Attention
Some things don’t stay the same. The human attention span is one of them.
It used to be that human beings were very predictable. We are, in many ways, creatures of habit. And in the world of Advertising and Marketing, our behavioural traits became bankable assets for those who were trying to capture our attention and sell us stuff.
Fictional character’s like Advertising Executive Don Draper from hit TV Series Mad Men were able to rely on the fact that the majority of the population essentially performed the same daily actions over and over again as they lived their lives.
The husband would drive to work in the morning, listening to the radio on the car stereo, hear a news broadcast or two via radio in the morning in the office, have lunch and buy a newspaper, drive home in the evening, eat dinner, sit in front of the TV and watch 2-3 hours of a pre-programmed schedule which he had no control over before going to bed, getting up the next day and doing the same thing again.
His wife who stayed at home, would drop the kids to school, return and do housework, listening to the radio as she worked. She would perhaps flick through a magazine at lunchtime, meet up with her neighbours for a chat prior to picking the kids up from school. She would cook the family dinner and also sit down and watch some pre-programmed television with her husband that evening.
Weekends were slightly different naturally but the way in which we consumed media was not. We listened to radio, watched television and saw advertising in the same way, all the time.
As the years moved on, some things changed significantly, and some didn’t. More women worked instead of staying home. We bought VCR’s and color televisions replaced black and white ones. We got remote control devices which made it easier to change between channels. More and more TV and radio stations were created.
We also built vast amounts of new infrastructure. More train lines, more roads, highways and bus corridors. We built vast quantities of new houses and apartments which we filled with lots of new consumer electronic devices like desktop computers, gaming consoles, programmable washing machines, microwave cookers, etc.
Even in the early days of the internet in the 1990's and early 2000's , our daily behaviours, and subsequently our primary attention spans remained virtually unchanged since the 1940's. We just had more toys to play with.
However, the early 2000's was a time when things really were changing, and changing fundamentally. Driven by the growing numbers of people going online, the growing number of mobile computing devices (mainly laptop computers then) and crucially the early movers in the Social Media Space (such as Friendster in 2002), our daily routines began to shift away from what we had all being used to.
Throw in the seismic shifts that occurred as a result of internet companies such as Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin coupled with an explosion in the mobile computing space and almost universal access to wireless broadband internet in the developed world, and you have a married couple who may now spend their day as follows:
The husband and wife are awoken by the alarms on their Smartphones, which they reach for before getting out of bed to check the news via a Native App on their phone and have a quick check on their social media feed to see what’s happened since they last checked it before falling asleep about 5-6 hours earlier.
The husband jumps in his car, turns on the radio and drives to work, checking his social media feeds multiple times in traffic as he goes (not recommended, but that’s what happens). His wife drives to the train station, jumps on the train into the city, and because nobody talks to each other on the train/tube/bus anymore, will be checking her social media feeds, email and news apps as she travels.
Both will spend the morning catching up on a mountain of email (most of which is junk which they don’t open), and will check their social media feeds at least one time per hour, if not more.
At lunch, both will check their social media feeds as they eat and chat with their colleagues. After lunch, there will be a slowdown in the number of times they check their feeds, but they will check them again in detail prior to leaving the office for the commute home.
On the way home, the husband might listen to a podcast streaming into his car radio from his smartphone, instead of listening to the local radio shows, and his wife may spend her train ride home checking through the latest fashions on her Pinterest feed.
One of them will call the other to remind them to pick up a fast cook dinner on the way home from work, which they will eat after they have gone to the gym, where they will check their social media feeds on the way to, and the way back.
After they have eaten dinner, they will sit down to watch some TV. The husband may be watching a pre-recorded TV programme on his DVR while his wife is on their iPad browsing the web or her social media feeds. During the ad breaks, the husband will fast forward the ads if he can via his DVR device, or if he can’t fast forward, he will browse his social media feed on his smartphone while the ads are on.
As they prepare for bed, they both plug in their smartphone devices beside their beds to charge, set their alarms on their phones for the next morning, and go to sleep. And of course, the same process will repeat itself the next day.
What’s the difference between this modern day couple and the couple from the 1950s ?
The primary difference is their ATTENTION span has completely shifted and is now not only a lot shorter, but is dominated by a relatively small number of dominant social media and news apps which they access on a continual basis from a combination of Smartphones, Tablet, Computer and other connected devices.
Furthermore, they are now used to, and subsequently expect, to be able to consume (watch, listen, read) content when and where they like.
They want to watch their TV programmes when it suits them, not when it suits the programme creators or the advertisers.
And they do not want to watch advertisements. Nothing new here, nobody really likes to watch advertisements anyway (save for the Superbowl), but we did so because we had no real alternative. It was either sit through the ads, or change channels and turn off the TV or Radio, or don’t buy the newspaper etc.
Now though, advertisers have a real problem. THE USER IS NOW IN CONTROL OF THEIR OWN ATTENTION.
Don’t like the ads running during your favourite TV show ? Easy, just record it on DVR and watch it 15-20 mins behind. That way you can fast forward the ads and enjoy the content, which is what you wanted to watch in the first place, right ?
Can’t skip the ads ? No problem. Just jump onto your Facebook feed and engage with some of your friends while you wait for the ad break to finish.
Sitting in traffic or walking down the street, do you want to look up at the billboard across the street ? No because you are walking and checking your feed as you go.
Tuning in to listen to your favourite radio show ? Why bother, just subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and listen to it when you like on your Smartphone.
Want to watch a movie ? Go to the cinema and watch some pre-movie advertising , OR just jump onto Apple TV or Netflix and watch the movie from home, with no ads to interrupt you.
And how will they decide what movie to watch/buy ? They will ask their friends via Social Media instead of listening to what’s said in a piece of Advertising Copy on a banner ad.
Frustrating, right ?
The sooner those of us in the Advertising and Marketing industry realise that we have LOST the battle to control consumers attention and stop trying to FORCE FEED advertising units to people, the better it will be all round.
The new realities of consumer’s attention, and the power shift it has created, liberate us to find new and engaging ways of capturing the attention of those we wish to connect with.
Ironically, it’s opened things up to “go old school” in how we communicate the core message of a brand to it’s audience. Storytelling, in the true essence of the word, is back in vogue. It has being around since the dawn of time, but it just got put aside while we tried to use Interruptive Ad units to blast unit after unit of one way advertising messages to consumers who never wanted to consume the ads in the first place.
Consumer’s attention always was, and remains the most valuable commodity there is to connect with an audience. We lost the battle to control it. We are not going to win it back. The only choice we have is to create better stories than our competitors and find better ways of connecting these stories in Organic/Native ways to their intended audience. If we try to force advertising units on consumers in the world we live in today, we’re finished.
Thanks for taking the time to read this far ! I’m publishing one post per day for the month of February 2014 on Medium. If you liked this short story, it’d mean the world to me if you could share it or recommend it via the buttons below.
