Pixar's latest film is about a child addicted to her tablet, for an audience of adults who will be on their phones within minutes of leaving the cinema.
And if you work in marketing, I'd argue it's about you specifically.
Toy Story 5 is pitched as a kids' film about toys competing with tech. Bonnie, the little girl who owns Woody and the gang, gets given a tablet called Lilypad, and her toys spend the film fighting for her attention. Toy meets tech. Lovely. Bring the family.
Except the film's message isn't really for kids. Their screen habits are mostly learned, and they learn them from watching us. Left to it, most kids will still choose mud, sticks and imaginary worlds. It's the adults who can't sit through a coffee without checking something on their device. The average adult now racks up around four hours of screen time a day. Do the maths on that and it's sixty full days a year. Two months, gone, mostly to other people's holiday pics and arguments between strangers.
Attention is our currency.
For those of us in marketing, that number should feel particularly uncomfortable. Attention is our currency. It's the thing we're paid to earn, hold and convert on behalf of brands. We plan campaigns around it, measure it, fight over fractions of a second of it. And yet we're worse than almost anyone at protecting our own. We are, professionally speaking, attention dealers who can't stop using our own supply.
So when Woody and Buzz stand in that bedroom trying to win back a distracted kid, I don't see our children, I see ourselves. We are Bonnie. The tablet won us over years ago, and everything in our lives that needs patience and presence has been quietly losing the fight ever since. Our hobbies. Our books. Our friends across the dinner table. All of them standing there like abandoned toys, hoping we look up.
The phone wins because it asks for nothing.
What Pixar gets right is that Lilypad doesn't need to be a villain. She just has to be effortless, which is exactly what our phones are. They're simply better than anything else ever invented at giving endless reward in exchange for zero effort. The toys on the floor need a child to bring the imagination. A walk needs you to look up. A conversation needs both people actually in it. The phone needs nothing from you at all, which is why it always wins.
Boredom is where the good stuff happens.
A while back I checked my screen time for the first time in a while, and had to look away. What those hours had quietly removed was my boredom. Screens are better than anything ever invented at killing boredom, which sounds like progress until you remember what boredom was for. It's the gap where kids invent entire worlds out of a cardboard box, and where adults have their best creative ideas. Ask anyone where they have their best ideas and you'll hear the same answers. The shower, the dog walk, the drive home. Hardly anyone ever says forty minutes into doomscrolling. Remove the boredom gap and you lose everything that used to happen inside it.
We've replaced recovery with more input.
In agency life we spend the working day making content, and the evening consuming it. Screens at the desk, screens on the commute, screens on the sofa, screens in bed (always just one last scroll before sleep), and at no point does anything actually switch off. Scrolling feels like rest because the body is still, but the mind is being sprayed with stimulation the whole time. Then Monday's brainstorm feels like wading through wet sand and nobody can quite say why. We talk a lot about burnout in this industry, and we usually blame workload. I'd argue at least part of it is that we've quietly deleted recovery from our lives and replaced it with more input.
We sell attention. Then give ours away for free.
We sell attention for a living while giving our own away for free. Every campaign we make is built on the assumption that attention is valuable, scarce and worth fighting for. We just don't apply the logic to ourselves. Imagine treating your own attention the way you'd treat a client's media budget. You'd never spend it the way most of us currently do.
Pixar knows what it's doing. The toys never try to beat the tablet at its own game. They just try to remind Bonnie what she loved before it arrived.
The lesson isn't for the kids.
Maybe that's the lesson for our industry too. Capturing attention was never really our problem. We're good at that, and the tools keep getting better. What I'm less sure of is whether we can hold onto enough of our own to keep producing ideas that deserve anyone else's.
That's the real message of Toy Story 5, and it's not aimed at the kids watching in the cinema, it's for whoever brought them.
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Tim Wickham is a Senior Digital & Motion designer for Pinpoint Media, part of PrettyGreen, and the author of Offline Adventures - a book about putting your phone down and remembering what you did before it arrived. Available now on Amazon. https://linktr.ee/offlineadventuresbook
