That was a pretty esoteric post title, but what isn't esoteric are the findings from BIGresearch, which should send a chilling message to anyone in the attention business. Here are some excerpts:
- ...the attention spans of media users are not necessarily equitably divided among media, and may in fact migrate from dominant to subordinate positions during multitasking
- media attention spans don't just compete with other media, but with a variety of other non-media activities.
Bob Greenberg, ubercreative and visionary at R/GA, talks about foreground and background, and this data really validates the assertion that the attention business is even more complex than we might have previously thought.
The so-called clutter that we are supposed to breakthrough exists on two planes:
1) the intra-medium clutter e.g. number of ads in a pod or pages in a book or banners on a webpage
2) the inter-medium clutter (as per BIG) which is the multitasking finding that more than one medium can be accessed and consumed at any given point in time
3) the inter-activity clutter (as per BIG) which would include things like talking, eating etc (in my book, I cite a Knowledge Networks study which shows that 75% of consumers tend to engage in "other" activities whilst consuming TV)
The bottom line here is that with all the choice available - content, commericals, media, activities etc - we're still talking about one consumer with one attention span and if we thought "reaching" them was the issue, that's just the ante up in the attention stakes. We need to connect with them...and not just get their attention, but keep it...and not just keep it, but keep at least 51% (majority) and hopefully 100% of it in the process.
Sheesh....this business is getting complicated!
P.S. The same study revealed that electronic media, esp. online, TV and radio were voted "most likely to be combined with other media" in their school yearbooks - all in the 69% range.
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