Shortening attention spans are a myth. Let’s build content that demands attention.

In 2015 Microsoft produced a report that stated that due to increasingly use of digital media, our attention spans have dropped below that of goldfish.

This is one stat, that gets quoted everywhere, is a scourge on our industry because…

1. It’s provably wrong.

2. It stands to slowly destroy our industry.

It’s easy to show how untrue the findings of the report are and a quick google, other search engines are also available, will bring up tens of articles on the subject.

The unfortunate thing is this ‘insight’ has infected the way that we look at media online and has caused us to lean in to shorter and shorter formats, compressing the stories we tell in an attempt to get to the conclusion before the viewer loses interest.

Everytime we shorten a story something is lost, whether that be nuance or detail or humour. If we continue to shrink our stories they become fractional and boring and ultimately pointless.

8 years ago, I quit media to become a teacher. The reason I bring it up is because the first person you are introduced to in teacher training is BF Skinner. He was the forefather of behavioural psychology who spent years conducting experiments on rats to try and understand what it was that dictated their behaviour.

After many years of development by hundreds of scientists, Dopamine was identified as the chemical responsible for many of our learned behaviours. It’s a hormone that is central to our rewards system and is responsible for lots of our positive — from an evolutionary perspective — behaviours.

It’s also responsible in some way for some of our most negative behaviours including alcoholism, drug and gambling addictions.

Dopamine is also at the heart of social media platforms.

Sean Parker admitted earlier this year that comments and likes drive drips of dopamine that ultimately keep us coming back.

And it’s working, despite all of the negative publicity that Facebook is losing followers, that Snapchat’s redesign is keeping people away.

On aggregate, month on month, we are continuing to increase the amount of time we spend on social platforms.

The great irony is that the time we’re spending with individual posts is dropping through the floor.

The graph is from our annual report on Facebook ad data based on billions of our own impressions.

What we see is that in Jan 2016, 20% of people who were served a video watched it for more than 3s.

Now, that figure is almost 10%.

It’s not hard to understand why. We are being served more content than ever before and we’re struggling to keep up.

When there’s a wealth of information, our attention becomes the most valuable commodity.

We see this in our own data, as we have increased the impressions we’re serving to audiences their attention for our content on average has diminished.

Given this drop in average view lengths it’s no surprise that the industry is pivoting towards shorter and shorter formats from 2s views from Facebook and 6s video buys from YouTube.

I’m not universally agreed that this is the best approach for two reasons.

1. Average has never been an aspirational word in my vocabulary and by the way if we all create videos that are as long as the average, the average is only going to become shorter. We end up in a cycle of diminishing returns.

2. In the same way that Hemingway’s shortest story ever told — a masterclass in short story writing — is never going to be as rich, compelling and powerful as For Whom the Bell Tolls, all of the metrics tell us that longer videos and more time spent with brand delivers more consideration, favourability and purchase intent.

It’s also based on a myth. Hollywood is one of the most sensitive industries to consumer behaviour and if our attention was really dropping it would be making shorter films.

Films are longer than they have ever been.

They’ve increased by 50% in the last 50 years.

Another behaviour that defines us over the last four years is binge watching streamable content.

We’re so used to watching 4 or 8 hour marathons, that Netflix’s CEO considers his greatest competitor not to be Amazon Prime or broadcast TV but sleep itself.

‘Nuff said.

No experiment better sums this up than one run by Unskippable Labs from YouTube.

Tested 30s videos, no visual and no sound and they performed better than ads with thousands of pounds of investment in concepting, ideation and production.

Why? Because they looked like ads and people weren’t interested.

My best mate’s two year old daughter can barely talk but she can use an iPad to find Pepper Pig on YouTube. The first thing she does after she clicks on the episode is hover her finger over the skip ad button.

She can’t hold a useful conversation but she can identify an ad and she knows she doesn’t want it.

So we’re in a situation where impressions and reach are incredibly cheap but they are less and less likely to result in meaningful attention.

The question is not how can we get in front of as many people as possible but how can we get them to pay attention?

