Your attention please, PLEASE?

Can you resist the TL-DR impulse? You’d have to make the effort, the next paragraph is long and somewhat boring, but necessary to lay the foundation of what I assure you, is going to be a valuable lesson, economically as well as acumen-ically!

Societies have always had an organizing principle. It is what divides our history into various eras. For a long time it was land. There was a limited amount of productive land hence a limited amount of food. People worried about it more than anything else, politics revolved around it, nations fought over it. Land was the biggest economic scarcity; it was the currency, it was the organizing principle of human society. But then the industrial revolution hit and the primary scarcity was no longer land; machines could now help produce more than enough food for everybody. Everything revolved around manpower, so labor became the new currency. You needed skilled labor to run the machines that made people money. Enter the consumer era and now there was more being produced than any one person would ever need or could ever purchase. The new organizing principle of society, the new currency, the new scarcity was knowledge. With so many choices of what to purchase with their hard-earned money, people spent most of their day-to-day existence trying to figure out what the best washing powder was, what a vacuum cleaner could do, how to spend their retirement fund and so on. The fields of advertising and marketing came to dominate society, as the means of distributing the information people needed to make those all important decisions.

If you are still reading this I salute your self-control and appreciate your investment of time and attention from the bottom of my heart.

So where are we now? What is the organizing principle of modern day mankind? The internet of today has more information than any of us could possibly know what to do with. Whatever you want to know about, you can in 10 seconds or less.  Knowledge is no longer the scarcity in our world. There’s an abundance of it, just as there’s an abundance of labor and an abundance of land. The wealth of information means a dearth of something else, something information consumes; isn’t it obvious now?

The new scarcity is that of attention. There is more information flowing through our society than any of us could ever hope to process or understand. You know the whole argument around how the smartphones and internet together have ruined everything, from privacy to politics? Well I like to use the word “disruption” instead. It is ironic really, that the technology created to get things done (our laptops, tablets and smartphone) are now the gatekeepers of an infinite number of distractions and sources of instant gratification, accused of preventing you to get work done more than any other factor has ever been. Simply put, our attention is a resource and these devices get most of it, but you only have that much of it! Before my digital advertising friends start jumping with joy, this does not assure digital advertising will work any better than its conventional counterpart.

Let me elaborate this without losing more of my readers: Google has been able to document the interaction of the new and old media in its search statistics: It has found a strong relationship between specific televised ads and a spike in searches on the topic of the ad.  The relationship between online and offline behavior operates in both directions, so one is not supreme over the other, period!

This is also why we are still bombarding the average consumer with thousands of advertising messages per day, and no matter who says what, these messages are still intrusive in nature. Why else would the ads we make (and aspire to) get wackier and more preposterous with every passing day? Irrespective of medium, advertising has always been about luring the audience into consuming a piece of communication; it has always depended on the amount and quality of attention. But attention wasn’t the primary currency for brand advertising like it is now. We all have a very limited amount of it and marketers ahead of the curve now value it higher than any other variable. Perhaps it is because the way we pay attention has changed. How often do you sit and spend focused time on one thing, never flipping between different tasks? For most of us, it’s pretty rare if not never. Whenever we are doing one thing, we are also doing another. My favorite modern day writer Mark Mason explains it beautifully:

“This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of non sequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes in through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen”.

Most of us though, find that our ability to multitask has improved but that also means our attention is fragmented, unfocused and pretty hard to retain. No wonder we’ve given birth to what researchers call the Goldfish generation. According to a recent study published by Microsoft highlights the deteriorating attention span of humans, saying it has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, when the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds now - which is less than that of the notoriously ill-focused goldfish!

A shrinking attention span is making it that much harder to engage customers in an increasingly fragmented media market. But before the media planners and buyers reading this quote me and proclaim “The 30 seconds spot has stopped working!?” or that “The new standard of copy size should be 8 seconds instead!!” let me finish. Nope, that’s not it. To be honest I never believed an ad’s duration should be dictated by the media plan. Media plans are made for the communication and not the other way round. In fact, by just getting the ad viewed several times you can no longer guarantees the message will get through. What the ad copy size does and should depend on is what needs to be said and how creatively does it need to be said.

And for those making the ad, it has also became clear that the role of “creative” in advertising is moving even farther away from its former wacky haired, slow paced, shallow philosopher paradigm and into a younger, quicker, co-creative, almost push-button future where ideas meet technology in a market defined in minutes, not months. And while it looks like the most challenging time for conventional advertising agencies, it is also the most opportune. Just because we may be allocating our attention differently as a function of the technologies we may be using, it doesn't mean that the way our attention actually can function has changed. You’d be surprised to know that your tech savvy consumers are actually getting better at processing information and encoding that information to memory through shorter yes, but more powerful bursts of high attention.

So if you (brand or agency) were any good at conventional advertising, you’d do just fine in this era, and the next. All that has changed is the velocity of things; if it was going to fail, it will fail faster now. I say this because the science of creating powerful communication hasn’t changed. I see the marketer who understands his audience better still wins. I believe great ideas are still medium independent, and that true product innovation still does more to get loyalty than most loyalty schemes.

If you remember I promised this would be a valuable investment of your time and attention, I salute you again. You sir, are no goldfish!

Here is the gist of it, besides all the science behind creating advertising communication for the goldfish generation, or the Millennials, or the GenZ or whatever comes next, three fundamental to consider:

1. Always start with a clear, single-minded advertising objective

It is what will help you arrive at a single-minded proposition. Whenever you’d try to say too many things, you’d waste your time, your money, and their attention. Remember, less is more!

1. Trust your gut, playing safe is not exactly safe

I’ve always been a big proponent of investing in research. But lately I see a lot of gutless marketers looking at research as a safety net only. No matter how much our industry values research, no matter how big your big-data becomes, do not lose faith in your gut on a mistaken belief that people make decisions based on facts and evidence only… that we all always act reasonably. The process consumers follow to arrive at a buying decision is sloppy, filled with irrational thinking, often contrary to their best interests, sometimes courtesy our efforts and sometimes for no reason whatsoever. If you believe in an idea, go for it. What’s the worst that’ll happen? It will fail? Rest assured it could have failed even if the research said it wouldn’t.

1. There is no such thing as an ‘original’ idea, there is only your idea

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.
Jim Jarmusch, MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004

 I have this written on my office wall. Whenever I get too full of myself and my all ‘original’ ideas I read it out loud, laugh at myself and am reminded of where my idea actually originated from. Stop being so stiff about it, as long as you made it yours, as long as you took it somewhere else, as long as you didn’t conceal your thievery, it’s alright!

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Originally published in the Business Recorder AdAsia 2015 Special on November 23, 2015
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Bibliography

Statistic Brain Institute: Attention Span
https://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/  

Microsoft Advertising: Goldfish Generation
https://advertising.microsoft.com/en/cl/31966/how-does-digital-affect-canadian-attention-spans

Attention Is the New Currency for Brand Advertising
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243087

Jim Jarmusch, quote from the MovieMaker Magazine
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/131591-nothing-is-original-steal-from-anywhere-that-resonates-with-inspiration