FOCUS 1: Increasing attention In an age of limitless choice, it takes a \little psychology to stand out

Every day, we’re exposed to an eye-watering number of content options. Whether it’s choosing what to watch, what to read, or what to listen to, the variety that’s on offer is inescapable and often overwhelming.

That’s largely thanks to the growth and expansion of our hyperconnected world. There are more channels that organizations can use to offer consumers content, more content out there to be offered, and more data available to help marketers and advertisers understand what their customers want.

For businesses like yours, that’s great news. Hundreds of thousands of potential customers are just a few clicks or taps away. And all you need to do to get their attention is put the right content in front of the right people at the right time.

The bad news? Every one of your competitors is trying to do the same thing—with largely the same capabilities, strategies, and messages.

You’ve got two options. You could try to shout louder than your competitors, and add to the riotous cacophony already taking place across your channels today. Or, you can get a little deeper and unpack what it really takes to not only grab, but retain customer attention…

The economics of your attention

In 2019, Dentsu Aegis launched 'The Attention Economy': a study designed to explore the connections between attention and consumer buying behavior. The study examined 3,400 people as they engaged with 17,000 different adverts across various channels—using state-of-the-art tracking capabilities to measure how long an advert held their attention, and how that correlated with their buying decisions.

The key result was confirmation of the fact that the more time and attention we give to an advert—or any piece of promotional content—the higher our propensity to buy. Or, the longer your can hold your audience’s attention, the more likely it is that whatever you’ve created will drive measurable customer results.

While the focus of 'The Attention Economy' was predominantly on advertising, the same results hold true for other forms of customer engagement. From articles to videos and from emails to web pages—if we can get our audiences to spend more quality time engaging with our content, we can expect better commercial outcomes for our businesses.

Optimizing content for attention

That’s great. But it immediately begs a different question: What can marketers do to ensure their content generates that kind of attention?

That’s a big question. But fortunately, it’s also one that we’ve already answered in depth in our Demystifying the Psychology of Attention webinar.

The answers we uncovered are a little too deep to share in detail here, but the very short version is that to generate the right kind of attention, your content needs to be audience relevant, of high quality, visually striking, and crucially, presented in an engaging format.

The right format can make all the difference

Scientists at Lumen Research ran a study to find out how content format (the way messaging is delivered) impacts reader attention.

They discovered that the right content format can positively impact:

💌 Readers' brand perception
📱 Mobile engagement with content
🧠 Higher accuracy in messaging recall
🎨 Accessibility and visual standards

Brain-friendly and dynamic formats like Turtl Docs for example receive 10x more engagement than traditional, static formats like PDFs. It’s something we’re incredibly proud of at Turtl, especially when we see how it translates into the right results for our customers and partners.