Attention is the scarce resource now, not production value

A business owner spends three weeks and a decent budget on a video. Someone on staff points a phone at a toy tumbling down a staircase, and it does better. That is not a fluke. It is the current shape of attention.

Dr Gloria Mark, who has spent over two decades measuring how long people stay focused on a single screen, tracked the decline plainly: 2.5 minutes of sustained attention in 2004, 75 seconds by 2012, and an average of around 47 seconds for the last five to six years. Other researchers have found similar numbers. Media has adjusted accordingly: the average television shot length, once measured in tens of seconds, now sits at roughly 4 seconds. Separate research from Sprout Social backs this up from the other direction: most people will only watch a video in full if it runs under a minute.

What this means for production value

None of this is really news to anyone who has doom-scrolled before a meeting. What is worth sitting with is what it implies about production value. A recent global survey of more than 1,500 marketers rated short-form video the single highest-ROI content format available, at 48.6%, comfortably ahead of long-form video (28.6%) and blog posts (22.3%). The standout example in that same research was not a slick campaign. It was a smartphone clip of a plushie toy falling down a flight of stairs, posted by a language-learning app, that pulled 57.7 million views, more than any polished campaign that brand had produced.

For a South African business owner, this should reframe a decision many of you are quietly stuck on: whether to keep saving for a “proper” video shoot before posting anything at all. The attention data says that instinct, while understandable, is working against you. You are not competing for a slow, considered viewing. You are competing for the first three seconds of a scroll, against everything else fighting for that same three seconds. A beautifully lit, slowly building video with a logo reveal at the end loses that fight before it starts, no matter how good it looks on a laptop screen in a boardroom.

This does not mean production quality is worthless. It means the calculation has flipped. Clarity, speed and a reason to keep watching in the first ten to fifteen seconds now matter more than lighting, colour grading or a polished script. A shaky, well-timed video of something true about your business, a real process, a real reaction, a real moment on the shop floor, will often outperform something expensively produced but generic, because it respects how little time it has and gets to the point.

What we would do about it

First, audit whatever video content exists on your channels right now and check how long it takes to reach the actual point. If it is longer than ten to fifteen seconds, that is the first thing to fix, regardless of budget. Second, give yourself and your team explicit permission to post lower-fidelity content when it is faster and more honest than the alternative. That permission is often the real blocker, not equipment or skill. Third, treat the opening seconds of anything you publish as the whole pitch: state the interesting thing immediately, then earn the rest of the watch time.

If the return on short-form video really is this far ahead of other formats, businesses that keep waiting for the “right” production setup are leaving a genuinely higher-return channel sitting unused. The bar to start is lower than it has ever been. The bar to keep someone watching has never been higher. Those two facts, together, are the actual opportunity here.

Sources: HubSpot, The Psychology of Short-Form Content, drawing on research by Dr Gloria Mark (UC Irvine), Sprout Social and HubSpot’s 2026 global marketing survey.