The rules for content creation are all wrong.

For years, the experts have told us how to create better content. These rules have become sacred. Rules such as keeping all the important information above the fold on a web page. Making your headlines short and punchy, with four to five words. Or not creating video more than 90 seconds, because nobody watches a long video.

All these truths about creating content are focused on capturing the attention span of your audience in a few seconds. It’s a trend often called snackable content. Where everything is created in bite-sized chunks for easy consumption. I’ve had many strategists tell me personally that we shouldn’t produce any more of that ridiculous long content, as people don’t have time to read 2,000-word articles or scroll down a web page. Or else we’ll lose them.

Another great example of shrinking content length is video. We’ve seen the trend in the industry go from 60 second TV spots down to 30. Then 15-second pre roll. Then 6-second vine videos. And it’s only getting shorter.

Here’s the latest fact in this story. In March 2019, the Mobile Marketing Association published a new report on content length. They studied how the human brain reacted to mobile advertising. And they learned that in 400 milliseconds, or 4/10thof a second, our brains not only engage with a mobile ad, but they trigger an imprint with that brand that’s either positive or negative.

All in less than a second.

Here’s their takeaway, “The implications to these findings suggest that although brands have been trained to develop 15/30 second creative and media strategies, or even 06/07 second strategies, marketers should now develop plans and strategies that address the first one second.”

They conclude that mobile ads get attention faster than on desktop and that the process is faster for known brands. And in order for your ads to reach your audience, you need to create not just snackable content. But content that communicates your message in one second.

One second. Five words. All above the fold.

All these strategies are focused on speed. Faster content. Or less time. Or fewer words. Because the human attention span is shrinking, right?

Wrong.

I totally disagree.

And I want to raise my hand and challenge all these rules of content creation.

To be clear, I don’t discount the data, like in the recent report from the Mobile Marketing Association. I believe they got the data right. I just believe this and other marketing truths are focused on the wrong thing.

What’s really going on under the hood.

While researching my book on proving the value of creativity in business, I learned a few things by interviewing experts in neuroscience. I wanted to find out how humans react to marketing and advertising ideas, without using the traditional industry path of hosting focus groups or referencing case studies.

I wanted to know the answer based on science, without any subjectivity. (I know, this seems impossible in the subjective world of creativity.) Stick with me for a bit as we go through some science. Here’s what I learned.

According to Dr. Scott Steffensen, a neuroscientist I interviewed at Brigham Young University, we only pay attention to anomalies.

As he put it, “When our brain is doing its job at predicting our surroundings, our subconscious is in control. Only when there is an error or something doesn’t match our predicted reality, does the conscious brain kick in. Only then do we become aware and notice the element that’s different.”

In essence, awareness only happens when something violates our predictions. If you’ve ever driven home on auto pilot, you understand this principle. You start driving, and suddenly you arrive at your destination. But you can’t remember anything along the way. No conscious breaking at a stop sign or using your turn signal. It all happens subconsciously. You wonder how you didn’t crash the vehicle.

But imagine that same scenario of driving home on auto pilot, and suddenly you see an accident. Firetrucks, ambulances, smashed cars. In that moment, you are completely aware of every detail as you rubberneck to see everything you can. Because you are experiencing a violation of your predicted reality. Or an anomaly.

The way our large brains remain efficient is by only paying attention to a small amount of new data and predicting the rest. Here’s another example. If your brain is like a computer, think of all your senses as the input devices. All the data from your vision, from smell, from touch — all those millions and millions of pieces of data are flooding into your brain every second. This amount of data is far more than the few thousand ads we see every day. And there is no way your brain will retain all that data. It only keeps the data that it pays attention to. The rest is ignored.

Take your vision. If the view in front of your eyes is like a screen with thousands of pixels, you really only see a cone of vision in the center, and the rest of the peripheral is predicted by your subconscious.

Unless you experience an anomaly.

Anomalies are a big part of how we react to content — specifically in the way we make decisions. When we’re confronted with a decision, like whether we like a piece of content or not, we first do a cross analysis of all our past experiences in our memory. If we find a positive match with a past experience, our brains let us know with a quick emotion.

Like our fight or flight response, a quick hit of neurochemicals is how our brain is wired to respond. Neurochemicals like dopamine, serotonin, or oxytocin. All our emotions, from love to hate to pride to fear, are created by small fluctuations in neurochemicals. And they instantly remind us of past decisions, so we don’t make the same mistakes.

But what if we find ourselves in a new situation. Like the car accident on the way home. Then our other slow system kicks in. That’s where our executive function, or our frontal lobe, takes control and logically works through the problem. This working memory can only handle a few variables and requires a lot of energy. Think of it as your conscious decision-making ability.

