The New Rules of Attention

At the House of Brand Transformation in Cannes, 10 Days hosted a captivating roundtable session with a distinguished lineup of senior marketing and creative leaders. Here, the agency's partner and chief brand officer, Pia de Malherbe, unpacks the conversation to reveal the ‘New Rules of Attention.’

Attention used to be bought. Now, it has to be earned.

That was the starting point for our roundtable on the ‘New Rules of Attention’ at the House of Transformation at Cannes. It was a conversation with four brilliant voices working at the intersection of sport, entertainment, creativity and brand-building: Madison Raisch, creative director at the National Women’s Soccer League; Shelley Macintyre, CEO, brands and licensing at BBC Studios; Mario Dughi, head of marketing transformation, home care at Unilever; and Ellie Norman, CMO at Formula E.

It is a challenge we all recognise. Audiences are harder to reach, content is infinite, and the traditional media playbook is losing its power. We are living in a world of shrinking attention spans, creator-led culture, fragmented communities and AI-generated everything. The question is no longer how brands can interrupt people. It is how they can matter enough to be invited in.

What emerged was not a neat formula, but a set of strategic principles for how brands can earn attention today.

From audiences to fandom

As Ellie Norman put it, “fandom is our currency.” At Formula E, that means moving beyond broadcast reach and into belonging, community and cultural relevance. The race may be the product, but the real opportunity sits in the ecosystem around it: the drivers, teams, creators, live experience and communities that give the sport its pulse.

Take Formula E’s Evo Sessions. Instead of telling people that Formula E is fast, electric and extreme, the brand invited creators into the sport and gave them the keys. They understood that creators are not just distribution channels, but trusted translators. When given genuine access, they can tell the story of a brand in a way that feels native to their own communities.

The old model says: buy media and push the message out. The new model says: build something people want to belong to.

The power of the human story

Ellie also reflected on the transformation of Formula 1, particularly through Drive to Survive. Formula 1 had always been an extraordinary franchise, but it had become technical, clinical and engineering-led. The drama was there, but it was trapped behind the machinery.

Drive to Survive changed that by pulling back the curtain. It made the drivers, team principals, rivalries and emotional stakes visible. It showed that the magic of Formula 1 was not just speed or spectacle, but the collision of “man and machine.”

As Ellie described it, the opportunity was to move beyond the “engineering lens” and build emotional engagement through the human side of the sport. Madison Raisch saw the same principle at the NFL, where the idea was called “helmets off” marketing: show the people, not just the uniform. Reveal the character behind the performance.

Every category has a helmet. The trick is knowing when to take it off.

Borrowing fandom

For some categories, fandom comes naturally. Sport, entertainment and media are built on passion. For others, it is harder.

As Mario Dughi noted, “people would not generally be fans of home care products.” But Unilever shows how brands can earn their place in culture when partnerships are built on genuine alignment.

Dirt Is Good, known as Persil in the UK, partnered with Arsenal Women to get children playing outside. The ‘It Starts Outside’ campaign used real childhood photographs of the players, reminding us that before they were professional athletes, they were simply children playing outdoors. It was an effective, emotionally resonant expression of the brand’s belief in dirt, play and outdoor experience, while connecting the brand to the momentum behind women’s football.

It worked commercially, too. Mario shared that, among people who had seen the Arsenal partnership, half were 30% more likely to buy the product. Even supporters of rival clubs, became more likely to buy, showing that meaningful partnerships can create affinity well beyond the obvious fan base.

Going where culture already exists

Mario also shared the story of Cleanipedia, Unilever’s cleaning platform built through TikTok and creator communities. During the pandemic, cleaning content exploded. CleanTok became a phenomenon, fuelled by people spending more time at home and seeking practical, satisfying ways to improve their spaces.

Rather than trying to manufacture a community, Unilever tapped into one that already existed. Cleanipedia worked with cleaning creators around the world, eventually building a network of more than 4,000 creators.

The brand’s role was not to dominate the conversation. It was to add credibility. Unilever could bring science, testing and reassurance to the hacks and solutions creators were already sharing. It’s clear that the smartest brands do not force their way into culture. They understand where attention is already focused, then find a useful and credible role within it.

