By Afrah Asmar
Attention has never been shorter. Reasoning has never mattered more.
People still read. What has changed is how they read and how little patience they have for following a thought from beginning to end. Social media trained us to live in fragments. A caption. A stitched clip. An emoji that stands in for a full sentence. Eac h fragment carries meaning but rarely invites depth.
This is post -literacy. Not the absence of literacy, but the decline of literacy as the main way we make sense of the world. The sentence has been replaced by the meme. The paragraph has been replaced by the scroll.
From sentences to signals
A meme today does the work of a sentence. It compresses context, tone, and emotion into one shareable unit. It does not wait for the reader to unpack it. It lands immediately. The pace of the feed rewards shorthand, not explanation.
Where brands fall behind
Many marketers still write as if social media were a billboard: long copy, polished slogans, campaigns designed to be read slowly. That rhythm is gone. Attention is clipped short.
A Microsoft study once claimed t he average human attention span had dropped to eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish. Whether the number is precise or not, the point is clear: messages that take too long to land do not land at all.
Audiences move before you have even finished your headl ine.
The brands that break through
The brands that succeed are not simplifying. They are reasoning differently. They take an idea, strip it to its core, and rebuild it in a format that moves: a looped video, a cut that hits in seconds, a line that works as both headline and caption.
Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” campaign showed the shift. Each looping Instagram cut carried the punch of a headline, fast, visual, and instantly shareable, but still rooted in the clarity of a larger narrative.
The work is not li ghter. It is sharper.
The balance ahead
Post-literacy does not erase writing. It rewires it. Audiences now decide in seconds if your message belongs in their world. The risk is not just being ignored. The risk is sounding like a relic from a slower age.
Marketers who thrive in this climate hold two disciplines at once. They master the fragment: the headline, the loop, the meme that can travel at speed. And they master the reasoning underneath: the clarity of thought that makes each fragment meaningful ins tead of disposable.
The solution is to build campaigns the way an editor builds a story. Start with the sharpest line, then cut until nothing dull is left. Test every message against this standard: does it land in five seconds, and does it still hold up wh en someone asks for more?
Even the smallest business can apply this. Take your next campaign idea and strip it to its first five seconds. If it does not work there, it will not work anywhere. The scroll is less patient than you think, and your audience is not waiting to be convinced. They are waiting to be moved.
Attention has never been shorter. Reasoning has never mattered more. The future of marketing belongs to those who can hold both: the speed of the signal and the depth of the idea.
About the Author
Afrah Asmar is a bilingual strategist who has shaped campaigns for global brands including Nutella, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kinder. With over a decade in leading Middle East agencies, she writes about culture, behavior, and the way market ing must evolve to stay real and be remembered.
