If This Title Isn’t Catchy Enough, You’ll Probably Stop Reading
This past Sunday night, I flipped on Youtube TV and tuned into ESPN to catch the highlights from an exciting weekend of playoff football. For nearly the past decade, I have worked in marketing and advertising. As much as I’d like to get up from the couch during a commercial break, I’m always curious to check in on the landscape of TV advertising. On Sunday, as Scott Van Pelt took SportsCenter to a commercial break, I was suddenly hit with a quick 10-second commercial. And then another one, and another one, and then an even shorter one. Instead of the typical 4-6 commercials, you would see at each break, I felt as if I was scrolling through Instagram, being served one 6-10 second ad after another. I sat there, honestly a bit stunned and overwhelmed by the dozen commercials I had just viewed. “That was stressful,” my friend said. I agreed. But it led me down the rabbit hole of exploring attention spans, and how the industry of advertising is changing.
To understand this change, it’s important to look at how the landscape has shifted over the past few decades. As the television was becoming a common household object, Nielson, a media research company, would track the behavior of a small sample in the U.S. using an actual box that was given to a household. Nielson collected details such as age and viewership numbers, but ultimately the data was pretty vague. Now, as more people cord-cut (move away from traditional cable and onto streaming services), more data is being collected by these companies. Facebook, Netflix, and Hulu, aren’t just measuring viewership— They’re looking at how long you hovered over a thumbnail, your viewing and browsing history, and exactly how many minutes into a show you were when you decided to give up on it. They use this data to market more specifically. “…for example, to promote ‘House of Cards’ Netflix cut over ten different versions of a trailer to promote the show. If you watched lots of TV shows centered on women, you get a trailer focused on the female characters. However, if you watched a lot of content directed by David Finch, you would have gotten a trailer that focused the trailer on him.” (Selerity, How Netflix Used Big Data and Analytics to Generate Billions)
Live-streaming platforms such as Youtube TV, Hulu, and Fubo also know more about our behaviors than live TV ever had in the past. As we are unable to stay as attentive, advertising has adjusted to pander to our goldfish-like attention spans. This allows streaming platforms to sell more advertising spots. More ads lead to a wider spattering, which gives you a broader audience. If a product resonates with the viewer, it’s unlikely that the company would need a whole 30 seconds anyways. Remember, the ad is meant to spark interest, to get a potential customer to enter the sales funnel.
As someone who loves movies, shows, and books that take the time to build characters and stories, I’ve even noticed my attention span slipping. At work, I’ve had to adjust how I shoot web commercials. I’ve started to aim for three different versions of a video; a six-second, a 15 second, and a longer form (1:30-2 minutes). One to hook the viewer, one to give a little more information, and one to provide details for someone who is really considering the product/service. This changes production quite a bit and requires both the script and the messaging to be dialed in before we start shooting.
According to everything I mentioned above, most of you will not have gotten this far. So for those still with me, I’d like to wrap things up by saying that you may no longer have the amount of time to relay your message as you once had. Remember that selling a product or service almost always takes several impressions. Use shorter-from media to hook your potential buyer into researching more, going to your website, or sending it to a friend. Also, don’t forget to feed your goldfish!
