Annually, marketers spend 450 billion dollar on bought media attention. Every 11 seconds of the time we are awake, we get exposed to an advertising message. As a result, people zap, skip and block messages and bought brand attention looses its glory. In this talk for the top Graduate Students and Alumni at the Erasmus University Rotterdam I discuss the powerful concept of Earned Attention. The presentation describes an alternation path to building brands in the digital age. Brands that remain fixated on buying attention per second, inch or pixel will loose the battle of attention. Tomorrow’s effective brands prefer to talk with instead of to people. They activate their fans and create content worth sharing. This results in authentic brand conversations, whereas people become media themselves.