How to Grab People’s Attention

At the most fundamental level, successful communications must grab a person’s attention. But attracting someone’s attention doesn’t necessarily happen automatically—rather, attention is a commodity you earn from people by resonating with how they reason, how they feel, and how they subconsciously react. Effective attention-grabbing requires that you, the architect, understand three scaffolded concepts: the three parts of the human brain that affect people’s attention; the six tactics that grab attention the most; and the four strategies you need to keep attention locked in.

Review the graphic here, then read in more detail below for how to grab people’s attention:

The Three Brains: Head, Heart, and Gut

The human brain is widely viewed as having three distinct regions: the reptilian (“primal” or basal ganglia); the emotional (“paleomammalian” or limbic system); and the rational (“neomammalian” or neocortex). Common evolutionary theory suggests that these parts of the brain are progressively complex, meaning that our “old” brain, the primal one, functions almost entirely on instinct (protects us from danger, helps us survive); the limbic system imbues us with more complex emotion (such as happiness, sadness, disgust, or contempt); and the neocortex sophistocatedly helps us complete complex tasks (like making decisions, solving problems, or reasoning). As it turns out, grabbing attention follows a similar progression in the brain. First, we want to cause people to instinctively look or react. Second, we want to get them emotionally involved. And third, we want to then help them process and reason with the information.

The Six Tactics: Danger, Food, Sex, Faces, Stories, and Movement

As it may be inferred from the description of the primal part of the brain, research has shown that people’s attention tends to be initially hooked by those things that instinctively help our species survive. It’s almost impossible not to look, for example, when we see a car accident on the side of the road. Indications of danger (even if previous or relinquishing) make us pay attention. Likewise, we need food to survive and sex to keep our species from extinction, so we will instinctively pay attention to pictures of food or attractive and sensual people. Research has also shown that people tend to be initially hooked by images of human faces, storytelling, and and things that move or blink. When creating a PowerPoint, billboard, brochure, website, or other communication piece where you want people to engage, consider how to include human faces, food, movement, stories, and appropriate uses of physical beauty and health to initially capture people’s attention.

The Four Strategies: Selection, Salience, Frequency, and Time

To hold a person’s attention beyond the initial grab, four different strategies can be used, sometimes all at the same time: selection, frequency, time, and salience.

Selection: Attention is selective and people will filter. If you want people to pay attention to something, help draw their attention by using highlighting tactics to emphasize what is important and relevant. If you don’t do it for them, people’s brains will do this on their own and they may not select what you want them to.

Salience: People tend to only pay attention to and remember the most obvious, noticeable, or important piece of information. In every communication you create, emphasize what is most important first, then work backwards. Think in terms of A-B-C messaging: most important should be most salient, then progressively less so.

Frequency: People unconsciouly know roughly how frequent something occurs and they will pay attention when that moment comes. If you want to draw attention to something that occurs infrequently or irregularly, make an extra effort to draw attention to it. If it happens regularly, keep the communication consistent so people’s subconsious can expect to pay attention at the right time.

Time: Average adult attention span for listening and watching is about seven minutes. To maintain attention, change topics, activities, or direction every ten minutes. Average time spent on a website is about 59 seconds. Determine what you can reasonably expect somene to pay attention to in less than a minute on a website.