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For those intrepid souls who have clicked through . . .
For decades, marketing and design people have been trying to uncover the “secret” to capturing and then sustaining audience attention so they can buy / sell by means of that attention. Attention is in its own way a commodity (the term “commodity” is defined by economist Karl Polanyi as “objects produced for sale on the market.”) From this definition, we can deduce that the term “commodity” includes time-with-eyeballs as “produced” by design and marketing efforts.
Attention is both fleeting and finite. Individuals cannot “hand out” their attention to all comers. Attention is binary. When someone has your attention, someone ELSE cannot have it, regardless of the duration.
Our human condition of being “up to here” with “inpuuuut” (as Johnny 5 famously said (Short Circuit, 1986)) is the opposite of the perennially perky little bot’s capacities as he couldn’t get enough of … everything. Humans are also insatiable in their own way, but only to a point. Do you track the cumulative screen-time hours you put in on your devices? The thing is, we have already exceeded our limits for input-capacity (we’re not robots, after all), and the symptoms are everywhere. It truly is a case of everything, everywhere, all at once. And I’m guessing that your world is like that as you navigate your personal multiverse of your home, work, and online life.
As for those buyable / sellable “units of attention,” (as with any commodity) they have less value the more crowded the field becomes. Glut the market and the value goes down. And so it is with attention — we’re all in perpetual fatigue with the constant visual / sensory pollution that now “colonizes” our minds. Try putting down that phone.
Movie producers have never cracked the code on what creates an “instant classic” — those rare films that both capture everyone’s attention and “set up housekeeping” in our imaginations — versus what flops. It’s the central mystery that makes the film industry so fraught with risk.
But I digress.
So, what kinds of strategies might sustain attention once it’s captured?
Here are some ideas:
- Launch straight into a compelling story. The power of stories in marketing is well known and is easily corroborated by our own individual experiences. Humans crave stories. Always have. That’s what all social media is about, right? And who doesn’t experience some addiction to social media?
- Make it visually engaging. Interesting and compelling imagery is an important component of sustaining attention. Simply put, if it looks good, trustworthy, fun, interesting, and/or useful, more folks will stick around.
- Suspenseful? Maybe. This technique only works if the nature of that suspense is something that the viewer can truly relate to. Otherwise, it’s just a “tease.” To paraphrase Tolkien, I cordially dislike clickbait in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. Additionally, timing is of the essence for this one. Bury the lede — i.e. make ‘em wait too long to find out what you’re on about — and you will already have lost them.
- Scary? Yes. That can / will work, but personally I find scary stuff (read: threats) manipulative and disingenuous. We’ve all heard that negative attention is “as good as” positive attention (witness the child who acts out in class). What’s truly perplexing is that negative attention is at least better than no attention at all. But only for those who “MUST” have it, pathology aside. Bad PR is still a bad idea.
- Funny? I’d take funny over scary any day, both as a “consumer” of information and as a creator.
- Exciting? This works well, especially when it is at the same time inspirational. Yet many attempts at what’s presumed to be exciting can fall flat. Turning once again to the movies — how many “whizz-bang” chase scenes that go on for minutes at a time end up supremely yawn-inducing despite all the on-screen noise and action that becomes a “wall” of noise and action until your attention “circuits” become saturated and as a result (ironically enough) inured to it? Same with violence: it can become overkill (pun intended).
- Shocking? Hm. Back to manipulative and frequently by its nature also scary. Not a big fan. But this is from a person who actually *bookmarked* a particular page in a children’s fairy tale book that had an illustration they found so disturbing they had to mark the page in order specifically to AVOID it (I guess I was “born” sensitive to all things visual.)
- By Repetition; Repetitive/Interruptive — This technique is related to shocking in that repetition and interruption are both a more-or-less “brute force” means of sustaining attention. Have you noticed those ads on TV that run not just once, but again immediately? What’s happening there? The repetition, it is assumed, will further induce your attention / absorption of the information by dint of immediate reinforcement of the message. Akin to the advice for speech-making to “Say what you’re going to say, then say it, then say what you just said.” It’s yet another tactic I’m neither thrilled nor convinced about. My response to this tactic is usually “I heard you the FIRST time!” — but it does seem to work. Maybe because it interrupts our expectation that an ad will run once and then leave us alone for a while.
- Compelling? Elegant? Simply beautiful? I do try to do that.
These are just a few ideas.
“Bottom Line,” I recommend being fully mindful of the specific audience that the message is meant to reach / appeal-to while brainstorming about how to capture and sustain that elusive, fleeting, finite attention. Keep in mind that it’s all about THE AUDIENCE, not YOU. When you’ve cracked THAT code, you have the best chance of capturing and sustaining the attention of your intended audience.
