The Attention Journey
Understanding attention so you can get it, keep it and do something good with it.
When people hear the word attention, their first associations tend to be negative - a fear of predatory interests, amoral corporations and profit-motivated technologies which hijack our “lizard brain”. It’s a shame - a little like hearing the word “forest” and immediately picturing deforestation or hearing the word “water” and picturing floods or drowning. Attention is a rich and fascinating primary facet of consciousness which should be associated just as much with an engrossing late-night conversation, a powerful novel or life-altering sunset.1 A deeper understanding of attention is absolutely fundamental to recognizing how art or entertainment or content connects with the people it was presumably, at some point, intended to reach.
Attention isn’t a binary. It isn’t on or off. It’s not even any single process or faculty, rather a combination of internal mechanisms and systems. I’ve found it helpful to think of it as a spectrum or gradient, from initial awareness to fully-committed immersion. I want to propose a model for understanding it and designing for it - the Attention Journey.
There are many different, but easy to recognize, qualities to attention as it develops. Imagine you hear a sudden loud noise on the street. Your head turns towards its source - a movement made unconsciously, reflexively. Your glance maybe turns into a squint as you try to work out what’s going on - firstly to rule out a threat, then to find out if it’s worth more of a look. Your gaze probably then softens to take in more information - if there’s something to see, to examine further, maybe you reorient your body to find out more. Perhaps if it’s really interesting, you explain to your patient companion what you’ve gathered so far and settle in to nosily peer into whatever urban drama or curious distraction is unfolding. From the initiating spike to the prolonged focus, the journey is a shifting one, flowing through distinct and familiar stages.
This same journey of attention is happening in every media choice you ever make - going from scanning headlines to reading full articles, swiping through split-seconds to stop on some particular TikTok, a movie poster or review catching your eye to sitting in a darkened room with strangers, browsing thumbnails to losing yourself in a 20 minute YouTube video. Think about the two ends of the journey and how qualitatively different they are.
Distributed to Focused: Going from paying attention to a wide field to zeroing in on a single object of focus.
Passive to Active: Lean-back browse mode becoming an active engagement in the particular content you choose.
Pre-Attentive to Attentive: Things are catching your eye2, on the edge of your awareness before your attention really noticeably kicks in.3
Exogenous to Endogenous: An external stimulus causes or initiates your attention, but then you’re in charge of controlling, refining and deepening that attention.
General to Specific: An open interest in whatever might come up shifting into a specialized focus on a single item.
Broad to Nuanced: An awareness of the most obvious features of something developing into an appreciation of its subtler qualities.4
Unconscious to Conscious: Deeper desires and instinctive drives shifting into a deliberate decision to spend your valuable time with something.
Effortless to Effortful: From spontaneously being drawn to something to engaging critical faculties, even enjoying the challenge it presents.5
Sebastian Watzl’s writing was revelatory to me in terms of these poles - as was Britt Anderson’s “bifurcation of attention” perspective. Various writers have described a floodlight or lantern state of consciousness in which you’re taking everything in as opposed to a flashlight or spotlight which narrows the beam of your attention on to one thing to the exclusion of others.
My entry-point to thinking about this journey was trying to work out the specifics of video concepts and executions with creatives. I often found that aspects of the appeal of a show would be overemphasized or under-emphasized - that the framing concept used in the series would come to dominate its narrative or that a subtler appeal which loyal viewers came to love was used as a primary selling point to new viewers. I break out the elements of an idea’s appeal like this:
Hook - the big, bright, curious, novel, clear, cute, fascinating, surprising spark that brings people in.
Way In - the neat structure, the clever concept, the easy entrance that makes the viewer feel secure and understand what’s going to happen and how.
Primary Appeal - the main event, the central value that you have to deliver, the story, the main course, the reason anyone’s going to stick around.
Secondary Appeal - the bells and whistles, the bonus features, the charm and style and executional expertise, the stuff you tell your mates about.
Understanding how to craft great hooks or really get in touch with the primary appeal of any piece of media is a whole mission in itself, but having an understanding of this framework and knowing which is which for your project, especially in collaborative creative, is insanely helpful. Over and over again, from TV shows to digital videos to entire media brands, you see these elements being switched around - the hook takes the place of the primary appeal, the secondary appeal is positioned as a hook, etc - and it invariably signals the decline of the property.
The intent of each of these pieces of the puzzle is to connect, intentionally and sequentially, with the natural flow of people’s attention. They align with what you need to do to take someone’s hand and lead them along the attention journey.
Get Attention - That initial moment of entering someone's consciousness. It's the glass tapped at a wedding to introduce a toast, the "read all about it" from an anachronistic news vendor, the bright colours and arrows in a thumbnail, Tom Cruise’s huge face on a movie poster or streaming home page, the surprise and novelty of a compelling concept.
Engage Attention - Laying things out in an appealing way, capturing the imagination, passing the initial critical scrutiny of a distracted, demanding and discerning viewer, engendering trust and drawing them deeper in.
Keep Attention - Mostly just delivering. Also keeping people engaged with fascinating revelatory insights, surprises along the way, dynamic variation, a persistent and palpable sense of value. There are too many approaches to “audience retention” and most of them are just being great at what you do - layering different kinds of appeal, alternating styles, keeping up the pace of delivering quality, caring about every aspect of production, actually genuinely giving a shit, etc etc etc.
