Another bit of information, likely related to the myth that attention spans are getting shorter, is the amount of information to which people are exposed in the modern age. Various sources have cited that the average consumer in the US encounters 3,500 to 5,000 marketing messages per day.
Those numbers seem suspiciously high, and I have not been able to find a source that explains how they are calculated, but I imagine that it would be necessary to include as an "encounter" any instance in which a logo crosses a person's field of vision: such that every time I check my watch, it counts because there's a logo on the face. Each time I open my refrigerator, add fifty more. It's a bit of a stretch to go to this extreme, and it's the only way that I can figure anyone to be able to justify a number so high.
But if we accept a liberal definition, it would not be unreasonable to suggest 3,500 to 5,000 marketing messages per day - which would mean an average of one message every 12 to 16 seconds of our waking lives (giving 8 hours to sleep). This seems suspiciously similar to the amount of time that marketers claim the human attention span has been degraded to - and as such, if we did nothing but pay attention to marketing, each message would have a very short allotment of time.
This goes back to my earlier point: that in order to function in an environment where we are constantly bombarded with marketing, it has become necessary to be adept at quickly assessing the degree to which a each message is meaningful and relevant and quickly dismiss the many that are not. It's simply impossible, even foregoing sleep, to give as much as 30 seconds attention to every message that marketers want to push at the consumer.
As such, advertisers should be grateful, rather than mournful, when they can get even fifteen seconds of a person's time: there's just too much going on to pay attention to everything, and attention is a commodity that is even more scarce and precious than money.
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