“People Have Short Attention Spans” Is What Boring Marketers Tell Themselves

“Nobody has an attention span anymore.”

Really?

Because I watched a man restore a 120-year-old rug for 14 minutes yesterday.

Didn't need a rug.

Don't particularly care about rugs.

Still needed to know how that little bastard came up.

People watch three-hour podcasts.

Six-part documentaries.

Twenty-minute YouTube videos about why a restaurant they've never visited is badly designed.

They binge eight episodes of television in a night and emerge looking like they've recently returned from war.

They'll spend 45 minutes reading the comments underneath a video they didn't even particularly like.

But your ad?

Gone in 0.7 seconds.

And we've decided the problem is their attention span.

Convenient.

People Don't Have Short Attention Spans. They Have Options.

This is the bit marketing sometimes forgets.

Your customer isn't sitting patiently waiting for your content.

They're choosing between essentially every interesting thing humanity has ever created.

Right now.

Inside their phone.

Friends.

News.

Memes.

Porn.

Celebrities.

Sport.

Music.

Drama.

Recipes.

Conspiracy theories.

Exes.

Current crushes.

People cleaning disgusting swimming pools.

Someone building a cabin in Finland with apparently no need for employment.

And your ad.

“At [BRAND], we believe…”

Gone.

Not because the human brain has suddenly lost the ability to concentrate.

Because the human brain has become extremely good at deciding:

Not this.

Attention Isn't Dead. Entitlement Is.

For a long time, advertisers could buy access to attention.

Commercial break starts.

You're there.

Magazine opens.

You're there.

Billboard beside the road.

There you fucking are.

The audience could ignore you, obviously.

But distribution gave you a pretty decent shot at being seen.

Social changed the deal.

You can still buy the impression.

You cannot buy the attention.

The thumb has a vote.

And the thumb is ruthless.

Your customer doesn't owe you five seconds because Media bought the placement.

They don't owe you the setup.

They don't owe you the product benefit.

They don't owe you enough time for the story to “really get going.”

You have to earn the next second.

Then earn the one after that.

“But Our Message Takes Time to Explain”

Sounds like your problem.

Not theirs.

This is one of our favourite bits of marketing logic.

“We need at least 15 seconds because there are three key messages.”

Why three?

“They're all important.”

To whom?

“The business.”

Excellent.

And does the customer wake up desperate to receive all three?

Silence.

Brands often confuse the amount they want to say with the amount anyone wants to hear.

Your organisational complexity is not a customer content strategy.

If it takes 27 seconds before something interesting happens because you need to establish the proposition, brand world, product architecture and three RTBs first…

The audience may have some feedback.

Unfortunately, they already left.

The Hook Isn't a Trick

“Hooks” occasionally get treated like some dirty performance-marketing tactic.

As though serious brands should be above such things.

We tell stories.

We build brands.

We don't do…

hooks.

Okay.

What do you think the opening of a great film is doing?

A headline?

A book's first sentence?

A comedian's first joke?

A trailer?

A newspaper front page?

Humans have been finding ways to make other humans want to know what happens next for quite some time.

Social didn't invent the hook.

It just made it brutally obvious when yours is shit.

You Don't Need to Make Everything Shorter

This is where people misunderstand the lesson.

If audiences leave quickly, the answer becomes:

Make it shorter.

Six seconds.

Five seconds.

Three seconds.

Logo immediately.

Product immediately.

Everything faster.

Now.

NOW.

BUY FUCKING YOGHURT.

Maybe.

Sometimes shorter is better.

Sometimes the job only needs six seconds.

But duration isn't the same thing as attention.

A boring six-second ad is still boring.

It's just mercifully over sooner.

The question isn't:

How short can we make this?

It's:

How long can we make someone want to stay?

Very different creative problem.

The Internet Is Full of Evidence Against the Attention-Span Theory

Look at what people voluntarily consume.

A creator tells a brilliant story?

People stay.

Someone opens with:

“I found something incredibly weird in my Airbnb…”

We're staying.

A genuinely useful tutorial?

Stay.

Drama?

Stay.

Transformation?

Stay.

A ridiculous argument involving somebody's neighbour and a fence?

Cancel my afternoon.

Part 1 is nine minutes?

Fine.

Part 2?

WHERE IS PART 2, SARAH?

We haven't lost the ability to pay attention.

We've become extremely selective about where we spend it.

Which, frankly, seems reasonable.

Your First Three Seconds Aren't the Whole Ad

They're the audition.

This matters.

