It’s been a while since I bought a nice glossy magazine. I usually enjoy flicking through one at my favourite cafe. I’m not sure why I was so surprised to get 32 pages into the latest edition of Vogue and still be on the adverts. The entire magazine was 208 pages, 100 of those pages were adverts.

By the time I’d leafed through the articles, (it didn’t take long), I felt more than a little cheated. That was fifteen minutes of my life I would never get back. What I wanted was to be entertained, but as I closed the back cover I couldn’t help feeling that my attention had been stolen. Impact of those 100 pages and thousands of advertising dollars. Zero.

The world is full of people like me. Remote control wielding, advert skipping, PR immune consumers. The kind of people you want to engage with. People who choose to ignore what you’re selling every day, because they can.

So instead of trying to steal their attention, captivate them. Do the thing that the big guys didn’t realise was important.

Give them something to care about.

Image by Siddharth Khajuria.