THE ATTENTION DEFICIT: MORE SCREENS, MORE CONTENT AND HOW BRANDS CAN CONNECT
YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE AMAZING. INSIDE THEIR HEADS IS THE MOST COMPLEX AND POWERFUL STRUCTURE IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, THE HUMAN BRAIN. IT’S A BUNDLE OF BIOLOGICAL WIRING SO VAST THAT IF EACH CONNECTION WAS LAID END TO END IT WOULD CIRCUMNAVIGATE THE EARTH TWICE OVER. IF IT WAS A COMPUTER IT COULD STORE AROUND 2.5 PETABYTES (A MILLION GIGABYTES) OF DATA.
Governing access to the brain’s data centre is an equally impressive filtering system, often referred to in academic psychology as Working Memory. A filter constantly sorting relevant and useful experiences across everything seen, heard and experienced, storing this in the hard drive for another day or throwing it out in the recycle bin.
This filtering system your customers use to great effect is now being faced with a new environment, a transition in our digitally connected world from information scarcity to abundance. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt encapsulated this new age of abundance in 2010 when he said the same amount of information created between the dawn of civilisation through to 2003 was now being created every two days.
This transition to exponentially more information availability, alongside the constant filtering of the relevant from the irrelevant is creating a new dynamic marketers and media owners need to face: Attention Deficit. A reaction from our brains to filter more noise and store the same amount of information, resulting in people paying less and less attention to what they see, hear and experience.
This new dynamic is no better observed than in the screens we interact with on a daily basis. The shift from a 20th century appointment to view TV or focused internet access on fixed in-home devices to always on, anytime, anywhere access provides more content and information than can be humanly consumed.
