The Truth Behind 6 Second Ads
How an industry created a myth about human attention, and then exploited it.
September 13th, 2017. Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas. Home of bright lights, sensational shows, and all-night entertainment. The gambling capital of the world was a prescient choice for the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) annual conference. Speakers and panellists from across the marketing ecosystem came together to tackle the industry’s hottest topics: ad viewability, declining view-through rates, the Facebook-Google duopoly — there was no shortage of tough questions. The final keynote presentation of the two-day event, The Need for Speed: The Evolution of an Industry in the Face of Mobile, promised to deliver one last hurrah of high-octane answers.
The speaker was Andrew Keller, newly-appointed global creative director of the Facebook Creative Shop, whose role had been described by Garett Stone at AdAge as, “the tricky task of teaching agencies how to make ads on the constantly changing social network.” The presentation did not disappoint. “The average person scrolls through 300 feet, or one Statue of Liberty, of mobile content every day”, begun Mr. Keller, the epigram eliciting excited murmurs from the packed auditorium. “Mobile has also changed our brains. Our brains are getting faster.” Mr. Keller went on to explain that it in 2001 it took 0.3 seconds to process ‘a thought’ but that by 2014 that had shortened to just 0.03 seconds. It wasn’t the first time someone from Facebook had proposed that human brains are “getting faster”. In June 2017, Mr. Keller’s colleague and Facebook’s Global Creative Strategist, Carolyn Coyne, cited the same numbers at Social Media Week Los Angeles.
The source of these insights is a MIT study from 2014 which found that our brains can recognise a concept, e.g. ‘flowers’, in an image shown for as little as 0.013 seconds — for context, it takes 0.3 seconds to blink and 0.1 seconds to register ‘perceptual awareness’, like sunlight touching your skin. MIT’s results were notable for finding that the speed of ‘unconscious visual recognition’ was significantly faster than that recorded by various earlier studies undertaken between 1980 and 2012. There’s no mention in the 30-page paper of ‘0.03 seconds’, ‘mobile’, ‘media’, nor even ‘internet’, and the authors, Mary Potter and Carl Hagmann, make no suggestion that human brains are actually getting faster. All we know is that thanks to a new research methodology, MIT brains performed a very specific task faster than in previous studies.
How much thinking can someone do in 0.3 seconds or less? Well, it depends how we define ‘thinking’. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s research into cognitive bias popularised the theory of dual cognitive processes in Kahneman’s 2011 best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 (fast) is the brain’s fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious; System 2 (slow) is the brain’s slower, effortful, logical, deliberative, conscious. What MIT found is that ‘fast thought’ is very fast. Without System 2’s rational, considered, input, System 1 (fast) thinking can quickly become System 1 behaviour: ‘automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious’. If Facebook users ‘scroll’ through 300ft of content per day, and Facebook tells us the human brain is “getting faster”, it’s probably because Facebook users are making more use of System 1 thinking than System 2.
Back at Caesar’s Palace, nobody slowed their minds enough to think on these dynamics. The correlation between MIT’s research into the speed of ‘a thought’ and adoption of mobile internet usage was portrayed as unambiguously positive. We humans aren’t quite as dumb as we would have ourselves believe — we must be getting smarter! Our mental capacities are accelerating and this neatly coincides with the adoption of mobile phones. Therefore, mobile phone usage must be speeding up our brains! How wonderful — thank you, mobile phones!
There’s just one catch. It’s not easy to sustain someone’s attention when their mind is moving so quickly. “You don’t get any time. All time has to be earned”, said Mr Keller. “Just because you buy 30 seconds, it doesn’t mean you get that time.” We should have known as much. Video ads on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have average view times of 2–5 seconds — it seems that the mobile ad recipient has become a slippery viewer indeed. How should marketers conduct marketing in these conditions? The answer, according to Facebook, is that at least 70% of a brand’s advertising efforts on Facebook and Instagram should be aiming for the “sweet spot of six seconds” in video length, designed for “on-the-go mobile”; 20% should go to interactive ads and 10% into immersive ads. “It’s not a formula”, Mr. Keller added, as attendees hurriedly wrote down and took pictures of the figures displayed on the screen behind him, “I believe it’s a new art form.” And so, the AMA’s conference concluded with a vision for a new art form: six-second mobile video, where “creativity matters more than it ever has”.
Google has been offering six-second bumper ads — those that play automatically as pre-roll before video content — on YouTube since April 2016. The format, said Google, would “help [advertisers] capture attention in today’s mobile world.” A blog post later that year reassured advertisers, “What can you say in six seconds? Most likely, more than you think.” To whet the appetite, YouTube asked “creatives and filmmakers” to craft films into six seconds, and shared the output at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival — the very same festival where YouTube was premiering the original film project, This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous, a bold cinematic accomplishment that portrays Gigi Lazzarato’s journey, from Gregory Lazzarato the aspiring athlete to Gigi the YouTube transgender female beauty and fashion star, that’s since received an impressive 75% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and has a run time of 91 minutes, or 910 consecutive sets of six seconds. The inspiration to creatives and filmmakers wasn’t Gigi Gorgeous, though. Our focus had to be on six-seconds.
