By Mike Khouri, CEO, tactical.
Scroll. Kill. Scroll. Kill.
That’s the modern rhythm of consumer attention.
People are killing more content than they consume. Every thumb flick is a micro-rejection. The average user decides in 1.7 seconds whether something is worth their time. And most of the time, it isn’t.
For brands, that’s a brutal reality. Attention can’t be bought anymore. It’s earned. And the currency of earning it is entertainment.
The death of borrowed attention
Marketing used to be simple: buy a spot, hold attention hostage, sell something. That era is gone. Today, every brand that enters a feed is trespassing on someone’s personal entertainment space. Yet most still behave like just showing up is enough.
It’s like strutting to the centre of a busy dance floor and saying: “I have an announcement to make”. Nobody cares. Nobody can hear you. Everyone is too busy having fun.
Consumers don’t owe brands their time. If they stop scrolling, it’s because something moved them, not because a logo asked politely.
Whilst being at Cannes Lions this summer, Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube summed it up perfectly. On stage beside him weren’t CMOs or agency heads. They were entertainers – creators like Alex Cooper and Brandon Baum – the people defining what attention looks like today. They’re not selling products. They’re building audiences who want to be entertained.
That’s the mindset shift marketers need. Stop treating social as a media channel. Start treating it as a stage.
Entertainment misunderstood
Some people hear the word “entertainment” and think it just means “make them laugh.” In the words of Dwight Schrute: FALSE.
Entertainment is any content that makes people feel something. Humour. Awe. Pride. Curiosity. Even that little spark that makes you stop scrolling for half a second.
The common thread? Connection.
If it connects, it entertains. And if it entertains, it earns attention.
Think about why you switch on the TV. You want to feel something. Sports fans tune in for drama. News viewers tune in to feel informed. Rom-com lovers tune in for warmth or escapism. Each choice is emotional.
On social, it’s the same. People stop on what hits a nerve. It might be a line, a face, a sound, a story, a labubu livestream – but it lands a feeling.
That’s why we call it Effective Entertainment: attention plus emotion that drives action.
Sport is perhaps the best analogy for effective entertainment. It has everything – conflict, heroes, heartbreak, unpredictability – and a clear commercial outcome. Fans become fully invested. For brands, the playbook is to replicate that mechanic and keep the audience emotionally involved, episode after episode.
Creators hold the blueprint
If you want to see effective entertainment in action, look at creators. They test, learn, and iterate daily. They know exactly why a thumbnail worked or why a greeting didn’t. They analyze retention curves, comments, and shares – all in pursuit of the next emotional hit.
That’s why creators like MrBeast or Huda Kattan have turned content into billion-dollar empires. They mastered the balance between entertainment and effectiveness long before most brands realized they were even in the same business.
Meanwhile, brands are still optimizing for sign-off. Creators optimize for speed. One builds process, the other builds momentum. Guess who wins the scroll?
From storytelling to story living
Most brands are still running on an old operating system – one that values message control over emotional connection. The future belongs to those who can live their stories, rather than just tell them.
That means moving from:
- Ads to episodes – Create worlds, not one-offs
- Audiences to fandoms – Measure passion, not impressions
- Ownership to collaboration – Co-create with culture instead of renting space in it
Look at Apple, Wimbledon, and Burberry. Different sectors, same mindset. Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” turns users into storytellers. Wimbledon built a live theatre of sport on social, where style and humour drove billions of views.
Burberry embraced chaos and culture, blending heritage with meme-ready moments. Each brand treats entertainment as a business system. And in each example, the work continues to drive commercial results.
The leadership challenge
For CMOs and CEOs, it’s about rewriting the playbook around results that matter. Likes, shares, and vanity metrics are noise. The signal is commercial value – attention that converts into loyalty, community, and growth.
Creators have already proven it works. The question is whether leadership is ready to follow suit. Because entertainment-led marketing isn’t a creative indulgence, it’s a performance strategy. It wins customers, keeps customers, and compounds cultural and brand equity.
The bottom line
We’re living in an attention recession, and most brands are still using pre-digital economics to survive it. The power has shifted from the broadcaster to the audience, from the brand to the creator, from the media plan to the moment.
The new reality is simple: if you can’t entertain, you don’t exist.
So, stop chasing attention. Start earning it.
The brands that understand that will own this next iteration of marketing.
The rest will vanish in the scroll.
