The Marketing Millennials 238 - How to Capture and Keep Your Audience’s Attention Using Neuroscience With Ted Harrison
The Marketing Millennials podcast episode with Ted Harrison, founder of New Motion and former Twitter head of production for advertisers, delves into these nuances, offering a rich exploration of marketing strategies that resonate in today's digital landscape.
Pathways to Marketing Mastery
Ted Harrison's journey into marketing began with an academic background in film and digital media at Baylor University, quickly transitioning into the field of digital content as the digital landscape evolved.
His experiences at Weber Shandwick and Twitter, culminating in the founding of New Motion, highlight the significant role of understanding platform-specific nuances and the psychology of attention in creating impactful marketing content.
Transition from traditional media education to digital marketing, reinforcing the adaptability required in the marketing field.
Experiences at Weber Shandwick and Twitter underline the importance of platform understanding and content strategy.
Founding of New Motion represents an evolution towards specialized, platform-aware marketing services.
The Science of Attention in Marketing
Ted emphasizes the crucial role of attention in marketing, a concept often mentioned but seldom understood in its psychological and neurological dimensions.
He shares insights on leveraging knowledge about human attention to create more engaging, effective content, moving beyond conventional strategies to incorporate findings from fields like neuroscience.
Attention is more than just eyeball time; it's a complex neurological process that marketers can channel for higher engagement.
Diving into research and experimentation to understand and harness attention dynamics for marketing purposes.
Utilizing principles like context, location, and novelty to maintain viewer engagement and convey messages effectively.
Strategies for Captivating Your Audience
The conversation with Ted provides tangible strategies for marketers looking to capture and retain their audience's attention in a cluttered digital environment.
These include understanding the “rules of engagement” for content on various platforms and leveraging psychological insights to design content that resonates and engages.
Embedding depth and emotional resonance in content to drive engagement and action.
Utilizing platform-specific features and user expectations to make content feel at home on each platform, enhancing relevancy and connection.
Applying creative contradictions, novelty, and tailored messaging to arrest attention within the first few seconds of exposure.
Conclusion: The Future of Marketing is Human
Through Ted Harrison's insights, it's evident that the future of marketing lies in a deep understanding of human behavior and how it intersects with technology. Marketers who succeed will be those who not only grasp the technicalities of various platforms but who also empathize with their audience, crafting messages that resonate on a human level.
The key lies in creativity within constraints, leveraging the wealth of data and psychological insights available to inform marketing strategies that captivate and convert. Ted Harrison stands as a testament to the power of combining marketing acumen with a curiosity about human behavior, underscoring the potential for innovation in how we communicate and connect with our audiences in the digital age.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇
Audio OWEWK5070594921.mp3/2024-03-12
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. I had to draw the map before I could build the world. Before I can tell the story, I had to build these like rules so I could then be creative in the boundaries of the world I'm in. We have to think about what are the rules and like not see them as limiting, but rather like an exponential increase that we can play off of in our creativity. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials Podcast. Today I have Ted Harrison on the podcast. He's the founder of New Motion. He was at Twitter for over six years and he can tell you his experience there. Not all the juicy details, he'll tell them later, but he'll tell you his experience and we're going to talk about some cool things about how you can get attention. So welcome Ted to the podcast. Happy to be here. Excited. Been listening for a while, so it's fun to be on here. I want to start off and ask just for everybody, how did you get into marketing? Like most people who make content, I went to school at Baylor University to get a degree in film and digital media and quickly realized, you know, upon graduation that producers aren't like lining out the door to hand you like millions of dollars in budget to go make a film. And so I quickly realized that I had an opportunity in front of me, especially as the digital landscape was like really coming into form and people were trying to figure it out like, oh, digital video is actually a really great place to play in. So I started doing some work at an agency out of Dallas called Weber Shanwick and then eventually transferred up to the New York office, worked at basically digital and PR agencies for a minute and then made the transition over in 2017 to go do some video editing at Twitter, which is really where I think a lot of things took off and kind of fell in place for me when it comes to just like my marketing career and background and understanding how to really get attention in the timeline that's moving really fast. And so, yes, I started doing editing there and then eventually built a pretty big business where advertisers were making content for them and became the head of production for advertisers at Twitter back around like 2020, 2021. And yeah, just like oversaw all the content that we were like, basically advertisers would come to us and be like, what can we do that's going to really work to drive home the metrics we want to see? And so we kind of ideate with them, put those things together and get that