You Are a Distraction. Get Good at It.

Most marketers think they are important. That their message matters. That people should stop and pay attention. Here is reality: you are a distraction in someone's day. Like a squirrel running past their window. If you are lucky, they might look up for a second. You can be angry about that. You can write long, detailed messages assuming people will sit down and carefully read them. Or you can accept what you are and get very good at it. The second option produces results. The first produces content that nobody reads.

The delusional assumption

There is a version of B2B marketing that assumes your prospect is going to pour a cup of coffee and settle in with your email. Nobody does that. Not even close. Your email is competing with every other email, every other tab, every meeting running over, every Slack message that just popped up. Your LinkedIn post is competing with everything else in a feed that was designed by a billion-dollar platform to be maximally addictive. Your landing page is competing with whatever they had open before they clicked. The assumption that you are the most interesting thing in their day is the source of most bad B2B copy. It is not misplaced ambition. It is a misunderstanding of the environment.

Optimize for the glance

Smart marketers accept that they are a distraction and work with it. They know their message has to work in the tiny moment someone glances at it. That is why headlines need to be understood in under a second. That is why subject lines need to earn the open before the reader has decided to open. That is why the first line of every piece of copy is doing heavier lifting than everything that follows. You are optimizing for the glance. Not the whole show. The glance. The street performer who succeeds does not complain that people are walking too fast. They do something in the first second that makes some of them want to stop. That is the whole skill.

The bathroom scroll reality

People are so thoroughly distracted that they reach for their phones in the bathroom. The last private, uninterrupted moment most people had in their day has been colonized by the scroll. As a marketer, you can find this depressing, or you can find it useful. The implication is that people are always looking for something to fill three minutes. They will read almost anything if it arrives at the right moment with the right first line. Your prospect is scrolling right now. The question is not whether they have three minutes. It is whether you are more interesting than the next thing they will tap on if they do not read yours.

What distraction-aware copy looks like

It is short. It does not require setup. It does not have a long introduction explaining why you are about to tell them something important. It does not make them scroll past three paragraphs to find the point. It starts at the point. It assumes nothing about their prior knowledge of you, your company, or your product. It earns each sentence with the one before it. The test is not whether the whole piece holds together. The test is whether someone who has been in three meetings, eaten lunch at their desk, and has seventeen unread messages wants to read the next line after the first one. If yes, you wrote it for the world as it actually is.

Being angry that water is wet

Being angry that you are only a distraction is like being angry that water is wet. The environment is the environment. You can complain about it or you can build skills around it. The companies that figure out how to get a second of attention, earn thirty seconds, and then earn a response — those are the companies that win in this environment. Not by fighting the distraction economy. By becoming the best distraction in the room. That is a winnable game. The other one is not.