Embracing Shorter Attention Spans

Shorter attention spans are having a profound impact on marketers, who have to work harder to win and sustain attention, and have to get to the point right away.

Steve Rubel of PR firm, Edelman, recently gave a speech on how brands can gain authority in an age of digital information overload. The point is that attention now has be earned, because it is harder to buy.

We used to think of brand trust as a necessary condition for believability. Now it is a necessary condition to be heard at all. Marketers are spending more time thinking about how they can be authentic and add meaning to their marketing, and less on how to "break through" with a message.

A tactical corollary is that messages have to make their key points right up front, clearly and unmistakably. Recent studies of video consumption show, for example, that users will not watch much more than about two minutes of any typical video, and most often do not watch an entire video.

So content and other marketers have to make their points quickly, and upfront.

Embracing Shorter Attention Spans | Millennial Marketing

Shorter attention spans are also forcing brands to pare down their messages. In today’s brand strategy, mantras and vision are more useful than sentence-long positioning, especially if that positioning has more than two benefits.