Playing it safe is killing your brand

"The attention myth The common narrative is that attention spans are shrinking. People are distracted. Everyone's scrolling too fast. If you don't grab them immediately, you've lost. This narrative is wrong in a dangerous way. People aren't giving less attention. They're being more selective about where they give it. Your audience has the same cognitive capacity they've always had. They're just making faster decisions about what deserves it."

"Why people scroll past your $10,000 video Here's where most brands catastrophically misjudge the situation: They assume professional production quality will capture attention. High-resolution footage, perfect color grading, smooth transitions. The content looks expensive, which surely means it looks valuable, right? Dead wrong. After years of exposure to professional content, audiences have been trained to scroll past anything that looks like an ad."

Attention spans are not shrinking; audiences remain cognitively capable but have become more selective about where they allocate attention. Viewers make millisecond decisions using pattern recognition developed through extensive scrolling, asking "Is this worth my time?" Highly produced, brand-safe content often triggers an automatic rejection because it resembles advertising. Expensive production can signal "marketing" and cause viewers to skip content before the message registers. Effective scroll-stopping content leverages pattern interruption to break visual or conceptual feed patterns, such as lo-fi or unexpected elements, to compel viewers to stop and engage.

Read at Inc