The “onslaught” of advertising we face is not the cause of our short attention spans, but the result of it. It’s the chicken or the egg all over again: which came first, the ads or the dwindling, distracted mind? Our attention spans are too short because of the society we live in (and its technology), where everything is fast paced and competitive. We are used to accessing millions of different pieces of information with a single click of a button; we are used to tv programs, video games, and movies that are full of action, explosions and gore without much substance in terms of a plot. We take express buses to get to work or school faster, we have deadlines to meet, we eat “fast food” because its easier than cooking a real meal…We rarely have time to breath and actually look around us.
We have become impatient, we want everything NOW. And with this type of mentality (although it doesn’t apply to everyone), its easy to see why we can’t engage in long conversations or endure tedious advertisements. The ad army is poised to attack us because of this change in human behaviour; because ads are made to sell things to consumers, they need to cater to the consumer’s attention, so in order to keep up with their limited attention spans the ads have to be louder, bolder, or more prevalent in order to get their point across in as little time as possible. If not, then then ads are ignored and shelved away with all those other images and jingles the mind cannot retain and eventually throws out.
The way I see it, there could afford to be less advertising. However because we can only retain so many messages, it’s crucial that ads try even harder to stand out and connect with their consumers. The vast quantity of ads is like throwing darts at a dart board: If I throw only three, I have three chances of hitting the target, but if I launch a whole pile, then there is a greater possibility some of them will be accurate. However there’s also a greater possibility of making mores holes in the wall and not the dartboard. So it’s the same with advertising, the brands figure the more quantity of ads there are, the likelier it is that some of them will actually stick.
But… with all these ads assaulting us everywhere we go, the more they increase the more we will ignore them. Because, if each ad has a voice, then suddenly there are all these voices screaming different slogans at me at once, I don’t hear ANY of them, just a migraine-inducing cacophony. It’s a vicious cycle. The more ads, the more we tune out the majority of them, the more ads the agencies figure there have to be so we are forced to look at some of them because we can’t escape.
If brands reduced their advertising costs by 10 percent, they would see an appropriate drop in profits. With less ads, the consumer is less likely to remember the product, and if the ads continue to decrease over time, he/she will have less triggers to want to engage with that product, forgetting it all together. With bigger, well-established brands the effect would be less, but still noticeable.
Yes, it is a positive that there is such a sea of ads because the brands that try something different really do stand out, and are even more effective because they can attract attention despite the millions of competitors they have. So cracking the difficult ad market can be more rewarding: it means your brand has triumphed over so many other ads that are out there. And yes, I think you’re rambling, but not as much as I have done in this blog post.
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