MARKETING TO THE GOLDFISH

Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard or read in many articles till now about how the attention span of the digital audience these days is similar to that of a goldfish. Whether this is an urban digital legend or a neurological fact can be debated but the undeniable fact is that the digital age has definitely altered the human attention span. To understand what this means for the marketers, lets understand the changes in the attention span a bit better.   

Audience has become very unforgiving on repetitive and tedious stuff  

Every year our screens are flooded with tons of videos during Mother’s day. Some of us may remember 1-2 of them but do any of us remember the brands associated with them? Most of these videos never bother to go beyond preaching the obvious motherhoods associated with the mothers and how their own brands link with the same. So they all look the same and tedium sets in very quickly.

The current audience is very unforgiving on this kind of stuff and so if you thought that your repetitive, riding-on-a-fad content can get the savvy digital audience to drop everything and look at your content for a long period of time then you are just living in a fool’s paradise. A good example of how to ride the festival/topical platforms even through a normal 30s TVC would be the Saregama Diwali 2018 TVC or the Surf Excel Holi TVC 2019 which forced you stay glued to the whole video till the end because they were so engaging.

Hand on heart, how many of us pay any attention to the flight safety videos we have to endure? Despite its obvious importance, and that we are literally a captive audience at that time, nobody pays any attention to it. However, remember the Air New Zealand flight safety video from 2015 (Google it if you were born after 2015)? Interesting content can even make tedious instructions look interesting and worth a dekko.

Digital media is the Jane Goodall of Human Attention Span

Since the time we learnt to SMS awkwardly with one finger to this age where we literally scroll through a statue of Liberty worth of content each day with our thumbs, tech adoption and social media usage are training consumers to become better at processing and encoding information through short bursts of high attention. As a result people who spend more time with digital media actually use their attention in very different ways. Simply put , changes to our attention means that we can now process more information, not less. Besides, people are also becoming better at multi-tasking. This levels of improvement in the both of these attention related skills obviously means that they are getting better at finding the content that they find relevant. So the challenge for the marketer is not the diminishing attention span – it’s how to counter the ultra high demanding attention of the consumers. Dull and pointless marketing content is out, interesting relevant consumer content is in.

Lazy Content Marketing to “get attention fast” will damage your brand

The consumers are still searching for “interesting” content and hence if marketers try to oversimplify or shorten all content (with branding in every corner) to get attention fast, they may end up damaging their brand. You and I still like to hear interesting stories and an attempt to over compress could be akin to our reading a book which only has a prequel and sequel with nothing in between.

As an exercise try to think of the last interesting video you saw on FB/YT or anywhere else. Does any 8-10 seconder come to your mind or is it some interesting 1-2 min video that you are able to recall? I would like to bet that it’s the later. Offcourse all interesting content needs to be precise but letting the tail wag the dog can be damaging.

In conclusion, yes the digital beings may have a shorter attention span than goldfish – but the main challenge is to address not the quantity of this attention span but the quality of it.This changing attention span makes it more intense, more demanding and more hungry for information, not less. So you need content which is sharp, engaging and short all at the same time. This means that the marketers will need to switched on at all times to make proper choices. One way of doing so is to follow the leading opinion leader of our times Thanos (anyone asking who that is doesn’t deserve to be born) who said – “The hardest choices require the strongest wills”