content on the timeline. And yeah, so now it's led. I left X now over or back in September and then launched New Motion in October of 2023. So just a few months in the door here, but already have some great clients and it's very, very fun to be working outside of just the Twitter atmosphere that I was used to working in for so long. We talked about this before the podcast, but could you give how you kind of work backwards from creating content using neuroscience or psychology and work backwards and your process around that? So one of the fun things about working at Twitter or working in an environment like that is it obviously at a certain point you have so much data in front of you about what's working, what's not. But then you get to a point where you're like, I actually need to kind of do some further research, especially at Twitter, where some of our performance products weren't always up to par with where our brand marketing products were. I was trying to look and see, OK, well, what can we do to make up for the fact that some of our products aren't in the same competitive sphere as like a meta or another places? And I really took a deep dive one day after I was I kept telling advertisers I'd be giving these talks to, you know, the apples and paneer breads and stuff of the world about like what they needed to do with their content on the platform. And I realized I kept telling everyone, you have to get attention, like got to get attention, got to get attention. And like, I kept hearing that also everywhere in the industry. And finally, one day I was like, wait, what what is attention? Like, I understand what attention is. Right. Like, I kind of understand its core principle, like, oh, I'm giving my attention to something. But what are our brains doing in order to determine where we're going to give it at any given moment in time? And so after, like I said, the fun part about working at a place like Twitter is like the innovation is encouraged. Right. So it's like you don't have to just look at what's in front of you. And I think a lot of times and I would encourage anyone out there like at an agency or anything right now, take the time to go like do research that's not sitting right in front of you. And I went and looked at like MIT research papers, started to dive in on like how we're training computers to mimic human attention. And I was like, there's some really interesting stuff in here for how we can apply this to creating video and image content online and across the board. And so that was really what sparked it. And then I've kind of I feel like I'm like constantly on this journey to find out more and more because there's like an endless supply of things to learn in this space. And what's really fun about this, too, and I love to use the word fun because I think the more we get away from we get so caught up in like the details of like getting the metrics right. And I'm talking about neuroscience and video, which sounds like it's sucking the fun out of it. But it's actually fun because I feel like the more we learn, the more creative we can actually be. And that's the thing that I like get the most joy out of whenever I'm talking with our clients at New Motion or just in general, like sitting here, I get like really passionate about it and I can go on and on. And so I would encourage anyone to like continue to think about, OK, what are the things in front of me? What can I dig further on? And like, how can I like really pull that out for for impact in the content I'm making so that I can be creative ultimately? So I want to go in two different directions here. One, what are some of the things that you learned from going outside the scope of Twitter, the MIT paper and stuff that you learned that you took back to garner more attention for advertisers and video and stuff like that? And then also the other question is like, what are some things you learned at Twitter to to get more attention? A couple of things that I think are really important when you're going out to make your video content, there are two really key principles to kind of take away from understanding what our brains are doing. We're constantly looking for context about like what's going on around us, like where things are and like what's going on. And then the location piece is like where things are. So it's context and location. Our brains are constantly trying to seek out really important details between those two things. So what that means for us as marketers and as people making content online is that we need to provide interesting context in interesting locations and not just do that in the first three seconds, which is what we're often like thinking, like get something moving in the first three seconds or like ask a very provocative question right off the bat. It's really about making sure that we're doing that every three seconds to continually maintain that attention as our audiences are playing the space. An easier way to think about it, Daniel, honestly, is it's very hard to just like talk about something that's very visual is you've seen Les Anderson films, I presume at some point. OK, he's constantly using the location lever, right? The way he structures the frame in every single shot, it's very clear where not only that I'm paying attention to the screen, but where I should be looking at on the screen because he's like using location specifically to draw the audience's attention to those specific places. It's actually very interesting because, yes, on social, we don't have captive audiences like films, but one thing that the really great filmmakers do is they make sure we know where to look at on the screen because then that helps them tell the story that they're trying to tell. So as marketers, the takeaway for us is, OK, if I can set up my frame and set up the shot in such a way that I'm not just getting attention like in general to this like video that's sitting here, but rather to the place that I want the audience to be looking, whether that's your product or your message, you're already