Hearts & Minds: How attention has become the new oil

Two academics reason that attention should now be treated as a factor of production alongside land, labour and capital. On average, we’re spending 25 years of our lives staring at screens. For the next generation, the figure will be much higher - the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising reckon that the under-25s will spend 16 years of their lives just on their phones.

To go with that is the reality that attention is also finite. In a seminal paper, George Miller, a Harvard psychologist, once estimated that people’s short-term memory span for recalling items in order was capped at seven. That is why car number plates are seven characters long.

For corporates, in comms, the implications are stark. Clarity beats clutter, always. The opening lines matter more than ever. The prize is being able to impart a message

instantly. Announcements need to be stripped down to a handful of repeatable points.  Stick to the essentials. Cut, cut and cut again.

Sit back from the PowerPoint, from the draft. Make yourself the viewer. Get rid of that sub-clause; lose those points; that doesn’t make sense; that bit there, it’s slowing up the rest; that section is nice but we don’t need it.

In a sense it has long been like this. At news organisations, every morning, editors and their seniors go through the schedule. The editorial meeting lasts around 40 minutes, there are different headings to get through - news, politics, world news, opinion, business, sports, arts, lifestyle. That’s eight. Five minutes each. It’s an elevator pitch, in which every floor is a section. They speed through the stops in seconds. It’s a glance, a snap, no more. Only the top of the story, the quick summary matters. If it can’t be told and understood just like that, it won’t make.

That carefully crafted announcement, with explanations as to how shareholders benefit? It’s boiled down to this. That brilliant argument you made to the journalist as to why the CEO should be interviewed? They reduced it to one line.

Of course, the detail is important but that comes later. The headline, the takeaway, is first. After that, everything else falls into place. That, too, must be direct. The reader is investing their time in you, deciding to linger, choosing you over everything else. Make it count, make them feel vindicated in their selection, that is your aim.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.