by Ryan Faist
Credit: The Pack
I was waiting at a stoplight, staring at a six-foot tall dog with a newspaper jammed in its mouth. It was an advertisement on the back of the truck ahead of me. When I stared longer, I realized that it was an ad for a landscaping company. The dog had nothing to do with the message; it only served to grab my attention, which it did. But after seeing it, I wasn’t compelled to treat my lawn. Instead, I was asking myself why Americans’ attention spans have shrunk to the point where some advertisers will stray so far from their message to grab a person’s attention.
It’s not just advertisements. It’s all forms of popular media. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the average scene-length of movies and television shows has shortened significantly over the years. Even the style of most blockbuster novels today is much more fast-paced – tension on every page. I’m not saying any of this is bad, but I am saying that we Americans have become an inpatient culture. And the media knows it.
Some people will argue that technology is to blame. The internet, social media, iPods, blackberries, yada yada yada, have all collectively spoiled us with immediate access to information. That makes sense, but something else is bothering me.
Let us suppose that America suffers from attention deficit disorder for whatever reason. Fine. Advertisers and marketers have to adjust as the playing field changes, just as any businessperson must. I understand this. But the giant dog staring at me from the back of a commercial truck was something much more frightening. At first, I thought it was an ad for the local newspaper, or maybe a dog-catching service. That would have been okay with me, even though I like dogs. But when I realized it was an ad for a landscaping company, I became enraged. In a strange way, I felt like the people who created it were contributing to the degradation of a once patient culture… just so they could make a few bucks. No, I’m not crazy.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the power of a good advertisement. But I can’t help but wonder about how the current state of advertising is dealing with the shortened attention spans of American consumers. Even worse, I wonder if some advertisers are somehow helping to shrink attention spans even more with ads that ignore the rules once practiced by the advertisers of previous generations. Maybe people will get used to advertisements that use arbitrary and shocking images to catch their attention, just as they’ll get used to short scenes and fast-paced novels. Where will it end? How about the Statue of Liberty dressed in fish net to sell macaroni and cheese? Why not a three-eyed gargoyle floating over the moon to promote toothpaste?
I’ll tell you why. It’s stupid. Creating advertisements is a craft, and just like any other craft, there are techniques, guidelines and aesthetics to every good ad. It’s within these boundaries that you find your creativity. Once you become a rebel ad-maker with no respect for anything done in the past and a willingness to do anything in the future, including arbitrarily exploiting people’s short attention spans, you risk more than just failing your clients with bad ads. You may unknowingly participate in the degradation of our culture by contributing to the shrinking of the average American attention span until it reaches the point where 1) we as a people have no patience for anything other than instant gratification, and 2) ad-makers become more and more willing to stray even further from good ad-making principles in the lazy effort to grab your attention. Both are grim forecasts for a brave new world.
