The Split Screen Gen: Why your Message isn’t Landing

Here’s a question. Think back to the last time you sat down to watch something. Netflix, Stan, whatever you’d spent twenty minutes exploring before landing on the perfect watch. While watching that carefully selected show, did you also check your phone? Scroll Instagram? Online shop? Fold laundry?

If you did at least two of those things, welcome to the Split Screen Generation. And before you think this is about “those young people on their phones” - it’s not. It’s us. All of us.

We’re ordering groceries while listening to podcasts while planning our next holiday. Our fitness apps don’t just track steps. They play music, connect us socially, and provide mindfulness guidance to help manage the overwhelm we’re creating for ourselves. We are living multiple streams of experience simultaneously. It’s not a bug in the system. It’s our new operating system.

So what does this mean for your business?

Every time you bring your team together for a conference, a workshop, town hall, or a Monday morning stand-up - they walk in split-screen. One eye on their phone, one on the presenter, and their brain is already composing an email about something completely unrelated.

You’ve won the battle to get them in the room. But you’re losing the war for their mindshare.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: satisfaction is not transformation. Attendance is not engagement. And compliance is definitely not advocacy. Most organisations measure the wrong things -counting who showed up when they should be measuring whether anything actually changed when people were released back into the wild.

The Passive Learner Paradox

Today’s audiences aren’t disengaged because they don’t care. They’re passive because they’ve been conditioned to be efficient with their attention. They’ve sat through hundreds of presentations. They’ve endured slide decks that could have been emails. They’ve received “takeaways” that went straight in the bin on the way out.

They’ve developed sophisticated filtering systems. They’re scanning for value within the first 90 seconds. They’re deciding whether to give you their full attention, or whether to split-screen this experience too.

The shift from share of wallet to share of mind

This is where it gets interesting. When you DO capture a split-screen consumer’s mindshare; when you surprise them, when you give them something genuinely valuable - they become your biggest advocates. They can’t stop talking about it. They want more.

The opportunity isn’t to fight the Split Screen Generation. It’s to create experiences so compelling that people choose to put their phones down and lean in.

The 5 Principles of Immersive Impact

Through years of working with leaders and teams across some of Australia’s largest organisations -and yes, a few years lecturing to university students, which makes you an expert in distracted humans, we’ve identified five principles that consistently cut through the noise:

1. Participants Centre Stage - stop talking at people and start making them co-creators of the experience.

2. Psychological Safety with Stretch - create environments where people feel safe enough to take risks and genuinely engage.

3. Multi-Sensory Engagement - bodies remember what minds forget. Engage the whole person, not just their ears.

4. Unexpected Combinations - when you combine things that don’t traditionally belong together, you create experiences people can’t confuse with everything else they’ve sat through.

5. Enduring Touchpoints - give people something that keeps the experience alive long after they leave the room.

These principles work together, not in isolation. They apply whether you’re designing a global conference or a team workshop for fifteen people.

The bottom line

The Split Screen Generation isn’t a problem to solve. They’re an invitation to evolve. They’re asking us to be better -to create experiences that honour their intelligence, respect their time, and deliver genuine value.

And when we do? That’s when messaging doesn’t just land. It sticks.

If you’d like to explore how the 5 Principles of Immersive Impact could transform the way your teams learn, connect, and perform, or if you’d like Serena to bring this to your next event - we’d love to hear from you.