Whisper to be seen, wave your hands to be heard. Joseph Carrabis explains.
I was recently talking about the increasing number of distractions people deal with on a daily basis and how this affects the marketing and ad placement landscape. How do you create environments that focus the attention of the viewer so that they start single-tasking and consume only one media channel?
Or more directly: How do you get people to pay attention to what you want them to pay attention to?
Let me give you some marketing variations on this question: You pay for a banner ad but nobody looks at it. Not only do they not look at it, they outright ignore it. To them, it doesn't exist. What did you spend your money on then? Or you purchase a 30-second television spot in highly targeted markets and your numbers show sales are falling in those same markets. Forget sales, your numbers show that brand recognition is decreasing in those markets. Wha' happened?
Both of the above scenarios are examples of answering this question incorrectly.
Answering the question correctly involves attention studies, consciousness studies, cultural-emotional conditioning, goal versus stimulus psychologies, language studies, memory studies, neurobiology, self-awareness, self-perception, semantics, sensory phenomenology, social behaviors, social networking theory, volition studies and vision studies.
I've written about marketing principles that fall from these studies before. Interested readers can find a complete bibliography on my BizMediaScience blog.
But this column is going to explore what's going on when people don't pay attention and what you can do about it. We're going to begin with a review of topics dealing with attention. Next we'll show some attention-getting techniques that don't work and some that do. Our next to last stop will be suggestions for getting attention on the web. We'll close with a review for you to carry forward.
The brain lets the mind know where to focus its attention
The brain has evolved some elaborate cross sensory-attention functions that most people don't know about and that are still very active in the brain's wiring. When we can't see what we're reaching for, we focus our hearing on it. Why? Do we expect the TV remote that got kicked under the couch to say "Oh, I'm over here!"?
No, not really, but our ancestors did expect to hear snakes hissing or rattling, the scuttling of spiders, or the nervous twitching of some predator's tail as they reached into shadowy leaves for some choice fruit or walked into a darkened glade for a tender morsel.
Most of our ancestors' predators favored the dark, only revealing themselves when they (the predator) thought it was too late for our ancestors to act. The result? We listen for what we can't see. Obvious, yes, and most people don't think of it until you state it.
One of my favorite cross sensory-attention functions is that of taste, smell and hearing. Our ancestors tended to want to sleep after a meal (I still do). The senses of taste and smell were no longer necessary and the eyes were closing. The sense of touch? Nice, but by the time your sense of touch told you there was a problem it was usually too late. What's left? Hearing.
Humans as a species haven't evolved enough for these systems to go the way of the appendix. In fact, it's only been since the industrial revolution and the rise of a recognizable middle class that we stopped using these cross sensory-attention systems on a daily, hourly basis. But they're still with us. Recognizing their purpose and how they function is important to getting the attention you're paying for.
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