getting ahead of the game in terms of hitting those KPIs that you're trying to hit and report back up to your manager that you're able to get to those results. So that's the location lever. And then there's also in the context piece, I don't know if you've seen the movie Power of the Dog by Jane Campion with Benedict Cumberbatch, but I'll set it up quickly. The name of the movie is Power of the Dog, and that's actually context in and of itself. And so you're watching this movie that's nothing to do with really a dog in the film. But ultimately, as the scenes play out, there's actually a dog shadow that looms over the background in the mountainside. And that's like a very big metaphor in the film for the character that he plays. And what's interesting is that because of that context being constantly seated, there's a moment in the film where you kind of fully understand that that shadow is there without them saying like the shadow is there. And it's an interesting use of context to drive you to a specific place on the screen and your attention is further invested into the content. And so for marketers, the more that you can say, hey, here's the context of why you're seeing this in your feed right now, like providing that context and putting it in a location that's like separated out from other elements of your video, you can drive attention to that message. And then if you keep moving it, you'll continually maintain that attention throughout a piece of content. So that's like getting a bit in the weeds and very tactical. But what I love about it, Daniel, is that whenever we have these principles off the bat, I can then go and go, OK, what's a creative idea? Because no matter what creative idea we have, we know we can get the messaging and the content and the product that we want to really showcase out there first and foremost. We know we're going to be able to do that because we know what we're going to be able to do in the post-production or in the shoot to make sure that that's out there and in the forefront. Would you break down if I was a brand and said, I want to put context and location in my ad, what would, when I'm making that brief or when I'm before the video, what's an example of context for a brand and then location for a brand that I would put as just initial scope? And then I use the creativity to say, OK, I'm going to use this context in this creative way and I'm going to use this location in this creative way. Yeah, if you think of like a big brand, let's actually just like go for the Marketing Millennials podcast, right? Let's like talk about let's go through that lens. We'll make it something practical for you. And you've got to talk about this podcast that, you know, like, OK, Ted is talking about attention today. So like, why should I, you know, why should I care? I think an interesting thing for someone to think about when they're setting up that context for the audience is getting the words that the message, like, let's take the messaging. OK, Ted is talking about attention and how to get it in video content. So what we want to do is quickly get to a distilled context that they can understand. Another principle that we often utilize in New Motion is the fact that people can read five words per second on average. What I want to do is get under 15 words because that's ultimately three seconds. Right. And be able to clearly articulate probably in the top left or top right what that message is that we're trying to get across right off the bat. And in the opposite corner, Daniels, to help your metrics for your brand, I want to put that Marketing Millennials logo, make sure that that's clear so that they know who it's coming from, because we've already set up, OK, that your audience is understanding and aware of what your brand is. And now we know what we're talking about. And then in the rest of that content, the rest of the video, we're able to quickly move into something creative. So if we wanted to go shoot something with me, I live in Denver, you know, I could go outside. We could go do a bunch of different stuff if we wanted to make that piece of content to like have to provide interesting things. But we've already set up what's going on. And then we would move that context and further conversation about what that's going on, what this is about, maybe even a quote from the podcast down to the middle section. Because this is another fun thing about how our brains work. We scan an image from the start, we move from the top left to the middle, to the top right, back to the middle before taking in everything else. The way that I like to think about it is like it's kind of a natural flow, but also how we're taught to read. It's a very simple kind of way to understand it. We start in the top left. That's like why we are prone to go there. Languages that go right to left are the opposite of this, which is interesting. But for most of us marketing here in English speaking countries, it's top left to middle to top right, back to middle, and then you take in everything. So the more I can move the context about what's going on and like what's providing more details about, OK, this is why you're watching and listening and paying attention to this piece of content throughout in those three spots, top left, middle, top right, the better off you'll be. I actually at one point took over 200 ads that were considered top performing at Twitter into Photoshop, which is a terrible idea, by the way, that Photoshop file was a nightmare. And I decreased the opacity. I was trying to understand some similarities and like about what was working in those things. And we genuinely found boxes in the top left, in the middle and in the top right. And what's fascinating about that is I kept drawing it everywhere. I was like in our office in London. I was in our office in Sao Paulo. And I kept just drawing these boxes and conference rooms being like, if your advertiser does nothing else, make sure they provide context about why people are watching this piece of content and like what their