📌 Great Content Fails Every Day. Here’s Why.

Hospitality brands are losing potential guests every 1.2 seconds. This newsletter shows how to hold their attention long enough to win the booking.

🌞 Welcome To This Week's Newsletter

Marketing has a deceptively simple mission:

Deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time.

And these days we can add, on the right device and the right channel.

But what happens when your message is ignored and fails to deliver the results you wanted? Your next guest could be gone in just 1.2 seconds.

You’ve produced great content. The team put in the hours. But it’s going unnoticed. Internally, it feels like wasted time and budget. Strategically, it’s worse: it means lost business. Your analytics might show traffic, clicks, and even engagement.

But none of it translates into results. And while your analytics reports may show activity, you’re not getting the results you need. That’s because

Attention Does Not Equal Comprehension or Retention

Just because you reached your customers’ screens, it doesn’t mean that they’ll pay attention. This week, we explore how attention influences comprehension, memory formation, and buying behaviour. You’ll learn how to create campaigns that capture and convert.

📄 On the Menu this week

• What attention means for marketers and why it’s hard to keep

• How to capture attention on social media

• Platform-by-platform attention tactics

• VIP extras: Rehook swipe file

Let’s Check In ☕

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🤹 What Attention Means for Marketers & Why It’s Hard to Keep

Attention is the brain’s limited ability to focus on and process information while filtering out all other distractions. It determines what gets noticed, what gets stored, and what gets ignored.

Without it, there is no comprehension, no emotional engagement, and no commercial action. And every piece of content you produce is in direct competition not just with other hospitality brands, but with every other company vying for screen space in that moment.

Mobile users spend an average of 1.2 seconds per post on social platforms.

During that time, they are hit with notification badges, video loops, pop-ups, and messages, all competing for mental space. Each post interrupts focus, making it harder for consumers to form a memory. Even strong content is vulnerable in this environment. Here’s why:

• The human brain receives up to 11 million bits of information per second, but we can only consciously process about 120 bits per second

• Estimates vary, but the average person is exposed to at least 6,000 advertising messages daily, with some reports suggesting up to 10,000+

• Multitasking can reduce comprehension and retention by up to 40%

That’s a lot to juggle.

What’s more, social platforms reward speed and novelty, not understanding. Every swipe and tap triggers a dopamine response, pulling users into a cycle of instant stimulation. Content that isn’t immediately clear or rewarding gets skipped, no matter how well made.

The Wrong Metrics = Missed Outcomes

60% of marketers don’t measure whether their work is delivering business outcomes. This is because most performance reports and analytic dashboards prioritise reach, impressions, engagement rates, and video views. But none of those metrics prove that the content was processed, understood, or remembered. And if it isn’t remembered, it doesn’t convert.

There is no single metric for attention, but smart marketers read the signals others miss.

Analysts can build attention models from a number of sources. Here’s what they do 👇

(Click for detail view)

Attention is only useful if it leads to action. If your goal is to shift behaviour, you need to look at the signals that reveal how people process, pause, or move on.

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📐Designing for Cognitive Flow

When planning a memorable campaign that’s mapped to attention patterns, we first need to think about time. Not just what time the audience sees the content, but what mental state they’re in when they do.

Cognitive flow is the mental state where a person is fully immersed, with focused attention and minimal effort required to process information. To design for this, you need to understand what cognitive load your audience is carrying and how that shifts throughout the day.

A tired brain reacts to brand messaging differently. Under stress or cognitive strain, people interpret content more literally, skip supporting context, and focus only on what feels immediately relevant. Nuance gets lost. Long copy becomes friction. Even helpful details such as your opening hours, room specifications, or dietary options can feel like noise.

Content must do more with less. Headings must clarify, visuals must anchor, and layouts must reduce ambiguity.

Adapt this table for your venue and buyer behaviour

(Click for detail view)

Once you understand how attention behaves, you can start designing content that captures and retains attention.

👉 Try this:

Remap one of your live campaigns using this table. Adjust the send time or creative density to match your audience’s mental state. Benchmark your results against your current baseline.

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🗝️ Join Me in the VIP Lounge 🔒

You’ve seen how fragile attention is. In the VIP Lounge, we go deeper into how to use it. Get access to platform-specific tactics, scroll-state design methods, and a swipe file of rehook strategies built to recover distracted users in real time.

Plus: a fast-reference summary, and an action plan to apply what you’ve just learned.

These help you design for distraction, rehook fast, and win bookings in moments that matter.

Let’s get to work 👇

🔄 How Attention Changes Per Platform

Attention isn’t transferable. What works on one platform will fail on another, because each triggers a different mental state. TikTok rewards speed and novelty, with attention peaking in the first 3 seconds before a steep drop-off. Instagram sparks inspiration, especially through visual-first formats like short Reels and carousels under 15 seconds. Google Maps triggers decision mode. Pinterest encourages saving for later.

The more closely your message aligns with the platform’s pace and purpose, the more likely it is to capture attention.

Each platform has its own attention window, design bias, and behavioural flow. This table helps you see exactly how attention shifts by format, what to prioritise in layout, and where to insert visual or sensory triggers. Use it to time your hooks, structure your scroll content, and match campaign formats to the platform's cognitive rhythm.

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