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Nearly three hours long and based on a 2,700-year-old poem, The Odyssey doesn’t look like entertainment designed for the age of shrinking attention spans.
But audiences don’t care. In its opening weekend, Christopher Nolan’s latest epic earned around $264 million globally, the biggest worldwide debut of his career. It also delivered a record opening for IMAX screenings, helping fuel hopes that 2026 could become cinema’s strongest year post-pandemic.
"We’ve too often confused efficiency with effectiveness."
In stark contrast, for the past decade our industry has been getting progressively shorter, optimising campaigns into 15-second videos, six-second bumpers and fleeting social assets designed to stop a thumb for just long enough to register an impression.
Along the way, we’ve too often confused efficiency with effectiveness. Shorter content can be cheaper to distribute, easier to complete and simpler to measure. But conversion rates, last-click attribution and cost per view do not necessarily tell us whether an idea has built consideration, strengthened a brand or created something distinctive enough to be remembered.
Above: Christopher Nolan's recently released, and hugely successful film, The Odyssey, tells us that sometimes more is more.
If the success of The Odyssey tells us anything, it’s that audiences are willing to make a considerable investment of time when the experience feels worth it. Not every brand should make a three-hour film, but this particular epic reminds us that quality, anticipation and storytelling still command attention. Perhaps attention is not shrinking at all. Audiences are simply more selective about which odysseys are worth taking.
Attention has become more selective
Look at how people consume entertainment. Viewers binge entire television series over a weekend. Adolescence, despite running for close to four hours across four episodes, was often treated as a single sitting. Episodes of Stranger Things can be longer than many feature films, while programmes like Clarkson’s Farm, Rivals and Race Across the World invite audiences to spend hours inside their worlds.
If the success of The Odyssey tells us anything, it’s that audiences are willing to make a considerable investment of time when the experience feels worth it.
Podcasting tells a similar story. Goalhanger has built a major media business through the likes of The Rest Is Entertainment, The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History, with episodes regularly running for an hour or more. And gaming dismantles the idea that people can no longer concentrate for sustained periods. Millions voluntarily spend hundreds of hours exploring Minecraft, Elden Ring and Fortnite.
These experiences do not succeed because they’re brief; they succeed because they’re immersive. Audiences are objectively not avoiding long-form. They’re avoiding content that doesn’t sufficiently reward their time.
Above: Video games have proved that people are willing to spend hours concentrating on something, as long as it's immersive.
Stop treating shortness as the strategy
None of this makes short-form ineffective. A six-second film can introduce an idea, spark curiosity or reach someone at precisely the right moment. The mistake is treating brevity as an objective in itself. People use different formats for different needs. Short-form is powerful for discovery and immediacy, while long-form creates space for immersion, emotional investment and deeper participation.
Marketers should therefore start with the role that content needs to perform, rather than the duration a platform or media plan appears to demand. Too often, we begin by asking how many cutdowns an idea can produce instead of asking what experience would create the greatest value for the audience and the brand. The strongest branded entertainment reverses this order of priorities. Take The LEGO Movie and Barbie: neither feels like a conventional advertisement stretched to feature length. Both succeed as entertainment, allowing their brands to become part of culture rather than interruptions to it.
Too often, we begin by asking how many cutdowns an idea can produce instead of asking what experience would create the greatest value for the audience and the brand.
The emergence of TikTok micro-dramas makes the same argument from the opposite direction. Screen Time, a 57-part vertical thriller from Issa Rae's Hoorae Media, became the platform's biggest micro-drama with more than 150 million views. The format may be short, but the commitment isn't. Audiences willingly return episode after episode when the story earns their attention, proving that engagement is driven by the quality of the idea, not the length of each instalment.
Above: Neither The LEGO Movie nor Barbie feels like a conventional advertisement stretched to feature length.
Long-form is not just for Hollywood
The same principle can work on a smaller screen. Documentaries, creator partnerships, podcasts and episodic formats give brands room to explore subjects audiences genuinely care about. For Cancer Research UK, Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures used three hour-long Channel 4 documentaries to make complex science feel human, accessible and hopeful. The format gave patients, researchers and breakthroughs room to breathe - and delivered results, with brand consideration rising from 54% to 58% and regular giving increasing by 39% while the series aired.
The better starting point is not, “How short can we make this?” but, “What will make this worth someone’s time?”
Boots’ Summer Unboxed took a lighter route. The five-part series embedded products naturally into familiar British summer experiences, creating entertainment first and campaign assets second. Both show the same thing: long-form can be the idea at the heart of the campaign, with shorter content extending it rather than replacing it.
Measure the value, not just the seconds
For marketers, the real lesson is not that long-form has defeated short-form. It’s that duration is a poor proxy for effectiveness. The Odyssey is succeeding not despite asking for three hours, but because audiences believe those three hours will reward them. Marketers do not need Nolan-sized budgets or Homeric runtimes. They do need the confidence to stop treating every additional second as a liability.
A six-second film can be powerful when six seconds is all the idea needs. Equally, forcing every story into the smallest possible container can strip away the very things that make it distinctive: tension, emotion, character and the space to draw an audience in.
The better starting point is not, “How short can we make this?” but, “What will make this worth someone’s time?” That shifts the focus from completion to impact, and from serving the demands of a format to creating something people actively choose.
Nolan teaches us that good entertainment doesn’t ask for the least amount of time; it just makes every second worth the journey.
