We’re in a poly-crisis era, living through multiple overlapping stressors at once. And people are doing what humans do when the noise gets too loud, heart searching. Looking for meaning. Looking for each other. Looking for anything that feels like a real exchange.
If you hesitated, you aren’t alone. Most B2B marketers can rattle off their traffic numbers but may have no idea how many visitors actually become opportunities.
AI & the search for connection
Even AI-first companies are experimenting with human-forward experiences and messages, like Perplexity’s café in South Korea staffed by people instead of machines and last year’s ChatGPT people-focused brand campaign. Tech is accelerating. The need underneath it – connection – is ancient.
So, while obituaries for the death of attention spans are written every few months, we’re all hungrily finishing seasons of our favorite shows, forwarding long reads, and willingly spending 20 minutes with a podcast host who insists they’re ‘just curious.’
People haven’t really stopped paying attention
Case in point: The Pitt has won over audiences, and a Golden Globe, by refusing to act like feed content. The feed wins by compulsion. The Pitt wins through earned commitment. Compulsions keep you busy; but commitments keep you invested.
The Pitt’s writing is propulsive, layered, and human. It assumes you’re smart and paying attention. It moves fast, stacks storylines and, amazingly, leads with decency instead of doom.
But we’ve just entered a new era of authored vs. automated storytelling where audience expectations have skyrocketed. ‘Pretty good’ stories are cheap and increasingly machine-made. Even Netflix has started using generative AI in final footage, which tells you where production is headed.
The simple exchange
So, here’s what we keep missing when we talk about attention: attention isn’t really the goal. It’s the connection, the feeling of aliveness we want to feel, but just don’t.
My feed feels a lot like a slot machine. Most of what it spits out is forgettable on impact. Content that’s optimized to perform, and engineered to slide past you, most often vanishes without fingerprints. Kind of like a bag of Sour Patch Kids.
Well-crafted writing gets audiences invested by sparking curiosity and satiating that hunger for deeper understanding. Creating connection is a simple exchange:
Audiences will give you their slow, thoughtful time, if you give them a strong POV on the realities of their struggle. Scripted or unscripted. Brands can’t just sell anymore. They are being hired to solve real problems.
If there’s one thing to remember in 2026 and beyond…
It’s that attention is concentrated, and the desire for connection is huge. And that’s why we make documentaries. Because craft matters. Quietly. Aggressively. Now more than ever. Craft is the difference between something people ‘watched,’ and something they remember.
Transmission builds stories that matter because the internet is currently running a volume business. We’re not. We’re in the make-it-memorable business.
Discover how IBM took AI from lab to living room in Who is… Watson? The Day AI Went Prime Time.
We made Who is… Watson? The Day AI Went Prime Time, and 93% of YouTube viewers were new to our channel. The average view duration was 6.5 minutes. One-third watched the full 18. But the real win wasn’t just attention. It was what attention did.
On our own experiences
Who is… Watson? created a shared moment. A reference point teams could use to talk about the hard stuff: readiness, risk, ambition, uncertainty. We had hundreds of viewers in theaters from San Francisco to Cannes, and new inbound RFPs directly tied to the work.
That’s the part B2B marketers sometimes forget: the point isn’t to entertain executives. It’s to equip them. To give them language that travels. A point of view that holds up in a room. A story strong enough that people don’t just watch it, they carry it forward.
Six minutes is slow thinking time. Enough time to move from awareness to understanding. And understanding is what strategic decisions require.
Open a new chapter with your brand storytelling
Discover how to craft narratives that capture the imaginations of everyone in the room.