message is in one of these three spots. And finally, I had someone come up to me and go, hey, why do you keep drawing like an envelope in every single conference room? Because you can probably visualize this now top left, middle, top right. And I was like, yeah, thank you. Like that's that is what I'm trying to communicate. Like, you know, who are you? Where is it coming from? Who's this who's providing this message in the top left? What's the context? Who's it going to in the middle? And then have you stamped it with additional information? It's like a very simple way to think about it. So I like talk about the envelope method quite a bit as a way, especially if you're like crunch for time to get content out. Structuring your content that way is the natural progression of how humans take in an image in 13 milliseconds. So it's a fun way to think about it. But like those are some of the ways I would start to set up what we would do to be marketing this specific podcast. So a lot of the things is getting attention in the video, making sure the attention stays every three seconds. But what about getting that first stop? Because I think that's probably one of the hardest things like, oh, I see this ad. How do I get that first attention in the ad? And then I need to get attention of that first three seconds in the next three seconds in the next three seconds, however long the ad is. So how do I get that first one second, basically? So the first one second is you want to be doing something that there's like a number of things. I'm not going to go all the way down into this. You actually can find some of this. I'll be sure to make sure it's out there so you can see it. I'll maybe follow up with the link for you. But one of the things that we really we walk through with our clients is so we want to be able to present something either novel, like something completely new to this audience. We want to present a contradiction. It's like getting into some basic things that we are inclined to like want to latch on to, like our brains love to latch on to a contradiction. So if you say something that's like that doesn't seem right, immediately you've got more attention by providing a little bit of that contradictory context, essentially. And so that's like a really powerful way to like get. powerful way to like get that attention immediately. It's less, you do want movement. Like people are inclined to see like vibrant movement and dynamicism in their video content. But more importantly, it's what are you saying that like they actually wanna engage with? There's a reason Daniel clickbait works, right? Because it works. And people getting to that short, sweet copywriting material, if you start thinking about those principles and then you start putting it into like different locations and you're not just keeping it in the same spot, you wouldn't wanna just have the, don't have your captions or like a message you're trying to get across in one spot in your 15 second video online. Like it should probably ultimately be in five or six different spots by the time that's done. Because we wanna be moving it constantly because it is re-engaging the audience and then we're able to provide different bits of information elsewhere. So contradiction is not the only one you can do. Like something, like I've mentioned novelty, there's also something for nostalgia and things that we can play on in that regard. And the other big thing lately that I'm really focusing in on is making people feel at home on whatever platform they're on. So if you're on Instagram or if you're on TikTok, what are the things that you can do in your content to make like basically you can have the same piece of content that lives elsewhere, but for that specific export out of Adobe, like what can you do to make it feel like intrinsic to that platform? Is there a subtle nod to the buttons on the right-hand side on TikTok, for example? Is there a way to work in on your Instagram account, like what that DM message icon looks like? It's a subtle play to your audience that you're recognizing where they're at. And if you think about it, this is what's fun about using human-based principles and content. Ultimately, when you start to think about it, it's like, what works in person? Like Daniel, if you're coming over to my house and I know you loved, I don't know what drink you'd love necessarily, but if you'd like love iced tea, okay, and let's say you just like love iced tea, it'd be a miss on my part if I'm not providing you some iced tea. That's like, hey, I know that about Daniel. He loves this drink and you're coming over to hang out. I wanna make sure you have the drink of your choice, the thing that you wanna have. I wanna be a good host. So when you do those things on social, because your content is so distributed and your audiences are so fragmented, meeting them where they're at and providing that little bit of extra detail is attention grabbing. It is another thing that plays into, oh, this brand understands where I'm at. The two things I like that you said is, one is lean into that copywriting ability in the first couple of sentence, whether it's novelty or contradiction. And then the second thing, which I think is, what I say to everybody is you have to, you're in social, you have to treat every platform like a different country. Because everyone has a different language. Everyone has a different style. Everybody have different architecture and stuff like that. You can't just say, it's like you put a random house in Paris from the US and everybody will be like, what is that doing in Paris? Like, I don't wanna be part of Paris. Or if you start, instantly if you're in Paris and you start speaking with American accent, people will be like, oh, that's an American. It's not a local to this country. If you do things like take a Twitter video and put it on TikTok, people will be like, wait, this does not feel organic to this platform. Why am I watching this video? But if you put something that's full screen, looks like a shot on an iPhone, looks