Marketers sometimes treat the opening as the place where we need to cram in everything.

Brand.

Product.

Offer.

Claim.

Logo.

CTA.

Maybe a QR code if we're feeling violent.

But the first job of the opening is simpler.

Make me want the next bit.

That's it.

Create curiosity.

Show me something.

Say something.

Introduce tension.

Make me laugh.

Give me a reason.

If the audience stays, you've bought yourself time to communicate.

If they leave, it doesn't matter how beautifully you explained the product benefit in second 11.

Nobody was there.

This Is Why Social Data Is So Fucking Useful

You don't have to guess what holds attention.

You're publishing content constantly.

Look.

Which openings consistently keep people?

Where are people dropping?

Which creators hold attention longer?

Which subjects get watched?

Which formats buy themselves more time?

Which videos are 45 seconds long and somehow outperform the 12-second ones?

That's interesting.

Because it immediately tells you:

Shorter isn't always the answer.

Better might be.

And those learnings shouldn't stay trapped inside your social team.

They should inform paid creative.

Creator briefs.

Campaigns.

TVCs.

Everything.

If a particular type of opening has repeatedly earned attention from your actual audience, why would your expensive campaign deliberately start with something else?

Stop Cutting the Interesting Bit to Make the Ad Shorter

We've seen this happen.

Creative starts at 30 seconds.

It's good.

Need 15.

Okay.

Something has to go.

Remove a bit of the joke.

Need six.

Remove the setup.

Need bumper.

Remove everything except product and logo.

Perfect.

We now have an incredibly efficient little piece of nothing.

Sometimes cutting down creative doesn't concentrate it.

It kills it.

The pause was the joke.

The setup created the tension.

The weird moment made the thing memorable.

The story needed enough time to become a story.

If you're cutting purely because:

PEOPLE HAVE SHORT ATTENTION SPANS

you may be solving the wrong problem.

“People Won't Watch That Long”

Will they not?

Or wouldn't you watch it that long?

Because those aren't the same thing.

If the content earns attention, people constantly violate our neat little assumptions about optimal length.

Creators know this.

They'll make a 90-second story because the story needs 90 seconds.

Then they'll make an eight-second joke because the joke needs eight seconds.

Length follows the idea.

Brands sometimes do the opposite.

“We need 15 seconds.”

Okay.

What's the idea?

“Not sure yet.”

Interesting creative process.

Boring Feels Longer

This might be the actual science we need.

A boring 15-second ad feels like a hostage situation.

A brilliant 60-second video can disappear.

Time is experienced differently when you're interested.

That's why:

“Nobody watches long ads anymore”

isn't particularly useful.

Nobody watches long boring ads if they can avoid them.

They also don't watch short boring ads.

They avoid boring.

Extremely efficiently.

Attention Is a Creative Outcome

We often treat attention like something Media delivers.

We bought 10 million impressions.

Therefore:

Attention.

Not quite.

Media can put you in the room.

Creative gives someone a reason to look at you.

And on social, those two things start affecting each other.

Better creative can hold people longer.

People can share it.

Platforms can distribute it further.

Your paid performance can improve.

Suddenly the quality of the thing isn't separate from the distribution of the thing.

Which means blaming attention spans can become an expensive little excuse.

Maybe we don't need another million impressions.

Maybe we need to make the first million more interested.

Stop Treating the Audience Like They Have a Medical Condition

This is the bit that annoys us.

“Consumers have shorter attention spans.”

They sound unwell.

Poor things.

Can't concentrate.

Must be TikTok.

Meanwhile, that same consumer has watched 38 minutes of a stranger explaining the collapse of a cryptocurrency they've never owned.

They're fine.

They just have standards.

And options.

Lots of options.

Your customer isn't incapable of giving you attention.

They're deciding you haven't earned it.

That is a much more painful diagnosis.

It's also a much more useful one.

Because you can do something about it.

Don't Make It Shorter. Make It Harder to Leave.

That's the brief.

Maybe it's six seconds.

Maybe it's 60.

Maybe it's three minutes.

Who cares?

Start with something worth watching.

Give people a reason to stay.

Then keep giving them reasons.

Cut the boring bits.

Not automatically the long bits.

Use what your audience has already taught you.

Look at the hooks.

The creators.

The stories.

The formats.

The things people voluntarily spend time with.

And stop blaming the human attention span every time your beautifully produced brand film gets annihilated by someone's thumb.

Because people have plenty of attention.

They spent hours of it today.

They just didn't spend it with you.

That's not an attention-span problem.

That's an interesting problem.