It’s Attention, But Not As We Know It

In an era where distraction is ever-present and continual, marketers are facing an inflection point in what constitutes consumer attention. The implications for brands are significant.

In the age of distracted living, every second of consumers’ time is accounted for. The omnipresent smartphone has become their significant other and distraction is constant.

Indeed, such is the emotional pull of the smartphone that consumers are imagining distraction. Nine of 10 people suffer from “phantom vibration syndrome,” where they mistakenly believe their mobile phone is vibrating in their pocket.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that when a person leaves a phone in their pocket, it becomes “part of their body,” and the resulting imagined vibrations are simply a hallucination and reflection of their digital anxiety.

In the midst of these competing demands what constitutes consumer attention has reached an inflection point.

Marc Curtis, head of labs at TMW Unlimited, believes that marketing is at risk of becoming this white noise, similar to the way anyone who lives next to a railway line will shut out excessive and continuous noise. He explained: “Digital advertising has become a shouting contest, where all the brands are in an echoey room shouting at once, while the consumer is sitting at a small desk in the middle of the room trying to compose a haiku on the properties of silence.”

This is a shift that has not only made it harder for brands to gain consumer attention, but made consumers actively resent the interruption.

Beyond The Goldfish Bowl

Gloria Mark, a researcher of interruption science, calculates that it takes consumers 23 minutes before they are able to resume attention after an average interruption. The more people are interrupted, the more they programme themselves for self-interruption. Mark estimates the rate of self-interruption to be every three-and-a-half minutes.

Research from Microsoft suggests that digital lifestyles have made it difficult for consumers to stay focused, with the typical attention span shortening from 12 seconds to eight seconds in more than a decade.

However, Andy Mayfield, CEO and founding partner of Brilliant Noise, believes that marketers should be aware of reductive characterisations of attention. “Not everyone has the attention of a goldfish because they now own a smartphone, and not everyone has a massive intolerance to content that goes deeper than a puddle.”

Relevance Over Reach

In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” author Nicholas Carr describes the cognitive changes to our brains driven by our technology-laden lives. These include a shift away from deeper intellectual processing such as critical thinking to the fast-paced auto-pilot processes such as skimming and scanning.

He writes: “The internet is an interruption system—it seizes our attention only to scramble it.” While many marketers would dispute this vision of consumers’ inability to filter out the digital junk, moral ambiguity over the impact of technology on consumers’ lives is growing.

Matthew Heath, chairman of direct marketing agency LIDA, believes that consumer patterns of attention are changing. “Our smartphone addiction has reprogrammed our brains to skim, skip, and spring from one source of amusement or information to another. So brands need to stop chasing reach in a world of fleeting attention to start chasing relevance,” he explained.

In line with this shift, Heath believes the marketing industry’s long-running battle for attention is no longer viable and brands must stop being “addicted to reach” and treating it like a blunt commodity.

He explains: “Marketing communication has been driven by numbers of eyeballs for a long time; as marketers we have purchased presumed ‘attention’ by the thousand or by the millions as if [we are] buying groceries by the kilo.” This approach fails to take account of the nuances of how, why, and where consumers are engaging, or not engaging, with advertising.

Unsustainable Interruption

In an era where time is consumers’ most precious commodity, there is little patience for brands attempting to hijack their attention through intrusive advertising formats.

Andy Walker, experience design director at MRM Meteorite, points to research from the Reuters Institute that reveals that three in 10 consumers find traditional banner advertising distracting and will actively avoid sites where they interfere with the content too much.

He explained: “Today’s consumers have lost patience with traditional forms of online advertising and there appears to be a correlation between the amount of interruption caused and the vitriol consumers feel towards it and, consequently, the brand broadcasting the message.”

Some in the industry believe that brands have contributed to consumers’ feelings of being over-whelmed. “There is a fundamental erosion of trust that exists between brands and consumers. Marketers and brands are guilty of taking the path of least effort with centralised, at scale programmatic campaigns that target segments with noise,” explains TMW Unlimited’s Curtis.

Smart brands are already recognising the interruption model is unsustainable and are turning their attention instead to technology that connects with consumers rather than simply diverting their attention from any given task. David Fisher, head of digital at Sky Media, said that while attracting and holding attention had become more of a challenge in today’s market, there were more solutions for brands.

He believes that well-targeted advertising using the best of today’s data and technology is the way to win attention. “Online and on-demand content can be matched with consumer mindsets of multiple devices, ensuring tailored content specific to the moment,” he said.

A New Paradigm Of Attention

The decimation of consumer attention holds more opportunity than threat for marketers. “Our ability to tell people something about our brand, to start a conversation, however fleeting, about a topic of our own choosing has always been a privilege to be used wisely. Now shorter attention spans mean we need to make it quick and meaningful,” explained Jo Arden, head of strategy at creative agency 23red.

While the idea that “humans now have less of an attention span than a goldfish” makes a nice headline, it fails to embrace the complexities of consumers’ digitally driven ecosystem. In order to better understand the ebbs and flows of consumer attention, brands must move beyond binary terms such as the “second screen” and “multi-tasking” to embrace a more fluid understanding of attention.

Technology writer and consultant Linda Stone has coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” as embracing the shift towards the networked life. She writes: “We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimise for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognised and to matter.”

In a single generation talking on the phone has become intrusive, a picture can both tell and subvert a story, and a simple emoji can communicate the highs and lows of the human heart. It’s attention, but not as we know it, and it demands a fundamental reappraisal of how brands connect with consumers.