Who has the longer attention span… average goldfish or average person?

I was sitting having a coffee with a peer and he was telling me about a seminar he had just come from. He shared that the presenter quoted a statistic from a Microsoft study that indicated that the average human today has a shorter attention span than the average goldfish. I wasn’t shocked, too much… but I was intrigued.

My immediate action was to send myself an email to remind me to research the topic, and then I answered a couple of emails… and then went back to the conversation. Wait, did I just validate the results?

I found an article published in Time magazine that quickly explained the study, (short article for all of our short attention spans) which lead me to the Microsoft study.

As a marketer and a bit of a social scientist, there was a quote from Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella that struck a chord with me, “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention”.

What does that mean to you as you try to market your product, service, company in the online digital world?

• Be clear, personal, relevant and (quickly) get to the point

• Defy expectations, leverage rich media and movement to grab attention

• Embed calls to action, be interactive, use sequential messaging, and build cohesive, immersive experiences across screens

Align your messaging to your buyer’s journey. Stay focused on what they want and need. Be relevant.

The study highlights that “It’s not just ‘kids these days’”. And the factors that are contributing to this shorter attention span?

• Media consumption

• Social media usage

• Technology adoption rate

• Multi-screen behaviour

The report goes very deep on how marketers can address the varying behaviours, and because I respect our ever-dwindling attention spans, I’ll save some of that detail for a future post.

When you need a guide to help you navigate these ever-changing marketing and communication media, we’re here to help.