Attention Spans Study Confirms Multi-Zone Digital Signage Layouts Bad Idea

May 18, 2015 by Dave Haynes

Microsoft Canada has pushed out a useful report about the fleeting attention spans of today’s consumers – pointing out it’s not just kids and young adults who can’t keep their noses out of their devices.

The attention span study is a free download and is based on both online surveys and neurological research done late last year.

Here’s the executive summary:

Good news! It’s not as bad as you think. Attention is obviously a necessary ingredient for effective advertising, but Canadians’ digital lifestyles are changing the brain, decreasing the ability for prolonged focus and increasing their appetite for more stimuli.

Marketing too must evolve:

• Don’t believe everything you read: there’s a lot of variance beyond the <30 year old digital natives. Media consumption, frequency of multi-screening, and social media usage are the main indicators of attention span variance.
• Overall, digital lifestyles deplete the ability to remain focused on a single task, particularly in non-digital environments. But, all is not lost. Connected consumers are becoming better at doing more with less via shorter bursts of high attention and more efficient encoding to memory.
• Multi-screening trains consumers to be less effective at filtering out distractions – they are increasingly hungry for something new. This means more opportunities to hijack attention but also that brands need to work harder to maintain it.

What can marketers do?

• 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

What I found particularly useful is validation of the points I go on endlessly about here and in talks I do at conferences and for clients:

• cluttered screens with multiple zones are pointless and counter-productive
• when people see too much crap on a screens, they tune it all out
• you have fleeting seconds to make a point and have an impact

As the study asserts: use simplicity to focus on your message.