Introducing... the Attention Coaches!

You are not alone on your Earn It J-EARN-ney

Welcome to the Creativity Business, a newsletter about earning attention and differentiating yourself as a marketer or content creator. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up and get content & differentiation strategy delivered to your inbox every two weeks for free.

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Tuesday is a big day for me. It’s been years in the making. October 1 is the official launch day for my book, “Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers” and I can’t wait for it to finally be out in the world!

Until now, I have been holding back one very exciting detail about the book.

I have enlisted the help of some serious legends in the quest to help marketers and creators earn more attention. I feel like I’ve assembled The Avengers of Attention.

Without further ado… (drum roll…), in alphabetical order, please meet… your Earn It Attention Coaches!

Jonah Berger is the bestselling author of Contagious, The Catalyst, Magic Words, and Invisible Influence. He’s also a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Jonah knows how to create change and make ideas spread.

Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of several books, including The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap. Michael knows how to ask smart questions and play a generous long game with content, and has exceptional empathy for audiences.

Ann Handley is the bestselling author of the book Everybody Writes and the hugely popular email newsletter about marketing and writing, Total Annarchy. Ann knows everything about building relationships with audiences and crafting a unique brand voice.

Dan Heath is the bestselling coauthor (with his brother, Chip) of Made to Stick, The Power of Moments, Decisive, and Switch; the author of Upstream and the forthcoming book, Reset. Dan is also the host of the podcast What It’s Like to Be. Dan knows how to make ideas enduring and memorable.

Dan Misener is the cofounder of Bumper, a podcast growth agency. Dan is one of smartest problem solvers I know and is a global expert on building audiences for content published by brands.

Jenny Ouano is my original cofounder at Pacific Content and is the cofounder of Rewrite Capital Advisors. She is the best person I have ever met at designing unique, unexpected, memorable content, experiences, cultures, and environments.

Tom Webster is one of the media industry’s top research and strategy minds, as well as a compelling speaker and author of The Audience Is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast. Tom is a partner at Sounds Profitable, a company focused on growing and improving the podcasting industry through research and education.

What a stellar collection of mega-brains, right?! You might be wondering what these Attention Coaches are doing inside the book. Well, much like the “hero’s journey” made famous by Joseph Campbell, you are being called to adventure. Earn It pulls you out of your comfort zone and sends you off into the wilderness to overcome tough challenges in pursuit of a better, more effective way of marketing and creating content.

And–not gonna lie–sometimes the journey is going to be tough. Following the pattern of every epic hero’s journey, though, there is expert help every step of the way. Much like Luke Skywalker had Yoda, Neo had Morpheus, Frodo had Gandalf, and Harry Potter had Dumbledore, you have this amazing assemblage of Attention Coaches who have agreed to be part of this book and serve as your guides and mentors.

An Attention Coach Preview

Here are some appetizers of Attention Coach wisdom–just to whet your appetite for the main course 😜. Let’s start with the basics. Why do all these experts (who I am not paying to agree with me) think earning attention is important and valuable?

Jonah Berger: Some things attract attention, but holding it is also really powerful, particularly if we want to change minds or drive action. The challenge is a little bit like food. Sometimes food is delicious and sometimes food is nutritious, but the goal is for it to be both. And so you want it to be delicious enough that it grabs our attention . . . but it also has to be nutritious enough that once you’ve given it some attention, you’ve actually learned something from it.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Are you building a lighthouse or are you trying to fire off a lot of flaming arrows? Sometimes when you’re seeking attention, you’re shooting arrows all over the place and hoping that somebody notices. Earning attention says I’m building a lighthouse that helps people navigate by what I stand for. It only works if people come into the realm of your lighthouse. There is something about having the confidence to say, “This is what I stand for and this is how you can choose to navigate by what I put out into the world.” Earning attention is saying that you can trust my lighthouse.

Ann Handley: The Holy Grail of earning attention from anybody is that they want to hear from me. They want information from me. I love that that bar is so high, and I love the fact that the minute I disappoint them or I don’t deliver on their expectation, they can unsubscribe and I can never darken their doorstep again. I love that kind of pressure as a marketer and as a person.

Dan Heath: Sticky ideas are effective partly because of their ability to capture and hold the attention of the audience. For messages to stick, they need six traits (or as many of the six as you can muster).

• Simplicity

• Unexpectedness

• Concreteness

• Credibility

• Emotion

• Story

Unexpectedness applies most to earning attention.

Dan Misener: Earning attention acknowledges the opt-in nature of content. It’s hard to force somebody to watch, read, or listen to something. So earning attention is about making something worth people’s time. How do you know if you’ve made something worth people’s time? It’s good if people spent time with it and it’s bad if people didn’t spend time with it.

