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.
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