Well, a couple of things that build on this.
1. I read of a psychological study that found that the subjective
experience of "now" lasts about 3 seconds. That is, if you ask
people about whether some stimulus or whatever the researchers were
looking at was happening "now," the general response was "yes" as
long as the thing occurred plus or minus 1.5 seconds or so of the
time of the asking.
2. This actually can be converted to a measure of how much
attention people have in a day. If at each quantum of "now"-ness a
person can only effectively be attending to one thing, then in a
24-hour day, if we assume 16 are conscious and available, that's
roughly 19,200 "moments" of "now" a person has each day.
3. Advertisers well know how to command (literally, as in, what we
are hard-wired for) our attention: loud noises, quick movements,
flashes of light, attractive women (to get male attention) etc. So,
on the "tragedy of the attention commons" I was postulating earlier,
what we have is a large but non-infinite number of opportunities for
folks who want our attention, to grab it. By going from traditional
print to the Internet, we have created a lot more opportunities for
that. There are 19,200 "nows" per day per person, that can input
either signal or noise. Increasing ads (including directed ads)
means more noise and less signal, net. Key point:
The pool
of available attention is very limited. (Note: if it's
really 3.2 hours per week, that's only about 3,840
moments-of-attention available.) That very limited pool is what
more and more advertisers are trying to colonize. So it's no
wonder, it seems to me, that people are both building taller
defenses and getting more exhausted in maintaining them.
4. There are some behavioral economic studies being done by a guy
at MIT that analogies the lives of people in poverty that indicates
that their choices are
harder to make than non-poor
folks, in an analogy to what is called the "suitcase problem."
Suppose you are packing for a weekend trip, and you have a very
large suitcase. Packing is easy: you put in stuff you know you'll
need and stuff you might need. Very little mental effort. Now
imagine going on a one-week trip and all you are allowed is one
carry-on-size bag. Now you have a hard problem: you have to decide
what is essential and what isn't, what has to go in first in order
to make sure everything will fit, etc. It's a harder mental task
(which various studies have shown truly use up biological energy).
The MIT guy points out that the entire task of facing the economy
is, for a poor person, like trying to pack for a week-long trip with
too small a suitcase: the suitcase is their money, and the clothes,
etc., to go in, are their needs. Every day is mentally exhausting
for poor people, because poor people actually have to do a lot more
mental work to get through a day than does a middle-class or rich
person.
5. A similar phenomenon occurs with the issue of allocating our
attention. Figuring out what is signal and what is noise takes
work, and it takes more and more work the more noise there is --
like listening to your favorite radio station as you drive further
and further away on the long-distance highway. It gets scratchier
and fuller with static, but if you keep
listening harder (interesting
idiom there...) you can still hear what they are saying. With more
and more informational static being thrown at us for our 19,200
"nows" per day, it takes lots of mental work just to try to keep
focused on what actually matters in a life (kids ... job ... spouse
... spiritual practice ... hobbies/interests). Fitting all of that
into the mental time suitcase can be really hard. Adding all the
noise makes it harder.
Do advertisers ever think in terms of their effects on a limited,
shared resource, aka,
my brain cycles?
Chris S.
2/17/2013 5:07 PM, Iain Henderson
wrote:
" type="cite">
Thanks Katherine, your point re number of hours in the day
reminded me of a key quote sent to the list a few months back (by
Richard Bates, Consumer Focus, UK).
“Consumers are however pressed for time and spend on
average only 3.2 hours a week on all consumer tasks. To ensure
that consumers remain empowered in the face of the growing
information overload and increasing lack of time for shopping,
new shortcuts and comparison tools need to be found.”
That quote came from a research study across more than 55,000
individuals, so pretty robust. European Commission Staff Working
Paper (2011): Consumer Empowerment in the EU (SEC [2011] 469
final), Brussels: European Commission –
http://bit.ly/J45aRl
Add to that, one of the main effects of The Internet on the
individual being that they typically have an awful lot more
supplier/ service provider relationships to manage than they did
before, and you therefore have a huge volume of 'permissioned'
advertising being squeezed into what amounts to a very small
amount of time.
In that respect, our job is to build tools that help get a
better return out of those 28 minutes, and maybe even one day
increasing the time spent because the return on it is much
improved.
Iain
3.2 hours a week is 192 minutes, or almost 28 mins per day.
On 17 Feb 2013, at 15:28, Katherine Warman Kern <
">
>
wrote:
Sylvan and Chris,
As a practicing planner who takes pride in being a
trusted advisor, I'd like to share some insights from
the perspective of my clients.
The reality the consumer has an overabundance of choices
and a marketer has an overabundance of tools to choose
from.
But the number of hours in a day to make those choices
has remained exactly the same.
As the number of choices have increased, the odds that
bad choices are made increases.
Share of Voice, as many measuring sticks, is flawed from
the start because there is no truly accurate way to
measure or project it. One marketer can spend the same
amount of dollars much more effectively than another.
And since few marketers publish their mistakes, no one
really knows what really happened. In fact most
published accounts of marketing case studies have very
little resemblance to what really happened.
I continue to be shocked that no new entry capitalizes
on digital technology and social media to offer an
improvement over Nielsen to monitor integrated marketing
in real time.
K-
Katherine Warman Kern
www.comradity.com
@comradity
203-918-2617
On Feb 17, 2013, at 9:37 AM, sylvain willart
"><
> wrote:
This "tragedy of the commons"
made me think when you first posted about it.
The sheep example you mention is well-studied in
economic game theory,
and there are some writings as well in Public
Economics sudies dealing
with scarce resources,
But I very rarely read this kind of thinking in
advertising/marketing.
Only perhaps in "Store Wars" (Corstjens &
Corstjens , 90's). Actually,
the hypothesis of the consumer brain being a scarce
resource is
sometimes discussed, but never measured. And media
planning relying
heavily on measures and metrics, this hypothesis does
not well fit in
traditional approaches.
Moreover, you can expect people to protect scarce
natural resources
(even if they loose direct advantage) for the sake of
a "bigger cause"
involving altruism (a long studied effect in game
theory); but who
really cares about the exhaustion of conusmer brain?
there is nothing
here a good night of sleep can't fix... (the consumer
himself may be
the only one to care, hence the importance of VRM
tools IMHO).
Media planning is also competitive by nature, and
while planning you
have to care more about your competitors' expenses
than your
consumers' ability to process all those ads. An
important metric in
media planning is for example the "share of voice"
(your expenses
divided by the market expenses), perhaps the dumbest
metric ever
invented, as it is known from long it is not robust at
all (meaning it
can lead you to make stupid planning choices)
The entropy hypothesis however may be quite appealing,
and this metric
is often used in other field of marketing (for
measuring variety of
assortments for example). I'll try to dig into it to
see wether it has
been used in advertising/intrusiveness research.
Sylvain
2013/2/17 Chris Savage
"><
>:
Sylvain,
Thank you, this is very helpful. I will ponder a
bit more.
I have mentioned, perhaps on this list, my sense
that there is a "tragedy of
the commons" effect going on among those who would
sell me stuff. Just like
in the Garrett Hardin story where each shepherd
looks at the common field
and thinks, "Oh, letting one or two extra sheep from
my flock graze won't
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