Reward Attention - Where all the added value goes. It's the stuff that the real fans fall in love with, that inspires the loyalty. The subtle charms of the host, the nuances of performance, the creative flourishes, the repeated familiar elements that make it feel like home, the craft of the writing or the relationships that emerge.
Think how this matches up with some people’s four part version of a marketing funnel - awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty. It’s the same path, recognising that people will go through stages of being curious then critical, appreciative then eventually receptive to more refined and complex qualities.
The mistake a lot of people make is imagining the two ends of the attention journey as mutually exclusive or at least likely to inhibit one another, thinking that if you have an important story to tell, it somehow shouldn’t be designed to draw people in6 or that if you design something to garner maximum attention, it can’t then deliver real substance.7 I think that’s terribly pessimistic and, worse, self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating. This is all really just storytelling - holding a viewer or reader’s hand and leading them through to whatever it is that you’re driven to show or tell them. I hope this model can provide a sense that engineering creative to effectively reach and connect with people doesn’t have to be a cynical enterprise or a manipulation of baser instincts. Instead, it can be an intentional and balanced process that, by tuning to the journey of a viewer’s attention, can create richer, cooler, better, more edifying and valuable experiences in media.
Links
A must-watch talk by Charlie Kaufman from the BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series.8 Heartfelt, sweet and smart, charming and inspiring.
“What’s Up, Fatlip?” showed up in the reboot of White Men Can’t Jump and it reminded me how brilliant he is and how good the Spike Jonze video is.
Adam Buxton’s podcast is functionally a hug, maybe a cup of tea. It’s back - episode 201 features a lovely gentle chat with Tom Hanks.
People always say that you can’t get films that aren’t sequels, remakes or reboots made. Here are 100 from last year. They also say that no mid-budget films get made either, so I put the estimated budgets, where available, in there.
Whatever you’re saying about the algorithm, it might be a good time to rethink it. The ever-wise Entertainment Strategy Guy dropping knowledge about the nonsense construction that lives in people’s minds that they call “the algorithm”. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, exactly, yes.
Ed Catmull of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios is the clearest communicator about driving a successful creative business I have ever encountered. In this piece from 2008 he explains at once how simple and how complicated it is to deliver repeated creative success.
I listen to quite a lot of new music and was asked by a friend to, rather than recommending 10 albums a week to give a listen, make a playlist of the highlights every now and then. Here’s the latest one:
“Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.” - Iain McGilchrist
"Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."
“The distinction between a parallel ‘pre-attentive’ stage encoding simple physical properties vs. a serial ‘attentive’ stage encoding more abstract properties remains common in the current literature.” - Jon Driver, A selective review of selective attention research from the past century.
“First, we can feel bored when we’re in a position where we can’t pay attention, either because the task we’re doing is too easy or too hard. “For you to be able to pay attention and maintain attention on something, you need cognitive demands and cognitive resources to be balanced,” Dr. Westgate explained — in other words, the demands of the task need to match what your brain can bring to it.” How to Be Bored, and What You Can Learn From It, NY Times
“A number of dichotomies have been employed over the years to assist in drawing the line between sensational and "proper" news topics. These include entertainment versus information, infotainment versus edutainment, human interest versus public affairs, situational versus timeless issues, soft versus hard news, opinion versus fact, and unexpected events versus issue coverage.”
Explicating Sensationalism in Television News: Content and the Bells and Whistles of Form, Maria Elizabeth Grabe
“In contrast, academics and activists sustain suspicions of filter bubbles, public sphericules, and disastrous effects on media diversity. They object to how such algorithms seem bound to confirm rather than challenge or develop taste, conjuring up nightmares of Brave New World–style surveillance and bread-and-circus wish fulfilment, bemoaning the opacity of the technology and the murky corporations that control it. Such revisionists and contrarians have raised myriad dangers that include the datafication of identity and the mathematization of taste leading to a wholesale redefinition of culture. For these passionate interlocutors, algorithmic recommendation represents the end of humanist criticism as we have known it, the death knell of the Arnoldian “best which has been thought and said.”” - Mattias Frey, The Internet Suggests
"What can be done? Say who you are. Really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won't be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can't help but be... but more importantly, if you're honest about who you are, you'll help that person be less lonely in their world. Because that person will recognize him or herself in you. And that will give them hope and it's done so for me. And I have to keep rediscovering it, it's profound importance in my life. Give that to the world rather than selling something to the world. Don't allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are, is the way the world must work and that in the end, selling is what everyone must do. Try not to." - Charlie Kaufman
This is a fantastic read! I'll be sharing it in the Storythings newsletter this week.
So true and explains, to the untrained consumer, the itchy, can't-put-my-finger-on-it frustration that the content you once signed up for in good faith isn't keeping up its end of the bargain. Presumably, the creators of the cases you mention take for granted the vast, calcified reserves of attention they sit on and will probably stop producing it when they feel like it or, maybe, get exposed. If content is to sustain the high benchmarks it set out with, it should cease to be made when the consumers say so, not vice versa. But the pact we make with it is strong and deceptively one-sided and I'm tired and there's nothing else on so I'll just watch a Gogglebox and go to bed.