natural to the platform, immediately they feel comfortable in that situation. And then you could do all the things you said, like a novelty, the three seconds, moving them around the screen from top, middle, and top again. So I think that's really a good point to make. It's actually, Daniel, you're hitting on exactly what we're doing for a number of our clients at New Motion right now, which is, I at least see it, I think this is the opportunity I saw in the marketplace whenever I left X was, we have brands, like brands now get social. They kind of understand that it's gotta be a part of what's going on. But what they're doing, you use countries, which I also love, and I've been talking about it in the form of, people will build this gigantic, beautiful blueprint of a mansion with their TV spot. They'll make this amazing commercial. And they've cleared out all the furniture so they can host everyone in it, so that millions of people can see it at one time. And then what they do often is they're like, oh, crap, we forgot what the pool table or the game room should look like. And so they just take that whole blueprint and try to shove it inside the game room. And everyone's like, what is this? Why is this here? Like, it doesn't make any sense. And so the more that you can build out your entire campaign strategy, and the space that we're fitting in at New Motion is, let's plan out, let's take this big blueprint and then like really tailor it to these various different rooms and do it without like killing your budget. Because I think that's the biggest hesitancies that brands have. It's like, oh no, I've gotta go like do an agency for every single platform, or I've gotta go work with these teams to do all these different. And it's like, no, if you lay out a blueprint, let's take that in and like do the work to make sure that each room feels comfortable to the audience, right? Like these things can be translatable. I loved actually what BMW did during the Super Bowl with their Christopher Walken spot, because they did a good job of getting their messaging in. It was, you know, like there's no imitation. They had Christopher Walken and then everyone's imitating Christopher Walken. There's like no imitation for the ultimate driving machine. And I love that they got that across. And then on TikTok, they were encouraging people to do their own Christopher Walken like imitation and like building off of that. And that's like one example, but what would be cool is to see BMW also figure out what does that look like on Twitter and on Instagram and on this, like all these different platforms on Reddit and so on in a way that's like endemic to those different platforms. I'm obviously passionate about that because I obviously spend a lot of time like learning how much, how powerful a campaign can be when you make it endemic to the platform, because we were doing that so often at Twitter. I was going to mention how well Duncan did it with they had their ad and now they had, they filmed more things in that ad shoot that they filmed the TV ad and then they filmed little bits that should be going on TikTok ads and IG reels and even organic posts. So they made these, all these things in one shoot that can go on multiple platforms. And I thought that was just brilliant of such an omni-channel approach of thinking about, oh, I saw it on Super Bowl and the story is still continuing weeks after Super Bowl where I think that's like the only ad that I'm seeing now that is continuing in my feed. Maybe Uber Eats is probably the only other one, but they did a really good job of taking the story and making sure the story keeps, they're taking that piece of content and keep repurposing it for a longer period of time, but also doing multiple shoots in that one shoot that's like, we're not only filming for commercial here, we're filming for TikTok ads, we're filming for this. They thought about it before doing it all. So I thought that was brilliant by Duncan. Yeah, it is so fun. And I think you're watching more and more social teams and the brand marketing teams across the board really see the opportunity there to build their brands, not just in on their linear TV spots, but ultimately in places that you don't often see. Even in a recent client discussion, like Discord kept coming up and it's like, what is that gonna look like? It's really fun to think about, like everyone sees it as a challenge that the audiences are so fragmented, but as a creative, that's just like opportunity. And I think that's why I always come back to this being so fun is like, at the end of the day, we're making something, we're getting to create things. And I think that's like really cool to see. And like, you're right, Duncan really nailed it here. And I think it's gonna be really interesting as we continue to see brands realize the opportunity and build out in that space. I also think the big opportunity, as you're saying, is in the B2B space, because I think e-commerce is getting it very well. I think the consumer space is getting better and better at it, but you don't see many B2B brands knowing how to, they only like maybe putting like a LinkedIn spot or an email spot or a Facebook ad spot, but you don't see them while going like taking a TikTok ad and then making it an organic post and then making it on Twitter. And like, I don't see many B2B brands that I could name that I get targeted with that hit me on multiple channels, but I could name multiple e-commerce brands or consumer brands that are hitting me on all these channels. Well, first of all, I'm hoping to change that soon. I'm hoping that you'll be seeing some of our clients. We're working on some really fun stuff, Salesforce being one of them. So stay on the lookout for some multiple channel ways of thinking about content in general. And I actually really appreciate what Salesforce has done, because what they did is when we first started talking was just a recognition of, hey, we know we can play in this space and we're seeing it happen other places. And what I like