In this age of faster, how do we explain millions of Americans watching baseball games—for three hours?
How do we explain three hundred people listening to a speaker for two hours without averting their eyes? Their faces? They look completely engaged and content.
Why?
Because we so rarely experience these moments of single focus on a simple thing, and that feeling—our Zen-like moment of connection to one thing—delights us.
Consider our constant alternative: enduring the siege of words and images. Watch CNN financial news, for example. We hear a dark-suited anchorperson talking quickly. We may notice sentences like “Dow drops on IBM earnings report” jogging across the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen, we might notice abbreviations and numbers racing by with the current prices of the most active stocks. We spot the time in the upper-right-hand corner, the temperature in the left, and the list of upcoming stories on the right. We are viewing as multitasking.
Meanwhile, we’re scanning our local newspaper and checking our voice mails while Norah Jones sings in the background and our daughter croons in the foreground, “Can you play with me now?”
After we’re done, we go check golf on the CBS website. On just the portion that fits our screen, we see fifty-nine—fifty-nine!—different web links we can hit. To check scores for the Masters, we see two links to “Scoreboard.” We wonder, is one scoreboard better than the other? What if we choose the bad one? We are besieged by information and bewildered by what to do.
What is the almost inevitable result? But of course. When did we first hear of attention-deficit disorder, and why was it not more than fifteen years ago? Was this because no one suffered ADD in 1980? Or had it just not reached epidemic proportions?
What caused the epidemic? Did our species suddenly start selecting for a gene that predisposes humans to deficient attention? Or did the world change and the cascades of images and words so overwhelm so many of us that ADD became not just a diagnosis but a description of our culture?
In a world of people who cannot concentrate, how do we get and keep their attention? We’ve suggested that nothing gets attention like surprise.
Surprises delight us, intrigue us, grab us by the necks. The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile parks outside our favorite local burger spot. Many of the diners leaving the restaurant squeal when they see it, and every diner asks a passerby to take his photo. We love a surprise.
But even surprises are having trouble surprising us in this new century, as a clown discovered recently.
Imagine this spectacle: A clown in full clown regalia rides a unicycle across our favorite college’s campus. Thousands of passersby stop, and dozens laugh out loud. But the clown steers by dozens of students who, when asked later, “Did you see the clown?” answer, “What clown?”
This spectacle occurred at Western Washington University in 2009, where researchers hired a clown to unicycle across campus. Yes, many students noticed the clown and reacted as the researchers predicted. But dozens of other students said, “What clown?” How could they?
It was because when the clown pedaled by, these students were talking on their cell phones. They cannot talk and see at the same time? Isn’t that worse than being the fall guy in our famous old slam, the guy who could not walk and chew gum at the same time?
The clown at Western Washington suggests that our brains can do only so much. If it’s engaged in talking, it’s not seeing; if it’s busy reading, it’s not hearing. We multitask, perhaps, but our brains do not and cannot.
We are texting, talking, and Tweeting; we are checking the Web, religiously checking our email, seeing who has called. The more of this we do, the less of everything else we notice.
The researchers call us victims of inattention blindness. We are lost in the inner space of our brains. Out in the real world, clowns pedal by us on unicycles, ads cry out to us from every surface.
But we are blind.
Writing in the November 9, 2009, New Yorker about the clown case, Nick Paumgarter reminded readers of a bizarre parallel case: the missing plane. Just two weeks earlier, two Northwest Airline pilots overshot Minneapolis, their destination, by 150 miles. Their explanation?
At the moment when they should have been landing, they were reading on their laptops the new flight-crew scheduling procedures. One can only wonder: What if their laptops were showing a Ford Bronco fleeing the Los Angeles police? Would they have realized their mistake over Honolulu?
These stories of the unicycling clown and the distracted pilots reinforce the lessons of a famous older test. Dr. Daniel Simon of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris of Harvard once asked subjects to watch films of a basketball game and to keep track of the number of passes thrown by one team. When the test was completed, the test subjects proved to be experts at counting. What they weren’t, however, were experts at noticing.
Midway through the film, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walked though the middle of the players for nine seconds, even stopping to face the camera and thump her chest. And what happened? Almost half of the viewers didn’t notice.
But we know why, don’t we? The more we try to see and do, the less we notice. Trying to notice basketball passes, we miss chest-thumping gorillas.
As any marketer knows, labeling something makes it seem real. Combine that with our characteristic self-confidence, and it’s easy to see that we’ve come to believe in multitasking. But we don’t multitask; we multitry. We are trying to do more, but we are accomplishing, and noticing, less.
This case of the missed gorilla seems unusually ironic. That’s because fifty years ago, the iconic ad man David Ogilvy decried the trend in advertising toward award-winning ads that merely surprised, or even shocked, the viewers. Ogilvy said that an ad must offer a compelling premise, and that anyway, getting people’s attention was simple. “All you have to do is show a gorilla in a jock strap.”
Ogilvy might have been right then, but that was then. Today, it’s not just marketing messages that are cluttered. It’s our desks, our phones, and the focal point of all marketing, our brains. They’re jammed.
This is not the Information Age. It’s the Inundation Age.
Attention blindness has become the disease of our century. It forces marketers into being so surprising than even the blind will notice their ads. But ten years from now, will even that kind of audacity work? And what will?
In 2007, HarperCollins spent $10,000 creating three risqué videos to promote Chad Kultgen’s book The Average American Male. In just two weeks, one million people watched the videos, which seemed to show that classic push techniques, pushed through new media like YouTube, could produce startling returns. But what were those one million eyeballs worth?
A blip: HarperCollins printed just ten thousand copies of the book. There’s no record that it sold them; it just printed them. Publishers regularly go into second, third, even thirtieth printings of books, which raises the question: Did those one million YouTube viewers translate into one more buyer of the book?
The marketers’ problem isn’t just that we suffer from attention blindness. It’s that even when we notice, we do nothing. We notice a Coors ad and say we love it—and go buy a Miller Lite instead. As HarperCollins might ask, what are a million eyeballs worth?
They might ask the former dot-com executives who saturated the 2000 Super Bowl with so many commercials that the game is also known as the Dot-Com Super Bowl. Those twelve companies spent $80,000 per second trying to get our attention. What did they end up with? Pennies on their original dollars or, in the cases of Pets.com, Epidemic.com, Computer.com, and OurBeginning.com, nothing.
These ads outperformed the clown on the unicycle and the gorilla—they got our attention—but the start-ups didn’t realize the problems that creates. The first time someone gets our attention, we take away two messages: that they exist and that and we’ve never heard of them before. They’re new and unfamiliar, and we love the familiar.
It’s not attention good marketers want; it’s attention over time, and products and services that deserve people’s attention because they appeal to what Americans—we childlike Americans who think with our eyes—love.