Only the Entertainers Will Endure

By Alex Best, CEO of Wonderhood Studios

There is no attention crisis. There is an entertainment crisis.

Every year the advertising industry tells itself the same story. Attention spans are shrinking. Media is fragmenting. Consumers are impossible to reach. AI is changing everything.

It’s a comforting story because it suggests the problem is happening to us.

It isn’t.

People haven’t stopped paying attention. They’ve become ruthless editors. They’ll happily listen to a four-hour podcast. Binge an entire series in a weekend. Analyse football tactics on YouTube for longer than the match lasted. Fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes at one in the morning. Watch a stranger clean a patio for twenty minutes and then watch them clean another one.

Attention hasn’t disappeared. It has become something people choose to give, not something brands can simply take.

For more than a century, advertising relied on interruption. We interrupted television programmes, newspapers, magazines, radio stations and, later, websites and social feeds. We built an extraordinary industry around renting people’s attention.

That model is disappearing.

Today, audiences own their attention. They decide what deserves it and what doesn’t. Every advert, every piece of content and every brand interaction is judged against everything else they could be doing instead.

That changes the job of marketing.

Call it captivation: the ability to make people care enough to give you their time. Entertainment isn’t the only route to it, but it’s one of the most powerful. Before a brand can persuade, it has to captivate. Before it can sell, it has to earn the right to be watched.

The message trap

Nobody wakes up hoping to consume your brand message. Nobody thinks, I wonder what my bank has to tell me today. Or my insurance company. Or my supermarket. Even when the product genuinely improves their lives.

Yet marketing still behaves as though communication is the objective. Every campaign begins with a list. Five key messages. Three product benefits. Two reasons to believe. By the time everyone has contributed, the entertainment has often been squeezed out of the communication.

I suspect our growing obsession with measurement is partly responsible. As marketing absorbed the logic of the technology industry; precision, optimisation and attribution, it naturally gravitated towards what could be counted. We became exceptionally good at measuring whether someone had seen an advert, clicked a link or completed a purchase. Measuring whether they genuinely enjoyed the experience is much harder.

So, we built a discipline around what was measurable, rather than what was memorable.

We’ve become brilliant at communicating.

We’ve become much less accomplished at captivating.

The irony is that communication has never been the hardest part of marketing.

Making people want to listen has.

Permission before persuasion

The first job of advertising isn’t persuasion. It’s permission.

Permission to have thirty seconds of somebody’s life is a privilege, not a right.

The brief for Waitrose’s Christmas campaign didn’t begin with “What’s our message?” It began with a more demanding question: “Would people actually enjoy watching this?”

The answer was a four-minute romantic comedy that people actively chose to watch, share and discuss. The commercial results followed because audiences had first chosen to spend time with it, not because they had been forced to.

That’s an important distinction.

The same principle explains why the Compare the Market meerkats became part of British popular culture. The advertising wasn’t successful because consumers desperately wanted insurance quotes. It succeeded because the entertainment earned attention that the message alone never could.

Walt Disney understood this long before the digital age. “Entertain first. Educate later.”

Advertising has often insisted on doing the opposite.

This isn’t because entertainment is somehow at odds with effectiveness. Quite the reverse. The IPA Databank has consistently shown that emotionally led campaigns outperform rational ones over the long term. We remember experiences far more readily than we remember information. We remember how something made us feel long after we’ve forgotten what it said.

Entertainment is not the opposite of effectiveness.

Increasingly, it is the price of admission.

Competing with everything

The uncomfortable truth is that we’re no longer competing with other advertising.

We’re competing with Netflix. The Premier League. Taylor Swift. Podcasts. YouTube. TikTok. PlayStation. Group chats. Books. Sleep.

Consumers don’t separate advertising from entertainment in the way our industry does. They simply distinguish between things that deserve their time and things that don’t.

That doesn’t mean every advert has to be funny, spectacular or cinematic. Entertainment is much broader than that. It can be humorous, moving, beautiful, surprising or intellectually satisfying. It can educate, provoke debate or simply tell a brilliant story. The common thread is that it leaves people pleased they paid attention.

Nor does every marketing task require a four-minute film. Search advertising, CRM, retail, packaging and customer service all have different jobs to do. But brands are not experienced one touchpoint at a time. They are experienced cumulatively. Every interaction either strengthens or weakens the relationship. Every touchpoint either adds to a sense that this is a brand worth spending time with or quietly reinforces the habit of ignoring it.

That’s why captivation matters. It isn’t a campaign objective. It’s a business objective.

The brands that consistently earn people’s attention build stronger memories, stronger relationships and, ultimately, stronger commercial results.

We had it backwards

For decades we’ve behaved as though creativity exists to communicate messages.

I think we’ve had it the wrong way round.

Creativity exists to earn attention. Messages travel inside that attention.

Or, to put it another way, creativity exists to captivate. Attention is simply the reward for doing it well.

The future won’t belong to the brands that publish the most content, optimise the most media or shout the loudest.

It will belong to the brands that people actively choose to spend time with.

The brands that understand entertainment is not a distraction from effectiveness, but one of its most powerful drivers.

Only the entertainers will endure.