Where the model came from
AIDA is well over a century old. It was formalised for salespeople and print advertising, in a world where a reader who had bought the newspaper was going to look at the page, and where an advert’s job really was to arrest a wandering eye.
The logic held for a long time, through radio and television. If somebody was in the room and the programme was on, the advertising happened to them. Attention was something you could take.
What changed
Not attention spans — that is the lazy explanation, and it is mostly wrong. People will still watch a three-hour film.
What changed is the cost of leaving. Skipping used to require getting out of a chair. Now it is a thumb movement, available continuously, and the alternative is infinite. Your advert is not competing with the other adverts in the break. It is competing with everything.
That inverts the first step. You cannot grab attention from somebody who can leave before you finish grabbing. You can only be given it — and it is given in the first moment, on the basis of whether what you are showing appears to be about them.
The zombie advert
You have seen thousands of these. The advert opens on a sweeping shot of a building, or an actor smiling at a laptop, or a slow logo animation. Fifteen seconds later it explains what the company does. Then it makes an offer.
It is a perfectly executed AIDA advert — attention, interest, desire, action, in order — and almost nobody sees past the second step, because the first fifteen seconds contained nothing that told a viewer this was for them.
These adverts are not badly made. They are frequently beautiful and expensive. They are simply built to a model whose first assumption stopped being true, and they go on being commissioned because the model is still what everyone was taught.
What replaces “attention” as step one
Recognition. Not "look at this" but "this is about you".
In practice that means the first line, the first frame, the first three words do one job: name the reader’s situation precisely enough that they recognise themselves in it. Specific beats clever, every time. "Your website looks fine but nobody enquires" outperforms any amount of production value, because a person with that problem cannot not read it.
The rest of the sequence survives more or less intact. Once somebody has recognised themselves, interest, desire and action work approximately as advertised. It is only the opening move that has to change — and it is the one nearly everybody gets wrong.
How to tell if your advertising has this problem
A quick test. Take your advert, your homepage or your latest video, and cover everything after the first sentence or the first three seconds.
Ask: could a stranger tell whether this is for them?
If the answer is no — if the opening is your name, your logo, a mood, or a generic promise about quality — you have a zombie. It does not matter how good the rest is, because the rest is being read by a much smaller number of people than you think.
The fix is rarely expensive. It is usually a matter of moving something you already say further down the page up to the top.
Why this is worth caring about
Because the first three seconds decide the economics of everything after them. Doubling the number of people who get past the opening doubles the value of every pound spent on the production, the media and the landing page behind it.
It is the cheapest improvement available in most advertising, and it is available to a business of any size — which is not true of production budget, and not true of media spend.
In shortCover everything after your first sentence. If a stranger cannot tell whether the advert is for them, the opening is doing nothing — and nothing after it is being read.
Getting that opening right is most of what a campaign is, which is why positioning comes before a penny goes to any platform. More about marketing campaigns and advertising →