Bear markets are the cheapest attention you'll ever buy: should you cut marketing budget in a downturn?

Sunny Ray · Jun 5, 2026 · 5 min read

Bear markets are the cheapest time in the cycle to buy attention, and most companies sell it back.

Don't cut marketing first in a downturn. Cut the marketing that performs instead of works: the hype content, the vanity sponsorships, the agency retainer nobody can tie to a meeting. Keep and grow the marketing that builds trust with the people who'll still be buying when the cycle turns: stories, real conversations, and outreach that gives before it asks. Ad costs and agency costs come down when everyone else pulls back. That's a discount, not a warning.

Hype dies, substance compounds

On June 4 I joined an X Space about marketing in a bear market. The timing was perfect. Bitcoin had dropped hard over the previous week, and you could feel the nerves across the whole market.

My opening take was the one I believe most:

Bear markets are when the real builders get found right hype dies you know but the substance kind of compounds and I think the marketers who win now are the ones doing real work not performing it

I've lived through enough cycles to mean it. The fundamentals don't change when the price does. There are still 21 million Bitcoin. The quiet stretch is when the people building real things get noticed, because the noise has gone somewhere else.

Why the marketing budget is always the first cut

Everyone on the panel agreed on the pattern. When the market turns, companies coil up. They reduce spending, they get fearful, and the first line they cut is marketing, even though marketing is what produces next year's customers.

It's the first cut because it's the easiest to defend in a board meeting. Payroll has names attached. Infrastructure has contracts. Marketing looks like a discretionary line item, and in a lot of companies it's run like one, so nobody can prove what it produced.

That's the real problem. Not that marketing is optional, but that most marketing can't show its work. If your marketing can't point to meetings, pipeline and closed deals, it deserves to be cut in any market. If it can, cutting it in a downturn is cutting your future revenue to save this quarter's optics.

Attention gets cheaper

The point I pushed on the Space was the economics:

the other good thing about bear markets is that the cost of advertising and marketing goes down right

When competitors pull budget, ad auctions get less crowded. Agencies that were turning work away start calling you back. The panel listed both: lower advertising costs and cheaper agency services. And on the demand side, people consume more content in uncertain times, not less. They're researching, reading, trying to figure out what happens next.

So you have cheaper supply and more attentive buyers at the same moment, and most of your competitors have left the room. If you had a fixed amount to spend across a whole cycle, this is where you'd want to spend it.

Perspective beats education in the AI age

The content question came up next, and it matters more now than it did two cycles ago. Anyone can get a decent explainer from an AI model in thirty seconds. Generic tips are free and infinite. If your downturn content plan is ten ways to optimize your treasury, you're competing with a chatbot, and the chatbot doesn't get tired.

What can't be generated is perspective. Your story, your scars, the call you got wrong, the thing you learned at 3 a.m. during the last crash. One of the other panelists put it well: the more personal the story, the more people connect with it, flaws included. The room agreed that storytelling is the differentiator now, and that AI slop is the fastest way to lose trust.

I saved a post on X a few days earlier that framed it from the product side: when anyone can build the product, distribution is the moat. In a bear market, the founders who own a direct line to their buyers are the ones still standing when the cycle turns.

Give before you ask: the show invite as a downturn channel

Here's how we run that direct line. I told the Space I was doing high volume: four interviews the day before, plus daily live streams. Every one of those conversations started with a cold email. Not a pitch, an invitation to come on the show.

The logic holds in any market, and it's stronger in a bad one:

You always have to create value before you ask for value.

People don't mark a podcast invite as spam. They say yes because you're giving them a platform when everyone else is asking for budget. The pre-interview and the conversation build the relationship. And even if the guest never buys, you walk away with content that's real, specific and impossible for a chatbot to copy, because it's a conversation that happened.

The same system works for customers and for investors. In a downturn, both are harder to reach and both are more willing to talk to someone offering value instead of asking for it.

What I'd cut and what I'd keep

• Cut: hype content, generic tips, anything you can't tie to a meeting.
• Cut: retainers that report impressions instead of conversations.
• Keep: stories, perspective, the content only you can make.
• Grow: direct outreach that gives first, while it's cheap and your competitors are quiet.

The builders who get found in the quiet are the ones who kept showing up.

If you want a show that keeps booking your buyers while everyone else goes silent, start a show that books your buyers.

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