If you want to grab as much attention as possible at scale, you need to constantly try to solve for this ultimately unsolvable problem. Sometimes you’ll succeed and produce a hit movie or TV show. More often you’ll fail, even when you attempt to hew tightly to the basic contours of attention that are common knowledge among those of us who work in the attention business. Why did one network’s police procedural succeed while another failed? No one knows! Humans are unpredictable, and human appetites, literal and figurative, are vast and strange.
