People have no attention span anymore. At least, that’s how marketing likes to explain pretty much everything these days. No one reads anymore. Videos need to be shorter. The first three seconds are everything. Text? Less. Message? Immediately. CTA? Preferably even sooner. Because if we don’t grab someone’s attention right away, their thumb is already on its way to the next post. And yet, that same person will spend the evening watching four episodes of a show back-to-back, lose half an hour reading comments under a video posted by someone they don’t even know, and at 1:37 a.m. suddenly realize they’ve somehow ended up scrolling through the Instagram profile of a restaurant in Naples they will probably never visit. So maybe our attention spans haven’t disappeared after all. Maybe we’ve just been defining the problem wrong.
Attention isn’t gone. It’s just more expensive.
We’re competing for attention at a time when almost everyone is trying to get it.
Brands. Creators. Media outlets. Influencers. Streaming platforms. Podcasts. Newsletters. WhatsApp groups. Discord servers…
And, of course, ads. Lots and lots of ads.
That’s why it can feel like people have stopped paying attention. They haven’t. They’ve simply become much more selective about where they choose to give it.
And that distinction matters. Because if we believe audiences simply “don’t have the attention span anymore,” the solution seems obvious: make everything shorter, louder, faster and more aggressive.
But if we accept that attention still exists, we just have to earn it, the entire way we think about marketing and advertising changes.
Stopping someone isn’t the same as interesting them.
Sure, we can use enormous text. We can write: “YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS WRONG YOUR WHOLE LIFE.” We can add a giant red arrow. We can scream: “WAIT. DON’T SCROLL.”
And maybe the person actually stops. But then what?
There’s a big difference between getting someone’s attention and being worth their attention.
The first can be achieved through interruption. The second requires something more. Relevance. Personality. Usefulness. Emotion. Humor. A point of view. A story. Or maybe simply a creative concept good enough to make us genuinely want to see what happens next.
That’s why marketing that constantly interrupts people for no good reason isn’t necessarily good marketing. It’s a mosquito. Yes, we noticed it. Yes, it got our attention. But it also annoyed us. Not exactly the ideal KPI.
Buzz less. Glow more.
Since we’re apparently using insects as marketing metaphors now, we’d much rather be a firefly. 🙂
A firefly doesn’t need to shout. It doesn’t need to chase us around. It definitely doesn’t need to retarget us six times while we’re simply trying to live our lives. It glows.
We notice it, and we keep looking because there’s something interesting and different about it. We might even start wondering about it: how does it glow like that? How do other animals see it? What does it eat?
You get the metaphor.
That’s how brands should think too. You don’t necessarily need to be the loudest brand in your category. You need to be the one people recognize. The one with something distinctly its own. The one whose post couldn’t be dropped onto five competitors’ profiles simply by swapping out the logo. More content will never make up for a lack of identity.
The algorithm isn’t your customer.
One of the stranger consequences of modern marketing is that we’ve started creating content as if our ultimate goal were to impress the algorithm.
“Reels are performing well right now.” We make Reels.
“Shorter videos perform better.” We make them shorter.
“You need to post more often.” We post every day.
“This sound is trending.” Quick, everyone use the exact same sound.
And suddenly ten completely different brands are creating almost identical content because they’ve all been given the same advice about what supposedly “works” right now.
The problem? THE ALGORITHM ISN’T YOUR CUSTOMER.
A platform can help put you in front of someone. It cannot give that person a reason to remember you. And it definitely can’t give them a reason to come back.
Reach and attention are not the same thing. Attention and interest are not the same thing. And interest and trust are DEFINITELY not the same thing.
Good marketing has to do something much harder than simply appear on a lot of screens. It has to leave something behind after it disappears from them.
You don’t always need more content. You need a better reason to create it.
There’s a strange pressure for brands to constantly have something to say. To post something. Anything. Just to keep the feed moving.
But we don’t need to publish content simply because the content calendar says we should.
Post because you have something worth saying, not because it’s Wednesday. The internet will survive if you don’t post today. We promise. Your brand will too.
And just to be clear: consistency does matter, but consistently publishing average content won’t magically build an interesting brand.
So, how do you become worth paying attention to?
There is no five-step formula. Thankfully. Because if there were, we’d all end up doing exactly the same thing again…
There are, however, a few better questions a brand can ask before hitting “post”:
- Are we actually saying something meaningful, or are we just filling space on the feed?
- Is there a reason this would be interesting to the person on the other side of the screen?
- Would someone recognize our content if we removed the logo?
- Does our content have a personality, or could it have come from almost any other brand?
- If we were the person holding the phone, drinking coffee on the terrace, with roughly 400 other things we could be looking at, would we actually stop for this?
So no, the future of marketing isn’t necessarily shorter, louder or faster. Quite the opposite.
In a world where everyone is fighting for attention, the advantage will belong to brands that understand one simple thing: no one owes them theirs.
Attention hasn’t disappeared. The standards have simply gone up.
