What two decades inside networks taught me about holding attention

ABC, NBC and TMZ. The job was never getting attention. It was holding it, and being able to prove you had.

I started on the production side. ABC, NBC, TMZ. Product development at NBC.com, where the job was building and shipping digital product for a broadcast network, in front of an audience that leaves the instant you bore it.

Broadcast teaches you something that performance marketing does not. Getting attention is cheap and mostly mechanical. Holding it is the whole craft, and there is a scoreboard for it that updates whether or not you like the number.

The transferable lesson is that the first three seconds are a promise and everything after is whether you kept it. Most marketing is very good at the promise and completely uninterested in the rest, which is why the click-through rate looks fine and nothing converts.

Later I ran go-to-market for a racing simulator company, selling a premium engineered product to an unforgiving audience worldwide. Same lesson in a different room. Nobody cared about the spec sheet. The unboxing videos did numbers no ad budget could buy, because they kept the promise the first three seconds made.

That is the discipline I bring to a paid media account now. Not more impressions. A message that survives contact with someone who has somewhere else to be.

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