content may be relevant and targeting may be flawless, but if the creative format fails to engage and retain attention within the first few seconds, the investment is wasted,” says Rodrigo Coutinho, Director of Newsroom AI and a specialist in creative technology.
According to Coutinho, the next transformation in retail requires technology to be deployed in service of the user experience, moving beyond dependence on traditional platforms.
“The future of ROI in both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail is not about producing more generic content to feed algorithms. It’s about applying data intelligence and interactive formats across every screen—from smartphones to Smart TVs—to transform screen time into genuine consumer engagement,” he concludes.
