Insights Attention needs an address

The first second

Every feed is a queue of things asking to be watched, and the thumb moving through it decides fast. Most of that decision is made on the first frame and the first line.

People stop for something they recognise: a face, a situation, a line they have said themselves. They are much quicker to move past anything that opens like an advertisement.

The first frame decides

So the first creative question is how your customer chooses. For a restaurant, the answer is usually other people.

A table for two

Malabar Melange was a new restaurant brand that had to find an audience from its first day.

We noticed that people choose where to eat from what they see other people eat. A launch like this would be won in short video, and in the local search that follows it.

So the launch led with organic short-form video and influencer collaborations, and made sure everyone it reached could find the restaurant on Google.

One of those reels, “Table for two”, opens on a line almost anyone could say at a restaurant door. The restaurant’s name arrives at the end, once the viewer is already in the scene.

1M+

organic views on a single reel

Malabar Melange · Fezey-reported

A reel like that does its work in the feed. What it is worth to the restaurant is decided somewhere else.

Where the attention goes next

Someone who watches a food reel and wants to go rarely goes straight from the video to a table. They search for the name, or for food nearby, and they look at what comes up: the map, the hours, the photos, the phone number.

That search is where launches leak. A reel can travel a long way while the restaurant’s listing shows the wrong hours, no photos, or nothing at all. The attention arrives and finds no address.

Illustrative. Not Malabar Melange data.

restaurant name

food near me

Listing completeListing missing

The thread runs the whole way, and the door’s window lights.

For Malabar Melange, the Google My Business profile was optimised for local discovery alongside the video. The views are the figure we report. The listing was there so the people behind them could find the door.

The same question gives a different answer in another category. Burj Al Arab Auto Care, a car-care workshop in Ras Al Khaimah, was opening a second branch in Dubai, in a market where every garage promises the same thing.

Drivers buy trust before they buy a repair. So the identity was built around the people who do the work: photography of the technicians in uniform, campaign creative in Arabic and English, a commercial film, and a website that takes a callback request in a few fields.

1 2 3 4

The identity on the uniform

The workshop in shot

One blue through the frame

A callback request in a few fields: phone, name, vehicle brand, service

A restaurant shows people enjoying the food. A garage shows the hands that will work on the car. In both, the creative starts from how the customer decides and ends at a place where they can act.

Before you post

Creative is easier to judge once it is connected to what follows. Before the next shoot:

1. Start from how your customer chooses. Write down what they look at before they decide: other diners, reviews, the person who will do the work. Then film that.
2. Earn the first frame. Open on a person, a situation or a line your audience would recognise. Let the brand arrive once they are watching.
3. Fix the address first. Check the listing, the map pin, the hours, the phone number and the website before a video starts travelling. Search for yourself the way a viewer would.
4. Judge a video by what follows it. Views tell you a video travelled. Profile visits, saves, direction requests, calls and bookings tell you whether it brought anyone closer.
5. Plan the content and the listing together. When the people making videos never look at the search results, the two drift apart, and the attention falls between them.

If your videos get watched and your phone stays quiet, look at what happens after the view. Start something, and we’ll follow that attention with you.