Building worlds people want to return to

Shelley Macintyre brought a different lens through BBC Studios and the extraordinary success of Bluey.

Bluey is not just a children’s show. It is a modern family franchise with rare intergenerational pull. Children love it, parents love it and young adults have discovered it through TikTok. Shelley described it as a “unicorn of an IP”, and what makes it powerful is not scale alone, but emotional precision.

The stories are small, grounded and deeply human: family life, play, curiosity, parenting, siblings, gardens, games, feelings. In a loud and anxious world, Bluey offers calm. Muted colours. Gentle music. Slower pace. The emotional intelligence is unusually sophisticated.

It is also a reminder that franchise-building is not simply about expansion. It is about protection. Bluey has grown into games, music, audiobooks, social media, live experiences, theme parks and licensing, but Shelley was clear that building a franchise means saying no as much as saying yes. The brand world has to remain coherent. Every partnership has to add to the emotional equity, not dilute it.

As Shelley put it, brands have to understand the human need they are solving, “whether that be to satisfy a passion, to be useful in a certain way, or to level up the experience.”

Growth without losing the core

Madison Raisch spoke about the rise of the National Women’s Soccer League at a moment when women’s sport is experiencing extraordinary momentum. The NWSL had exceptional talent, but the brand itself needed investment, infrastructure and creative confidence to match the quality on the pitch.

Her challenge was not just to make the league look better. It was to help it show up like a serious, ambitious, future-facing sports property without losing the heart that made it special in the first place. Madison talked about the need to respect the original fans, the people who built the energy around the league before everyone else arrived, while also expanding to new audiences.

That is the tension at the centre of modern brand growth. If you only serve the core, you may never scale. If you abandon the core, you lose your soul.

The return of craft

Madison also made a passionate case for craft, particularly in sports branding. Her view was clear: typography, systems and visual rigour are not surface details. They are how a league, team or event earns authority.

From the NFL and Super Bowl to MLB, NHL and the Toronto Blue Jays, she spoke about typography as the backbone of sports identity. The best design systems create stature. They make a brand feel premium, established and worthy of belief before a single word of messaging appears.

In an age of infinite content and increasingly automated production, that feels especially important. Craft is becoming more valuable, not less. When everything can be made quickly, the things made with precision, taste and discipline will stand apart.

AI and the human in the loop

The conversation inevitably ended with AI.

Mario talked about Sketch Pro, Unilever’s in-house AI-powered design studios. What stood out was his caution against using AI simply to produce more. “It’s not about making assets for the sake of making assets,” he said. The goal is not volume. It is better, sharper, more useful creative output.

That point was echoed across the table. AI can support social listening, concepting, content development and production. But the human in the loop remains essential.

The New Rules of Attention

Shelley’s rule: Matter first.

For Shelley, attention begins with human connection. Brands need to understand the real need they serve, whether satisfying a passion, solving a problem or elevating an experience. “You’ve got to matter,” she said. “And to matter, you’ve got to build a connection.” Even in an AI-shaped world, storytelling and connection stay central.

Ellie’s rule: Be bold and actionable

Ellie’s rule balances cultural courage with connected infrastructure. Brands need to create unscripted moments that build emotional connection, while proving their authority to the algorithms and agents now shaping discovery. “Be bold and be actionable,” she said. That means building a brand ecosystem that earns attention, builds trust and stays visible wherever audiences, platforms and AI agents are looking.

Madison’s rule: Back your base, then build beyond it.

For Madison, growth means respecting the fans who built the brand while opening the door to new audiences. “Always back your base, but go beyond it,” she said. The challenge is to protect the passion of the core without letting it become a ceiling. The strongest brands and leagues honour the loyalists who built the energy, while expanding the world around them and opening the future of the sport to everyone else.

Mario’s rule: Earn your place in culture.

Mario’s point was that not every category comes with fandom built in, but every brand can earn a meaningful place in culture. The challenge is not to chase attention or create content for content’s sake, but to understand where people already care and contribute something genuinely useful, trusted and relevant. The same principle applies to AI: success is not measured by more output, but by work that is sharper, more distinctive and more valuable.

The old attention economy rewarded interruption. The new one rewards connection.

And perhaps that is the biggest rule of all: if you want people to pay attention, first give them something worth caring about.