about that, Daniel, is so often brands will look at their competitor landscape only for inspiration. And one of the things I clicked on very early on with the Salesforce team is that inspiration comes from everywhere. The more important thing is to understand, okay, who has similar objectives to us and how, and like their content may need to look different or their messaging may need to look different because they're trying to reach a specific audience. But if they have a similar objective and goals, let's try to use that, but with our own messaging. And then we're able to like kind of take it to the next level in our marketing efforts. It's funny you say that because like, for example, today I saw a clip of the BFFs pod, if you don't know, like Dave Portnoy and Brianna Chicken Fry and all that. And they were doing, it was Josh and his girlfriend for eight months were doing like a newlywed type game. And I was like, oh, I might put on a virtual event soon, but how could I do that with my wife? But it put like a marketing twist on like a newlywed marketing game and put that on a podcast. I put that on a virtual event. So it's good to have a, like listen to these, all these different types of podcasts and all these different, and see if I just take this from another space and just plug it in and just add a twist to it. How can I make it an original idea? It's like a cool way to think about it. It's really what you're saying, Daniel, and what I like about it is like, there is just keep your eyes open. And that's why, like not to hit this home too much, but when you understand these like tactical things that just make the content work, and like you're able to kind of put those pieces together, it like frees up your headspace to do exactly that, to go, hey, I like that. It's a little different than what I, how I could implement it. But if I take a twist, I mean, what's the classic saying? Like, you know, good artists copy, great artists steal. And I think it's just like a great opportunity to be like, hey, let me steal that, but for my own use case and my audience and get that and reach them the way that these people are reaching their audience and just do it with my own twist. And it's suddenly brand new. Part of the reason I even mentioned the BMW commercial earlier, Daniel, is like, it was such a departure from your typical, like every car ad is more an ad for cars than it is for like a brand. It's like, how many times can I watch an SUV drive on a mountainside, you know? Like, and it's because they're looking at each other and eventually things start to become similar. And the second that someone deviates from that, everyone's like, oh my gosh, I can't believe how creative that was. And it's like, yeah, because someone was freed up to be creative. And that's when it's like really fun. I like that when brands, because what they did is what you said is they took the main context of the video of imitation and just made that just play out through a story and have some elements of the car placed smartly in the video. But it wasn't like the ultimate driving machine. Here, me driving down the mountain range and my car's driving fast and it has these cool features. It was more like, hey, you can't imitate BMW because BMW is BMW. Like, you can't imitate greatness. Like, it's like, greatness is greatness. So I like how they set it up and just had a messaging and like the messaging was just the creative boundaries. Like, here's the guardrails. The guardrails is I want something about imitation. What can we do to be, make this creative? So I think that's good. If you have some sort of guardrails, like context and location, then you can do anything creative if you have those good guardrails to start with. Absolutely. What are some quick tips for people to start getting more attention today that we haven't talked about by using the human brain and how it works? One of the best parts is the principles don't stop with attention, right? It's like, what are the human-based principles for engagement and then ultimately conversion and all the other different objectives that you have as a brand? One of the things I actually really like about engagement is how straightforward this is. It's probably like in hindsight going to be like, oh, that's actually kind of obvious, but you don't notice it off the bat. In order to like think about engagement in your content, you should just start immediately thinking about the word depth and that's both visual depth and emotional and like, you know, interest depth, like actually providing something that's not just surface level. So if you're wanting people to engage, whether that's commenting or liking or sharing or even clicking through, the real thing that you wanna do, believe it or not, we live, Daniel, in a three-dimensional world. So everything around us is in three dimensions, but on our phones and on these platforms and on your computer, we don't all have the Vision Pro yet, so it's not all quite, you know, in three-dimensional space. But what's interesting is it's all very flat. Like we don't know, like it's not immediately obvious. Like we have to kind of know the behavior, oh, I can double tap this to like it or I can click in here to comment. But all those actions are moving along an axis that doesn't really exist in your phone. You can't push into the phone. And so when your content actually visually is in three dimensions and like provides depth, so even if you just like add like another layer into the foreground of your content in post-production, just like getting like a bubble to pop up that's like in front of people and clearly providing depth, it's like a small, small signal, but it is a signal to your brain that like, oh, I can like engage with this because we're so used to like, I got this like coffee cup here and I can like pick it up, you know, because it's three dimensions and there's like depth. I can see that. So it's a small thing. The more like layers you can put into your content, the better it'll be. We actually did a campaign. I remember