Part 1: The Attention Calamity
A friend recently sent me an article from the Guardian. The headline was startling but effective. It read, Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen. (The Guardian) It’s a compelling statement, and a true one at that. As a society, it seems we’ve completely lost our ability to focus on anything. I remember a marketing presentation where we compared people’s attention spans to goldfish. It always got laughs, but it’s still sad. And it’s only getting worse. Everyday, it’s reflected in the world around us. We are zombies, heads down walking slowly lost in a pit of endless scrolling, constant clicking, bouncing headline to headline, tweet to tweet. Rarely if ever do I see anyone sitting and reading a book anymore, or having a real conversation. Full family dinners are spent with each person sitting together in isolation on their own device. It’s heartbreaking.
We are giving so much attention, yet not really absorbing anything of any real measure. This phenomenon is called continuous partial attention or CPA. It was coined by ex Apple & Microsoft consultant Linda Stone. CPA cites that we exist in a constant state of alertness scanning the world but never giving full attention to anything. In the short term this may be fine, but long term this creates a toxic feedback loop between the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. (Guardian) I start to wonder what kind of damage that does long term?
As a marketer and a strategist, I have to assume this is not good for our industry. Our industry was built on attention. Grabbing attention is the first phase of the consumer funnel, yet here we are facilitating the destruction of attention, our industry’s life blood. We are making the problem worse, not better. And as a result, we’ve seen a crisis in effectiveness.
This has driven a considerable drop in advertising performance over the last 10+ years. (The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness). A lot of this has been caused by a rise in short term focused marketing efforts. We are littering the marketplace with ads. Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest advertisers in the world, said, “We tried to change the advertising ecosystem by doing more ads, and all that did was create more noise.” (The New York Times) And with all that noise we thus enforce a gap in true attention. More work does not mean more results anymore.
And as brands lean into quantity, we see continued negative impacts. Recent headlines tell the story.
- “Research Shows Millennials Don’t Respond to Ads” (Forbes)
- “Ad Tech Could be the Next Internet Bubble” (Wired)
- “A Dangerous Question: Does Internet Advertising Work at All?” (Atlantic)
So we have to ask why this is happening. The Guardian article I was originally sent delves into this. “Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains that “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. This is a story of limited cognitive capacity but the delusion that we are mentally capable of more. This phenomenon is called the “switch-cost effect.”(The Guardian) The constant second screening, clicking, scrolling, tweeting culture is ferociously degrading our attention quality and wielding our marketing efforts worthless.
In summary, we just aren’t cognitively capable of ingesting all of this content at once. And this is a real problem because the world seems to be in a full court press for more of the same. Every trend article I’ve read talks about increased digitization. Similarly, I see tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg pressing for the next big thing, the metaverse, and I have to ask, “Is this the right direction?” With digital capacity already at its brink is a full digital world really the answer?
And for brands, what role should they play at the intersection of attention and escape? What would success and real disruption look like? In the world of more is more, can less equal more for brands?
In the next installment of this series, we will dig into how some brands are beginning to engage in this new digital world and provide some color commentary on what’s working and what’s not.
At Dendro, we believe that brands are driven by ambitious leaders and ambitious decisions. Sometimes talking the right stand means doing something no one else is doing. Sometimes it means starting a movement, or truly defining a purpose that drives real consumer benefit and improves connected relationships. Ambitious growth is solving brand problems by solving consumer problems, not by finding ways to break through the noise. For more information on how we think, and how we can help please reach out via our website. Wearedendro.com
