News companies can build brand by capturing and retaining attention
Product & Tech Initiative Blog | 29 January 2025
As our fast-paced world becomes increasingly digitally connected, it’s more important (and challenging) than ever to build a modern identity.
During this week’s Webinar, James Stephens, executive vice president of brand for global branding agency Monks, shared the challenges facing companies today and zeroed in on the importance of balancing familiar and dynamic brand expressions, leveraging algorithms and AI, and continuously gathering data-driven insights to optimise brand messaging and engagement.
Content consumption is changing
To start the conversation, Jodie Hopperton, lead of INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative, looked at how consumption patterns are changing. Sharing information from the Reuters Digital News Report, she noted fewer people are visiting Web sites and apps directly:
“The gateway into us and our brands … are not the front page of a newspaper or a TV anymore,” Hopperton said. “A lot of the time it’s through social media, it’s through search, it’s through aggregators, maybe it’s through mobile alerts. They’re coming from very different places and this is becoming more and more fragmented.”

And, as the environment splinters, brands must work harder to create and maintain identity. Building an enduring brand today requires navigating a world dominated by real-time interactions and immediate choices, Stephens said. Today’s relationships are built on an “exponentially growing number of available connection points.”
The average person is bombarded with thousands of ads daily, and that’s “not to mention all the other forms of content news and the connections people try and make with family and friends, colleagues and coworkers,” he said.
This all adds up to cognitive overload: “We simply can’t process all of those attempts to get our attention.”
Real-time choices
So what’s a brand to do? Change the way they capture and retain attention.

As consumers make choices about the content they engage with in real-time, several factors enter in to their choice. Familiarity and context play crucial roles in these decisions, Stephens said:
“We make these real-time choices in a moment … in .3 seconds, the mind can decide if we’re going to skip something based on both those familiar expressions that create this long-term affinity meaning and trust, as well as those dynamic expressions that reflect the real-time context.”
For instance, a user is more likely to pause and engage with content from a known source, such as a family member, than from a stranger. Algorithms further influence these behaviours by rewarding content that aligns with user preferences, so brands need to create optimal, contextualised experiences.
“Essentially, think about how you can define audiences against all the ways that your brand or your product or your offering or your content could be positioned against almost infinite creative expressions,” he said, adding this is where AI can step in and override the previous constraints imposed by time and budgets.
“Anyone’s going to have the capacity to create really high-quality content,” Stephens said.

Capturing what’s familiar
To effectively capture and maintain audience attention, brands must strike a balance between familiar and dynamic elements. Stephens shared the importance of creating a consistent brand identity through design systems, logos, colour palettes, and other visual elements.
However, companies must also embrace dynamic expressions that adapt to different contexts and platforms. This adaptability allows brands to remain relevant and engaging across various touchpoints.
A key component of successful brand building is turning every act of creation into an opportunity for data collection, Stephens said. This requires collaboration between creative teams, media buyers, and data teams to generate valuable insights. Continuous learning and feedback loops help brands understand what works and why, enabling them to refine their strategies and better connect with their audiences.
Brands that have learned to work in real-time, he said, “have solved the speed of culture problem. They capture the opportunity inherent in every channel, community, moment, and conversation.”
How real-time works in the real world
To illustrate his points, Stephens offered several campaigns from clients. Job site CareerBuilder’s rebranding effort involved creating a consistent design system to improve brand perception and conversion rates.
The platform’s two biggest careers are nursing and construction, so Stephens showed how the subtle use of yellow and teal colours added a sense of familiarity to users.
“The yellow reflects the vests that construction workers wear, and the teal reflects the colour of the nurse’s outfit,” he explained. “So again, there’s familiarity even in the colour palettes you choose that somehow will cue, consciously or subconsciously, certain identities.”

He showed how Netflix’s approach to brand building leverages its wealth of content, creating powerful experiences that enhance the overall brand. Hulu’s use of its iconic green colour across diverse content types is a perfect example of consistent visual branding.
Messaging for diverse audiences
Stephens also discussed the importance of adapting brand messages to different audiences.
The “rallying cry” approach was successful for Penn State University, which had seen a significant sex scandal and scandals within the student body. It also sits in a politically divided swing state. The task was “to attract students, young teenagers, their parents, Pennsylvania voters, both Democratic and Republican, donors, as well as alumni,” Stephens said. “So imagine just about every age, race, gender, political affiliation ... and trying to come with one message to work for all that.”
The campaign centred around a rallying cry of “We are Penn State,” and it successfully united a diverse audience by emphasising the impact of community. “The universal rallying cry brought them together, but reflected different audiences,” Stephens said.
Brand building in real-time
Building an enduring brand in a real-time world requires a multifaceted approach, Stephens said. By balancing familiar and dynamic elements, leveraging AI, gathering continuous data-driven insights, and adapting to diverse audiences, brands can navigate the complexities of modern identity and create lasting connections with their audiences.

“We want to turn every brand expression into an act of insight creation, constantly learning to better understand our audiences and our world, be as curious about them as we hope they are about us, and then finally transform the process of creation to feed the marketing engine,” he said.