Why brands need to stop chasing goldfish and start creating for humans
Attention spans – according to some – are shrinking, which has meant advertising ideas have got shorter, snappier and hookier, in an attempt to quickly snag people's interest. But, says Michael Brown, Executive Creative Director at immersive design studio Pinch, what seems like distraction is actually discernment.
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Ask anyone in advertising how long the average person’s attention span lasts and, chances are, they’ll say eight seconds. Or five seconds. Or even three.
They might mention a goldfish, circling its bowl and forgetting with each lap that it swam past that same piece of plastic seaweed a few moments prior. They might bemoan social media and the always-on dopamine drip of content that has supposedly stripped us of our ability to focus on anything for more than the time it takes us to count to eight. Or five. Or even three.
The always-on dopamine drip of content that has supposedly stripped us of our ability to focus.
It’s a common misconception, this – that somewhere in between the advent of Facebook and the invention of AI, we’ve all had our attention spans stolen from us. Never mind the fact that you only have to step inside your local cinema to see that it’s not remotely true.
Above: We have learned to sharpen our 'selective attention' as we flick through social media's infinite scroll.
The so-called 'goldfish myth' traces back to a Microsoft report from roughly 2015, which claimed our attention spans had plummeted to eight seconds – theoretically, less than that of a goldfish. Researchers have since studied goldfish (and humans) in depth, and firmly debunked the theory. But the idea stuck around anyway – and it has shaped advertising strategy ever since.
For the last decade, advertising has been in a race to see who can create the snappiest copy and find the biggest hook. To find who can create campaigns so catchy they can snag users’ attention during that supposed eight-second window, before their minds glide away.
Understanding the difference between sustained attention and selective attention, and how each one shapes messaging perception in different ways, is key.
Maybe this strategy worked for a little while, but it isn’t working anymore. It’s easy to believe that the information overload we’re experiencing today is somehow breaking our brains, but when you examine the evidence, it points in a different direction. What looks like a distraction is actually discernment. Our sustained attention – the deep focus we might bring to reading a novel or watching a film – is alive and well. What has shifted and sharpened is our selective attention – the filter we deploy when flicking through infinite feeds of infinite content and deciding when to click through and when to simply scroll on.
Understanding the difference between sustained attention and selective attention, and how each one shapes messaging perception in different ways, is key if brands want to engage and connect with consumers. It’s one thing to analyse the declining number of views of an Instagram ad campaign and conclude our attention spans must have dropped to eight seconds (or five, or three), but step inside an engaging, thoughtfully designed brand experience and another, more nuanced, narrative emerges. People still have the capacity to concentrate – they’re just not going to waste their energy unless they deem it worthwhile.
Above: Pinch's Fragrance Lab, at this year's Cannes Lions, "was for tech not to talk about itself, but to understand each guest through a detailed profiling experience".
For example, at Cannes Lions this year, our agency designed a fragrance lab for Amazon Web Services. The goal was for tech not to talk about itself, but to understand each guest through a detailed profiling experience, culminating in a custom-made perfume they could take home. People waited in line for an hour – not for a freebie, but for an experience worth remembering.
People waited in line for an hour – not for a freebie, but for an experience worth remembering.
At Pinterest, I watched as guests spent hours completing craft projects. At Meta's skate park, visitors created multi-step reels. These weren’t quick hits; they engaged their guests in a meaningful way and earned everyone’s attention as a result. Similarly, consider Google at Milan Design Week, year after year; they showcase their products by weaving experiences around the five senses and the many inspirations behind their designs. In doing so, they consistently elevate hardware from the practical to the profoundly human.
Or look at Gentle Monster, a brand that continues to grow and expand, while still doing the things that set them apart, such as prioritising brand experience over product features, cultivating an experimental ethos over a uniform identity, embracing the surreal and letting in-person experiences drive everything. None of these brands is about being the loudest, they’re about creating thoughtful, engaging moments which draw people to lean in rather than scroll past. Watching crowds spend so much time, thought and energy at these events shows that marketers who think audiences have lost their ability to listen are telling the wrong story.
Above: Advertising needs to stop trying to hook goldfish, and start engaging humans.
No surprise, then, that experiential marketing has become this year's buzz. It’s messy to measure and impossible to fit into the analytics framework that digital advertising taught us to worship, but experiential succeeds precisely because it operates on a different logic to that which brands are used to. It’s not about reaching through your screens, desperately hoping to catch consumers in that mythical eight-second window, it’s about carefully choreographing activities and spaces that people actually want to experience – and building the kind of long-term memories that can't be captured on a dashboard.
Shouting ever louder into feeds where nobody's listening clearly isn't working.
This demands a different way of thinking – making the tricky pivot away from measuring clicks and views and towards designing encounters people want to return to. But the alternative (shouting ever louder into feeds where nobody's listening) clearly isn't working.
It’s time to stop chasing goldfish and start creating moments people want to remember.
