
Episode #52
S4 Ep52: Navigating the Age of Attention Scarcity with Claire Coady, Founder of The Attention Practice
This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Claire Coady, Founder of The Attention Practice, a specialist communications consultancy built for what Claire calls the “Age of Attention Scarcity“. Drawing on more than 20 years of advising global brands, governments and NGOs, Claire and her team fuse brand and media strategy, audience research, information risk and the science of attention to help organisations cut through in an overwhelmed world. They discuss why attention should be treated as a finite resource, and why it now belongs on every CEO’s agenda rather than being left to the marketing team. Claire explains the tipping point that led her to found a practice dedicated entirely to attention, and how the battle for attention changes when the subject is complex or sensitive rather than commercial. She walks through her approach to designing strategies that sustain attention rather than simply capturing it, from applying behavioural change insights to building a brand’s defences against the attention hacks used to spread disinformation. The conversation covers the realities of scaling a human-first, research-led consultancy in an AI-driven information environment, including how generative AI is complicating the attention problem, how the “Can We Have Your Attention?” podcast and Claire’s Substack attract government and institutional clients, and how she bridges the cultural attention gap across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Claire also shares what award-winning, high-budget campaigns and shoestring projects have each taught her about attention, how she thinks about risk and resilience, and how her commitment to social progress as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts shapes her day-to-day work. Find more about The Attention Practice here: https://www.theattentionpractice.com/ Follow Claire Coady here: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/clairecoady