Jenny Ouano: If you really want people to experience joy or wonder about the content you’ve made—there’s so much noise out there—then it’s up to you to really understand that audience. You need to deeply understand who this is for. Don’t cheapen it by not listening to what they want or ignoring whatever is important to that particular audience group. You have to put in the work to make the really good quality stuff that people will talk about and remember.

Tom Webster: Earning attention is a trailing variable of doing something really, really good. Maintaining attention is a different thing. That’s a daily discipline that never ends. You have to earn your audience every single day. 

This is some serious, heavyweight experience and they all really deliver the goods. Thank you, Attention Coaches - I’m so grateful to every one of you for your participation in the book!

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Earn It Updates

• A huge thank you to Sevaun Palvetzian for this early review of Earn It:

  “Compelling content is addictive. But the bar to pass in producing it is higher than ever to reach. In his unique style and voice, Steve shows readers how to blow past mediocrity and earn the attention of audiences -- differently and consistently.”
  –Sevaun Palvetzian, President and CEO, UNICEF Canada

• Did you know that a book cover only has TWO SECONDS to earn the attention of a potential reader? Peter Cocking does. He is the Creative Director at Page Two Books and the designer of Earn It. He fully embraced the challenge of crafting an unconventional book cover that earns attention. Here’s a video with all the smart design choices he made to gamify a book cover.

@steve_prattA book cover has only TWO SECONDS to earn your attention! Here's how Peter Cocking, the Creative Director at Page Two Books uses unconventional approaches to stand out in a sea of covers. #books #booktok #bookdesign #bookdesigner #marketing #bookmarketing

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• I’m very grateful to the team at Wisereads (makers of Readwise Reader and Readwise, my favourite digital read-it-later and highlighting apps!) for featuring Earn It this week and giving their wise readers a free preview of the first chapter. (If you’re a power reader, I highly recommend checking out both services and the newsletter.)

• Big thanks to Matt Cundill for having me as a guest on the Sound Off Podcast to talk about Earn It. Matt is real pro - it is always a treat to talk with someone who really prepared for the interview and who spends time crafting it afterwards. Thank you, Matt!

• I wrote a tribute/love letter to the most original and hard-working celebrity interviewer I’ve ever met - meet Nardwuar the Human Serviette!

What’s Earned My Attention Recently

Seinfeld Wisdom

Since publishing my piece on Costanza Marketing (Do the Opposite!), I’ve had a lot of wonderful Seinfeld insights shared with me.

Steve Goldstein shared the Jerry Seinfeld quote above with me–it echoes something Tom Webster talks about in the book–the “short attention span” theory is disproven every time we binge a Netflix series or listen to a three-hour Joe Rogan podcast. When something is of high quality, we have loads of attention.

Stephen Shedletzky shared a funny clip of Jerry Seinfeld accepting a Clio Award, telling the crowd of advertisers, “I love advertising because I love lying!”

Farnam Street Insights

I really enjoy Shane Parrish’s newsletter, Farnam Street. He recently had two nuggets of wisdom that resonated with the themes inside Earn It. One of the ‘hard truths’ about making extraordinary work that is worth people’s time and attention is that it takes time and hard work. Unpopular, but nonetheless very true.

“You don't have to be special to be successful. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things by choosing to be what most people are unwilling to be: consistent, hardworking, patient, and determined.”

Following up on the word “patient” above, apart from a very rare exception, short-term success doesn’t really exist with content. It’s a long game. You have to show up over and over again, being unexpectedly awesome each and every time.

“The short-term crowd is always too distracted to notice the long-term crowd slowly compounding.
An investor obsessing over daily economic data misses the big picture. A teenager chasing fleeting popularity neglects to develop genuine interests and skills. A co-worker stops paying attention to the details to chase attention. All chase false stimuli at the cost of lasting value.
Never try to win the moment at the expense of the decade.”

Viewing marketing and content as an asset whose value compounds over time would shift a lot of current strategy and would earn a lot more attention.

Say What They Can’t Unhear

There’s a terrific book coming out on October 8th from Tamsen Webster, the author of one of my favourite messaging books, Find Your Red Thread. The new book is called Say What They Can’t Unhear. Tamsen is on a mission to make it easier for people to make change happen and this book delivers the goods. Even better, the science and psychology Tamsen shares recommends finding alignment and empathy instead of cajoling and pressuring! 😜

Meditations for Mortals

Four Thousand Weeks is my most recommended book of the last several years. Oliver Burkeman has truly made me rethink how I approach spending my time and to appreciate how short our finite lives are. Oliver has a new book, Meditations for Mortals, coming out October 8th and I’m eagerly awaiting fresh new perspectives on life. (Spoiler: I was thrilled to chat with Oliver last week about the book and will be publishing the highlights of our conversation soon in The Creativity Guild. Stay tuned…)

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I’ll be back with a short Earn It launch day newsletter on Tuesday and then it will be back to the regular cadence. Thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement with the book - it means a lot to me!

Steve

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