My mate’s two year old daughter is a great analogy for this. If he were to put a plate of broccoli in from of her, and she’s not interested in eating it, he has an upskill struggle to get that plate cleared.

If he were to hide it or cover it in something that’s more appealing, all of sudden the task becomes much easier.

In the same way, if we take a brand message and apply some serious creativity to it. Make it funny, or sad, or important. We see that audiences respond far more effectively to it and all of our campaign metrics spike.

If I think of my favourite TV ads, they have one thing in common.

More than 10 years later, I can still tell you the brand they’re promoting, the product that they are talking about and the narrative of the content.

That’s because they are watchable, they are entertainment with a brand message attached.

But if you were to go and take these great examples and — as many of us do — go and upload it straight to social. Every one of them would underperform.

There’s so much more competition than there has ever been before and we don’t get the opportunity to build in the same way.

In 2006, Pixar launched the first ever Cars film. I’m playing it now.

It starts with the production companies, then the films that they’ve made, and 25 seconds in, it lands the first idea of what the narrative might be.

11 years later their behaviour completely changed.

Now, recognising that they need to snatch attention early, the video lands its message in the first 5s.

We need to do something engaging nice and early because the first principle of advertising is to attract someone’s attention.

Too often we get ignored though, precisely because it looks like advertising.

When it doesn’t look like advertising. Well, then you have rocket fuel.

My favourite ad of all time is the Lego Movie. I love it because it’s a 2hr advert that millions of people bought on DVD to put their kids in front of so that they’d spend the next 6 months being pestered for Lego merchandise.

People reacted differently because it doesn’t look like an ad.

In the same way, Dollar Shave Club created an ad that looks so different from something produced by Gillette or Wilkinson Sword, something so interesting that it generated millions of views for a fledgling brand. 6 years later, people are still searching for it on YouTube.

John Lewis ads have become part of our Christmas traditions and yesterday morning, the first thing a lot of my colleagues did was to search on YouTube for an ad that they hadn’t yet seen on TV.

Publishers manage this better than anyone on Facebook. By prioritising entertainment ahead of brand messages, Vice delivers 54 second average view times and Jungle Creations deliver more than 20 seconds.

We have more to offer than this and if we take advantage of it. We can tell people stories that look even less like ads and deliver even more attention.

This is one of my favourite case studies. It’s nominated for a tonne of awards and I hope it wins more than its fair share.

Gorillaz launched their last album with the narrative that a band member had been locked up in Pentonville, down the road from my house.

They offered fans the opportunity to talk with him on Facebook Messenger as he plotted his escape.

The ad, because that’s what it is, delivered 1.3M chat sessions averaging at over 7 minutes.

It’s a beautiful ad experience but offered in a format that is unexpected and feels as far removed from a crap ad as possible.

Stories are a proxy for consumer experiences and AR offers us the opportunity to get a lot closer to showing consumers what it’s like to purchase the brand.

BMW launched their new model, the X2, using a Snapchat World Lens. Allowing people to quite literally put it on their driveway, trialling different paintwork, walk around it and get inside. That experience delivered an average of 57s of attention across millions of views.

Gatorade have gathered over a minute and a half of attention with their in platform Snapchat game and IKEA and KLM have had much success with AR functionality that is app based but soon can be delivered via social.

So…

Let’s cover off what we know.

Social is the most competitive channel for delivering marketing messages. Why stop on a piece of content when there’s a sneezing panda over the fold?

If we’re going to win, we need the best stories and the most engaging content.

Often, we don’t deliver because it’s less expensive than TV we phone it in or simply re-use creative from elsewhere.

We need to get over ourselves and recognise that people want to be entertained more than they want to hear our brand message. Let’s start prioritising entertainment.

One final slide from me, the picture is much rosier than advertised.

The dopamine drip is ensuring more people spend more time on social media and they are desperate to be entertained.

But remember they hate crap ads, anything that looks like an ad will be ignored and discarded.

If we’re going to maximise the attention we can generate, we need to deliver stories using new narratives and new formats.

The future is bright if we follow the stats and not the myths.

Thank you for reading.