seeing the results from this and being like, I cannot believe the difference. Like we literally did A, B tests of a bunch of content that was flat, but just kind of like had stuff moving left to right and up and down. And then content where we did this depth and the engagement difference was like multiple double digit points more in the content that had that depth associated with it. And it's just like one small thing. But the thing is, is when we're putting content in front of like thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, those small things add up to make a huge difference. A lot of it is you have to play the game and understand the rules of the game. And then you can start twisting the rules a little bit, but a lot of people just don't want to even acknowledge the rules. And they think that their way is the best way. They don't want to acknowledge that this is how social works, or this is how attention works, or this is how the brain works. They just want to be like, my content is great. content is great. It's going to perform. They don't want to, they don't want to acknowledge that they are rules of the game. Humans are part of the game and you have to play that. And you see this with athletes and everybody. The best athletes understand the game, the rules, how to use the rules against them to make better plays, better options, better, put themselves in better positions. But a lot of people just don't want to understand the rules of TikTok or understand the rules of Twitter, understand the rules of Instagram, understand the rules of LinkedIn. They just want to be like, yeah, my content has so much depth and so much greatness that it's going to perform. And it's like, no, you didn't play the game. Otherwise you didn't even play within the rules. So it's not going to perform. So yeah. It's just funny because a lot of these things is just understanding these rules. So I just recently published a book called entrepreneurial creativity. And one of the chapters in it is boundaries allow for freedom. And one of the quotes that's like right off the top in that chapter is from J.R.R. Tolkien, who, you know, if we're going to talk about putting out good content or being creative, probably should listen to J.R.R. Tolkien did a pretty good job with Lord of the Rings and building out middle earth. But he said, you know, I had to draw the map before I could build the world, before I can tell the story. I'm butchering the exact quote, but essentially what he was saying in this like kind of mini monologue he went on was I had to build these like rules so I could then be creative in the boundaries of the world I'm in. And like, what you're saying is exactly that. Like we have to think about what are the rules and like not see them as limiting, but rather like an exponential increase that we can play off of in our creativity. Yeah. And I mean, Mr. Beast, I quote this in probably 15 podcasts, but he said this really well is the algorithm is the audience. Like you're trying to get people's attention. If it's not working, you're just not understanding the audience very well. And that means like you're either not having a good hug. You're not doing like placing context and location while you're not doing these little things to make sure that your content stands out. And then you're wondering why the audience doesn't like it. So you have to have some of these cues in your content to make it work. And like you said before, like clickbait works. Like, I'm sorry, it works. You can do it in a good way where clickbait matches with your content. A lot of clickbait is just nonsense content on the other side of the click because they're only trying to sell the click. That's all they're trying to sell. But you can have a clever headline that leads to great content, but you need to get people to stop before you even get people to listen to that ad or anything. Yeah. So play within the rules, but you don't have to be cheesy like magazines that have done for years. You could be more creative with the content, make it great content that people are watching. No one's ever been mad about clickbait when it's backed up by something that's interesting. And that goes back to that initial thing of like continually providing the interesting context. I mean, even today, Daniel, I think that your newsletter was the headline was like ditch best practices or something along those lines, which immediately as a marketer is like, wait, what's going on? But then you get into the context of it. What's going on behind that? And you're like, I understand what he's saying. I understand why this is going on. And it's a great way to get me hit. What's a marketing hill you would die on? Listen to the people who can make content. I'm actually very passionate about this. There's a study that was done in like 2015. And it's not been done since. So it's probably a little bit outdated, but basically anyone who's like got degrees in like how to be able to make stuff ends up not working in a creative field by the time they're 25 at like a 80% clip. It's like almost everyone who gets a degree in something that where they like are tangibly capable of making content or designing things ends up in another job. And the reason I say, I like want to like die on this hill is that these are the same people who can like manipulate something in three-dimensional space. They like understand how key frames and all these things work and how to map all this stuff out visually. And like, we often don't, we're like, well, they just need to like make sure to change the color on that banner for like the fifth time in a row. And so what I would encourage like a lot of like leadership, cause there's still a kind of a mix of leadership right now. It's like, okay, I've got a marketing heavy background. Like I understand the principles I've read and I've read Marshall McLuhan. And like, I know all the D all those things. And that's great. Like I'm not by any means saying like, don't listen to those people. I actually really, really value the