Attention & Advertising
Craig Berger
October 14th, 2014
Craig Berger
October 14th, 2014
One
crisp grayscale October evening I sat on a wooden bench- both the bench and I
creaking and unsettled along the outskirts of Washington Square Park in
Greenwich Village, NYC. Beside the bench
stood a tall and mockingly professorial light post that illuminated the various
disheveled notebooks on my lap. I had a
graduate school midterm at NYU in an hour and needed to review my notes on the
topic of attention. But, I couldn't
focus and the irony of the situation made it only worse.
A few sentences in I heard a crunch of leaves to my right from an unleashed jack terrier making quick chase of a pair of sketchy squirrels. The terrier's coat was a dark coffee with one large caramel spot on its back. The spot shaped like a scone, kinda. A scone that would go great with a caramel latte. Yes, that's what I needed to focus!
Trip to Oren's Daily Roast and then back to the bench. Alright. A few more sentences in and then a long shadow fell across the page. A man stood uncomfortably close to me feeding pigeons, along with those two asshole squirrels, from a Hello Kitty backpack slung loosely from his right arm. His left arm continued to push along a squeaky laundry cart brimming with bags and missing one wheel. Is he going to ask me for money? Nope. Cool. But, where the hell did he get that Hello Kitty backpack from? Canal Street? Should I ask him? My niece is what, five now, and just had a birthday? Is Hello Kitty too old for her? What is it anyway? I bet it's not actually a cat, but a little girl who just happens to look a lot like a cat.
The whole quiet solitude of the park plan was turning into a disaster so plan B: the more manageable distractions of a hole-in-the-ground townie bar a block away from class. "Craig!" the bartender announced. "I'm not here," I whispered loudly, "need to study." So, I grabbed a stool at the far end of the bar along with a beautiful happy hour draft. Much better light here, I justified. Words clearer in this somewhat sickly yellow glow which highlighted a series of notes where I couldn't read my handwriting. Did I write "attention" or "intention"?
My handwriting that, at its best, would compete with any doctor's scribble, had turned into some cryptic riddle out of The Da Vinci Code. But, I wrote it once, so I can just as easily unwrite it, right? A second beer would help this conundrum. Which it did, if only to remember that those notes happened to be during a class that followed the last time I made the poor decision to visit this bar beforehand. But, the two-dollar Yuengling inspired a deeper point, and I was onto something. Attention and intention are intertwined in some surprising ways, especially when it comes to the most common distraction- contemporary advertising and brand marketing- that strives to dictate both of those elements.
First, it's important to understand that we now live in a world where attention is a currency. You have a limited budget to your attention. Therefore, your attention is a commodity in high demand of which you should be as mindful about unnecessarily wasting as you are with money or property.
At any given moment most of us struggle with an onslaught of decision making, pressure, and noise. Small things like "what am I going to eat for lunch" can in the same cognitive-contextual beat turn into "what am I going to do with my life?" It's this attentional conflict vulnerability, a type of cognitive dissonance that often unconsciously drives our desire for distraction and escapism.
One concept that addresses this is called Associative Coherence. A "complex constellation of responses" that can occur "quickly, automatically, and effortlessly" driven by automatic neurological processes that you have little control over (1).
It sounds more complicated than it needs to be. You make dynamic associations that drive attention, but in most cases you are unaware of it and can still perceive and attend to the world around you with a sort of fluid connectivity. That's a good thing in many situations, allowing you to multitask and if needed, for resources to be quickly drawn to other potential survival or nurture-based activities that have afforded us a distinct evolutionary advantage.
But that automatic reflex of attention can also cause problems and be easily manipulated. When you hear a word or perceive an image in advertising that evokes a specific memory and triggers an emotional response, especially discomfort or fear, it sets off a vast array of responses. These responses include your facial muscles, posture, speech patterns, heart rate, memory, and mood, creating a feedback loop and reinforcing associations.
However, your experience is one of a whole, seamless, and instantaneous event, which is one reason it becomes so difficult to differentiate the source of distraction and find any easy solution to refocus. In fact, the very act of trying to locate the source and straining to refocus can further enable the distraction.
This tendency was brought to the forefront of psychological theory over two decades ago thanks to Larry Jacoby. He suggested that there were actually two dueling systems in place to control attention, bound to specific types of recognition memory: implicit and intentional (2).
