Right Attention Filter
Evaluate marketing ideas by both attention potential and audience relevance.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 97%
The filter treats marketing selection as a two-axis decision. The first axis asks whether an idea can attract attention in a crowded environment; the second asks whether that attention comes from people and motives relevant to the brand’s objective. A conventional webinar may fit an enterprise audience but fail to interrupt familiar patterns. A MrBeast-style spectacle may earn enormous reach while creating the wrong expectations for a restrained B2B offer. Strong concepts preserve audience relevance while introducing enough novelty, emotion, usefulness, or personality to be noticed. Teams should identify why people would pay attention, who those people are likely to be, and what useful action could follow. This prevents raw views from becoming the default definition of success and helps brands take creative risks without abandoning strategic fit.
Origin
Patrick Campbell framed marketing as getting attention and then distinguished general attention from the “right attention” during Marketing Against The Grain.
Core principles
- 01Marketing must earn attention before it can influence anyone.
- 02Not all attention serves the business or brand.
- 03Audience fit and attention potential are separate dimensions.
- 04A familiar format may be relevant but invisible.
- 05A spectacular format may attract people who will never become customers.
How to run it
- 1
Define the Right Audience
Specify the people whose attention can advance the objective and the context in which they encounter the brand. Exclude audiences that create reach without useful relevance.
Pro tip Describe the audience by current problem or intent, not demographics alone.
Watch out A broad category such as business people is too vague to guide creative selection.
- 2
Score Attention Potential
Assess whether the idea interrupts familiar patterns through novelty, emotion, utility, personality, or timing. Compare it with what the audience normally sees.
Pro tip Ask what would make someone pause, remember, or mention the idea later.
Watch out Novelty without meaning may create a brief reaction but no durable association.
- 3
Score Audience Fit
Evaluate whether the likely viewers, emotional response, tone, and implied promise match the intended brand and offer. Consider both positive and negative attention.
Pro tip Imagine the idea stripped of its logo and ask what type of company people would expect behind it.
Watch out High reach can disguise that most responders are outside the useful audience.
- 4
Connect Attention to Action
Define the next useful behavior the attention should enable. Ensure the transition from creative hook to value proposition is coherent.
Pro tip Make the next action proportionate to the audience's current level of intent.
Watch out A viral hook that cannot bridge to the offer may produce no commercial value.
- 5
Adapt or Reject
Strengthen low-attention but relevant concepts with a distinctive execution. Constrain high-attention but irrelevant concepts until they attract the right people, or reject them.
Pro tip Borrow the mechanics of a high-attention format rather than copying its surface style.
Watch out Do not approve a concept merely because the team personally finds it entertaining.
- 6
Measure the Quality of Attention
Track recall, qualified engagement, audience composition, sentiment, and downstream behavior. Use the findings to recalibrate future choices.
Pro tip Review who responded and why, not only how many.
Watch out Views alone collapse attention quality into a misleading single number.
In the wild
An enterprise B2B company considers a MrBeast-style video. The concept promises attention, but the team examines whether the spectacle will attract relevant decision-makers, preserve trust, and connect naturally to the offer before approving it.
→ The brand distinguishes raw reach from attention that supports its positioning and pipeline.
Campbell delivered a conference talk in which the only spoken word was “churn,” varied through inflection while slides carried the story. The unusual format remained tightly connected to the company's subject and audience.
→ The talk earned conference-wide attention while reinforcing the brand's association with churn expertise.
Common mistakes
Equating Views With Success
Large reach can come from irrelevant audiences, outrage, confusion, or entertainment disconnected from the offer.
Choosing Safe Invisibility
Perfectly appropriate content produces little value when it resembles everything else and earns no attention.
Copying the Surface Format
Borrowing a famous creator's aesthetic without understanding its attention mechanism can feel incongruent and derivative.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for selecting campaign concepts, content formats, sponsorships, event activations, and brand experiments.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal for compulsory operational communications where reach and comprehension matter more than competitive attention.
From the transcript
“I think it just comes back to attention, right? We're just trying to get attention. That's all we're trying to do. And we're trying to…”
“So you're gonna get attention, but is it the right attention?”
“But like the thing to keep in mind is that memories are really short. They're very, very short.”
From the episode
$200M Founder Reveals Why Ai Can’t Replace Top 10% Of Marketers (#135)