Once you slow down and really think through this new situation, you eventually make a decision and live the experience. And the way our brains store that new memory is by sending it back to long-term storage in your subconscious by burning a new memory trace. This follows a similar process where a series of neurons, like 1s and 0s in a data string, are lit up in a sequential order by small bursts of neurochemicals between each neuron. In essence, we lock in new memories using the currency of emotion.

Later, when we retrieve that memory, our brain uses a flood of emotion to replay the experience. And the strength of that memory depends on how much emotion is present. Think about a personal experience that was super emotional. Even though it may have happened only once, we remember it vividly. And experiences that weren’t very emotional, we have a harder time recalling. Memories are just 1s and 0s until we lock them in order with emotions.

Here’s Dr. Steffensen again to tie this whole concept together. “When making a decision and locking in a memory, emotions are everything. In neuroscience, there’s another expression, ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together.’ In other words, the more activity you have in a certain pathway, the more it becomes plastic. And that plasticity is mediated by certain neurotransmitters and chemicals — also known as the regulators of emotion. So, when we make a decision, our brains are flooded with feelings.”

Bringing it back to content creation, the two essential ingredients you need to get your audience to pay attention are an anomalyand emotion. This is how you increase your chances of engagement. When your audience is bombarded with thousands of brand messages, or more realistically the flood of data lighting up their senses every second, these two elements will break through the clutter and earn their attention. This isn’t a marketing opinion. This is brain science.

Turning content into profits.

Paul Zak is known as the father of neuroeconomics. He studied how narrative stories or experiences drive us to action. In his lab, he could predict up to an 82% accuracy whether people would spend money on something, based on how they reacted to content.

According to Zak, there are two essential elements we can measure that can predict our intent to take action. These two elements are attention and emotion. For attention, he measured a quickened heartbeat and sweat from the eccrine glands in the skin. And his big discovery for emotion was measuring the vagus nerve with an electrocardiogram, as it’s a large regulator of oxytocin.

While most of us don’t have the resources to hook up our customers to machines in Zak’s lab and measure their responses to our content, we can still learn from Zak’s experiments with this simple formula:

Attention + emotion = action.

Comparing that to what we learned from Dr. Steffenson, another way to rephrase the equation is an anomaly + emotion = action.

In marketing speak, we now know how to get our audience to engage with our content. First, we need to find that anomaly. Which means sifting through the data about our audience until we truly understand what makes them tick. We’re talking about human insights that explain what they care about. Something of value to them, not just stats. Something different or unique that causes an emotional response.

Then we turn that insight into an idea — an anomaly idea. And we wrap that idea in an emotional blanket, like a story or visual experience. Here’s where creativity plays a big role, in how we package up that anomaly, so it causes our audience to have an emotional reaction.

What this means for content creation.

Coming back to the one-second strategy by the Mobile Marketing Association, they got the data right. We do create associations with content in a second. When you think about how the brain works with endless incoming data, this is no surprise. Our brains can probably engage in less than 400 milliseconds. Brains are built to sift through data really fast. It’s biology.

It’s the strategy based on this data that we usually get wrong. Here’s where all the truths from experts fall apart. Because they are focused on totally different elements — like speed, length, and time. And neuroscience teaches us that it’s about two completely different ingredients.

Which means, all that advice about engaging your audience is wrong. It’s not about how quickly you can deliver a message. It’s not about how much time your audience spends on your content. Or how snackable it is. Or how many words are in your article. Not speed. Not length. Not time.

The brain only engages with content that is unique and emotionally charged. Period. Those are the right things to focus on.

I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for short or long content. In a realistic customer journey, you should have all types and lengths of content. What I’m saying is that as an industry, we need to focus on the right elements of success.

Content is about the value it gives our audience. If we want to get more engagement from our brand platform, or our advertising, or our website, we shouldn’t just focus on the processof content.

The answer is that your content needs to have substance first and foremost. Great content is about value. It needs to be creative and unique. Anomaly and emotion. Only then will your audience give you their attention.

And if they think your content is valuable, they will give you as much time as it takes to consume. Less snackable, more savory. Think about that rule for a second.

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Adam Morgan is an Executive Creative Director at Adobe, with experience in creativity, strategy, and storytelling for over 23 years. He’s a keynote speaker at conferences and events — and was recently named an Adobe MAX Master speaker. Before Adobe, he was a creative director at several international ad agencies, delivering award-winning advertising and campaigns. He was named a 40 under 40 business leader by Utah Business Magazine, and Utah Ad Professional of the Year in 2014. To read one of his articles on data-driven creativity or more about his new book, “Sorry Spock, Emotion Drives Business,” that proves the value of creativity and design to your clients and stakeholders, visit him at adamWmorgan.com.