- Tension: Brands obsess over grabbing attention while failing to understand that capturing it and holding it require completely different strategies.
- Noise: Marketing advice fixates on viral moments and reach metrics, drowning out the quieter work of building sustained emotional engagement.
- Direct Message: Attention earned through emotional resonance compounds over time, while attention bought through interruption evaporates the moment you stop paying.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
On one side of the marketing divide, you have brands spending millions to interrupt people. Pop-up ads, pre-roll videos, sponsored posts that users scroll past in milliseconds. On the other side, you have the NFL, a league that somehow convinces 200 million Americans to voluntarily schedule their Sundays around its product, then stay engaged during the offseason through fantasy leagues, draft coverage, and player podcasts.
The difference reveals something most marketers still refuse to accept: there are two fundamentally different types of attention, and one of them is nearly worthless.
During my time working with tech companies in the Bay Area, I watched brilliant teams pour resources into capturing eyeballs while ignoring what happened after those eyeballs landed. Click-through rates climbed. Engagement metrics looked impressive in quarterly reports. But customer loyalty remained stagnant, and lifetime value barely moved. We were winning the battle for attention while losing the war for connection.
The NFL figured this out decades ago. And while small businesses may never have Super Bowl budgets, the underlying principle scales down perfectly. What professional football understood about human psychology applies whether you’re reaching millions or marketing to your local community.
The Illusion of the Captured Audience
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that keeps surfacing in consumer behavior data: most businesses operate on a flawed assumption about attention. They believe that if they can just get in front of enough people, some percentage will convert. It’s a numbers game, the reasoning goes. Cast a wider net, catch more fish.
But attention forced upon someone creates a fundamentally different psychological response than attention willingly given. One triggers resistance. The other opens the door to influence.
Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer, put it directly: “We got to fight for attention. We got to fight all the media companies, all the entertainment companies, in order to get that mindshare and to get that share of wallet.”
Notice his framing. Ellis doesn’t talk about buying attention or stealing it. He talks about fighting for it, which implies earning it through competition on merit. The NFL positions itself alongside entertainment companies because it understands that Sunday football competes with Netflix, video games, and family outings. Fans choose to watch. That choice changes everything about how they receive the messages embedded in that experience.
A 2024 report by EDO revealed that NFL TV advertising delivered nearly 36 times more engagement than the primetime average, with ads during the regular season being 8% more effective and the Super Bowl 198% more effective than typical primetime ads. Those numbers seem almost impossible until you understand the psychology beneath them.
People watching football have chosen to be there. They’re emotionally invested. Their guards are down because they’re engaged with something they care about. The advertising doesn’t feel like an interruption because the entire experience has already been welcomed into their consciousness.
I learned this lesson the hard way during my corporate strategy years. We built products optimized for acquisition metrics that looked fantastic in dashboards but created no real connection with users. Data without empathy creates products nobody wants, and marketing without emotional intelligence creates messages nobody remembers. I left that world at 34, partly because I realized I was optimizing metrics that didn’t matter.
Why Most Marketing Advice Misses the Point
Scroll through any marketing blog and you’ll find endless advice about hooks, headlines, and hacks for grabbing attention. The language itself reveals the problem: grab, capture, seize. These are the verbs of interruption, treating potential customers as targets to be ambushed rather than people to be engaged.
The conventional wisdom suggests that the first three seconds determine everything. Make them count. Create thumb-stopping content. Optimize for the scroll. And there’s surface-level truth to this advice. You do need to earn initial interest.
But this focus on the opening moment ignores what happens next. A 2025 study by Temple University found something counterintuitive: viewers who were more engaged with an NFL game were more likely to remember advertisements shown on a mobile device, especially when ads were congruent with the football context and appeared immediately after significant game events.
Read that again. Distracted viewers, people splitting attention between the game and their phones, remembered ads better when those ads aligned with the emotional context of what they were watching. The engagement transferred. The attention earned by the game extended to adjacent messages that felt relevant to the moment.
This completely inverts the standard marketing playbook. Instead of fighting for attention against the content people actually want, smart brands embed themselves within that content. They become part of the experience rather than an interruption of it.
The sports and entertainment industries have understood this for years. The NFL and ESPN engage audiences through platforms like live streaming and fantasy football leagues to keep fans interested year-round. They don’t disappear between games and then shout louder when the season starts. They maintain connection continuously, which means they never have to fight as hard to regain attention they never lost.
The Insight That Changes Everything
The brands that win attention don’t chase it. They create environments where attention flows naturally toward them because they’ve become genuinely worth paying attention to.
This shift in perspective transforms marketing from a battle into an invitation. And that distinction matters more than any tactic or technique.
Building Attention That Compounds
Kathrin Kozlova, a marketing strategist, captured the underlying principle during a recent session: “People don’t buy products. They buy how those products make them feel about themselves.”
The NFL makes fans feel like they belong to something larger. That tribal identity, the team jerseys, the Sunday rituals, the fantasy league trash talk with friends, creates emotional territory that the league occupies in people’s lives. Marketing messages delivered within that territory carry the warmth of the association.
Small businesses can build similar territory. I see it every Saturday morning when I coach my son’s baseball team. The parents who show up consistently, who bring snacks without being asked, who cheer for every kid regardless of jersey, they become trusted members of our small community. When one of them mentions their business, it doesn’t feel like advertising. It feels like information from someone we already know and like.
That’s the principle scaled down. Become part of people’s lives in a genuine way, and marketing becomes conversation rather than intrusion.
Randi Windt, senior vice president for revenue partnerships at Betches, explained how this works when reaching new audiences: “There’s a clear white space, and we know how to speak to the casual fan. They care about culture, they care about the person behind these players, and we speak that relatable, authentic tone.”
The key phrase is “relatable, authentic tone.” Casual fans don’t want the same intensity that die-hards crave. They want to feel included without feeling overwhelmed. Matching the message to the emotional state of the audience requires empathy, which requires actually understanding who you’re talking to and what they need from you.
Most mornings, I process ideas like this during my pre-dawn runs. The trail clears away the noise of tactics and metrics, leaving room for simpler truths. And this one keeps surfacing: attention given freely creates the foundation for genuine influence. Attention demanded or stolen creates resistance that undermines everything that follows.
The NFL built a $20 billion enterprise on this understanding. Their marketing works because their product creates genuine emotional experiences that people voluntarily invite into their lives. Everything else, the merchandise, the advertising partnerships, the media rights deals, flows from that core relationship.
For smaller businesses, the principle remains identical even if the scale differs. Create genuine value. Become part of your customers’ lives in meaningful ways. Earn the right to their attention by deserving it.
Then, when you have something to say, they’ll actually want to listen.
