The two final frontiers before we reach “Peak Attention”
First your car, then your world
You may have heard of the phrase “peak attention” or “peak content” before — likely from the many media and research organizations that have been pointing toward this phenomenon for some time now.
Based on eMarketer’s most recent study, growth in time spent with media will decline to just 0.1% YOY by 2018. This is a long way off of the steady growth of the mid-2000s, driven primarily by the introduction of smartphones — those pesky time-sucks whose pop-up notifications fit oh-so-nicely into the micromoments of our day (/s).
A cursory glance at the trends might lead one to believe that eMarketer’s next forecast could show complete stagnation in this metric, or even a slight decline. If you look to your own media habits, and those of your peers, doesn’t it seem that every possibly moment of leisure (to a reasonable extent) is occupied? Every opportunity for second-screening taken? I say that we’re not quite there yet.
I see two primary opportunities for expansion here before our media diets are truly saturated — for better or worse — based on two technologies that are not yet in the mainstream: autonomous vehicles and augmented reality.