In spite of the durational challenge, or because of it, responses to the six-second ad briefs were positive. “We quickly learned that you don’t need to tell an entire story in the traditional sense to evoke emotion. One word, one image, one second is enough”, said Mia Kuhn from TBWA/Chiat/Day. Topher Cochrane from Leo Burnett agreed, “I was surprised by the efficiency and power of images, and the elasticity of the brain. It’s only six seconds. 180 frames. But watching the film, brains aren’t really constrained by time. The images feel much longer to me in my memory.” The participants of MIT’s 2014 research couldn’t have put it better themselves.
In January 2018, YouTube set up camp at Salt Lake City once again. This time, the brief to creatives — no filmmakers allowed — was to re-imagine classic tales like Cinderella or Red Riding Hood in the six-second format. Fourteen agencies participated. Publicis New York were tasked with re-imagining the story of Snow White. Their six-second film explores the headline, “BREAKING: Snow White says her stepmom is ‘trying to kill’ her.” The post-modern twist of parodying media within advertising was a tempting strategy, one that few would have stopped to ponder. The videos reminded me of the ‘flash fiction’ genre of six-word stories, the most famous of which — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” — was attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Six-word stories are easy to re-read, over and over. Each new reading conjures new emotions and new ideas. It’s hard to imagine such a response to “Show White says her stepmom is ‘trying to kill’ her”. Even so, Tara Walpert Levy, vp of agency and media solutions at Google, who was running the initiative at Sundance, told AdAge that ‘the six-second ad will only become more popular in the year ahead’. With such advocates as Google and Facebook — which, combined, account for 25% of the world’s advertising spend — and even ‘traditional’ media outlets like Fox Networks Group testing six-second ads for TV programming, ‘six-second’ may well be in the running for Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year.
Facebook and Google are right about one thing — mobile usage is certainly changing our behaviour. As a ‘media’, we will invest 2–4 hours of attention per day with our phones, out of a media saturation of around 12 hours per day. The most ubiquitous of these (although only representing around 8% of the global market), Apple’s iPhone, has a ‘sleep’ and ‘wake’ button that also functions as ‘power off’, but it was never designed to be turned off. Today, seventy-five percent of smartphone owners in the United States have never — not once — completely disconnected. The original iPhone OS was designed with a black background specifically to draw attention to the thirteen apps on the home screen. Now, millions of apps later, most people still only use eight applications with regularity: a weather app, a maps app, email, and a web browser form the staple pillars; the other four are up-for-grabs. Among these, its communication apps that have flourished most consistently. Gaming is another strong category, but the individual titles see fleeting prosperity.
With the broadest of brushstrokes: in Asian cultures, communications apps are mostly represented by group and private chat services; in Western cultures, mainly ‘open’ social networks. Facebook Inc.’s Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram collectively command fifty minutes of the 2–4-hour mobile attention per day at a scale numbering the billions. What’s most astonishing, and under-appreciated, is that all the communications apps — in East and West — are free to use. The currency that they trade is attention. Facebook Inc., the master of this ‘attention economy’, makes 98% of its revenue from advertising. The fifty minutes per day of mobile attention is ‘harvested’ and processed into ‘audience data’, a product sold to advertisers who pay for attention.
While Facebook is eager to emphasise the importance of ‘thumb-stopping’ creativity over scientific ‘formula’ in delivering success for advertisers, formula was central to Facebook’s own success at farming attention in the first place. Specifically, formulas involving dopamine, the chemical most associated with reward-motivated behaviour. Sean Parker, Facebook’s original President, explained:
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social-validation feedback loop… exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
The method for delivering the ‘dopamine hit’ is perhaps one of the most influential graphic designs of modern times — the red notification circle. Originally designed for iPhone OS email app, ‘notifications’ in the form of red circles were expanded to communications apps and are now so pervasive that even reading this sentence may encourage you to reach for your phone to ‘check’ whether you have any notifications on your social apps. Even if you hide these apps in a folder called ‘social’, you may still sneak a peek — just in case. Once inside a communication app, there are a plethora of notifications to pay attention to, and all of them appear as a white number on a red background. Rumour has it that Facebook trialled a blue notification, but blue doesn’t create the same addictive urgency as red. The use of red is a design decision. The notification infrastructure is also the result of design decisions. The objective, as Mr. Parker noted, is to consume more “conscious attention” than competing platforms.
