How to Earn Attention in an Age of Distraction
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Why is earning customer attention the first step before any banking transaction?
Your bank or credit union is holding your customers' money. But right now, the World Cup is holding their attention. This year, nearly 6 billion people will follow the tournament. And many of them are your customers or members. And yet, most of those customers or members have not opened their app in weeks or even visit a branch. For years, your institution has competed for deposits, for products, and for rate. But before anyone opens an account, before they apply for a loan, and before they even trust your advice, something else has to happen first. You have to earn their attention. It's the one part of the contest that finance institutions keep leaving to chance. Watch what the World Cup does this month.
The news will lead with it. Advertising will be all around it, and conversations at work, online, and at the dinner table will all focus on it. Spending's going to shift, travel has shifted, and for four weeks, the rhythm of ordinary life rearranges itself around a tournament. That just didn't happen because the World Cup bought a few advertisements. It happens because people cared enough to make the tournament a part of their lives. That is the share of mind that every financial institution says it wants, and yet most of us don't do anything to build for it. Most banks and credit unions answer the attention question with visibility. You may count branches, impressions, sponsorships, and maybe just the sheer number of times that your name appears.
How does visibility differ from relevance in the banking world?
But visibility only measures who saw you. It says nothing about who actually cared. You can actually be everywhere a customer or member looks and still be the thing that they look beyond. The World Cup makes that trap obvious. Bank of America just became the first bank ever to sponsor it in a deal reported to be at least $100 million. That puts their logo in front of billions, but it does not buy their attention. It rents the proximity to attention that the tournament already created. The pushback to this narrative is obvious. You already spend on brand, you sponsor the local team, and people know your name. All of that can be true while the real problem deepens underneath it. The real threat is quieter than dislike.
A customer who simply stops noticing you and starts giving the attention to whoever earned it. Attrition rarely begins with a closed account. It begins months earlier, the day a customer's attention moves on without telling you. Attention is more than the number you report after the fact. It's actually the leading indicator of the whole relationship. By the time the deposits move and the balances thin out, the contest is already settled. you're probably reading the final score of a game you maybe never knew you were in. If you want the framework behind this, be sure to catch my recent insight video on silent attrition, which raises the question every bank and credit union should sit with. You're not the World Cup.
You cannot summon the planet's attention for a month, and you cannot buy your way to the front of someone's mind. So how does an ordinary institution...
What is “silent attrition” and why does it start months before a balance drops?
with an ordinary budget earned the attention that was never handed to you? Interestingly, the answer has almost nothing to do with advertising budgets. In fact, some of the most effective moves may cost nothing at all. Go back to the tournament for a moment. The World Cup did not earn its hold on us by outspending everything else in our lives. It earned it by being worth our time again and again until showing up for it became almost automatic. Attention given consistently is attention that compounds. This is the part that most financial institutions miss. The same mechanism is open to all of us at any size. When you show up usefully and consistently in places that attention actually lives and Maybe that's in feeds, in conversations, in communities.
And in the moments when money matters, that presence accumulates. And there's a new front most financial institutions are missing. Attention is no longer won only in a branch or on Google or even on social media.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is earning customer attention the first step before any banking transaction?
0:00–1:26
2
How does visibility differ from relevance in the banking world?
1:26–3:05
3
What is “silent attrition” and why does it start months before a balance drops?
3:05–4:59
4
How can banks use the World Cup example to earn attention without huge ad spend?
4:59–6:20
5
Why is AI‑driven financial search a new front for capturing attention?
6:20–7:22
6
What role do empathetic, insight‑based messages play in keeping customers engaged?
7:22–7:58
7
How can institutions become the first brand customers think of at key life moments?
7:58–8:20
8
What metrics should banks track to measure attention as a leading indicator of growth?
8:20–8:25