Implicit (automatic) memory or is constantly humming in the background and what gives you that warm sense of familiarity in most routine situations without too much cognitive effort. Intentional, however, is cognitively taxing and includes the very act of trying to remember, which can be easily frustrated by limited resources allocated to attention that require a lot of brain power.
The more obvious target of advertisers is to hit your implicit/automatic system through bright lights, emotionally reactive content, and high frequency repetition regardless of the media type: commercial, print, social media ad, music, radio spot, billboard, etc. Not only has this strategy endured for centuries, it's expanded into an inescapable advertising cacophony thanks to ever emerging technologies and media outlets.
The less obvious target is our more conscious intentional system. Especially our memory. Jacoby demonstrated this during a classic experiment on "the sleeper effect" (3). Let's say I gave you a long list of seemingly random famous and non-famous names in no particular order. After a day, you are highly likely to misremember the non-celebrity names as celebrities by virtue of their familiarity and ease of recollection. A cognitive memory quirk where we don't necessarily encode the source of memories, but can manufacture it later as needed to fit a certain expectation- allowing new experiences and moods to become easily retroactively branded.
There are many other subversive ways marketing and advertising professionals (not to mention religious groups and clubs) can tap into your intentional attention beams. Some of these include: reciprocity (free gifts), foot in the door (creating a small initial commitment), bait and switch (misleading message), ego depletion (taking advantage of fatigue that results from using your brain), recency and primacy (orders of exposure that influence memory), ease of consciousness (a comfortable solution within uncomfortable stimuli), value framing (leading choices through extreme examples), and more heuristics (natural human errors in decision making) than we can list here. Every screen you view and social media platform you use has been engineered to mine your attention and engage your loyalty.
That’s not meant to scare you, but to raise awareness of the extraordinary lengths that companies will go to in order to get a piece of your valuable attention. In the park that one Fall evening I lost the battle to reign in my attention, which would make me prime meat for most advertisers. However, we do have some control.
At any time, you can choose to gift your precious attention to more deserving sources such as a sick friend or lonely elderly neighbor instead of an obnoxious realty TV star or ad-ridden social media feed. And yes, if you are part of the 4% of adults diagnosed with ADHD (4), attention control is a big struggle. But, for most others, it boils down to simple impulse control, which many corporations and advertisers are betting billions that you don't have.
A few sentences in I heard a crunch of leaves to my right from an unleashed jack terrier making quick chase of a pair of sketchy squirrels. The terrier's coat was a dark coffee with one large caramel spot on its back. The spot shaped like a scone, kinda. A scone that would go great with a caramel latte. Yes, that's what I needed to focus!
Trip to Oren's Daily Roast and then back to the bench. Alright. A few more sentences in and then a long shadow fell across the page. A man stood uncomfortably close to me feeding pigeons, along with those two asshole squirrels, from a Hello Kitty backpack slung loosely from his right arm. His left arm continued to push along a squeaky laundry cart brimming with bags and missing one wheel. Is he going to ask me for money? Nope. Cool. But, where the hell did he get that Hello Kitty backpack from? Canal Street? Should I ask him? My niece is what, five now, and just had a birthday? Is Hello Kitty too old for her? What is it anyway? I bet it's not actually a cat, but a little girl who just happens to look a lot like a cat.
The whole quiet solitude of the park plan was turning into a disaster so plan B: the more manageable distractions of a hole-in-the-ground townie bar a block away from class. "Craig!" the bartender announced. "I'm not here," I whispered loudly, "need to study." So, I grabbed a stool at the far end of the bar along with a beautiful happy hour draft. Much better light here, I justified. Words clearer in this somewhat sickly yellow glow which highlighted a series of notes where I couldn't read my handwriting. Did I write "attention" or "intention"?
My handwriting that, at its best, would compete with any doctor's scribble, had turned into some cryptic riddle out of The Da Vinci Code. But, I wrote it once, so I can just as easily unwrite it, right? A second beer would help this conundrum. Which it did, if only to remember that those notes happened to be during a class that followed the last time I made the poor decision to visit this bar beforehand. But, the two-dollar Yuengling inspired a deeper point, and I was onto something. Attention and intention are intertwined in some surprising ways, especially when it comes to the most common distraction- contemporary advertising and brand marketing- that strives to dictate both of those elements.
First, it's important to understand that we now live in a world where attention is a currency. You have a limited budget to your attention. Therefore, your attention is a commodity in high demand of which you should be as mindful about unnecessarily wasting as you are with money or property.
