You're heard that today's consumers have the attention span of a goldfish? Well, this just isn't true. Otherwise, I'd have to fit this message into the 9 seconds attributed to that little goldfish’s attention span. But rest assured that this is simply a myth. Although this particular myth derives from a misinterpretation of misattributed data…, there are a number of marketers who are starting to believe their *own* versions of the low attention span argument. This happens when marketers start to examine the analytics behind their marketing efforts, particularly those that deal with the time people spend looking at marketing content. The problem is that these marketers don’t understand how to interpret the data that they’re uncovering.
Let’s say you make a 30-second ad on Facebook or Instagram and that 90% of the people who are exposed to this ad glance at it briefly, let’s say for two seconds, and then they move on because they’re just not interested. But the other 10% of the people like what they see and continue watching your ad for the full 30 seconds. If you were to take the average view time of your ad, you’d see that it was 4.8 seconds, which, when reported to the management team or to a client would lead many people to incorrectly suppose that your audience only has an attention span of slightly less than 5 seconds.
But that average view time is completely deceiving because it doesn’t represent anything. It doesn’t represent those people who only watched your ad for 2 seconds and then went looking for something else, and it doesn’t represent the people who stayed and viewed your ad for the full 30 seconds. Yet, it’s a metric, and people use metrics to make attributions regarding ad performance, even when those attributions are incorrect and lead to bad marketing decisions.
How you analyze and interpret those metrics makes a huge difference in the meaning that you can assign to them. The key is to avoid simplistic metrics such as averages or even medians and try a more holistic approach where we examine the distribution of the ad watch time data (or any ad response data for that matter).
On examination in this case, we find a clear self-selected segmentation of those people who tended to skip over the ad early on, and those who watched until the end. Further analysis could show us whether those segments differed based on other available demographic, socioeconomic, psychographic, or situational audience attributes.
In other words, this really isn’t an issue of “attention span,” but it’s an issue of how long you can capture an audience member’s attention given their interest in your message and the proclivity they have to view that message during the moment in time that they’re presented with it.
So the next time that someone tells you that consumers or purchasing agents or millennials or Gen X-ers or anyone else has the attention span of a goldfish, ask them why the average duration of content has not decreased to under the 9-second mark.
Remember, the job of a marketer is to attract attention, capture attention, and maintain attention long enough to communicate a message that is meaningful and memorable with the hope that the message will change the attitudes and/or actions of the audience.
And if your audience member happens to be a goldfish, you’d better do all that in under 9 seconds.
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