The Harsh Truth about Shrinking Attention Spans

One of the esteemed "LinkedIn Luminaries" recently shared a startling observation. He noted that within the initial 10 minutes of a keynote speaker's address, a staggering 90 percent of the audience was already engrossed in their phones.  

He interpreted this to mean we should cut all keynote addresses to 10 minutes to accommodate the audience's "reduced attention span."

Here's the thing: Anyone who gets on stage and captures, controls, and directs attention (i.e., entertains) will tell you that there's no such thing as an attention span.

No less than Jerry Seinfeld himself said, "There's only things people pay attention to and things that are not as interesting."  

My favorite mentalist, Max Maven, did extensive research into attention spans. He discovered that the average person willpolitely sit through just about anything for 7 minutes. After that, they no longer feel obligated to be polite (hence the cell phones).

So it's not that the keynote audience got bored after 10 minutes; they were bored for the entire 10 minutes, and they just started to show their boredom by getting out of their phones.  

I appreciate that this is "Professor of Harsh Reality" stuff. Nobody wants to hear someone tell them they (or the speaker they hired) are boring.

I know. I've been there. When I started as a bar magician, my mentor told me, "You don't even know what good is."  That's brutal feedback.

But that's also when he started teaching me the rules of entertainment and what it takes to capture, control, and direct attention. That's when I started learning how to engage and entertain an audience.

As soon as I started applying those rules, the audiences got bigger and louder. They started talking about me after the show, and they came back to see me night after night.  

It was like flipping a switch. The change happened that fast.

These are universal rules. Whether you're an engineer selling the new XL2000 product line or a research scientist with a spreadsheet of Nobel-worthy data, you either apply these rules and control attention, or you don't, and you lose the audience.

Our clients see this in their results as well. All of them already host fantastic events and get great results, but after we work together, they say things like, "I've never seen our audience so engaged," "I've never seen them react like that," or "They're still talking about our event months later."  

Why? Most people have never been exposed to the systems and processes that create these results. They don't know the entertainment rules, and those who do certainly aren't willing to share them with the general public.

If you're planning an event and you have a sneaking suspicion it could be better—whatever that means to you—maybe now is a good time for a conversation.

I'll ask a bunch of questions about what you've done in the past, what worked, what you'd like to improve, what you expect to accomplish, and how you'll know you've succeeded.

Based on what you tell me, I'll tell you exactly what other people like you have done in similar situations and what kind of results they got.

If you're open to that conversation, call me at (561) 596 3877 or set an appointment at MagicMeansBusiness.com/contact.