Advertising needs attention

Jane Raymond, a consumer psychologist at the University of Wales in Bangor, is carefully holding and gazing at a bottle of Chillz mineral water like a baby. Despite being made of clear plastic it looks as if it has been carved from ice. This simple feature means shoppers are drawn to this bottle over the others on the shelf and cannot resist picking it up, Raymond says. She studies the subtle factors that motivate us to buy what we buy, and advise big companies on how powerful an advertisement is, and how it could be designed to stick more firmly in a consumer’s memory. Most of all she works out how to attract your attention.

In today’s fast-paced consumer world, attention is in short supply. Whether we are taking our time shopping in a mall, surfing the internet for information, or just watching television as a form of passive entertainment, consumers are surrounded by messages experiencing one every 15 seconds of our waking lives, according to some estimates. Last year, companies worldwide spent $401 billion on advertising, according to the independent World Advertising Research Centre in the UK. But as the graveyard of failed products shows, they usually get it wrong.

Nine out of 10 new products meet an early death, says Jamie Rayner, director of research at ID Magasin, a UK consultancy specializing in consumer behavior. And the reason, he explains, is simple: conventional advertising has ceased to work. Rayner and his colleagues have measured how consumers, in particular regular commuters, react to advertising, and their conclusion should alarm many executives. They used a camera embedded in a pair of glasses to record their gaze as they glanced at advertisements on their journey to and from work. After analyzing the recordings and questioning the subjects, they found that most of the advertisements made no impression at all: only about one per cent could be recalled without prompting. It seems that although we may be looking at brands and advertisements all day long, most of the time we’re not taking anything in.

Raymond thinks she knows why. Her move from research in visual processing into consumer psychology began in the early 1990s, when she discovered some strange behavior in the brain’s attentional system. She showed people a stream of letters and numbers on a screen and asked them to look out for a white letter or an X. When she asked her volunteers afterwards what they had seen, she found that if the X appeared up to half a second or so after the white letter, or vice versa, people failed to see it. She concluded that if something catches your attention, your brain is blind to anything else for a short period afterwards. She called this effect the ‘attentional blink’. In short, the reason most advertising doesn’t work is that we’re in a severe state of attentional overload. Unless advertising is presented in a way the brain can absorb, it is simply not seen, Raymond says.

So what does this mean for advertisers? A typical television advertisement consists of a series of attention-grabbing images interspersed with the product. But unless the scenes in the advertisement are cut to take account of attentional blink. The brain is likely to ignore the information the advertiser wants to get across. The same applies to magazine advertisements, where viewers often register the main image but fail to pick up on the secondary images—the bits advertisers often desperately want us to see. Raymond says advertisers consistently fail to consider how easily the brain misses the point. It’s not that they haven’t realized that the space and time they have to get their message across has shrunk. But advertisers respond by cramming in ever more complex information. Raymond is opposed to this and her advice is simple: deliver your message in a straightforward manner and do so slowly, gently and concisely.

After her research on the attentional blink, she wondered whether attention would be linked to other processes in the brain, particularly emotion. Could our attentional state influence whether we like or dislike a brand, for example? Today, companies are hugely interested in the emotional value of their brand as they want their products to make us feel good. It is well known that if something elicits positive emotions then you are more likely to take notice of it. But Raymond’s further research also demonstrated that if people are distracted by an image or a brand when performing an intellectually demanding task they tend to instantly dislike the brands, regardless of its emotional value. So for example, if you are reading a web page when a banner advertisement starts flashing, or are watching a film with intrusive product placement, it is probable you will come to dislike the brand whatever it is.

This contradicts the more-exposure-the-better rule most of the industry follows, says Raymond and means that advertising can backfire horribly. Advertising can backfire horribly. Advertisers tend to buy as much exposure for a product as they can, through television and radio commercials, billboards, whatever they think will attract their target audience, but again Raymond has found that this doesn’t necessarily work in their favor. Perhaps the most dangerous time, says Raymond, is the holiday season when advertisers are madly competing to grab people’s attention. ‘Marketers don’t realize that humans digest information like they do food. Once they are full, if they are shown any more food, they’re disgust,’ she says.