opinion, but I want to encourage the collaboration between the two because I think that's when we get to the best results. Cause those, the people who like make stuff, you know, they've trained themselves to be creative. Like they went to school to go do that. They like invested the time to understand. And it's like in our best interest, whenever like we're looking to come up with concepts and creative ideas to like include them. Cause I think that we get to a better result by thinking about, Oh, I didn't even know. Like a lot of times when that collaboration really happens, people on both sides go, I had no idea we could do that. Like I had no idea that we could like, that was even a possibility. And I think that that's a really powerful place. So that's the hill I'll die on is like elevate the people who can do the work as much as you can and bring them into those meetings because you'll get to better results. You can help them set the context. Cause you, you understand how marketing works or how your audience works. You can help them say like, okay, this is what we're wanting to get out of it. This is like, like you just said, like contest location. This is the things that we want to get out of it. You think of this in a creative way of how we would frame the shot, blah, blah. But if you just have like a creative, try to come up with something with no context, they're going to fail. If you have like a marketing person who has no creative background that understands what you're talking about right now, they're going to fail. So it's also, I mean, the best creatives out there in marketing are like creatives like you, where you, you have marketing context, but you, you're applying, you're, you're deep consumed in marketing and you've deep consumed in creative and you're using those to branch into a new thing. That's a new marketing and creative together. And I know how to make both of these work. And then that's like a powerful skill. So like if creatives want to like level up too, if you start learning more about marketing, you're going to be 10X more valuable than just a creative who has no context about marketing. And the same thing about marketers. If you understand a little bit about creative, you can tell the creative what to do or like have, not what to do, but like how you're thinking about it in your head in a more succinct way, not telling them what to do. I never tell creators what to do, but tell them what you're thinking basically. Yeah, no, it's the classic. And I, you know, I, what's the classic joke about, you know, social media managers, like having like that title is being so ambiguous, right? Like there's, there's so many responsibilities and roles in that. And I think the tendency is to be like, and often it's true. Like there's a reason that that message resonates that it's like, Oh, I'm doing all of the things. Like my, my job is all of the marketing on social. Okay. And I'm doing, I'm just one person. There are times where that's unfair. And there's times when that's an opportunity to like learn. And I think that more than anything, if like someone coming out of this podcast, like my biggest encouragement would be, Hey, go like learn, like, and then apply it up level that skillset, because like you become to your point, Daniel immensely more valuable over time. And like, you've got that experience in that as, especially as like more and more social first marketers kind of slowly start to become like fall into the CMO slot over time. Like everyone in that space, like the payday is coming is what I'm saying. Like it's going to eventually get there to a place where it's like, Oh, I have a lot of skills in this area and I can be valuable and marketable myself. Yeah. I mean, I'll give a quick context about me quickly. And then we asked the last question too, but for me, I started marketing operations. So I understood everything about marketing, but I was also on the side learning social, learning how to create content, doing this all on the side. And then when the two worlds came together, it made me so much more valuable what I'm doing today, because I understood how marketing works, what marketers care about, what marketers are doing. Cause I had so much context about that, but I also understood how to play the game over there as well. So I took two pieces and just made it two legs of like a table. And that's why I say you shouldn't be a T-shaped marketer. You should be a table-shaped marketer. Like you should think about being good at two principles and then you're even more valuable because if you're good at social and ops or this and this, you become so much more valuable. Yeah. But lastly is where could people find you and what you're doing? Yeah. So you could head over to our website, which is new motion.com that's N E U E motion.com. So this is short for like neuroscience or Helvetica new, depending on which side you want to come from there, but check us out there. I'm also, you'll find me on LinkedIn at Ted Harrison and on, on Twitter at, or X now I still, still getting that mixed up, even though I worked at both, um, uh, at Ted vid short for video. And, um, uh, yeah, be sure to check that out. Got a course that goes way further into attention on the website and also have a book that just came out about really getting in the weeds of like creating repeatable, creative success and, uh, called entrepreneurial creativity. And you'll find the links out there on one of those platforms. Amazing. Thanks so much for coming on the pod and make sure you go follow what Ted's doing. And I'm excited to see what some of these big brands start launching with your help. So thank you so much for coming on the pod. Thanks so much, Daniel. It's been a pleasure and looking forward to being back one day. Thanks so much for listening tune in next week to hear more great insights from marketing schools operators. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to the marketing millennials podcast and giving it a five-star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.