The Biggest Lie Even The Best #Marketers Believe To Be True
Lee Kantor
Business RadioX? Founder | AltMBA Alumni | Helping Business Leaders Build Community By Sharing Stories That Matter
The biggest lie I hear over and over again is that when you market to millennials you have to do so in shorter and shorter bite sized messages because young people have short attention spans. Ad copy, tweets, photos, texts, gifs and videos have to get shorter because of the ADHD most young people possess. Some people believe that a young person's attention span is shorter than a goldfish.
I don't buy it. There is too much evidence against it. Riddle me this, Batman if young people have short attention spans then how in the world do they spend entire days on Netflix binge-watching Daredevil, Orange is the New Black and the latest hit Love? According to Netflix, 61% of their users binge-watch regularly.
If young people can only process bite sized "chunks" of information how do these marketers reconcile that these same young people spend entire nights on their Xbox playing "Call of Duty?" According to a recent survey, hard core gamers (of which their are over 34 million) spend an average of 22 hours a week playing video games. I'm pretty sure someone who has a short attention span isn't doing anything for 22 hours a week.
You can't have it both ways. You can't say that young people have such ADHD that messages have to come at them fast and furiously in order to get their attention. And in the same breath say these young people can sit on a couch and consume dozens of episodes of the same TV show, entire movie series' and play video games for hours at a time.
My premise is simple, creating marketing in shorter and shorter chunks is a cop out. If you can create truly engaging content for your prospect (and it doesn't matter how old they are) they will like it, consume it and share it. And more importantly they will buy what you are selling. If what you are saying is interesting and compelling people with stick with it. If it isn't they won't sit through a second of it.
Instead of trying to condense your content into smaller and smaller pieces how about you focus on creating content that people truly care about. Then after you have great content go and chunk it up to your hearts desire.
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Managing Partner | Private Equity, Strategic Investments
9 年Capturing the attention of the consumer is a vital step...they must have a desire to know more information. And, brands only have 6-Seconds to tell that story. Thought you might like to read a different POV, written by my colleague william fasig. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/winning-presidency-turns-6second-story-william-fasig?trk=hp-feed-article-title-share
Owner at Blue Room Books Publishing
9 年Lee, very well written. Kudos to you. Let me say also that I agree with you. Which also, at least to my mind, points out the next logical challenge in information dissemination, namely that the reason many people don't watch, read, or listen beyond a certain point is because of the glut of bad information out there.