Engaged to Bored in Seven Seconds

Advertisers lament the limited attention span of audiences, often complaining that it’s difficult to impossible to get people to pay attention.   They tend to blame the audience, citing that most people have only a seven-second attention span, implying that people are just too stupid to pay attention.    It’s not that people are stupid, though they sometimes seem that way – it’s that advertising is boring.

Studies in television commercial studies support the notion that people do not pay attention: over half the audience is “lost” during the first fifteen seconds of a video commercial.   20% of them drop out within the first ten, and 33% more drop out in the next five.   But at the same time, people are capable of being fully engrossed and engaged by a two-hour movie.   This suggests that it is not the mental capacity of the audience, but the ability of the message to maintain their attention, and the blame for audience attrition lays squarely on those who have crafted a poor message.

Consider the formula for commercial messages – start with a bang to grab their attention, then provide support information, then tell them how to behave if they want to obtain the promised value.   It is generally believed that the anticipation of something interesting will cause the audience to suffer through the boring information, and this does bear out.  But if “bang” is followed by information that is not relevant, then the audience’s attention will drift away.  Sometimes, even if the information is relevant, the audience will be lost because they become impatient, then annoyed, and then offended that what they had been led to expect is not being delivered quickly enough.

Physiologically and psychologically, the human brain is tuned to give attention to threats and opportunities – things that have the potential to do harm or to improve their situation.   Anything that is neither a threat nor an opportunity is ignored so that attention may be given to something more important.    Neurologically, the brain activity that results from an intense emotion fades very quickly – within a few seconds – and interest goes with it unless it is sustained.  This is the basis of the myth of the seven-second attention span: if the bang is not relevant to them or the supporting information is not germane, their attention will be lost very quickly.  

In terms of crafting the message, emotion is more important than information – if the emotions are engaged, logic will be engaged; but if the emotions are not engaged, then neither will logic be.   An advertisement, like any speech, is an emotional journey for the audience – and where emotion fades, the path is lost, no matter the logical soundness and rational structure of the message.

In the world of advertising, attention is the coin with which audiences pay – but if they don’t feel that they’re getting anything in return for their payment (and it’s “feel” rather than “think”), then they stop giving payment.   So consider the emotional economics of any engagement – what is the audience getting in return for paying attention?   If you cannot provide an answer to that question, or if your answer is contrived and weak, then you have identified the core problem of your commercial messaging.