At any given moment most of us struggle with an onslaught of decision making, pressure, and noise. Small things like "what am I going to eat for lunch" can in the same cognitive-contextual beat turn into "what am I going to do with my life?" It's this attentional conflict vulnerability, a type of cognitive dissonance that often unconsciously drives our desire for distraction and escapism.
One concept that addresses this is called Associative Coherence. A "complex constellation of responses" that can occur "quickly, automatically, and effortlessly" driven by automatic neurological processes that you have little control over (1).
It sounds more complicated than it needs to be. You make dynamic associations that drive attention, but in most cases you are unaware of it and can still perceive and attend to the world around you with a sort of fluid connectivity. That's a good thing in many situations, allowing you to multitask and if needed, for resources to be quickly drawn to other potential survival or nurture-based activities that have afforded us a distinct evolutionary advantage.
But that automatic reflex of attention can also cause problems and be easily manipulated. When you hear a word or perceive an image in advertising that evokes a specific memory and triggers an emotional response, especially discomfort or fear, it sets off a vast array of responses. These responses include your facial muscles, posture, speech patterns, heart rate, memory, and mood, creating a feedback loop and reinforcing associations.
However, your experience is one of a whole, seamless, and instantaneous event, which is one reason it becomes so difficult to differentiate the source of distraction and find any easy solution to refocus. In fact, the very act of trying to locate the source and straining to refocus can further enable the distraction.
This tendency was brought to the forefront of psychological theory over two decades ago thanks to Larry Jacoby. He suggested that there were actually two dueling systems in place to control attention, bound to specific types of recognition memory: implicit and intentional (2).
Implicit (automatic) memory or is constantly humming in the background and what gives you that warm sense of familiarity in most routine situations without too much cognitive effort. Intentional, however, is cognitively taxing and includes the very act of trying to remember, which can be easily frustrated by limited resources allocated to attention that require a lot of brain power.
The more obvious target of advertisers is to hit your implicit/automatic system through bright lights, emotionally reactive content, and high frequency repetition regardless of the media type: commercial, print, social media ad, music, radio spot, billboard, etc. Not only has this strategy endured for centuries, it's expanded into an inescapable advertising cacophony thanks to ever emerging technologies and media outlets.
The less obvious target is our more conscious intentional system. Especially our memory. Jacoby demonstrated this during a classic experiment on "the sleeper effect" (3). Let's say I gave you a long list of seemingly random famous and non-famous names in no particular order. After a day, you are highly likely to misremember the non-celebrity names as celebrities by virtue of their familiarity and ease of recollection. A cognitive memory quirk where we don't necessarily encode the source of memories, but can manufacture it later as needed to fit a certain expectation- allowing new experiences and moods to become easily retroactively branded.
There are many other subversive ways marketing and advertising professionals (not to mention religious groups and clubs) can tap into your intentional attention beams. Some of these include: reciprocity (free gifts), foot in the door (creating a small initial commitment), bait and switch (misleading message), ego depletion (taking advantage of fatigue that results from using your brain), recency and primacy (orders of exposure that influence memory), ease of consciousness (a comfortable solution within uncomfortable stimuli), value framing (leading choices through extreme examples), and more heuristics (natural human errors in decision making) than we can list here. Every screen you view and social media platform you use has been engineered to mine your attention and engage your loyalty.
That’s not meant to scare you, but to raise awareness of the extraordinary lengths that companies will go to in order to get a piece of your valuable attention. In the park that one Fall evening I lost the battle to reign in my attention, which would make me prime meat for most advertisers. However, we do have some control.
At any time, you can choose to gift your precious attention to more deserving sources such as a sick friend or lonely elderly neighbor instead of an obnoxious realty TV star or ad-ridden social media feed. And yes, if you are part of the 4% of adults diagnosed with ADHD (4), attention control is a big struggle. But, for most others, it boils down to simple impulse control, which many corporations and advertisers are betting billions that you don't have.
References:
- Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan (2011).
- Jacoby, L. “A Process Dissociation Framework: Separating Automatic from Intentional Uses of Memory.” Journal of Memory and Language Vol 30 (1991): 513-541. Print.
- Jacoby, L., Kelley, C., Brown, J., Jasechko, J. “Becoming famous overnight: Limits on the ability to avoid unconscious influences of the past.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol 56(3) (1989): 326-338. Print.
- http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2006/harvard-study-suggests-significant-prevalence-of-adhd-symptoms-among-adults.shtml and http://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/related-illnesses/other-related-conditions/adult-adhd