How attention works
People are supposed to be good at blocking -- not looking -- at ads. Sorry, that's poppycock. You can't not see something that's in your visual field. You can consciously and non-consciously choose to ignore something. To do either, your mind-eye-brain system needs to acknowledge the ad's existence for you to know where not to look, what not to look at, et cetera.
People choose to focus on or ignore something only after the non-conscious mind has alerted the conscious mind that something does or doesn't deserve attention. The same is true for listening. The parent who can hear their child's troubled voice amid all the sounds on a playground, the lover who can isolate the walk of their partner among all those on a city street, are picking up myriad subtle cues that, when summed together, cause the non-conscious mind to signal the conscious mind "Pay attention."
Information that isn't in our direct focus -- like an ad on a web page -- that gets our attention is known as meaningful noise. Meaningful noise is something that would normally be considered an interference or distraction but can't be truly an interference or distraction because the noise was selected by the non-conscious as something worthy of notice.
The child's cry on a playground is a perfect example of this. You're talking with the other parents and all of a sudden the conversation becomes irrelevant. Your child needs you.
Whatever gets our attention is no longer a distraction because it got our attention. This is also why people tend to get upset or confused when non-priority items get their attention. The parent realizes the child's shriek was a squeal of delight and not a scream of pain, shrugs or shakes her or his head, and then returns to the original conversation.
What gets our attention is based on selection mechanisms that are strongly tied to culture, native language, age, gender, education, training, lifestyle and the list goes on. Understanding selection mechanisms requires studies in visual intelligence, observer mechanics, visual recognition theory, inattentional blindness, negative hallucination, significance effects… and this list is longer than most people care to know.
Fortunately, using selection mechanisms doesn't necessarily require understanding them in any great detail. What it all comes down to is actually quite simple:
- If you know enough about your target audience
- Then you know where to place meaningful noise in their visual field
- So that they will actually stop and focus on it rather than ignore it.
Stated more for the purposes of this article:
- If you know enough about your target audience
- Then you know where to place an ad on a page
- So that your audience stops what they're doing and pays favorable attention to the ad.
What you need to know equates to determining where, on the page, the audience needs to see certain kinds of information in order to accept that information as valid.
Next: What's important to someone depends on what's happening in their life
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. Read full bio. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research.