The Art of Attracting Attention in Marketing and Sales
30 Mar 2026 · 8 min
In this solo podcast, Troy Cole argues that the common response to shrinking human attention spans—simply making content shorter—is misguided. He contends that attention is not a fixed capacity like breath-holding; instead, people will stay engaged if the material is made more interesting. Cole illustrates his point with observations about Netflix’s long‑form series, the necessity of a strong hook in short‑form platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and a personal anecdote about delivering a 45‑minute presentation at the Outliers Ophthalmology meeting that kept the audience captivated. He outlines two approaches to the attention‑span problem: (1) shorten content, which he warns leads to shallow, low‑information experiences, and (2) enrich content with hooks, storytelling, energy, and strategic structure. The latter, he says, is the “right way” and works for both short‑form and long‑form formats. The episode ends with a call to marketers and salespeople to treat attention as a scarce resource that can be captured through compelling, well‑structured communication rather than by merely trimming length.
Chapters
Human beings' attention spans are shorter than goldfishes. You've probably heard this statistic, data point, I don't know what that is. And, uh, you know, I don't even know how you can quantify a goldfish's attention span, but we can probably all agree that the attention span of human beings is shorter than it was 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago. All right. Can we all agree on that? That's fair, right? Because we're distracted and we got the phones and we scroll and this and that, you know, whatever. Okay. So attention spans are shorter and we need to take that into consideration with things like our messaging and our marketing and our content. And There are two ways that you can address shrinking attention spans. I want to go over both of them and let you know the right way to do it. All right. First of all, the, the common way that people will say, well, here's how we address shrinking attention spans. The common way is to make things shorter, to make them briefer, right? To, oh, let's cut this down. Let's shorten this message. Let's ask fewer questions. It's like, let's shorten everything. And I guess that makes sense if an attention span was more of a, hard function, like, like your ability to hold your breath. Like, let's say human beings just could only hold their breath half as long as they could 20 years ago. It's like, okay, well then we can't put them in situations where they're having to hold their breath for a long time or else they're like going to pass out, you know? Uh, that, but that's not how attention spans work. That's not how attention spans work. You know, if you could look at it, attention span. And this is, you know, this is not like I'm not sitting here talking about data or studies here. All right. This is just like common sense. Common sense. Okay. Troy, where's the data? Where's the— no, dude. Listen to me. Okay. Listen to me. Common sense. Look at the world around you. Look at the companies that make gazillions of dollars. Look at the things people are interested in. And draw some conclusions. All right, the answers are right in front of your face. We don't, we don't need some gigantic study or data points or Harvard Business Review or whatever to sit there and validate like what's happening. You exist in this world. You can see what's going on around you. So the other way, the other way to handle attention spans that are shrinking, it's not to shorten whatever you're doing. It's to make it more interesting, to make it more interesting. For example, if I look at the world around me, I find it interesting that like 9 out of 10 new programs that come on the Netflix are are shows. They're not movies. They're series with 6, 8, 10 episodes, each of 45 minutes to an hour long. Well, you know, we got these attention span problems, which would lead me to believe that devoting an hour and a half to a certain piece of content like a movie might be problematic. But you want me to jump into a show 10 hours, apparently. And that's what they're putting out and continue to put out. And so there's something to that. You might say, well, Troy, that's part of the strategy is get you invested in a show. Then you have to watch the show. Then you come back. Then you keep your subscription. Yeah, I agree. But at the end of the day, Like, if attention spans were really the issue and like that was the limiting factor, Netflix would be doing a bunch of abbreviated 3 to 5 minute shorts instead of 45, 50, 60 minute long shows in a 10 episode series. Hmm. I mean, you got to have a pretty long attention span to dial into all that, don't you? Well, how do they do that? How do they, how do they make sure that all these people with all these short attention spans come in and get hooked and spend all that time? And the answer is they make it more interesting. They make it more interesting. And from a tactical standpoint, how do they make it more interesting? Well, the same way that even with short-form content, right? right? If you're going to look at, man, how do we deal with short attention spans on TikTok, on Instagram, on social media, in the email inbox, through SMS messaging, you've got to have something that catches attention right there at the beginning. In social media videos, they call it a hook. What's the question that you ask right there at the beginning, or the visual that you show? What's the thumbnail on YouTube that you see and you go, oh, that's interesting. Right? What captures that interest and attention to get somebody into it? Then you get somebody into it, and really, like, there's a lot of technical things you can do, but my number one tip is just don't be boring. Just don't be boring. If you can make your things enjoyable, entertaining, enlightening, create some aha moments, it doesn't, doesn't matter if you've got a longer blog post or a longer video. The attention span is going to adapt to whatever captures the attention. So your two ways of dealing with shorter attention spans: one, try to shorten your stuff, and you can make it shorter, and attention spans get shorter, and you make it shorter. And now all of a sudden you've got a self-test with 2.5 questions on it. You're not getting any good info. You've not engaged the patient. But it's shorter. Or you make your things more interesting. You have a hook, you have a unique angle, you have energy. I'm recording this right after the Outliers Ophthalmology meeting that I spoke at over the weekend. I did 45 minutes Saturday morning. It was the longest slot of the entire program, and it was first thing in the morning. And I had dozens of people come up to me after and say, oh my gosh, that was so great. That was fantastic. 40 minutes, 45 minutes is a long time. You really made it fly by. I really liked your stories. I loved your energy. That was awesome. Okay. I don't, I'm not worried about your attention span for 45 minutes because I'm going to structure what I'm doing. My talk, my stories, my energy, my questions, my pauses in a way that captures your attention. And I want you to do the same thing in your marketing, in your sales messages, in your videos, in your self-test, in your website. It's not about making it as short as possible. It's about stepping up, rising up, Understanding that attention is a scarce resource, but that doesn't mean you can't capture the heck out of it. Okay, get out there and capture attention.
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