By Colleen Ryan, Partner at TRA
It’s expensive to buy media. So, measuring how much attention your advertising receives is important – though not easy. Rather than build attention hooks in at the creative development stage, it inevitably happens downstream when an ad is already live, and the media budget is committed.
We know that intuitively creatives are good at attention hooks. Their job is to get cut-through in a noisy environment after all. But we can do better than intuition alone. Understanding how brains work and how humans respond to stimulus can help us here.
We don’t just want our audience to notice us – we want them to remember us.
The work of Karen Nelson-Field has advanced our understanding of attention and memory structures. We now know that while we might be able to capture attention in the first millisecond, we require 2.5 seconds to actually embed memory structures. By exploring the cognitive science around this, we can draw on a set of principles to more effectively capture attention and then hold it.
People are exposed to vast numbers of signals and stimuli every second. Yet we can only process 50 bits of information per second out of the 11 million bits our sensory system receives. So how does our brain decide what to pay attention to?
It would be nice to think we have inbuilt rational filters, but we don’t. Instead, we have hard-wired biases that have been embedded over millennium, not least because they are critical to survival. It could be the difference between not paying attention to the threat of a predator or missing the competitive advantage of a new food source. These days the ‘predator’ is more likely to be a speeding car in our peripheral vision, however, the embedded triggers for attention remain unchanged.
So, what are some attention principles marketers can use to their advantage?
1. Novelty
New things might be good things, so we take notice of them. This is fast processing too, because we need to decide in an instance (100 milliseconds) whether it is worth investing the cognitive energy to stay with it while we work out what it is. Characters, especially animals behaving out of character, are often used in this way to great effect. We have seen this in the current Allianz ad which recently made TRA’s top 10 favourite ads. People told us it grabbed their attention because of ‘novelty’.
2. Unexpected
This is related to novelty, but it’s a different trigger. When ‘normal’ or familiar things occur, our brains conclude “nothing to see here”. But if something unexpected happens it tells us that we might have got this wrong – so pay attention. It is how we are constantly updating our understanding of how the world works. Uber Eats is using this to good effect in their campaign ‘Get almost, almost anything’ which begins like a regular ad for food delivery, and then suddenly an ape jumps on the table (a pun on grapes not apes).
3. Familiarity
Seems counter intuitive. Why would we pay attention to something familiar when our brains have already determined “there’s nothing to see here”? The answer is because we are constantly seeking information confirming or contradicting our view of the world. It allows us to revise our priors and hones our ability to predict. But it isn’t necessarily a fast-processing form of attention, so this is where an early hook using distinctive assets is critical. Aldi’s ‘Good Different’ is a great example of a campaign platform that blends the surreal and unexpected with familiar and relatable experiences.
4. Unfinished
Humans have a strong tendency to pay attention to things that are unfinished. This is probably because the finished event could have consequences for us. Ongoing stories attract attention because they are not finished. We see this approach used with Budget Direct’s ‘Insurance Solved’ campaign, and the recurring trio of Sarge, Jacs, and their little dog Chief. While the mystery is solved before the ad wraps, the story is never truly finished.
5. Personal relevance
Think about when you’ve been in a crowded room, you can hardly hear the person you are talking to, but you distinctly hear your name mentioned from the other side of the room. It’s called the cocktail party effect. Our brains are highly tuned to filter and pay attention to things that are relevant to us. The KFC ‘FLG’ ads use the ‘noise’ of uncommon scenarios but then drop in the familiar KFC product because everyone needs to grab something to eat, no matter what they are doing.
Every piece of communication does not have to have every hook built in.
Media budgets are under pressure which means the cost of consumer attention is on the rise. Marketers can no longer afford to treat attention as simply something to measure after the money has been spent. The science is clear – attention isn’t just about your ad being seen, it’s about your ad holding attention long enough to be remembered in a highly cluttered landscape.
By embedding attention principles at the beginning of the creative process, brands can build stronger memory structures, increase effectiveness, and ultimately drive greater ROI.
It’s time to stop chasing impressions and start creating brand stories and ads for impact because in today’s economy of distraction, attention can be your most valuable currency and could make your media budgets go further.
Top image: Colleen Ryan