Make me feel something. Sounds simple. Yet along the way, emotion stopped being the standard we hold ourselves to.
We talk about shrinking attention spans as if it’s an unavoidable reality. As if people have fundamentally changed and that the audience is the problem.
People haven’t lost the ability to pay attention. They’re just more selective with it.
They willingly give their time to long-form podcasts, TV series, football matches, cinema. Rarely with full, uninterrupted focus. Attention moves between screens. When something genuinely resonates, they look up and lock in. They pause the scroll. The attention is conditional: it must be earned.
We shifted from fewer, more considered campaigns to a constant stream of content. In theory, always-on should have helped reinforce memory and build familiarity. In practice, it turned into a system that rewards output over impact.
Anyone who has sat through a review recently will recognise the focus on inconsequential details. Meanwhile, a more important question quietly drops out of the conversation: is this actually worth anyone’s time?
Then there is the tendency to play it safe. Work that avoids friction or saying anything that might be misinterpreted. It feels sensible in the room, but rarely survives in the real world.
Because safe work has a predictable outcome. It gets ignored.
Part of the issue is how we think about brands in the first place. The industry likes to believe brands sit much closer to people’s lives than they actually do. That people are paying attention, waiting to engage, and ready to care.
In reality, they’re not.
People care about their families, their friends, their interests, the things that shape their everyday lives. Brands sit on the periphery, occasionally entering consideration when there is a need. Advertising plays a role in that moment. A small one. It nudges, reminds, and influences direction.
If we overestimate how much people care, we start producing work that assumes attention instead of earning it.
This is where emotion becomes critical.
A study by System1 covering more than 56,000 ads globally found that campaigns generating stronger emotional responses consistently performed better, both in the short and long term.
Emotion makes things easier to remember. What is remembered is more likely to be chosen. Yet, much of what we produce today is stripped of emotion.
In the push for efficiency and scale, storytelling is often one of the first things to go. Showing the product and listing features feels safer, especially when we assume people won’t stay long enough for more.
But that assumption doesn’t hold.
This applies in Saudi Arabia as much as anywhere. Cultural nuance matters. Dialects, references, and shared context all shape how something lands. In a market as diverse as Saudi, with its regional differences and distinct local identities, those details carry weight.
People are not a monolith. Not “Saudi youth”. Not “gamers”. Not “football fans”. These are meaningful identifies for many, but they’re often reduced to visual clichés. Depicting a gamer in headphones or a group of friends watching a match doesn’t say anything.
What is relatable are the small frustrations. The rituals. The emotional highs and lows that come with those interests. That’s where brands have a chance to be relevant in a way that feels earned. Solve a tension or facilitate a passion.
Instead, we often default to scale.
Influencers are brought in for reach, and AI is being used to generate more content, more quickly, oHen without improving the thinking behind it.
The AI conversation revolves around how realistic the output looks, trying to evade the faint uncanny quality that people can sense but not articulate. But little attention is given to whether the work says anything worth noticing.
None of these tools are inherently flawed. They become effective when they are used to amplify or improve something that already has substance. Without that, they simply increase the volume.
For brands, this leads to the uncomfortable question:
Is what we’re producing actually any good?
Answering it requires clarity. Knowing what the brand stands for, what it wants to be associated with, and making sure each piece of communication moves in that direction. It also requires restraint. Accepting that not everything needs to be said, and not everything needs to be posted. Most of all, it requires caring about the quality of what goes out into the world.
Because people are paying attention. Just not to most of what we make.
And if the work continues to be safe, forge;able, and easy to ignore, that is unlikely to change.
By Amr Sallam, Head of Strategy, Results Advertising.
