An average person is exposed to 4000 to 10,000 advertisements per day.
Attention is a scarce resource for advertisers – they know most people can’t wait for the five seconds before they get to press the skip ad button on YouTube.
If it’s evident that attention is a scarce commodity, then it’s not a stretch to think that it’s possible to think of attention as a resource and apply economic theories and come up with innovative solutions to information management problems.
The “Attention Economy”
The “Attention Economy” is a term coined by Herbert Simon, an economist and a cognitive psychologist.
His interdisciplinary research was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics and the Turing Award. He stated that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” and introduced the concept of information overload to economics. He emphasised the importance of not hounding consumers with irrelevant information.
Micheal Goldhaber, a theoretical physicist, rejected “information economy” and predicted a shift towards “attention economy” in his 1997 book “The Attention Economy and the Net.” He wrote that our creature comforts and material needs are satisfied, and so, there is an ever-growing competition to grab our attention as that is the commodity that is now in short supply. He thought that money flows along with attention.
Scarcity of attention is not merely speculation.
Psychological research states that many interdisciplinary studies point towards a limited amount of cognitive resources (i.e. attention), and expresses that allocating those resources to multiple tasks is difficult.
Another cognitive research proposes a cognitive capacity limit, calling it a bottleneck. In their combined economic and neuroscientific paper, Christie and Schrater stated that human brains have a sophisticated controller to allocate resources.
Furthermore, research on Neural Mechanisms states the limited capacity of visual attention to be a fundamental phenomenon, along with selectivity; people can filter out any unwanted information.
Attention Economy and Advertising
How advertising can seamlessly incorporate insights from treating attention as a scarce resource:
- By being unique and engaging
People are exposed to thousands of ads daily; that’s a big enough reason to stand out. The gravest mistake any ad can make is to be unoriginal and dull. Creative and engaging ads are simply more effective.
- By telling stories
With stories, the focus shifts away from mindless consumerism and towards the human element. As a result, audiences are usually willing to pay attention to a story, even if it’s an ad.
Storytelling doesn’t just sell a product or service but delivers an ideal and connects people to the brand. According to research, consistent brand identity will lead to brand love and loyalty, increasing consumers resistance to negative information, which doesn’t come simply from selling products.
- By making it emotional
Emotional marketing makes ads more memorable and more likely to grab the audience’s attention. According to Schupp et al., 2007, people are instinctively drawn towards emotional subjects. But what if it just simply grabs attention but has no meaningful impact?
A white paper study concluded that 71 per cent of those who saw an emotionally charged ad are likely to share it with others and have 306 per cent higher brand value.
Hyundai’s 20th-anniversary ad with over 220 million views knows how to use this technique. It shows a son trying to sell his father’s old car, despite the father’s protests. But, in the end, the son cannot sell it because he is overcome with emotions, recalling memories of the car.
- And, with shorter ads
Although more prolonged, more emotionally provocative ads have their benefits, short and crisp ads can create their impact in an era in which instant gratification is not just a need but an expectation.
Facebook stated that an average user spends only around 1.7 to 2.5 seconds on any content.
Written by Osheen Jain
Edited by Suranjan Das
| Osheen is a passionate student of psychology who works as a freelance content writer for PrimalWoke. Her interests include modern poetry, enjoying all forms of art, and being an obsessive bibliophile. Osheen has also been a TEDx speaker and you can find her on LinkedIn.