While Facebook Inc. commands fifty minutes of our time, it is a stretch to equate this to attention. The 2–4 hours of time people spend per day looking at mobile phones isn’t in a single, ‘attentive session’. Instead, the time is spread across an average of seventy-six sessions per day (exaggerated figures often quote attention grabbing higher numbers). Over a 12-hour period (media saturation) this equates to around once every ten minutes. So symbiotically attached are we to our phones, and so enslaved are we to the dopamine that notifications provide, that the phone has almost become a biological extension to our bodies. An average owner will ‘touch’ the screen 2,617 times per day — roughly the same number of times as we touch our face. Less of a second screen, the phone might be better described as a second face — one that many people say they simply cannot live without.
Just as time is different from attention, the line between attention and boredom is also hard to draw. If Facebook’s fifty minutes per day was split evenly across the seventy-six separate mobile sessions, time spent per session would be just 40 seconds. It’s useful, then, to consider what frame of mind someone is in when they visit a media multiple times a day, for less than a minute at a time, and ‘scrolls through 300 feet of content’. The clue is in the wording: “scroll” implies an idle behaviour, like ‘channel surfing’ or ‘binge watching’. One cannot ‘scroll’ through a book and claim to have been engrossed by the content. Tristan Harris, an outspoken design ethicist, notes that unlike books, magazines or films, social networks aren’t designed with ‘stopping cues’ that say, “end of chapter” or “time to leave the cinema”. Newsfeeds have no end. Far from attentive, focused, and considered, it’s more likely that the mind of the average Facebook user is idle, passive, and disengaged, not paying attention so much as giving it away. In 2013, an anonymous Japanese Facebook group called IDPW created a Chrome browser plug-in designed to economise Facebook time by ‘liking’ everything that appears on the screen regardless of content. The button, doudemo ii ne, roughly translates as, “Whatever button”. Fortunately for Facebook, the mobile app is protected from such hacks.
Facebook has been proactive in acknowledging the difference between passive and active usage. In December 2017, their corporate blog cited research in the American Journal of Epidemiology (the branch of medicine that deals with disease and health) that showed that people who clicked on more ‘likes’ and links than the typical Facebook user reported worse physical and mental health. It’s worth repeating this: clicking more — traditionally considered a form of ‘engagement’ — can lead to worse physical and mental health. In short, those who “passively consume” social feeds without “interacting one-on-one with others in their network” are not engaging in content but are instead engaging in self-harm. Consider that, the next time you evaluate a campaign by the volume of ‘likes’.
These adverse health effects are not only recognised by peer-reviewed doctors. In January 2018, the Financial Times observed that ‘quitting smartphones is the new quitting smoking.’ In the UK, a movement called Time to Log Off is spearheading a digital detox program which begins with ‘digital dieting’ under a 5:2 rule — five days connected, two days off. There are also retreats and workshops available for those who need a little more encouragement. Digital Detox Holidays ranks hotels and accommodations by how disconnected one feels while staying there. All are designed to support the ‘occasionally analogue’ lifestyle. Forget ‘ad blocking’, it’s ‘media blocking’ we need to worry about, with 2018 heralded by many as “the year of the digital detox”. Facebook has since responded by tweaking its newsfeed algorithm to show people more of what they might want to see (posts from friends), and less of what they had to see (ads).
Of course, it’s not all quite as binary as the tone of this article has often suggested. There are many people, and brands, who prefer shorter ad formats on TV or on mobile platforms, even if the ads aren’t ‘skippable’. Agencies are embracing the YouTube Sundance challenge with open arms. Most folks don’t seem to mind indulging in a little format festishization. “There never will again be a single dominant format”, said David Lubars, chief creative officer of BBDO Worldwide. “A big idea can fit in any length.” Mr. Lubars is absolutely right. #BlackLivesMatter is an idea that cannot rationally be described using geometrical metaphors, but is succinctly described in just three words. #MeToo is only two words. These ideas, and others like them, permeate culture not because they invite us to think fast, but because they force us to think slow. The format is insignificant compared with the cultural context in which the idea lives. It’s important that we remember this. Society graciously rewards those ideas that contribute to it, and doesn’t waste time on those that do not.
In the case of media, it’s always been easier to buy time than it has been to earn attention. Quantity time, however, does not make for quality time. When my wife tells me that I need to spend time with my family, that’s not an invitation for me to practise some email inbox management while occupying the same sitting space as them. Time spent isn’t the same as attention given. Advertising must contribute to social solutions, not exasperate social problems. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are all investing in long-form programming or content partnerships. Since 2012, Netflix has reduced its content library by half — because there is value in quality over quantity. There is value in doing less if it means we can give more. Speed is nothing without the right direction.
Dearest advertising advocates — we all came here to change the world. Please, let’s not stop at six-second videos.
